Yes – what IHN said. Too many people see veg as containing carbs and mistakenly avoid it.

Although I turned off WA backups because I want to conserve cloud storage space and my messages are ephemeral – I don’t care what I WA’d someone last month or last year.

I should be riding to Holmbury Hill for solstice, but this year I’ll be at home wishing I hadn’t got Covid.

“A video showing a police car hitting the calf on Friday night on a residential street in Staines-upon-Thames was met with widespread outrage, including from the RSCPA which criticised the move as “disproportionate” “ According to The Guardian: https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/17/police-who-rammed-runaway-cow-did-the-right-thing-says-farmer

If it was Feltham you’d expect it to be The Met, not Surrey Police.

Not unsurprising though, with the urban city. . .

Except in was in a medium sized town in leafy Surrey.  But let’s not let facts get in the way of our ignorant prejudices.

 police officers as they are.

How are they?  All the police officers I’ve met (mainly in leafy Surrey) seem nice people, who would have a lot of trouble dealing with this situation.

Will a helmet save you from being crushed to death by a car/bus/truck ?

Of course not. But if that’s your level of reasoning then the argument you are making must be absolutely feeble.

If you have a real point to make, then please spell it out,

Thankyou tractionman that looks very interesting.

Met Office forecast here in the Surrey Hills is sunny with clouds and that is exactly spot on.

I don’t touch BBC weather and focus on the Met Office maps: rainfall radar timelapse for what’s coming our way and can us soon,  and the other tab for a display of rain for next day or so: then you can get a feel for how localised it’s likely to be.

I understand that the rest of society considers a helmet the beginning and the end of the conversation on children’s bicycle safety

That really isn’t true: you’ve just made up that  ridiculous “fact”.

I used to do 12 miles off road each way with the laptop and used a rucksack. It was a bit of a weight on my back, so I’m glad I don’t do it now.

I’d be a bit concerned about putting it on a rack unless it’s well padded in a pannier.

I don’t remember it in the 1969’s – does that just mean all the months in 1969?  🙂

A stupid fat finger mistype for 1960s. 😕

Mushroom omelettes are great any time of day – you are lucky to have really fresh eggs.

 you’re told that breakfast is the most important meal,

By the breakfast cereal industry.  After breakfast cereal was invented by the Americans in the late 1800s they marketed it with slogans like «the most important meal» to drive demand for something people hadn’t needed before.

Its as meaningful as « go to work on an egg » – anyone remember that in the 1969s?

Fasting is a fancy word for skipping breakfast.

In my case time restricted eating type fasting is essentially no breakfast, indeed no food between about 8pm and 11am. Any tea/coffee in that period is black. So most of my morning rides, at least a couple of hours off road, are fasted.

I started through being too lazy for breakfast, and became more committed in the face of the “breakfast is the most important meal” crew. But the science on inflammation and gut health behind this from people like Tim Spector and  MM does sound very plausible.

This seemed to be a very big thing in Japan. Lots of people have their dogs dressed up and pushed around in prams.

With the birth rate being so low there we found it was more likely that someone pushing a pram had a dog in it rather than a child.

I see lots of social media and celebrities promoting. . .

Social Media and celebrities – whatever it is it’s clearly rubbish.

on the basis your X times more productive.

For most people only true if X < 1

In Japan recently I used an eSIM from Ubigi. What I learned was as people say above:

-it is way easier to do than you think it will be and works well with iPhones (and no doubt Android)

– you can buy a data or a data+calls version.

– you can designate the status of each of multiple SIMs in your phone’s options, such as primary or disabled

– WhatsApp works fine

It is one of those miraculous pieces of new technology that simply works way better than you expect.   Plug in WiFi packs are now RIP, unless you have an ancient phone.

I’d say Trump by a mile.  Unfortunately.

America is the global superpower so most people globally are aware of the country – and Trump has been the most high profile talked about American for a good few years.

Taylor Swift – no. There’s lots of the world where western music just doesn’t register for the general population, they won’t know or care about Taylor Swift, or Lady Gaga, or Madonna, or whatever the next product of the global pop industry will be.

Hotel manager on Jo marler podcast said hotel gets 50% of portal selling price.

