CaaC (John)

Aye, that's me just letting off steam, I think they are getting around the panic buying bit by refusing customers who pack their trolleys up with multiple items, me and the wife are lucky really as our son & daughter said to let them know if we need stuff and they will pick it up, and our daughter knows that I don't like sitting around and have to stretch my legs so she suggested I go for a small walk in the morning when it's quiet and that will keep me active a bit.

It's the panic buying in the big supermarkets like Tesco's that get me, just because there is a big car park facility outside the door they can wheel their goods out and pack them into there vehicles, they should close the car park facility down and make them carry shopping in plastic bags like a lot of elderly people do and walk and get a bus or a car parked yards away. I knew that Tesco's would have no loo roll left but I saw the likes of Farm Foods, semi-chem, Lidls and a few small shops had them, but people just go for the bargain-priced ones and leave the expensive articles on the shelve, I managed to get 2 packets of Adrex wipes and 2 bottles of disinfectant hand wash in £ Stretchers but they were sensible enough to only allow 2 articles per person. Another trick £ Stretchers did was put toilet rolls and hand towels on a top shelf with a sign saying "Please call for staff assistance" who would come around with small step ladders get the articles and hand them down 2 packs only to the shopper.

Doesn't work though buddy, the semi-chem shop around here has put limits on what people buy the lady in the shop said that does stop people, families like the hubby, wife, daughter or son or a friend all going in the shop one after the other then just buying one article each and then go home and stockpile them, I was speaking to an old boy the other day (86) and he said this is reminding him of after WWII and the rationing. As I mentioned before with me growing up in the early '50s if we were running out of loo roll my mother used to cut up newspaper into squares and put them in beside the toilet, it was great sitting on the pan and reading cut up cartoons or football stories and having a good old jobbie.

It's a fucking joke, nipped up Tesco's early thinking there would not be many people about as the wife wanted some long spaghetti and macaroni because she was going to make some bolognese and wee Kaiden loves his grannies cheese macaroni when visiting and the bloody shelves were bare (the same as the toilet roll, kitchen roll etc) all of the pasta related stuff was gone, lucky enough the wife had some pasta twirls left so that will do with the bolognese, Kaiden will have to wait another time for his cheese macaroni. That's me just ordered my asthma pumps from the medical centre and the local pharmacy will deliver it either tomorrow or Wednesday, that saves me walking all the way up the docs to pick the subscription up and take it to the chemists and pick it up.

We have, (wife & me) have just received this text message from our local doctor's medical centre regarding the virus, I think it centres mainly on me though with my COPD, Asthma, Sciatica & Heart Failure condition in which I take loads of tablets, I'm beginning to feel like a zombie now.

Sad to hear Phill but I bet she would want you to be strong and carry on with your life, take care buddy and your second family in here will think of your mum and you.

I was thinking about putting this in the 'Today I Had To Laugh At' thread. Just come back from Tesco's, some guy with a trolley with 6 Jumbo packs (x9) of Andrex toilet rolls in a trolley, started to unload it on the belt and the till operator told him "Sorry sir, you can only buy one pack of 9 at a time please" the look on his face was like he had been hit by a train, he didn't argue as there was a 6-foot odd's security guard standing there watching him, shaking his head with an evil grin on his face, fucking priceless watching him load 5 Jumbo packs back into the trolley and just pay for one.

Jan Vertonghen: Family of Spurs defender held at knifepoint during a burglary Jan Vertonghen's family was held at knifepoint as four armed men burgled his home while he was on Champions League duty with Tottenham on Tuesday. Police confirmed men wearing balaclavas forced their way into the house while his wife and children were inside. The 32-year-old Belgium defender was in Germany for the second leg of Spurs' last-16 defeat against RB Leipzig. "We have been supporting Jan and his family through this terribly traumatic time," said a Spurs spokesperson. "We encourage anyone who has any information to come forward to help the police with their investigation." A Met Police spokesman said: "Police were called to a residential address in NW3 at 7.49 pm on 10 March to a report of a burglary. "Officers attended. It was reported four men wearing balaclavas, armed with knives, had forced entry to the property and stolen a number of items before leaving. "Nobody was injured. The suspects had left the scene before officers arrived. There have been no arrests and inquiries continue." Vertonghen is the latest footballer to be targeted by criminals. In December burglars broke into the London home of Crystal Palace defender, Mamadou Sakho, reportedly stealing valuables worth more than £500,000. Arsenal footballers Mesut Ozil and Sead Kolasinac were attacked by carjackers in July 2019, while Liverpool forward Sadio Mane had his house burgled while he was playing in a Champions League last-16 tie against Bayern Munich in February 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/51895453

Our local McColl's newsagents/shop is trying to do there bit to help out for people that are struggling to get out (elderly)

This fucking stockpiling is a joke, Tesco's run out of toilet paper but we managed to get 4 rolls in Semi-Chem and the lady in the shop there said they have restrictions on how many rolls people can buy but she said that does not work as you will get the wife buying and then they will send the likes of hubby, son & daughter or family go and buy some more after, it's a joke.

