As well as a UK dowry, the EU would certainly help out. Ireland has been a very good investment. A classic case of a net beneficiary developing to become a net contributor, which is how it’s meant to work out.

The day after Brexit nothing material will have changed…our standards and systems will still be aligned and in place and will be for the foreseeable after Brexit, so no reason why things can’t continue as normal.

You have just described the Withdrawal Agreement and Irish Backstop.

In all seriousness, this is an excellent article which explains the “word wars” down through the years.

https://www.these-islands.co.uk/publications/i279/ireland_the_politics_of_nomenclature.aspx

It’s called the Free State.

😉☘️🇨🇮🎣

Maybe Ireland will join the UK.

Of all the fevered brexit hallucinations, up to and including our current Home Sec threatening Ireland with another famine, this is the maddest delusion I have heard.

There’s a really easy solution to the backstop: NI remains part of both UK and EU customs union. Customs checks between GB and NI occur at Holyhead and Stranraer.

The only reason this isn’t happening now is parliamentary arithmetic and DUP, who bizarrely consider themselves separate for abortion/gay rights etc, but joined up to UK for e.g food standards.

I suspect that if the arithmetic changes after a GE, this is the solution we’ll end up with. No one apart from a few nutters will complain. NI voted remain after all. There are other parts of the UK (e.g London, Scotland) who would bite your hand off for such a deal.

RoI has a higher GDP per capita than UK, but I suspect they’d find the net expenditure of taking on NI to be financially crippling. Not saying it couldn’t be done, but UK would have to hand over a big dowry.

I had always thought that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” meant that lots of little good things could add up to a big wrong thing.

However I see now that that’s not the case all, the proverb refers to
*unactioned* intentions.

…. so if you’re playing football you might shout “over here, on me nonce”.

Do you mean bonce?

* I think you mean nous.

Nonce is something different. 😬

It was an Interplanetary Society podcast and they were talking about the “Pell Fund”.

I heard on a podcast that the USA government/exec are refusing to stump up the extra NASA funding directly. Instead, they have said the money will have to be diverted away from a fund for poor American students to get to university.

It’s tough to think of a more toxic political manoeuvre.

It the prospect of being blindsided by a pheasant which plays on my mind, after hearing that this happened to a pal’s clubmate.

Kanedaaaa!!!

Tetsuoooo!!!!

You can probably ride to Ticknock aka 3-Rock. The waymarked trail is only 45 mins long but its good fun, you could happily do it a couple of times. There are also a bunch of other trails not on the official route (but I think are on Trailforks), though I haven’t done them.

Ballinastoe is about 90 mins of riding, it starts off slow (fire road, first bit of singletrack is a bit lame) but gets better thereafter. A bit of missing signage so keep an eye on the map.

The two hours on the bus would kill it for me, I would recommend Ticknock.

6 sets ordered. Great PSA.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 29er Spectral in the next year or 2.

I have a Spectral 29er from 2014. They were discontinued! 🤔

^^^ and when you account for steeper ST° and slacker HT° it will be shorter still?

I’m looking specifically at the XL/XXL here. I think I’d have been XXL on the old and XL on the 2020 model given big stack increase for XXL.

Can’t quite see what’s going on with the geometry. It seems to be shorter for a given stack than the old one?

Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon is definitive as far as Apollo is concerned.

it’s incredibly tense.

The score makes it tense. Relentlessly so. A bit of anxiety is fine for the lift-off and the landing, but could the composer have allowed us some variety of emotional response? It’s a constant stresser. Reminds me of Dunkirk, maybe because it was the last IMAX I saw, but there was a similarity with the score.

The contrast between Apollo 11 and For All Mankind is like one of those demonstrations from music lessons at school as to how the brain interprets exactly the same images differently depending on soundtrack. I want to watch FAM again for the dreamlike wonder and mild euphoria, I think that’s the antidote.

The 2.3″ Butcher and Purg size up markedly narrower than the DHF 2.35 and HR2 2.3 they replace.

On my 21mm rims, the Butcher is 2.17″ and Purg 2.14″.

Very quick postage though! 👍

On radio 5 live earlier they were saying that there’s TV footage of Froome putting on a gilet (though they said jumper) no-handed. Wout Poels admonished him “don’t take risks Chris, there’s no need”, he replied “it’s ok I’m fine”. That was just minutes before he took one hand of the bars to blow his nose.