Hmm – I’ve booked a lot of hotels for work trips and Booking.com is my usual first step. I then usually try the hotel’s own website but often, not always,  find it is more expensive that way. I have even phoned up and asked the hotel for a room at the Booking.com price and they said no!

So in my experience it is sometimes better to book direct and sometimes better to use Booking.com.

PS I don’t use hotel.com but have never had a problem with booking.com.

More fundamentally, tell us all about it here so we can give you some helpful encouraging comments, tell you why it won’t work, have a debate  about the pros and cons, then descend into personal abuse before someone gets close to a ban.

Without a patent its going to get copied by China

the Chinese are unlikely to allow a patent to get in the way. And you’d need to patent it individually in each country where you hope to get it protected not just once in the UK. This is quite expensive without help from a big company’s patent lawyers.

I was in Flanders recently

I find absence of hedgerows to be a feature of many European countries, just from recent memory I’m thinking of Scandinavia, France,  Germany and Spain.

Indeed I suspect hedgerows are something that foreign tourists find part of the unique charm of the classic southern English landscape – as you go north they tend to be replaced by the quintessential dry stone wall countryside.

This morning I ordered a couple of spring rolls and a coffee from a kiosk by the beach.  They guy gave me the coffee and said he has a rule that the first coffee he serves each day is free, in return for a verbal review.

The coffee was rank, I just didn’t know what to say.

I got the yellow rattle to take on our previously well established lawn – it’s blooming quite nicely now.  But I think you have to be careful to ensure the seeds get in contact with some soil.

But I am not so sure our plug plants from last year  have really done much this year – it seems to be more the local flowers from hedge rows and what on the borders I’d consider as “weeds” that are happiest.

a chemist with his level of knowledge could produce those precursors himself, he wouldn’t need to source them from outside

That’s not how chemistry works. He might be able to produce the precursors in theory but in practice it may be, expensive, time consuming and take a lot of expensive equipment.  It would  be like someone who wanted to bake cake illegally deciding to make his ”precursors” butter, flour, and sugar, by setting up a farm to produce wheat, eggs milk, and sugar beet, and setting up a sugar plant to make the crystalline sugar, a mill to make the flour and a dairy and cold store to make the butter. All without drawing attention to himself.

No, as a chemical engineer I thought Breaking Bad was pretty good about the production aspects, but perhaps understated the marketing problems.

I’m 6ft and have an L. For 6’2” I’d be going for XL.

I found Peaties to be useless, the awful sparkly bits didn’t endear it to me either.   I tried the orange one and it was reasonably good. But I’ve resorted to using Stan’s again because it’s consistently the one that works best.

Did the OP also believe that Brexit would be a good idea?

. . . because the only people who don’t have perfect knowledge of European geography and history will be those dumb Brexiteers.

#ironyalert

Yes, I was unaware of that until I went to live in central Scotland an brought an OS map. I guess Hadrian’s wall is the famous one because it is visually more impressive these days with forts and long sections of actual wall.  Whereas the Antonine wall maybe suffered from being in a more densely inhabited part of Scotland – and was built mainly of turf.

thought that “Cyclists Dismount” was a sensible warning on the map because it’s blooming steep

Yes, Cyclists Dismount was the name of the descent, based on there being a couple of council signs in the 1990s  advising cyclists to dismount. They are long gone now, but the name lives on in Strava.   I stuck a Strava segment on the climb about 15 years ago when I thought it might be feasible uphill too.

From what I rembobine static line, we were trained time and time again in a series of actions of moving towards the door, look in a certain direction and then take action after we jumped.

So when we were jumping for real the actual leaving the plane was something you did almost automatically because it was next in a sequence, rather than sitting by the door thinking am I going to jump yet.