Just told our son looks like we will be relying on you and your taxi to do the shopping if this happens, he said "no problem pops". Coronavirus: Isolation for over-70s 'within weeks'

That would drive me around the bend just sitting in here!!!! I do like taking the grandsons up the local park for a kick around with the football and stretching my legs but I gather if that restriction comes into place then I will just have to live with it but then hope our son and daughter don't catch this Coronavirus.

Tesco shelves were empty with no toilet rolls, all we did was nip into FarmFoods and managed to get some, I would love to sneak into someone's house that was panic buying toilet rolls and stacking them in a cupboard, nick them all and stick this onto there toilet roll holder.

Our grandson's Birthday today, went out shopping with his dad and spend some of his Birthday money, trust our son shopping with him, a new Liverpool top and football boots, I wonder why.

Coronavirus has caused rival gangs of monkeys to invade a Thai city Just when it seemed like the world couldn’t resemble the opening scenes of an apocalyptic horror film any more, it appears the coronavirus has sparked gang warfare between monkeys on the streets of Thailand. For understandable reasons, the pandemic has led to a decline in tourism around the globe. The Lopburi monkey population is usually split in two with one group residing in the city while the other patrols the area around the temple. Many of the monkeys rely on food from tourists but these are desperate times and tourists are few and far between. Because lots of people have isolated themselves and are working from home, there are also very few cars on the streets, so the monkeys are more free than ever to roam the streets. Eyewitness Sasaluk Rattanachai, who captured the footage, said: They looked more like wild dogs than monkeys. They went crazy for a single piece of food. I’ve never seen them so aggressive. Humans share about 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees, which probably explains the toilet paper riots of recent weeks... https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/coronavirus-has-caused-rival-gangs-of-monkeys-to-invade-a-thai-city/ar-BB118L6C?li=AAnZ9Ug

Ditto except our daughter only has Netflix and she has added us to her account with an icon saying 'mums & pops'

Our daughter is fuming, went into Tesco's for toilet roll and they had run out, these people stockpiling is stupid, if you run out of bog roll do what our mum & dad did when rationing was still around after WWII, use bloody newspaper cut up, it might be rough on the old arse but it works. Here's why the coronavirus has people panic-buying toilet roll UK supermarkets are limiting the amount of certain items customers can buy in an attempt to prevent panic-buying from cleaning them out. Pasta, hand soap, long-life milk and toilet paper have all made the list in certain stores. As the coronavirus continues to rapidly spread, reports of panic-buying have emerged from all over the world. Toilet paper, in particular, has been in the spotlight after a video of people fighting over rolls of it in an Australian supermarket went viral. Edinburgh Evening News

A Secret World War II Bunker Was Just Discovered in Scotland SLIDES - 1/3 Forty years ago, Kit Rodger and his friends discovered a small underground bunker while traipsing around Scotland’s Craigielands Forest. Apart from featuring in their boyhood adventures, the mysterious bunker remained unknown and was gradually obscured by undergrowth. A few months ago, Rodger, now a survey technician for Forest and Land Scotland (FLS), returned to the area to check for any heritage sites or environmental attributes that would interfere with an upcoming tree-felling operation. Without an official record of the bunker, Rodger and his colleague, Kenny Bogle, scoured the forest floor for any signs of it. “With only vague memories of more than 40 years ago, Kenny and I searched through head-high bracken until we stumbled on a shallow trench which led to the bunker door,” Rodger said in an FLS blog post. “Only a small opening remained, but we could just make out the blast wall in the darkness beyond.” After an investigation, the FLS determined the bunker was built during World War II to house an Auxiliary Unit, a British citizen militia tasked with sabotaging an invasion if the enemies made it past the first line of defence, the Home Guard. These highly clandestine units sometimes called “Churchill’s secret army” or “scallywags,” comprised men with a wealth of knowledge about the land—like gamekeepers, foresters, and poachers. Because they were the last resort, they were expected to fight to the death. And, because Auxiliary Units operated with utmost secrecy, many of their bunkers have never been found. This particular one is about 10 feet by 23 feet and was constructed from riveted, corrugated iron sheets over a cement floor. FLS archaeologist Matt Ritchie said in a press release that records indicate the bunker was used by about seven men who were armed with revolvers, submachine guns, a sniper’s rifle, and explosives. The only surviving evidence of the unit’s life underground is some broken wood, which might be the remains of bunk beds. As BBC News reports, the bunker likely also contained a table and a cooking stove. Though we know the bunker is somewhere near Moffat, a town in Scotland’s Dumfries and Galloway council area, the FLS is keeping its exact location under wraps to protect it from a potential influx of visitors. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/a-secret-world-war-ii-bunker-was-just-discovered-in-scotland/ar-BB1139UC#image=1

