Chixe

Red wine, like most alcohol, is an acquired taste.

Remember back all those years to when you had your first beer, If you were anywhere near as young as I was, you probably have some vague recollection of thinking it tasted like something between tar and shit.

Most white wine (and alcopops) are sweet and fruity - two flavours (or aspects) most kids grow up loving - and therefore there's no "learning curve". It's easy to understand why whites are so much more accessible than reds.

The food comment is particularly valid when you're talking dessert. Try drinking a traditional red while chowing down a sweet dessert and enjoying it. That's when dessert whites (have you tried one, Paul?) step in and redefine the phrase "sweet white wine".

I only started drinking red a few years ago when I started hanging out with my girlfriend's family. Haven't looked back. It's hard to beat a good Rioja or Burgundy for a sophisticated flavour.

Diet Coke tastes different from regular Coke. I see your point and understand there are people that drink it for its nutritional value (or lack thereof), but plenty of people prefer the taste of Diet Coke. My woman is one.

But as Ozone42 says, even if you are drinking it to be healthy, it is still marginally better for you than pumping in another batch of calories (if you assume it doesn't give you cancer, mucky AIDS, et al - as some have suggested).

Edit: Scrivs could you poke the RSS outputting so the links point at chawlk.com instead of 9rules.com? Or put a redirect in (instead of the "serious error")

Hear hear on the 'shrooms. They're fungus. They're decay. They're horrid.

Things that live in the water can also stay well away from my mouth.

Yeah that's pretty much where we settled for now.

We did a few little ones each but it's a metric buttload of hassle trying to convince the centre of an onion to come out without the outer layers:
a) tearing,
b) crushing, or
c) falling apart when you try and stuff it.

We bought a "large" Spanish onion (about the size of a baby's head) at a market a few weeks back and en "elephant" garlic, both seen below next to a 2litre bottle of Cola:

As much as I'd love the 2.6kg one, we might attempt it with one of those - two if we have company - and see how that fares.

Giant house rabbits are awesome but cats are the best.

Holy bump, Batman! But tigers are pretty cool.

there other ways of making money too

That statement applies to almost all ilks of organised crime. These people don't choose to go your route and earn an honest buck because:
a) they're criminals, and
b) crime pays more, faster and with considerably less effort.

How sad do these people have to be to create a virus and spread it around and making everbody's life inconvnient.....?

There's a lot of money in it. If they can make and "market" something you download and run on your computer (or something that can exploit an app already running there), they gain the power of your computer and internet connection to do with what they want. Some examples:

• Sending out viagra (et al) spam, earning commission.
• Sending out stock hoax-spam, driving up penny-stocks before the spammers sell theirs, leaving the user with a bunch of worthless stock.
• Sending out phishing emails to fool people into handing over their money and identities.
• Being used to automatically post to blogs and forums to advertise shit, and receiving money in exchange for the service.
• Being used to break captchas to gain access to new email accounts to create more spam for more money.
• Being used to crack passwords to accounts of all sorts (banks, emails, computers).
• Being sent out en-masse to attack web-servers or specific workstations and holding them at ransom or doing it because somebody paid for it.
• Holding the local data hostage and asking for a ransom

It's not "sad". It is big business for criminals.

Bananaphone!

Have you anything to lose by talking to her?

Decorating the Christmas tree with my sister

No offence to your sister, Sara, but doesn't the tree look a little funny with a real person on it?

My inability to grow a large amount of facial hair requiring almost no shaving.

*sighs* Me too. Stupid neckbeards >_<

Buy a kittycat. Done.

Oh, no. I won't. However sickly or injured my pet cat is, I will never have it euthanized.

Any single life is precious.

That is a cruel way of thinking. It's the quality of life that is precious. Why would anybody wish to let their pet's life end in pain and misery when it can end a short time sooner with minimal suffering?

I'll add, your pet's quality of life is your responsibility. If you let that diminish when you could avoid it, you aren't fit to own a pet.

