A woman goes into a shop and asks if they sell potato clocks. The assistant says “Sorry, we don’t. We have alarm clocks, wall clocks, wind-up clocks… But I’ve never even heard of a potato clock.” The woman says, “neither have I, but I start my new job at nine tomorrow morning so my husband said I should get a potato clock.”
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Nice one Mick! They (Liverpool) weren’t at their best last night.
Barrie
I’ve got a mate who’s a Liverpool fan, he contacted me via messenger about the Man U result, something I can’t really repeat.
Talk about egg on face the next day when it was my turn to send him a message.
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OK, the fireworks thread has reminded me… Been there and done it with the banger attached to a rocket, but our other trick was to get the 2d cannons, remove the plug in the end from them and pour in the powder from as many would fit into one of them and glue in a new plug. The resulting firework was always good fun.
Having seen too many war films we also realised that a length of copper pipe stuck in the ground made a great mortar. Drop in a lighted banger, immediately followed by a well fitting marble. Never did find out quite how far the projectiles could go, but maybe the neighbours found out…
JS
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My boarding school in Africa had a Rifle Club and Range, and quite a few of the pupils were farmers sons with ready access to some interesting firearms.
The target bank was a wide mound of coarse sand about six feet high and ten feet thick, walled on the front by three close stacked rows of vertical gum-tree trunks each about 8" to 10" thick and on the back by two more rows. These were from trees recently felled on site in the plantations.
One fourteen-year-old (AFAIR) brought in his grandfather’s hunting rifle as an example of obsolete weapons that still had a big kick. The Rifle Club assembled one afternoon to witness the Master in charge firing its one remaining cartridge at the range. This particular rifle had a very thick leather cushion pad on the end of the stock where it rested on one’s shoulder.
When he fired the gun from his prone position, carefully braced, we were all temporarily deafened. The master was pushed back several inches on his firing blanket and received a major bruise on his shoulder. Fortunately nobody was near or behind the target area.
He pulled a cleaning rod from the gun case to see how far the bullet had gone into the bank. The rod went in full depth. There was an exit hole on the back of the bank, as well as in several mature conifers in the plantation behind it. The bullet was eventually found in a tree nearly a hundred feet beyond the bank in a dead straight line, almost no drop.
If I had not seen it I would not have believed it. My memory of the detail of the bank is a bit hazy, but when we felled the gum trees they had to be at least ten inches ten feet up!
It was the only time that gun was fired at the school. I heard later that target bank was eventually rebuilt with two layers of 9" brick work inside between the gum poles and the sand.
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That must have been a sight to behold Richard! 
Barrie
Not as much smoke as we were promised.
It might have been a later cartridge, and the .416 bore is just over a centimetre, but the cartridge looked like a magnum type, which is how I was able to find the reference on the Wiki.
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