Magnetospheric Multiscale

ExoMars Rosalind Franklin: Rover mission delayed until 2022 Europe and Russia have decided to postpone their Mars rover mission. The ExoMars "Rosalind Franklin" vehicle was due to launch to the Red Planet in July/August but engineers aren't able to get the vehicle ready in time. Because an Earth-Mars journey is only attempted when the planets are favourably aligned, the robot's next opportunity won't occur until 2022. The Russian and European space agencies announced the delay on their websites on Thursday. The set-back - the latest in a long series for this project - has been signposted for some weeks. All the hardware is built, but there remains an intimidating list of outstanding checks that must be completed before the mission can be declared flight-ready. Chief among the obstacles in the timeline are some underperforming electronics boxes in the Russian descent and lander mechanisms that would put the rover safely on the ground; and also the overall flight software from Europe. Full testing required to achieve confidence in these items necessarily pushes the project beyond July/August. Matters have been further complicated in recent days by the international coronavirus crisis which has started to disrupt the engineering effort. FULL REPORT

Wasp-76b: The exotic inferno planet where it 'rains iron' Astronomers have observed a distant planet where it probably rains iron. It sounds like a science fiction movie, but this is the nature of some of the extreme worlds we're now discovering. Wasp-76b, as it's known, orbits so close in to its host star, its dayside temperatures exceed 2,400C - hot enough to vaporise metals. The planet's nightside, on the other hand, is 1,000 degrees cooler, allowing those metals to condense and rain out. It's a bizarre environment, according to Dr David Ehrenreich from the University of Geneva. "Imagine instead of a drizzle of water droplets, you have iron droplets splashing down," he told BBC News. The Swiss researcher and colleagues have just published their findings on this strange place in the journal Nature. The team describes how it used the new Espresso instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to study the chemistry of Wasp-76b in fine detail. FULL REPORT

Football related but I will put this in here. Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis has coronavirus Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis has coronavirus, the Championship club have confirmed. Marinakis was at the City Ground for Forest's Championship fixture against Millwall on Friday. FULL REPORT

Not sure if it's to do with this coronavirus but the last 3 days when shopping the disinfectant Hand Wash lotion we buy for the bathroom and kitchen the shelves in Tesco's are practically empty, the same as kitchen rolls and a lot of other items the wife gets, someone mentioned panic buying the same as when we had the bad snowfall 5 years ago and we were snowed in and no bus services.

Why plastic is a deadly attraction for sea turtles Scientists have new evidence to explain why plastic is dangerous to sea turtles: the animals mistake the scent of plastic for food. Thus, a plastic bag floating in the sea not only looks like a jellyfish snack, but it gives off a similar odour. This "olfactory trap" might help explain why sea turtles are prone to eating and getting entangled in plastic, say US researchers. Plastic debris is rapidly accumulating in the oceans. The likes of plastics bags, netting and bottles pose a threat to hundreds of marine species, including endangered turtles, birds and whales. Odours were given off by floating or submerged plastics were an "olfactory trap" for sea turtles, said Dr Joseph Pfaller of the University of Florida, Gainesville. "Plastics that have spent time in the ocean develop smells that turtles are attracted to and this is an evolutionary adaptation for finding food, but it has now become a problem for turtles because they're attracted to the smells from the plastics," he said. Garbage patches Once the plastic has been released into the ocean, microbes, algae, plants and tiny animals start to colonise it and make it their home. This creates food-like odours, which have been shown to be a magnet for fish and possibly sea birds. The new research suggests sea turtles are attracted to plastic for the same reason. Marine predators like sea turtles, whales and sea birds forage over a vast area to find food and it makes sense that they would use chemicals in the air or water to do so, said Dr Pfaller. "It's not just a visual thing - they're being attracted from probably long distances away to these garbage patches out in the open ocean." The danger of items like straws and plastic bags to sea turtles is well known. A video of a plastic straw stuck up a turtle's nose went viral on social media in 2015. Dr Pfaller said all types of plastic were a threat. "The errant plastic straw in a turtle's nose or the random plastic bag - sure those are absolute problems - but anything out there can grow bacteria and animals on it that turtles want to eat and so it smells to them like something they should go check out and possibly consume, which can lead to their death." Seeking the 'plastic score' of the food on our plates Plastic in the Pacific 'growing rapidly' Seven charts that explain the plastic pollution problem. he findings, published in Current Biology are based on an experiment involving 15 young loggerhead sea turtles that had been raised in captivity. The researchers piped airborne odours into the air above a water tank and recorded the turtles' reactions with cameras. The animals responded in the same way to odours from conditioned plastics released into the air as they did to food such as fish and shrimp meal. When they came up to breathe, they kept their noses out of the water more than three times longer than normal to get a good smell of the weathered plastics. The findings open up new avenues for research to protect the marine animals that are threatened by plastic debris in the sea, mostly through entanglement and ingestion. A recent study found that given current trends, 99% of seabirds will have ingested plastic waste by 2050. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51804884