I love how not a single one of the images of 'London' are actually from London. I get that they're meant to be vaguely illustrative, but honestly, they really couldn't find any images of the London suburbs? *quickly googles* - there y'go: http://c8.alamy.com/comp/E9PK2A/london-suburbs-wembley-E9PK2A.jpg
- most suburban London houses have a small front garden and back garden - the ones I've linked to are your typical outer suburbs with 1930s semi-detatched and terraced houses with bay windows at the front, often radiating out from the expanded London Underground network. Inner suburbs are mostly Victorian but again most often feature bay windows, small front gardens, and are all brick, no stone houses.

There - more than possibly anyone ever wanted to know about dull suburban London houses...

Yes, this list is fairly accurate - the tone of voice is the important thing, British people use a sort of dry, understated humour in, uh, well, most conversations really. If the tone of voice sounds ever so slightly like it might be being said by Batman's Butler Alfred, it will usually mean the opposite of the literal meaning. Having lived with Americans, I always found this was the thing that perplexed them, not the superficial linguistics differences (pants vs trousers, lift vs elevator, etc).

For an excellent guide on this kind of thing, have a leaf through Kate Fox's book 'Watching The English' - it's readable anthropology - not bad at all!

The main reason the 'hidden mother' portraits of children appear is that this was really the only way of keeping very young children still, facing the right way and basically co-operative whilst a photograph was being taken.

In some cases, the photograph is only meant to be of the children and so the mother is hidden or her face is not shown. However, in a large number of these cases (especially the ones where the face has been blacked out or scratched through) the women are most likely not the mothers. They are the nannies or governesses of the children, not people the family would necessarily want to appear in their photographs.

We have these in the UK now too - they're rather cute and I caught a couple of kids staring at it in amazement wondering where the projection was coming from.
We've also just started being able to scan the biometric chip in our passports and have an iris-scan instead of going through the normal passport control. Got to go through it as I have one of these new style passports and it is awesome!

It's an automatic (well, a wind-up powered) roasting spit. Put the meat on the inside, crank the handle and suspend over the fire or just beside the grate. You then don't have to hand turn the meat and it cooks evenly.

Look Out Schroedinger's Cat, It's a Trap! T-Shirt

Looks like a hoax:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/06/17/it-is-unspeakable

Smells like a hoax

This study is being reported in the DailMail, and is therefore probably being misreported and distorted to a degree - if there was a link to the original study however...

Yes, yes they would...still not wonderfully roomy, is it? Still, this is how turkey becomes affordable and widely available so it's all just so much supply and demand.

It's actually a strangely eerie sound

...this explains a lot about why these guys were randomly sitting on the shul roof whenever we went to deliver stuff for the weekend!

I agree, the principle is sound but, as with many things over the past hundred years or so, cycles have sped up so that the intervening time periods are now far shorter. All the posters above wondering how the eighties could ever become classic - for the past few years the shops have been full of 'retro' eighties looks (sadly). The early ninties are just coming back into fashion - this however, is the high-end fashion looks and not your mum's multicoloured tracksuit

His elements pictures are really wonderful - I was, however, confused by the cake!

It is a device for, literally, blowing smoke up your arse!

(Nietzsche watch please!)

...a machine for making punch-hole sheet music?

A clothes drier!

A tinderbox!