Paul Brownjohn @Paulos_the_fog@social.cleverlibre.org

The world's commercial banana production is in grave danger from a soil infection. Believe it or not, most bananas sold in the west and in India and China are Cavendish bananas; clones of one plant grown by the Duke of Devonshire's gardener on the Chatsworth estate, many years ago.

Now a fungus has evolved that attacks the Cavendish strain and kills it; it also attacks many other strains of banana. It seems we face a future without bananas!

The Cavendish strain is by no means the tastiest banana - I tasted bananas of other types grown for their taste when in Thailand and some of them taste absolutely exquisite compared to the average supermarket ones in the west!

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751

It's St Valentine's Day so I'm gonna take a flower home for the wife

#alttext A humming bird hawk moth with a floret from a Verbena flower stuck to its proboscis.

That's it - the ravens at the Tower of London are packing their nests and clearing off - the COBRA Committee have has been in permanent session for days.

This is an unheard of crisis - Britain is running out of TEA!

https://www.mirror.co.uk/money/tea-shortage-horror-sweeps-britain-32114738

Sunday morning in the incredibly quiet little village where I live. In darkest rural Luxembourg.

A neighbour emerges. From the apartment block directly opposite, wearing a hooded leopard skin print onesie. Wife or girlfriend then emerges from the apartment block wearing an identical onesie checks the mailbox then they both set off presumably for a walk in their leopard skin print onesies. Only then did I notice that they were both sporting long leopard style tails hanging off the back of their onesies!

@girlonthenet

I should probably add that such systems here are all sealed pressurised systems - so nothing like the abortions with header tanks in the roof that are still used in a lot of systems in the UK. The hot water cylinders are all fed with full mains pressure so they are enamelled steel or stainless steel, not copper.

In the end the landlord didn't need persuading as the outer jacket of the cylinder sprung a leak and flooded the hall!

When we got the defective cylinder out, there were, as I suspected, pinhole leaks in the inner coil of the cylinder that allowed the mains pressure water in the outer part of the cylinder to pressurize the circulating water in the system.

A new cylinder fixed the problem completely!

@girlonthenet

@calmeilles

Indeed - rates in Europe are also rising but nothing like so fast!

At the current rate, more than half the US population will be obese within a very few years - scary!

@calmeilles

@rvps2001

Lord Haw Haw got his neck fatally stretched for his efforts for the Nazi regime!

In an article about semaglutide (Wegovy) the author mentioned that 42% of Americans are obese - to me that's not only unbelievable but it has massive implications for general health in the US. Being obese has massive adverse health implications.

@girlonthenet

I used to be a builder and have supervised many a job in the past so I know a bit about what I am talking about.

We had a central heating engineer round servicing the boiler and he started berating me over the fact that the pressure in the system was miles too high. I assured him that no one would have even thought about increasing the pressure in the system (it was so high that the pressure release valve was blowing off excess pressure) and he absolutely insisted I was lying! I didn't take that very well!

A couple of days of deep thought and I had an answer - the only thing it could possibly be was a defective hot water cylinder. The problem then was persuading the landlord, firstly that that really was the problem and secondly that the bill for in excess of 1000€ really would fix the problem.