See you in Reading?

Imagine flying from Australia just to watch this

@benredstar said:
"Note for overseas readers: it's "Reading" to rhyme with "Bedding"; not "Reading" to rhyme with "bleeding"."

Wouldn't it be spelled 'readding' then or something? Idk. English came from the UK so if that's how it's pronounced I guess that's how it's pronounced. Three languages in a trenchcoat and all that.

@Retroblox77 said:
"Imagine flying from Australia just to watch this"
Regular sub-orbital flights may one day make that possible. Sydney to London could take less than two hours. You could visit the UK as a day trip. Likely eye-wateringly expensive initially, but I expect the price would eventually come down just as it did with conventional air travel.

What is the size of this show compared to the Bright Bricks Manchester show that was last weekend? That one was jam packed all weekend...........

@huw I was at Bricktastic last weekend. I’d never heard of or seen GBCs before. My son and I loved them, so inventive and mesmerising. Thanks for taking them on tour!

@Binnekamp said:
" @benredstar said:
"Note for overseas readers: it's "Reading" to rhyme with "Bedding"; not "Reading" to rhyme with "bleeding"."

Wouldn't it be spelled 'readding' then or something? Idk. English came from the UK so if that's how it's pronounced I guess that's how it's pronounced. Three languages in a trenchcoat and all that."
If that seems confusing, try pronouncing the name of the town of Frome in Somerset correctly! Even many Brits don't know that.
;-)

By the way, it's pronounced "froom"...

Here's for some fun education on the subject:

https://youtu.be/uYNzqgU7na4

Even their adverts that usually end the video are fun to watch. Gotta love those guys. :-)

@Huw said:
" @SuperMatt said:
" @huw I was at Bricktastic last weekend. I’d never heard of or seen GBCs before. My son and I loved them, so inventive and mesmerising. Thanks for taking them on tour!"

I'm glad you enjoyed them., Now you can spend hours watching them on YouTube. Here's our circult at Manchester: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8lNZyeakuc"
Excellent. Totally hypnotic!

for those of you who don't know, the Reading Railroad from Monopoly, from Atlantic City area and the city of Reading in Pennsylvania are also pronounced this way--"Redding Railroad" not, like many Americans believe, "Reeding Railroad."

@ohrmazd said:
"for those of you who don't know, the Reading Railroad from Monopoly, from Atlantic City area and the city of Reading in Pennsylvania are also pronounced this way--"Redding Railroad" not, like many Americans believe, "Reeding Railroad.""

I think I'd been playing monopoly for 15 years by the time I learned that. Nothing will ever beat Gqerbeha, South Africa though.

@Huw
My grandaughter was mesmerised by the GBC. It looked great.
Thanks for the brick, by the way.
It was good to put a face to a name

GBC modules that are combined to create a connected GBC series should use mostly one colour of ball punctuated occasionally by another colour. It would help viewers to track progress along the system or circuit.

I completely forgot this was happening. I might see you at the London Transport Event in July (?) though @huw. I hope to display there.

Massachusetts laughs at your town pronunciation discussion.

Worcester, Billerica, Peabody, Haverhill, Natick, Leicester, Leominster, Tyngsborough, Gloucester, Scituate, Waltham, Needham, Dedham, Quincy, Woburn... I guarantee nobody would pronounce that full list correctly unless they've actually lived within a stone's throw of Massachusetts.

(For the record, it's WUSS-tah, bill-RICK-ah, PEE-b'ddy, HAY-v'ril, NAY-tick, LESS-ter, leh-MIN-stah, TINGS-buh-ro, GLOSS-tah, SIT-chew-it, WALL-thum, NEE-dum, DEAD-um, QUIN-zee, and WOO-burn.)

@PDelahanty, I was in Waltham, MA once and pronounced the place just like its English namesake (WALL-thum) only to be corrected by locals who told me it’s pronounced WOLT-ham (and that my way of saying it was very funny).

@benredstar said:
"Note for overseas readers: it's "Reading" to rhyme with "Bedding"; not "Reading" to rhyme with "bleeding"."

I was going to ask if you were aware the railroad immortalized on the Monopoly board is pronounced the same way, due to being named after Reading, Pennsylvania, in turn named after Reading, England. It seems the only people in the US who have much hope of knowing that are either railfans or from around SE Pennsylvania.

But then I discovered the UK Monopoly board got localized, so you may not even realize the Reading Railroad is on the original Monopoly board in the first place. I would have found it very amusing if people in Britain got tripped up by it too.

@Huw, What? Non-purist parts! I’ll have to call the LEGO police and have you arrested for apostasy ;~P

Seriously, using another colour is a good move. If all the balls are white or orange in roughly equal proportions, it makes it difficult to see what’s happening. An alternative that wouldn’t work at shows but might in YouTube videos would be to run just a small number of balls through the system at a time.

