Obvious Things You 0nly Just Realised - 2020

[Sebastian Cobb]

Someone I know has picked up one of those electric mopeds for zipping around London. It makes sense for zipping about, and unlike an electric car you don't need a charging point as you can pop the batteries out and charge at home.

Although given they cost several grand and are slower and have less range than something like a Peugeot Speedflight, which can be snapped up for about £500 it's questionable whether it makes sense to buy one at the moment.

[NoSleep]

Watched a repeat of an old US sitcom called 'Just Shoot Me' and Bob Odenkirk turned up as a friend of the irritating character played by David Spade. It was centred around jealousy of each others girlfriend,and Spades character had just managed to connect with a (ficticious) supermodel,which rattled Odenkirks character. But then, I have been informed that Odenkirk, prior to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is a charcter actor anyway, and often turns up in stuff. I know he was also in the first series of Fargo as a hick sherriff/deputy too!

He is also a comedy writer. He wrote a couple of scripts for the comedy series Get A Life (featuring Chris Elliott and produced by David Mirkin[nb]Later producer of the Simpsons and writer of perhaps the best Simpson's episode ever.[/nb]) and also wrote for Saturday Night Live. It was due to the latter, where no money was spared on costumes and sets that inspired the reverse on Odenkirk's Mr Show; hilariously bad costumes and sets.

[touchingcloth]

Very few modern scooters or quads use 2-stroke engines nowadays due to the Euro 4 emissions regulations that came into force at the start of 2018 effectively banning the sale of them. Almost all of the cheap Chinese 50cc scooters use clones of the 4-stroke Honda/Kymco GY6 engine. These engines are made up to 150cc. There are also countless Chinese clones of the ancient 4-stroke Honda Cub/Trail 70 OHV engine made in 50 to 125cc sizes, the Honda CG125 OHV engine and it's more modern OHC replacement from the later versions of the CB125 used in bikes and ATVs up to 200cc. Above that capacity you get clones of Honda twins of varous vintages.

The smell you get from one of these engines is unburnt petrol from badly-adjusted carbs, as almost all but the latest Chinese-made bikes still run carbs instead of EFI. Most places that have Low Emissions Zones also have an addiitonal charge for non Euro 4-compliant 2-stroke vehicles made after 1973 too, unless you pay the £175 to get it's emissions tested (which effectively killed off the 2-stroke scooter for food delivery services in London, for instance).

There are still a couple of 'advanced' 2-stroke engines available from Peugeot in their scooters and KTM that were designed to meet the Euro 4 regulations by using Direct Injection or Transfer Port Injection, but by the time the next round of emissions regulations come into force these are likely to become difficult to homologate.

What's responsible for the noises their engines make? They all have insanely loud, fatty engines, and I can hear the scooters and quad bikes here for miles around even though their engines must be an eighth of the size of even the smallest cars. I can't imagine the only reason car engines don't announce their presence over a huge area is due to having a bonnet.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm sure there are differences with the engines themselves, but cars have less space and weight considerations so can have better silencing in their exhausts, as anyone who's had their back-box go will attest.

[buzby]

What's responsible for the noises their engines make? They all have insanely loud, fatty engines, and I can hear the scooters and quad bikes here for miles around even though their engines must be an eighth of the size of even the smallest cars. I can't imagine the only reason car engines don't announce their presence over a huge area is due to having a bonnet.

I'm sure there are differences with the engines themselves, but cars have less space and weight considerations so can have better silencing in their exhausts, as anyone who's had their back-box go will attest.

It's a bit of that - a bike has a short exhaust with only room for one small silencer. A car has at least 10 feet of exhaust with a catalytic converter at the engine end and usually two large silencers (one on the middle and one at the back). Scooters and small quads/motorbikes in particular also have small capacity single cylinder high revving engines that produce a different frequency profile to a larger multi-cylinder car engine, which leads them to sound like a large angry wasp. This is particularly true of two strokes, which go through the combustion ('bang') phase of their cycle twice as often as a four stroke engine.

It's also a thing amongst bikers to purposely debaffle their exhausts or to fit 'race' exhausts (which are illegal for the road due to noise levels) to make them louder, ostensibly so that other vehicles can 'hear them coming', but usually becuase they like being obnoxious/pretending they are Valentino Rossi.

[Dex Sawash]

Some are just playing Crazy Frog on repeat

[touchingcloth]

Does most of the sound of an engine come through the exhaust pipe, then? I've heard of silencers and baffles in exhausts but I think I've always assumed it was the engine itself where most of the noise comes from.

[buzby]

Does most of the sound of an engine come through the exhaust pipe, then? I've heard of silencers and baffles in exhausts but I think I've always assumed it was the engine itself where most of the noise comes from.

The sound component from the explosion in each cylinder mostly comes out through the exhaust (the expanding gases are pushed out of the cylinder by the piston duing the Exhaust phase of the 4-stroke cycle), and is then damped by the baffles in the silencers. A 4-stroke engine ideally should have as little restriction in flow of the exhaust as possible, but this has to be tempered by having to reduce the noise output.

