Any question answered...

Could have been pulled for an inspection/security - depending on the carrier it might just show up as a generic 'customs processing' message. How long has it been there?

It's those bloody immigrants

Cheers bud, I could have just googled that but I'd already started down the AQA road....!

since friday

which website are you using to track it? I had a parcel come from France and although the royal mail website said it was in customs the french post website showed it was sat at the local post office it was sent from and hadn't even made it to the sorting office

1. Arrivals from EU countries
   You don’t pay duty or tax on goods you bring in from the European Union (EU) as long as you:
   
   

transport them yourself
will use them yourself or give them away as a gift
have paid duty and tax in the country where you bought them

Point 1 doesn't apply?

ups. I contacted them and asked - they told me it was still with customs

Those look like the rules for air arrivals (and declaring things to customs) to me, which is a different thing.

a) UPS are shit (especially via phone) and their online tracking isn't great - email them at custsvcgben@ups.com and help_uk@ups.com and kick up a fuss, if you haven't already.
b) That length of time held somewhere (anything over 24 hours) suggests an issue the sender should be resolving - UPS or 'customs' should have contacted them, so get them to chase it up.

What types of frames need a 27.0mm seatpost and why?

Most 753 frames, and because that's what fits.

"why was someone making slightly thicker-walled tubesets than regular 531 in the 90s?"

Usually, the smaller diameter seat posts are for tube sets where the seat tube is double butted (e.g. most decent Japanese bikes), whereas most 531 frames were built with a single butted seat tube, only the BB end was butted so the walls were thin where the seat post went in, therefore needing a large diameter post.

Is that because of the butting thing or because the tubes have a smaller diameter overall (external and internal)?

Ta. I did exactly that. Package has suddenly been miraculously 'cleared for shipping' - read: "Oh yeah we found it in a room somewhere.. oops"

Fuckers

Is that because of the butting thing

Yes. The wall thickness is the same at the seat lug as it is in the middle, whereas DB seat tubes have a thick wall (compared with the middle of the tube) at the seat lug

Fasssssssssssssssssscinating!

While you're here, as the man who knows all, can you answer this:

Why did seatposts and headsets stop being part of groupsets?

Why did seatposts and headsets stop being part of groupsets?

Probably because OEMs stopped buying them when they realised that most people didn't care about cheaper Taiwanese substitutions. Also, frame materials changed, so what was once a case of having 27.2 and 26.8 to cover most steel frames suddenly became 20 different seat post sizes to suit oversized steel, aluminium and latterly carbon frames. That's fine if you're selling thousands at a time to an OEM, but a PITA for a shop trying to stock three or four grades each of Campag and Shimano in every size your customers might ask for, so the after-market upgrades went out of fashion too. Seat posts are pretty easy to make, so they were one of the things which the boutique manufacturers jumped on back in the purple anodised days, and it was hard for Campag and Shimano to come up with a product which they could stand behind which would compete on paper with something knocked up in a shed by some bloke with nothing to lose if it proved failure-prone.

On headsets, Dia Compe came up with a better way to skin the cat, and Shimano refused to pay for a licence (they are always deeply reluctant to use pay for other people's IP), which basically killed Shimano as a mainstream headset option, and I doubt that they were too bothered by the loss.

Far as I know UPS do a lot of pre- customs processing to make it as fast as possible, it was probably a fuckup/laziness on the french side. Like a Lemond Team Z bike I bought disappearing for a full 2 weeks that one time.

Anyway, best endorsement i can give is that when I buy special chemical products from Amsterdam I use UPS and they always arrive.

I've got a song stuck in my head and I can't find out what it is anywhere!
The chorus goes something like 'wheeeeeeeere did you go' in a slow harmonised descending melody and the timing is a little bit unusual - the first word of each line comes in a beat/half a beat early. I think there are some quite rich piano chords. I also think it's a newish song as it's been on the radio...
¯_(ツ)_/¯

Fort Minor - Where'd You Go?(?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okC7VFZvdgg
?

Less hiphop, more RNB/Indie/pop

I think it's a man/men singing. Production along the lines of Frank Ocean/Alt-J

Is anyone a student at the University of Reading?

https://youtu.be/tyANFcnrM8I

Haha, no.