FAQ for newsgroup uk.rec.sheds, version 2&3/7th 2000-02-04 (roughly) ============================== Part 7 of 8 : Inventory, clubs, pics "Inventory?" To paraphrase William Morris: You should only have in your shed those objects which you know to be hfrful or believe to be beautiful. {beauty and hfrfularff are of course, in the eye of the beholder} The cobbler's last is an item beloved of all sheddists. It's believed that the 3 armed type actually has a 4th arm orthogonal to the other 3 which extends into hyperspace and is not visible in our 3 dimensional world. A copy of Exchange&Mart, preferably at least a year old, takes pride of place in many a shed. Those outside the UK must, of course, make do with their nearest local equivalent. In emergencies it's possible to substitute items such as the 1985 What Camera? Buyer's Guide. Actually any out-of-date catalogue will do, though the more obscure items it has in it, the better. It seems that every shedder on the group has a copy of the Hawkin Bazaar catalogue - a current one! A partial copy of this is at http://www.hawkin.co.uk/ Check out the pop-pop boat! Various containers partly full of various liquids greatly enhance any shed. The most obvious choices are part used paint cans, but so poorly labelled that in fact you'll never find the right one for that bit of touching up on the dining room wainscoting, or if you do it'll be full of rust. Most of the real shed experts will have some Hammerite around somewhere. And it's obvious, I hope, that one cannot survive past the age of 30 without owning a can of WD40 or one of the close equivalents, although it's normal to lose the plastic straw. Of course every shedder has a least one Stanley knife, however it appears to be a universal fact that you can never find it when you want it. Some theorists believe that they gravitate through the shed-space continuum to reappear down the back of Bob's sofa, but Bob strongly denies this. A collection of tobacco tins full of partially sorted screws, nails, bolts, etc is a must: though some prefer to have the tins and the stuff that ought to fill them, but never quite get around to getting the two together.... For special storage needs, it's been suggested that a Klein bottle could be made by sewing together two Moebius bands, along their single edge. Can't say I've tried this one. "Affiliated Organisations?" SOBAR (not quite sober), the Society Of Brown Ale Revivalists Membership open to all who enjoy a pint of something dark. http://www.man.ac.uk/~zlsiida/sobar/ for a very poor web page. The International Goatkeepers Society You may join at the personal invitation of bill (skelm@worldnet.att.net) The Junior Bloody Club Membership is open to any who had interesting or amusing extreme physical trauma as a child. Copious amounts of blood would normally be required to qualify, but anything that makes your mother faint would do. The League Against Cruel Cats You'll know if you're a member of this one - you'll have the scars. The OETKB club - well, were you Old Enough To Know Better when you did that really stupid thing that led to injury (or at least, major embarrassment) ? A lot of Sheddi birthdays are listed at: | http://www.man.ac.uk/~zlsiida/sheds/birthdays | Didn't we use to have a shoe size list???? | "What Else?" C++ is something of a sheddy language: full of bits you don't really need but which might come in useful one day, not easy to get into, and anything you do want will be impossible to find as it will be buried under several layers of inherited classes in an include file called from another include file..... Frank Sidebottom apparently records his records and radio shows in a shed in his mum's garden. Linda Casey reminds us of a radio programme called "Our Shed" - "Aahh - but things are different there!" Max Wall would cry dramatically "Where?" he would be asked. "Our Shed" he would reply in a soppy kid's voice. "'Ere, it's everso nice in there..." The May/June 95 issue of The Idler had a good article about sheds. You can find a copy at http://www.man.ac.uk/~zlsiida/sheds/shedhvn.txt Thanks to Pete Shaw for bringing it to the newsgroup's attention. uk.rec.sheds archaeologists and historians frequently dispute the origins of the shed, which seem to stretch back into pre-history. However: Dragons used to sit on hoards of stuff; there's a dragon on the Welsh flag; there are some fine sheds in Wales with excellent tqt collections. If the dinosaurs managed to evolve into birds, maybe dragons evolved into sheds? According to Jenny Woolf, Lynn Tate of The Old Foundry, Leigh On Sea, SS9 2EP tel01702 471737 is doing greetings cards featuring sheds AND they're on the lookout for more sheds to immortalise. What kind of greeting you'd put on such a card is somewhat hard to imagine. There were several other things I meant to put in this file, but I can't offhand remember which pile of stuff I left them in. Maybe next time. Some of the posts from the pre-newsgroup threads can be found at: http://www.man.ac.uk/~zlsiida/sheds Naturally those files are half sorted. I've put the charter and faq there too, and there's a few JPEGs of various people's sheds in there as well. Send me some more. Here's one: http://gepasi.dbs.aber.ac.uk/ROY/shed.htm And there's several here: http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~cn237 andy the pugh mentions that images of himself, Gaye, Mike Fleming, Gaz and Mark Neil and glimpses of Gaz's collection of fine welsh sheds may be found at http://www1.psi.ch/~reid/aber.html Ian Roderic Izett has pictures of one of his sheds and its contents on his web page at http://www.aber.ac.uk/~iri Bob Goddard has a nice shed web page at :- http://www.godwit.demon.co.uk/sheds.html Stop by and see the contents of his shed and some nice piccies of his Stanley knife. Unfortunately there is no picture of his enigmatic sofa. Joe Tozer finally and circuitously JPEG'd a fine shed which can now be seen at: http://www.tozer.demon.co.uk/shed.jpg