Two stroke engines benefit from having a resonant standing waves in the exhaust, which helps to  stop the air/fuel mixture escaping down the exhaust prior to combustion. This was discovered by the Germans in WWII and was used as a fuel-saving measure.

you can see the exhaust wave expanding into the large chamber and being reflected back towards the engine off the narrowing diameter cone at the end. This reflected wave them pushes the escaping air/fuel mixture back into the cylinder for combustion. This is called an expansion chamber or 'tuned pipe' exhaust, and is often seen fitted to two-stroke scooters. After WWII, Walter Kaaden, working for the East German motorcycle manufacturer MZ developed this idea to increase the power output for their racing team. One of their riders, Ernst Degner, then defected during the 1961 Swedish GP and then went on to work and ride for for Suzuki, giving them access to Kaaden's ideas.

The rotating metal parts of the engine will generate mechanical noise, and intake noise coming through the carburettors/throttle body which, usually being a fixed length tract, will generate a specific resonant frequency like an organ pipe that gets louder the wider the throttle is opened. This is usually muffled by the airbox and air filter, but on racing engines that run without air filters it can become a considerable part of the noise output.

[Gulftastic]

He became well known due to the sketch show Mr Show (well worth a watch) but then seemed to struggle a bit afterwards to find his way. He went into directing but didn't have any films that hit big and seemed to not be that confident in his abilities. It was the (initially bit) part in Breaking Bad that seemed to rejuvenate his career into a serious actor

Speaking of Mr Show and Just Shoot Me, David Cross is in great episode of the latter called 'Slow Donnie'.

[JaDanketies]

Great episode of Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories with Bob Odenkirk in, called Toes. It was the first episode of Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories I watched, and my first introduction to Tim and Eric.

If you've not watched Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories then do. It's an anthology like Inside Number 9. It would be hard to say which one is better.

Bob Odenkirk popped up in an episode of Bob's Burgers I watched the other day.

[touchingcloth]

YouGov is a private company and not run by the government.

[Ferris]

YouGov is a private company and not run by the government.

...really? I didn't know that

[Bernice]

The front cover to Sgt Peppers isn't just a photo collage. It's a lifesize mise en scene that the Beatles put on their mad psychedelic army dress for and stepped into for a photograph.

[touchingcloth]

The front cover to Sgt Peppers isn't just a photo collage. It's a lifesize mise en scene that the Beatles put on their mad psychedelic army dress for and stepped into for a photograph.

I read this initially as meaning that all of the people featured in the image were southern actually there or being portrayed by people dressed up as them, and was all u fucking wot mate.

[Bernice]

To be fair it's a pretty hideously constructed sentence. Still, noe revisions, no edits. Pure, unfiltered Bernice.

[Tony Tony Tony]

When did Tim Vine make a porno?

[Gulftastic]

It was Harry Potter themed; Dobbie Does Dallas.

[touchingcloth]

The side of a coin with the queen's head is technically the front rather than the back.

[holyzombiejesus]

A Sou'wester is named after the south westerly winds you'd want protection from by wearing one.

What an ugly sentence.

[Twonty Gostelow]

A Sou'wester is named after the south westerly winds you'd want protection from by wearing one.

Also windbreaker?

La Cagoule, whose members were known as Cagoulards, was a secret, extreme right-wing French paramilitary group in the 1930s. Might explain why Betws-y-Coed is full of fascists from the West Midlands in the summer.

[Twonty Gostelow]

^  something something Peter Stormfront.

Hilarious!

[dissolute ocelot]

Also windbreaker?

La Cagoule, whose members were known as Cagoulards, was a secret, extreme right-wing French paramilitary group in the 1930s. Might explain why Betws-y-Coed is full of fascists from the West Midlands in the summer.

They were called La Cagoule as an insult by the slightly less extreme royalist nut Maurice Pujo. In French, cagoule doesn't mean what the British call a cagoule: it originally meant a monk's cowl or hood, but more recently refers to a balaclava, the sort of thing terrorists like to run around in (hence Pujo's insult). The English meaning comes from the cowl/hood sense, hence coat with hood, but the French don't use cagoule to refer to a hooded waterproof coat: insofar as they have anything to do with cagoules, the French appear to call the coats by the genericised brand name K-way, or parkas.

[Sebastian Cobb]

How do you say "whose coat is that jacket?" in French then?

[bgmnts]

Whose coat is that le jacket.

Although:

www.walesonline.co.uk/news/news-opinion/whats-french-whose-coat-jacket-11443295

[mjwilson]

Watched a repeat of an old US sitcom called 'Just Shoot Me' and Bob Odenkirk turned up as a friend of the irritating character played by David Spade. It was centred around jealousy of each others girlfriend,and Spades character had just managed to connect with a (ficticious) supermodel,which rattled Odenkirks character. But then, I have been informed that Odenkirk, prior to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is a charcter actor anyway, and often turns up in stuff.

Spoilers for Little Women
He's in Little Women too

[Icehaven]

The title of Mike and the Mechanics "The Living Years" refers to the years when someone (in this case Mike Rutherford's father) is still alive rather than when they're dead.

[Fr.Bigley]

The title of Mike and the Mechanics "The Living Years" refers to the years when someone (in this case Mike Rutherford's father) is still alive rather than when they're dead.

Pretty obvious though

[Cerys]

Thread title checks out.

[kalowski]

The Tim Burton film Alice Through the Looking Glass is the worst thing ever made.

[touchingcloth]

PayPal. Papal.