Your Friday WTF, 11/23/07
Posted on November 23, 2007 Posted by John Scalzi 24 Comments
English kids getting high by huffing fumes from burning plastic trash bins.
Lucy in the sky with garbage!
Whatever
FURIOUSLY REASONABLE
WHATEVER
Taunting the tauntable since 1998
John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, contributor – AMS
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Why don’t we get trashed and … pew …
It never ceases to amaze me the way young people will find such creative ways to do such stupid things to themselves and yet won’t apply that same creativity to living.
You guys are all missing the greater issue.
English people call trash cans “wheelie-bins”!
Now that’s funny.
Nathan,
They’re bins with wheels. What’s so inappropriate about calling them “wheelie-bins”?
Two countries divided by a common language again …
Bah. Copycats. They’ve been doing that in Rotherham in South Yorkshire for ages.
And what’s so bloody funny about “wheelie-bin”, eh? It’s no dafter than “fanny-pack”, which is a bum-bag, as any fule no ;-)
Fanny pack or bum bag, they’re an abomination whatever they’re called.
Man, whatever happened to rolling down a hill and making yourself dizzy?
I’m sure you look very natty in yours, John :-)
Wow.
Apparently, these English kids are idiots. And making themselves dumber by leaps and bounds.
Have they no Purell? Model glue? Gasoline? Hallucinogenic toads?
There’s that. Or, Amsterdam is just a short trip across the Channel.
Don’t look to me for defense of fanny packs or bum bags (either the names or the items).
And, sorry, but “Wheelie-bin” is just retarded.
Also, the story John linked has a link to this story. Another true wheelie-bin tragedy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/6945767.stm
Damn.. when I first saw this I thought it was monkeyfishing.
Having worked in plastics injection molding you don’t get high off the burning fumes. No where near intoxication. Dying brain cells, and other tissues, is pretty much it. Hey what’s this; the safety sheet says this one release cyanide when heated above 590.
They are better off getting Varsol from the hardware store.
# Dan Says:
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:10 pm
# PixelFish Says:
November 23rd, 2007 at 11:20 am
Man, whatever happened to rolling down a hill and making yourself dizzy?
There’s that. Or, Amsterdam is just a short trip across the Channel.
There are no hills in Amsterdam. The Netherlands are famously flat, in fact.
(joke)
At least the English know that mathematics remains plural when you shorten the word. This entitles them in my book to ‘wheelie-bins’ and ‘bum-bags’. (I actually much prefer the general usage of the term ‘bum’ over ‘fanny’. Fanny is a girl’s name. Calling me bum, ‘fanny’ seems bloody bonkers.) Some might accuse me of being anti-American, which I’m not, but I do have ancestors who were members of Butler’s Rangers, and had to flee the country for a few generations after the War, so maybe that’s why I sometimes think the British understand the language better than we do.
“Wheelie-bins” is funny, any way you look at it. Makes one think of Weeny, which is an innoffensive word but still makes me gigglish for some reason.
Getting high on burning wheelie-bins. I can see that happening. The drug progression would work like this:
1. intoxication on parental tabacco fumes
2. Watching too much reality TV
3. a brief (but thorough) incursion in pron,
4 That trip to Amsterdam that everyone was talking about
5, 6, 7, 8, 9: binge drinking like only British teenagers know how.
10: the required level of idiocy has been achieved! You are now ready to get high on trash.
I think “Wheelie-bins” is hilarious. Descriptive, fun to say, and (like Sara says), sounds like “weeney.”
What’s not to like?
“Wheelie-bins” puts me in mind of a poor-man’s transformers.
hehehehe
Or, taking a trash can with wheels, and riding it down a slope.
John @ #15,
Apart from being a girl’s name, fanny is something entirely different, coloquially speaking, in the UK!
#15: Many’s the US employee transferred to the UK or Australia, who has been taken to task for suggesting a “pat on the fanny”.
We have wheelie-bins too, but (#3) only if they have wheels. Anyone who sa otherwise is an uter wet and a weed and i DISKARD him into above-sed bin.*
*Decades before LOLCAT there was Molesworth.
My favorite British term is “sniffer dogs” (usually pronounced ‘sniffah dogs’) for what we’d call search dogs, or drug-sniffing dogs, or even ‘cadaver dogs’.
Also, huffing burning trashcans is arguably better than huffing fermented human sewage.
@11: Nathan said:
The tragic bit is the demonstrated lack of either clear communication or clues. I wonder if the charity sends their counselors out to visit the bereaved with a similar lack of information?
@21: Jon H said:
BINGO! And there, concerned citizens, is your answer: Add a quantity of sewage or nightsoil (bagged!) to the contents of your wheelie bin. If nightsoil is unavailable, substitute a sealable plastic vessel containing a small amount of 1,4-diaminobutane (putrescine), cadaverine, or other noxious nitrile of choice. Even the thickest of chavs may learn from this form of arson/inhalation aversion therapy…
Heck, it beats the leaflets and other measures proposed here.
Ahh… Teesside.
Is it wrong that this story almost makes me nostalgic for the place?
I’m sure that feeling will be cured when I go back there for Christmas.
Holy Crap.
British kids are stealing trash bins and smoking them. I don’t even know what to say to that.
I have lost so much respect for you, Britain. Don’t you know you’re a role model? Who will we look up to?