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Non Sequitur - Alexa[^] 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Too be fair, the shirt was hideous and made him look like a dork. Alexa, his digital wife, saved him from the embarrassment that he obviously was not able to do himself.
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That's why I keep the big hammer inside the house...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
modified 15-Feb-21 5:57am.
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I save on both Alexa and the big hammer - I haven't bought either. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Big hammers are useful.
You never know when you might meet a big nail.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I wasn't talking about Alexa, but the wife...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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and this is why we don't have any of those in the house. Just too much.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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Touch upon parapet in battle (9)
(Don't yell at me, I stole if from my Saturday paper. Been rebuilding laptop all day...)
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Appertain ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Yep. Solution?
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Anagram of parapet in
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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So ... Sydney Morning Herald guy, then? 
I didn't know anybody still used paper papers, if you know what I mean!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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These days I still buy the Saturday SMH and it's Sunday mate. Herself does most of the puzzles, and uses the paper TV guide for the week. They tend to wind up under the cat's dirt box. "News" we tend to get online or half an hour of ABC TV.
The SMH uses multiple cruciverbalists, and they are graded from quite easy on Mondays to difficult on Saturdays. I can usually get about half the Saturday ones.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Peter_in_2780 wrote: They tend to wind up under the cat's dirt box.
I use "puppy training pads" instead of newspaper because they are both more absorbent and have a waterproof underside, which helps when furface isn't feeling any too accurate ...
They work out at about £0.10p each if you buy a 100 off pack, which is far cheaper than a newspaper as well. ($AU 0.18, I think)
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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The Metro is free and a perfect excuse for a 20 minute walk each morning to the station and back. Plus it has a cryptic and an easy (too easy, usually) crossword and 3x sudoku. Herself likes the "lifestyle" pages and we use half of them to light the fire each evening and the other half under the cat tray.
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I wonder if it's the same Metro we can get here in the UK - that had three Sudokus of varying difficulty - it wasn't bad for a freebie and kept me amused on my daily 40 minute commute to London - I would try and complete all of the Sudokus and at least one of the crosswords before I got to Waterloo ( small victories  )
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Yes, that's the one I mean - I'm in the UK 
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Oh I thought you were in Australia - must stay in more
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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50 years ago today, the UK went decimal and the phrase "How much is that in real money?" entered our vocabulary. Us youngsters became the walking calculators for our parents - providing a translation service between the "old" (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound), and the "new" 100p to the pound.
Yes, LSD was a crazy set of monetary units, but I'm pretty sure mental arithmetic skills went downhill after we went decimal. But if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you... 
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I think that problem will be solved by Bitcoins:
Here is the money ...
Poefffff ...
And now it's gone !
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I don't think it was currency that did it, I think it was calculators.
When I was at school, right up to my sixth form calculators were expensive - we used slide rules and log tables, long multiplication and division - you know the sort of thing. Only one kid in my year had a calculator, and that was a Sinclair LED thing than came as a kit you built yourself. Even then, it was a lot of money: £25 for the kit!
Given that I got about 10 shillings a week* for my 7 days a week paper round (if I was lucky!) it would have taken me a year or more to save enough to buy one ...
So we had to use mental arithmetic: no real choice.
And for years - until barcodes took over from sticky price labels in supermarkets - I'd stand in the queue and add up my basket so I could hand over the right change ...
* Might have been less, and probably was - notes of the realm didn't play a large part in my life in those days!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I'm rather inclined to agree with you there. I too went through school doing all mathematical calculations (at which in truth I wasn't particularly good) in my head or with the use of either a slide rule or log tables. Computers of course were non existent except for the odd class where we would add holes to punch cards, have them submitted to the local university, wait for two months and then discover that two plus two did indeed equal five.
Now decades down the road having found myself writing more and more code for what were once these new fangled computer things I find myself revisiting the maths of my schooldays and being curious once again to use slide rules and log tables and see just how much you could actually do with them.
Slide rules I have been able to locate via the dreaded ebay and one or two other specialist sites, but log tables have proved to be more of a problem. It's almost as if they've disappeared of the face of the earth, that or I've been looking in entirely the wrong place.
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I still have the two slide rules I used in school, somewhere - though the big one has lost it's cursor - and I think I could still use one. They gave you a better "sense" of the answer than an calculator, I think: you could look at it and go "that can't be right, what did I do wrong?" instead of blindly accepting a result as gospel.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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