When i went in there was a load of sky kit, and then maybe two other jerseys in Large, rest of the mens jerseys were all massive or mostly small. Even the socks were nearly all small/medium, had a proper rummage and round 2 pairs over size 8! Shorts/tights i seem to remember had most sizes but seemed to be less well discounted.
Lots of hats though, the wintery ones are really nice and £20-25 iirc.

No problem is an orphan.
Never stop considering that you might be completely and utterly wrong.

Always a bit suspicious of stuff that appears on sports pursuit that i have never heard of yet has a massive range at huge discounts. Sports pursuit cannot be seen to sell anything at less than huge discount and a fair bit of their stuff for sale has that “officers club/sports direct” feel where you should totally ignore the ‘rrp’ and focus on the price asked on the day plus of course at least £4 postage as its sports pursuit.

I would be very surprised if dirty dog just suddenly acquired the tooling/moulding technology and started making their own helmets all off their own back.
Like so many things bicycley these days, try trawling the sites of a couple of taiwanese or chinese helmet manufacturers and find out who makes them, who else they make them for and then you might find a bit more about them. Even some fairly hip brands sell some rebranded catalogue stuff at hip prices (*coughs*pdw*pedros*) If it is for sale in the uk it will at least have a proper safety test though. Will be better still if it is available in the states as iirc their standards are higher.

Those little folding ones are good if you want something compact and that you can use one-handed on horseback. Most have a little saw in them too but you might as well get a folding/retractable saw if you want a saw blade.
Silky-type saw also good if your horsey is well behaved enough to let you have one had tugging at the bramle and one to do a stroke of the saw rather than waving and slashing.

[tinfoil hat] both the original act and the partial repeal have wasted a lot of parliamentary time but more importantly (edit:important to my conspiracy theory, that is!) also wasted/diverted popular media interest whilst we should have been worrying about what else the respective governments were up to at the time. It wasn’t Iraq invasion and wmd’s last time but i do recall changes to domestic terrorism legislation going on quietly at the same time as the original act. [/tinfoil hat]

Also, somewhere in a hunting/outdoorsy forum elswhere in the internet, ninfan will be arguing just the oppsite purely for his own amusement.

Coop have a supermarket-sized shop near me which is ok really, very popular with oldies and has utterly lovely staff who seem to have loads of time for their very elderly customers. Cafe in it is very sensibly priced too.
We had a furniture and department store too that closed which was a shame as the latter was a great way to get oficial school uniforms (ie ties, embroidered stuff, rugby shirts etc) and we are definitely paying more to kit out our kids for losing that part -local secondary heads seem to think this too.

However what is better round my way (city council seems to alternate between labour and conservative every 4-6 years if anyone’s bothered) is the load of crap comvenience shops with crap stuff in them under brands like happy shopper, one-stop etc etc (which also sold at higher prices btw) that they have bought up over the years. Convienience shopping is definitely much better round here over the last 10 years for the co op expanding.

Although usually made in industrial bakeries, technically crumpets aren’t really ‘baked’. Although having worked in one for a while, i would say that the machine that makes them really is also a thing of marvellous mechanical wonder. :)
http://www.griddlesystems.com/crumpet.php

I expect standards have changed now, but in my day we had very very clean hands and no gloves, (actually i can’t imagine working with normal food prep gloves on in that heat), and working on the lovely greasy crumpet line gave you lovely soft skin by the end of a shift. :lol:

They look yum.
Having just had the satisfaction of popping a normal tyre (conti go4000) back on a normal (friend’s) cxp22 rim the other day with my thumbs in a jiffy, i am feeling a bit down on the terribly tight rim/tyre bead combinations t’wife and i seem to have inadvertently got going on our road bikes. :(

Not so fussed about the others i tried but i used to like the super web grease for c&c hubs. Shame they have stopped producing.