OH THE SPOILERS!!!

Erk. The Wispas will be in your account by Thursday!

Steve, you don't realise how close I was to setting up a picture of me licking my website...

... Then I realised how the internet has a habit of remembering things like that like a 40,000 ton elephant. That photo could really have harmed future job prospects and the like.

This is me:

I'm an energy based entity. Fact.

You just need to keep a really close eye on him. He might bounce back but as your vet says, organ failure is much more likely at his age. Try to keep him fed and watered but if he loses his appetite completely or starts behaving differently, he might be in pain.

It sounds callous but remember that it's infinitely better to be a little early than being late.

Ever so slightly...

My answer? Try the other 23.

Eh? Radio 4 is pretty completely unisex (aside from Womans' Hour). I can't think of one program that's geared exclusively at men.

Reading the email I received, it is a reminder that we don't really know the people we interact with.

Too true.

I'll miss Mary because she didn't hold back. She spoke her mind and was true to herself in her postings here.

Along with everybody else, I'm sure, my thoughts go out to her friends and family. And my utmost thanks that her aunt got in touch to let people know.

Life is too fragile.

Don't be worried... I like you plenty. =)

I'm sorry but haggis has to take the award for the most "what the fuck were you thinking"-style food. The ingredients:

• 1 sheep's stomach (thoroughly cleaned)
• 1 sheep's liver
• 1 sheep's heart
• 1 sheep's lung
• 1lb beef suet
• 1 large onion
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1lb oatmeal

Basically: mix everything you'd never normally bother with (because they taste like dried scrotum) together and stuff inside a stomach. Yummy.

I'm not sure it really earns an unusual badge though... You can get them in almost every supermarket in the UK.

I have no pairs of jeans. None.

I do, however, have 6 pairs of three-quarter-length short-trousers, which are always nice. I'm a tree-hugging hippy. Sue me.

Oh you just had to go one further.. Right. O is my new nickname.

Calling a curse word a curse word is a little inaccurate and unfair on all the curse words out there. They're just words and like other words their meaning can fluctuate wildly between instances, allowing usually harsh words to mean the complete opposite depending on their context.

I have a problem with people who don't understand that and immediately think bad of something based on the words used.

With that said, any word can also be abused. Saying "fuck" twice a sentence tends to point to a lack of vocabulary or effort rather than creative wording.

Just Oli really these days... And that's just a shortening from my real name no nothing really magical there...

I use it so much, I'm considering officially changing from Oliver to Oli.

I'm joining this really late in the day but:

Why should he have to invest in a home he doesn't own?

Why should he get to live in a house for free? You can call it rent to start off with and if things get really serious, treat it like a buy-in.

The internet downloaded onto my own NAS.

can one really understand this topic?

What sort of a question is that? Sure you can if you're a dietitian or a nutritionist and this is what you do.

I guess you're trying to form the argument against it (or whatever direction you're taking this thing) with aspartame, the sugar substitute...

Well... I'm not giving judgement on it... For every six people saying there's nothing wrong with it, there are half a dozen saying it, and other sweeteners are responsible for everything bad in modern society.

It's interesting how every few (of either) cite and link to the studies they're all pulling this information from.

On a personal level, I'm not a fan of artificial foodstuffs... I'd rather eat something that has grown naturally than something that was designed and chemically generated.

It's a potato based "pasta"... It's different from pasta but it's grouped with it as food styles go.

What wikipedia says

A few reasons:

a) It's a technical impossibility for everybody to be totally successful on a capitalistic plane... Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.

b) Because people are different. They have different personalities and strive for different things in different measures. Some people are content, even happy with a lot less than others. They also have different starting points from where they launch themselves at their ambitions. Some start from too far away or don't put enough effort in and therefore fall short while others, through luck and effort achieve.

Neither they're both the kind of poo you have after 15 pints of Guinness. Never had 15 pints of Guinness in one night? Look at Marmite or Vegemite and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Bovril is the only nearly acceptable brown paste-link substance there is.