Were they on TT bikes with deep section fronts do we know. It was reportedly gusty.

I bought a pair of 29×2.3 Butcher and Purg last night.

How do they size up?

My old 2014 Roam rims are only c. 20mm int width so hopefully I’ll get a decent shape.

A bike will almost never be technologically obsolete. However it may become obsolete to your needs/wants.

Ex.1: good summer road bike gets displaced by something better and is relegated to winter road bike. If it gets relegated again then it’s off to the charity bike scheme.

Ex.2: hard tail gets relegated to shwalbe marathon tyres and dodging about duties.

It sounds to me like you have your heart set on the 3T Exploro. Quite understandably so, its beautiful. If there is any way you can push it that extra few hundred quid without causing yourself stress (can’t emphasize this enough), you should do so. It’ll be cheaper and you’ll be happier in the long run.

Whenever I have tried to be more economical, it’s always niggled away and triggered a merry-go-round of frame swaps which is perversely a very expensive way of doing it.

<Warning: Don’t not connect to a stove more than 500 times> on the can. And they don’t.

Of course they don’t. It would be ridiculous to suggest that a valve can be engineered to be fine on the 500th connection but fail on the 501st.

What can be engineered is for a valve to have a miniscule failure rate to start with. However as you make more and more connections the odds start changing. No one of us knows what the curve looks like, but the odds do change.

unless you 100pc empty it which in practice never happens.

You cannot speak for everyone’s filling/refilling regime. For example:

I just leave it all connected for a hour or two, outside, and the top cylinder will empty completely.

why are we suggesting its safe only if we do it three of four times? The valve on the canister

Because the canister will have been designed accounting for the fact that it will be pressurised once, and the valve will undergo a reasonable number of clicks corresponding to one canister. That design will then have a massive safety margin built-in, so that on the bell curve of probability an brand new can/valve will only fail say (for the sake of argument) once in a billion. As you exceed those design parameters, you start creeping along the bell curve. One in a billion becomes one in a hundred million. Then curve steepens and the odds reduce drastically.

So basically if you know what you’re doing you can reuse a few times and you’re only creeping along the valley floor of the bell curve.

To be clear I am talking about disc braked aero road wheels with road tyres for road riding, but just on a gravel frame.

For something so ultra scientific it’s such an opaque subject. The manufacturer’s all big-up their own rim shapes while throwing shade on the opposition. It’s impossible to tell. I think this is the only objective and fundamentally truthful guidance:

Personally, I’d say stick to what look the best!

What I’m getting at is this;

Will an aero wheelset be more, less or equally effective if used on a bike not specifically designed to be aero? i.e gaping fork clearances and slab bottomed downtube.

Schwalbe Pro Ones on Stans Grails no problemo.

Nice and slack but the reach is soooo 2017.

Also vent the tent, all flaps flapped. Otherwise you’ll be soaked in condensation.

Would you not go for the AXS reverb to go with the rest of your groupset?

Do you not just have one cable, the rear brake?

The wee plastic bits are presumably just to seal off all the holes you don’t need thanks to etap.

Thanks all. On balance it looks like I should keep my money in my pocket. When I eventually get a new bike I’ll go the whole hog get the advantage of boost too.

Existing wheelset is SRAM roam 50 which at 1.64kgs does have the virtue of lightness.

I suspect my non-boost frame would not have clearance for anything much more than 2.35″, especially with a wider rim.

Loved it. Thought it was a perfect Endgame to all that’s gone before. The pacing was superb, they used the three hours very wisely. They let the film breathe, and build gradually to its crescendo. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll really care. It’s a masterpiece.

So how did everyone go?

I was on my own this year, which amplifies the highs and the lows, the joy and the despair. I finished brightly though, and that’s what keeps you coming back for more.

Best bit of event organisation: the zero alcohol beer and falafel wrap at the end. Significant improvement from last year.

Worst piece of kit: Garmin Edge Touring, keeps crashing. It’s a liability.

Best piece of kit: the recently PSA’d Aussie Grit thermal gilet, perfect for yesterday’s conditions.

Honourable mention: Panaracer Gravel kings, no punctures. Unlike last year when my Maxxis Ramblers got sliced.