You won’t find any long technical climbs in the SE, but living by the North Downs I enjoy their short punchy climbs.  One classic is the final approach to Leith Hill tower from the east up the Frontal Assault.  A GPS error makes it look flat on this Strava segment, actually it’s a short, steep but do-able ascent where you have to carefully pick  line over roots and around trees and gullys to the top of south east England:  https://www.strava.com/segments/12157921

At the back of Headley there is the High Ashurst climb, short and quite technical: https://www.strava.com/segments/84747

Nearby behind Denbies vineyard is Denbies Stinking steep, a quarter mile at 15% it’s do-able but always a nice challenge: https://www.strava.com/segments/15288393

There are several good climbs on the north face of the North Downs, a few of which are:

• A real challenge is the Cyclists Dismount climb, a techy  quarter mile averaging 19%:  https://www.strava.com/segments/844412
• Nearby, shorter but more techy over the steps is the Landrover ascent: https://www.strava.com/segments/4765707
• Easier but still a challenge is McPhearson’s Mount: https://www.strava.com/segments/847749
• And in a similar vein is New Barn Farm climb: https://www.strava.com/segments/870855
• From the bottom of Coombe Lane there is Juniper climb, a third of a mile averaging 13%: https://www.strava.com/segments/17736889

There are plenty of others, especially over on Pitch and Holmbury, some of which haven’t got a Strava segement.

But finally as close as you can get to impossible without actually being impossible, is the brutal Honeysuckle Bottom sharp climb.  It’s over 30% and techy, so very few people have managed it,  At less than 200m it is too short for a Strava bike segment, so the running segment is shown here: https://www.strava.com/segments/6999856

Anti-aircraft guns are stationed on hilltops miles away where they can shoot things down before they’re actually overhead dropping bombs

Hmm, not sure about that. The Bethnal Green tube disaster of 1943 was supposed to have triggered by testing anti aircraft guns nearby – in the East End of London.

And on the flipside using unapproved chemicals to control weeds is actually illegal.

Really?   If I pour vinegar on my weeds to kill them what offence will I be charged with? Or indeed boiling water, which is also a “chemical” and I assume “unapproved” for killing weeds?

Their policy explicitly says: “the only women who should be in custody are those very few that commit serious and violent crimes and who present a threat to the public . . . For the vast majority of women in the criminal justice system, solutions in the community are more appropriate”

That means sentencing should be based on gender.  If it did not mean that it would use the word people instead of women.

Sentencing people based on their gender is a dreadful idea in so many ways.

The price increase seems very badly timed: like many here I was about to cancel Zwift for the summer IRL season – this is a good reminder to do that immediately.

It might have been a better strategy to wait until mid summer to do the increase, when we are all less interested, and by the winter when people re-subscribe it will be the new normal.

Having a law that says “you’re a woman so you might be more likely to have been a victim so we’ll not send you to prison just in case” is bonkers.

Absolutely this.

Worst major city airport for me was Berlin Tegel – a horrible little place that was plain embarrassing in the capital of Europe’s largest country. Luckily it closed in 2020. Another bad one is Chambéry – bad at the best of times it becomes a whole new circle of hell when you are waiting for it to reopen after bad winter weather. It was the only time I was fed by the Red Cross.

As for best, Qatar and Singapore are excellent. In the UK LHR T2 and T5 are very good.

The answer for the OP is Fusilli. Except for Spaghetti Xxx dishes and Lasagna Xxx dishes.

Penne isn’t bad but Fusilli is Il Capo.

not possible to plan in advance

Why not plan the route segment then share the link with yourself on WhatsApp? When you want to use that segment go to WA and click on the link.

For the quiet route options you can set “avoid motorways” or even set it to use a bicycle, but check afterwards it is not using a cycle only route.

I’ve always thought that most ands/artists are only really good for 2 or 3 really good albums if they are lucky.

I agree. It is only the really good artists that can re-invent themselves or develop to remain interesting over many years: Bowie, The Beatles and Kate Bush come to mind.

Our no mow area hasn’t been mown since the autumn and is already bright with yellow cowslips, primroses and purple bugle. No sign of the yellow rattle yet but last year that appeared later.

I have Gore and Showers Pass waterproof  jackets, and both seem very good at what they do.

The Gore is a Gore Wear Packlite which I use for road riding because it packs up small and just fits into a road jersey pocket.  It is remarkably waterproof and lightweight, but I suspect it wouldn’t last long with the brambles, thorns and falls of MTBing.

The Showers Pass is the EcoLyte Elite Jacket which I got for MTBing because it has thicker material than the Gore and it has a helmet hood.  Apart from not being packable in a pocket it is very good.