Iirc you can still get 2 designs and 3 shapes/cuts of mint jersey from thecyclejersey.com
http://www.thecyclejersey.com/new-mint-sauce-road-cycling-jersey-black-background
I had one which i shrank out of and sold on the classifieds here a while back, it was pretty nice.

just5minutes – Member
The problem with the “get it automated” suggestion is that many of the tube lines already are – the drivers don’t do any driving as such and would be better described as “cab based door operators”

Ah, the first 9 words of your post showed so much promise. …and then you spoilt what could have been a thoughtful post by laying into the job descriptions of 3, no perhaps even 5% of the total workforce doing the striking.

It is simply not right, ethical or fair that London is ground to a halt because of these greedy, arrogant and ungrateful people. the world doesn’t owe you a living and if you have a very good living you should recognise that. At the end of the day, the workers don’t work for their managers, or even the company – they work for their customers – it is they who ultimately pay their wages and benefits. And it never ends well when you piss your customers off. That is just a simple fact of life.

The first two sentences of this could be talking about a number of recent pay ‘disputes’ in the banking sector, non? “We can’t cap bankers bonuses becsause x y and z. We must bail out this that and the other bank because x y and z. We cannot sack or prosecute these people because of x y and z.”

Funny how because it is ordinary people with no friends in government that this process of ‘do right by us or we will screw things up for you by stopping/leaving/not playing ball” is now not ethical or correct.

And the thing with pissing your customers off is that if they are a captive audience then you really can piss them off and get away with it. (Step forward South West Water for local example to me) and you are in business terms in a far stronger bargaining position than somewhere with a realistic choice of ways of getting to work and room to expand on and improve the more favoured choice if what you are offering falls out of favour. There is simply no room above or below ground to build a rival tube system and little scope for making more seats on buses and getting them around any faster.
So yes, the 20% of tube staff on strike may get pushed out by frankly enormous investment in retrofitting these systems in possibly the least retrofittable and byzantine tube system in the world, but 1) given the somewhat special challenges of doing so in that tube system versus some of the others, is it really worth it yet? And 2) that doesn’t stop the other less well paid 80% of staff continuing to bargain for better conditions or even pay as they comtinue to realise the unique position they find themselves in -‘little people’ who have so much leverage because of the incredibly important system and economy that has been made possible in such a geographically small area mostly because their own tube system has allowed this.

Again, in business terms this makes sense, they are in a fantastic bargaining position that would have been ruthlessly exploited already were we talking about an unregulated transport system with shareholders that realised its importance to the workings of the city and could set its own ticket pricing for the benefit of shareholders as opposed to employees.

It is just that it is the ‘wrong’ people doing well out of this particular negotiation that is unusual.

Other cities around the world run perfectly well on driverless underground systems and unmanned ticket machines. In fact the majority of other tube networks outside of this country do, so not that hard at all. London has one advantage, the sheer number of people using the tube every day, so the business case would be, I expect, not too difficult to justify. But then again i’m just one of those ‘clever folk’ so what do I know?

Great, sounds like you might be just the man to price up converting the oldest and most ‘compact’ (platforms, tunnel sizes) tube system in the world to driverless and those glass platform doors, and factor in the running costs of all the other staff that are still facing working nights and you still need. Then you can decide how much it is worth to do that and still look after the rest if the non-driving non-ticketing workforce working nights, and how much its worth to do the same but without the driverless trains changes.

If its worth doing it the first way, then the unions will blink first, if its less expensive to do it the second way then the employer will blink first. Really, how different is this in principle from any other business negotiation?

actually it is hurting most those who are earning less, have less benefits and actually have to be at their place of work to work and might be losing a day’s pay because of it.

That will be the ‘means of production’ you are talking about then. Not just them that is hurt by them not getting to work, their employers and the parts of the city that rely on the businesses that employ the little people. You talk as if the city would just carry on conference calling and facetiming forever if the tube, city/borough council and the service industry all fell apart because the infrasturcture couldn’t take it. Really this is a fascinating insight into how the wealthiest people in the country still need little people and little tube trains not just to get to work but to support the rest of the infrastructure that supports their continuing to be wealthy.