@Andhe said:
" You mean to say they are actually pronounced like all the original places those names are originally taken from? Would have thought you would have ended up with a 'War-sess-tar' etc etc rather than the old English pronunciation. "

Having gone to college in Worcester for four years, I think I've heard every possible pronunciation. The most common was "Warchester". I saw a lot of crazy misspellings on the mail too. "Wooster", "Worchester" (most common), "Worcestershire" (I mean, really?!), "Worster", etc.

@PDelahanty said:
" @Andhe said:
" You mean to say they are actually pronounced like all the original places those names are originally taken from? Would have thought you would have ended up with a 'War-sess-tar' etc etc rather than the old English pronunciation. "

Having gone to college in Worcester for four years, I think I've heard every possible pronunciation. The most common was "Warchester". I saw a lot of crazy misspellings on the mail too. "Wooster", "Worchester" (most common), "Worcestershire" (I mean, really?!), "Worster", etc."

Well, Worcestershire was the original county in the UK, which still gives its name to things eg Worcestershire Sauce. So Worcestershire could just be an understandable mix up

https://autos.yahoo.com/lego-jeep-120-000-pieces-233700555.html

I’m scrolling through headlines on Saturday morning, and I came across this. Had to read a ways into the article to find out that it happened at a different show a week earlier.

@Binnekamp:
English is famous for its absolute lack of standardized spelling, which last saw a serious push for reform about 200 years ago when Noah Webster started publishing his dictionary...which resulted in the US/UK split in spelling. This was made so much messier than it could have been by the various times that Great Britain was conquered by someone who didn’t speak English as a first language, by having printed material produced by people who didn’t speak English as a first language, by borrowing so many words from neighboring languages, and by paying typesetters by the line without restricting the way words could be spelled (resulting in them padding the length of words to pad their paychecks). If the typesetters were paid by how much they could pack into each page, English probably would have eliminated all silent letters.

@PDelahanty:
Tyngsborough seems to be pronounced exactly as one would expect, unless they lived near a place where “borough” ends in a short “u” sound. Waltham is a 50/50 chance on whether you think it’s “walt-ham” or “walth-am”, so it’s not on the same level as the other “-ham” names you mentioned. Otherwise, the only ones I would have gotten right are the ones I was already familiar with (though I seriously doubt anyone from Massachusetts can actually say “LESS-ter”).

But, hey, everywhere has their quirky pronunciations. Houston St in NYC is pronounced “HOWS-ton”, rather than the way Houston, TX is pronounced. In Detroit, there’s Lahser St, which my parents argue about every time it comes up (my dad, a local, says it’s pronounced “LASH-er”, while my mom says it’s spelled “LAH-set”). And in Michigan, the town of Hell is pronounced “HEL”, not “HEL *snicker*”, “HEL *chuckle*”, or “HEL *silently mouths ‘WTF’*”.

@Zander:
Availability of balls is a huge problem for the GBC crowd. When GBC was first started, soccer balls were available on PaB walls, and many AFOLs bought large cups of them just for the sake of amusement. Then they stopped making soccer/basketball sets, and the supply dried up. One of the Brickworld Chicago regulars will give out 100 balls to people who are interested in getting started, because you can’t tell how if a module might work if you don’t have anything to test it with (and even then, unpredictable feed rates can seriously trip up designs that work fine at home). Eventually they came back, and showed up on LUGBulk price lists, but I’m not sure if that was random chance*, or if it was due to pressure from the GBC community.

Anyways, basketballs were great because they were molded in orange, where every soccer ball at the time was molded in white. Print isn’t helpful because it just wears off over time, so I understand where the 3rd party balls come in handy. Zamor spheres got their attention, until it was discovered that they were slightly larger and would not fit through a 2-stud gap. You can build modules that can feed them, but all it takes is one module with a 2-stud channel to shut down the entire GBC run. I have heard of people making single modules that will recirculate an independent supply of Zamor spheres mixed with a common supply of soccer balls, separating them out by size when they reach the end. Soccer balls get passed on to the next module, and Zamor spheres get retained.

* In the US, Title IX requires public schools to offer as many opportunities for girls to play sports as they do boys. This has lead to “Competitive Cheer” being turned into a sport to balance football (which is typically restricted to boys). It also lead to the surge in girls playing soccer in the US, because there’s so little required in the way of school funding. So, with one of the Friends girls being into sports, the return of the soccer ball may have been inevitable.

I had a wonderful time, and was lovely to finally put a face to a name! Plus that GBC was incredible!

Great to have a show on my doorstep. Brilliant day out today. Busy at 10 when it opened and again around lunchtime. Loads of great displays including the GBC. That LEGO House module looked awesome @huw