Dinner rush.

Freeclimbing El Capitan 😯 no thanks!

Paddy Considine

Good shouts for Jim Broadbent and Christopher Ecclestone

John Simm is pants IMO

What a bummer… too late!

Romeo y Julieta are nice and quite widely available – but wouldn’t necessarily recommend a ‘Churchill’ as above – that’s about the biggest cigar they make… probably take you nearly an hour to smoke! Coronas/petit coronas are a more manageable size I reckon.
Think the last cigar I tried was a Quintero. Nice.

I got one of these and I rather enjoy it.

Proper LOL 🙂

A spot of lunch. A bottle of water. A waterproof jacket. A map. Your mobile. A sense of adventure tempered with a healthy respect. Cojones.

Coffee n cigarettes

You haven’t lived until you’ve walked a couple of hours (in cleats) to the nearest settlement, begged a loan of equipment from a hardware store or petrol station, then had to time-trial it back in terrible weather and failing daylight along grim and busy 20 miles of trunk road.

Minimalism helps create epics, discuss.

Ton… ah, la Boqueria… best market I've ever been to 😀

Love it. Has to be fairly authentic though. A lot of the stuff you get in uk tapas joints is frozen/boil in bag crap.

Pinxtos (spelling?) in Bilbao is a brilliant system… you walk around the city from bar to bar having a nice glass of red or a wee beer, plus a couple of bites (most served on a slice of bread) in each place. Each seems to have a different special ingredient… ie one bar will be known for it's bacalao, another for its jamon, another for its pulpo etc etc. Before you know it, you've sampled about half a dozen good wines and tasted about 20 little portions of lovely food.

Hungry now!

Ball shrivellingly scary. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

A few good suggestions. Love Camus, Kelman and McCarthy.

Off the top of my head I'll chuck-in John Updike's Rabbit trilogy and Saul Bellow's Herzog.

A friend got a renault trafic for a grand. 2.2 TD – or something like that. Drives like a car – not too big – quite nice comfy cab etc. Think it had 90k on it – which is not a lot. I got van envy.

Woah – awesome. Huge potential to look like a prize tool – but carried off with aplomb.

Direct Line give NCB for named drivers I'm pretty sure.

Google docs can open and edit pdfs I think – although take care, as it might mess with advanced formatting a bit.

Oasis' entire output since Definitely Maybe.

[edit – damn, too slow]

Bonty – I reckon Q-Bert comes across as relatively sane compared to Mixmaster Mike! 😀

Check 1,2

Yeah – saw Tony Vegas vs Harry Love a few years ago. Magnificent.

Not directly related – but have you seen the film "scratch"? Can't recommend it highly enough.

cos u is teh shiz, innit

They are simply excellent. I just have an 8Gb as I like to keep a relatively small amount of tunes on it and ring the changes regularly. As a discreet little wifi web browser it rocks. And you'll never be bored on a train ever again.

Dreadful piece of punditry there, Mr Poddy. Those bands might all be crap but they're certainly not similar. (Although the audience for the Kaisers and Kasabian does overlap I guess)

Libertines? Couple of half decent songs (Time for Heroes springs to mind) – but I see them as a pretty commercial, poppy entity. A bit of punk spirit I suppose – but not half as much as they or their fans would like to think.

I suppose they're a bit like the Strokes without the musical chops or the good looks.

I was skeptical – but it has a certain filth about it

Dramatic light

Holy sh*t, trout – what an old boot. You've done well to stay patient.

bugmenot.com can be good (though may struggle with relatively obscure titles)

Escabeche like this…

Intriguing use of Cannondale as back-scratcher.

What a hunk 😯

Bummer.

At least you were no longer protecting you no claims?

Edit – actually I just thought better of that comment. 'Scuse me.

you're already at a level I'd consider sub-human

That's OK though – because you love all the wonders of creation as much as you love yourself, right?

Edit: CK – just so we're clear, 'creation' is only a figure of speech.

Picture yourself for a second, drugged and injured, so that your superior powers of intellectual reasoning have been dulled down to your basic instincts, in a circle of men who are just popping in and out every so often, kicking you in the face, stabbing you, not quite finishing you off. How do you think you'll feel. You'll feel primal instincts…fear, confusion, pain. I'll have a tenner with you that a bull can feel those very same things. Saying "we don't really know how the bull feels" is not any kind of argument for killing it in the manner of a bullfight. It's not a fair point of reasoning.

If we lived in a World with zero chance of man inflicting that sort of inhumanity upon fellow man then it would indeed be super-****'d-up. We don't. People are cruel. Maybe it's so shocking that it makes a few people in the audience think about how to live their lives better – or about the things that they value, or about how lucky they are just to be alive.

I've never said it's 'right'. It happens. There are two sides to the argument.

Still not convinced it's a valid argument for saying their lives are worth less than ours

No. But in witnessing that split second where a bull takes the upper hand, you just might change your mind.

should maybe be viewing both (potential) deaths equally abhorently

Yup – exactly. But as above, when the tables turn, perhaps the feeling starts to emerge that some animals might be more equal than others (to paraphrase another well known Spanophile).

Lets just say that viewed with the right mix of cynisism and respect it encourages mindfulness and introspection. Not altogether without merit.

DeadlyDarcy – you seem content taking on board only the half of the argument that confirms your own prejudices. Not a very open minded outlook.

misogynistic, alcoholic, boorish tw4t

All true. Hell of a writer though.

The same argument can be applied to humans

Almost, but not quite. For example, I know I wouldn't like to see a human be killed by a bull. 😉

The rational debate could go right down the spiral until we're talking Descartes' "cogito ergo…" stuff – but let's just agree that we'll never know exactly how thoughtful a bull is. To that extent, we cannot really emphathise with it on a meaningful level.

What we can be a wee bit more sure of its that our fellow humans can and will think about things to varying extents. But we're still made of the same basic building blocks as other animals and are still possessed of instincts and emotions which run deeper than the conscious mind.

Sometimes it takes something quite shocking to remind us that we are not as special as we think we are. Perhaps a life and death spectacle like a bullfight?

I think its incumbent on all bull fighting officiandos to rigourously defend the bulls right to stick one up the odd matadors arris

Great writing. And absolutely true. However, if you want it to actually kill a man then you're more twisted than is probably healthy. In the same way that everyone secretly likes F1 for the crashes – but if you're watching it to see people die, you have crossed the line into psychopathy.

And that gives us the right to treat it so badly for our own enjoyment

"right" is not part of my argument. And I don't really even know if a bullfight can even be 'enjoyed' as such. At best, perhaps it could be characterised as 'thought provoking'.

in assuming the views of the bull, you really are overplaying your part in the whole thing

Absolutely true. I have strayed dangerously close there to the sort of hollow rhetoric employed by some misguided animal rights campaigners. My apologies.

How many years experience you got? Are you any good? What do you think you're worth?

Peyote: perhaps beacuse it's the ability to rationalise on that level that makes us unique.

You might subscribe to the "virus with shoes" view of humanity but hey – you're part of the gang!

Bullfighting is amoral at best but cheapening human life is downright immoral. This response doesn't have to be logical… if nothing else it's purely evolutionary.

A bull is a glorious and noble thing – but it doesn't give a **** about you, me, or even another bull.

deadlydarcy – not sure of your point? Certain animal welfare charities* are responsible for some of the most emotionally backward, sentimental, unfounded claptrap you will ever hear. *Not all of them, not all the time.