Re: Totally on topic: Lego has done so much damage

Hoover Juniors, now they were a cr*p appliance, if they picked up anything larger than a dust particle they would break. Then Numatic showed everybody how to make vac's properly, their 'Henry' and other machines have never been bettered.

Fitted carpet is a health hazard, it contains dust etc, and helps cause asthma. Hard floors are much healthier.

I think you mean that people with asthma might get an attack.

But, if you trip over, hitting a hard floor damages you more!

Asthma is an autoimmune disease - fitted carpets certainly don't cause it, although dust mites lurking in carpets may exacerbate symptoms in people who already have asthma.

I think you are judging from a 21st century perspective. They are machines from different eras. Many a Hoover junior lasted 20 to 30 years and while they may not have the power we are used to now it should be remembered that when the first ones were introduced many homes had no power sockets, you connected to a lamp bayonet and you wouldn't want to power a 1200w Henry using that method. .I accept that early Henrys were rated lower but it is only fairly recently that they have been really marketed to the domestic market as opposed to light commercial users like Pubs ,shops etc. And what you call a crap appliance was much easier to use than dragging the carpet outside, hanging it up and then whacking it with a tennis racket like carpet beater.Not a job that could be done easily on a daily basis.

G.Harman

Appiances cost a far greater percentage of a wage then, todays kind of machines would have been mostly off limits. Hence lower power, more basic design. Why would anyone have wasted money on a hard bag case then?

NT

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "alexander.keys1" saying something like:

That may be so, now. However, the trend towards naked and polished floorboards started way back when the middle classes were rooking themselves paying mortgages and could barely afford to buy furniture, never mind carpets. Simply turned a necessity into a 'design feature'.

Ooh, isn't it lovely...

In my book, a floor without a carpet is a joke.

I can walk into my house with my gumboots on after a hard day's work. If I had carpet downstairs it would be harder to clean.

But may well ruin the acoustics. Still, may help promote the sales of headphones. :-)

You've reminded me of something I say in a TV prog a few years ago. I think it was one of the ones on 'building your own house' for those with more money than sense.

It showed the proud owners of a fancy new home they'd had designed to their taste. Bare floors and walls. minimal and trendy. With a 'fitted' audio system they thought was state of the art.

Pair of Quad ESL63s *up against the walls*.

Thus committing two audio bloopers in one go. Nice equipment, but no sign of any idea how to get it to deliver decent sound that matched its capability. Might as well have used Bose vented plastic shoeboxes. :-)

Slainte,

Jim

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Matty F saying something like:

So can many farmers, but it doesn't stop them getting a clip around the ear from the missus.

You'd be laughing yourself silly in our house then!

First thing I did on moving in was rip out all the stinking carpets from 6 deerhounds and a pissing cat that used to live here. Since then as we've renovated we've put tiles, lino, stained boards or Karndean downstairs instead, although a nice bit of woolen carpet is resident in the lounge (for lounging on in front of the fire.)

It's made a huge difference to cleaning up after people have wandered in with dirty shoes on - although IME country dwellers are much better at removing their shoes inside your home than urban dwellers.

We have put carpets back in the bedrooms though - it was just too cold at night when answering a call of nature!

Thought only the deerhounds and cats used the carpet for that?

The Japanese have developed a solution which would resolve this problem --

I've found that our wooden floors on top of 12mm marmox and bathroom tiles on top of 20mm marmox are extremely comfortable at night even in winder when the kitchen floor (tiles on concrete on earth) will free the marrow out of your bones.

No way on this side of hell will I ever have carpet again - except maybe on the stairs, but that's a concession to a) it hurts less slipping and bouncing down carpeted stairs, b) they were carpeted in a strip and the ends of the treads painted, so short of painting then all or doing a painful stripping job, not sure how I can make them presentable...

The boy's having a piss, but what's the girl doing?

Juggling flowers, apparently.

Powdering her nose.

Or possibly artistic licence for "picking flowers".

Other designs are of course available.

It does seem a little strange that they are all labeled in English rather than in Kanji.

Powdering her face? Although I prefer your explanation!