The UK unions are the weakest in the western world, they legally have less power than in any other half civilised country.

…and still not good enough for our prime minister, who if general elections were run like he wants strike ballots (turnout and majority rules) would not be in government now let alone in 2010.
Nb the strike ballot for this particular strike had both a turnout and majority that has never ever been seen in a general election in this country.

Yes i am in a union and yes i have been on strike (oh and it wasn’t about pay and it was in France so way more fun and way more supported by the public as i recall) -i missed striking last time my union in the uk did because i was already on a rostered day off, but i went on the demo etc.

Amazing how many clever folk on here seem to forget that like the air force, the driver is one part (often paid a lot more) of the whole setup. And that by its location the tube drivers supposed exorbitant salaries are inclusive of a ‘London weighting’ that the doctors and nurses salaries you are comparing them with are not. i would get paid between 15 and 20% more (outer and inner) if I worked in London but i don’t see any of the clever folk on here subtracting a sixth from the pay of tube staff when they compare them to other jobs outside London.

It is not just tube drivers going on strike, it is a lot of lower paid people who do all the other stuff that is not driving the train and still have to work nights to keep the trains themselves running. I wonder what some of them are paid and how much less exciting those numbers are to you. The automated driver option is pretty hollow when you consider the people you still have to employ however trains are driven, and that these employees are subject to these changes and striking too.

And hey, what about market forces, city folks? What price for keeping your city running? How expensive and impractical would the tube need to get for you to think its worth relocating your business or staff outside london? How much more should tfl look after their staff before its more economical to buy them out and replace them with people on new contracts/working conditions or automated trains, and ticket machines? How much money to develop and run robot platform/security staff and cleaners? The demand to keep this service going in order for the city to continue to generate wealth is very high, how is this different from any other part of the supply /support/logistics chain making sure they get the best share they can from this?

As an aside, are the stw tories on strike tonight too?
Usual apologists/denialists all seem absent on three obvious threads.
Are they all stuck in the city still?

I used to love IDS for his contribution to the then unelectabiity of the Conservative Party whilst he was leader.

However, i have a special dislike for IDS for his cheap crass and inept ‘trying to be something you are not’. That is a generous way of saying he lied like a cheap watch when he talked about his ‘life on benefits’ (you know, when he wasn’t in the army any more and had to live rent free in a cottage on his girlfriend’s absurdly rich parents’ absurdly nice (country house not council) estate.
That is like me saying my 20 mile ride in the snow on dartmoor last winter means i totally get what its like to do the iditabike and furthermore have the moral authority to make the race colder and longer cos i don’t think you other iditabikers are trying hard like i did. :?

mikewsmith – Member
Dear PJM1974 whats wrong with 15mm? I really can’t feel it being any worse

There was already a lighter and (allegedly) stiffer through axle system with great hub availability from all manufacturers including shimano before 15mm. It even came on the rs reba team for a couple of years.

As above, smaller does not always equal lighter (as we were told with numerous other new improved standards that involved things getting bigger and yet somehow lighter), and it seems lost in the hype that as a whole system you could still build a comaprably priced/specced and reliable 20mm front end lighter and (again allagedly- how do you really really know?) stiffer than a 15mm one.

[professional hat on]
+1 to asking gp about talking therapies. Our local nhs/free one you can actually refer yourself but most people seem to get referred by gp anyway as its relatively new (for round here) that you can access this sort of help so easily. Assuming you are in the uk redsox, google your nearest town and ‘iapt’ (improving access to psychological therapies) and your local mental helath provider should do something easy to access and free. Waiting lists vary massively by postcode though.
I would argue that antidepressants and talking therapies can be p good: i have encountered many people who were just too low or shut off to take in therapy, and the drugs were a way of getting them to the point where they could.

Also/in the meantime redsox i am sure this is daft advice on a cycling forum but it’s summer! -make yourself go out on the bike for an hour a couple of times a week even if you don’t want to. And since this is stw, home of great pointers on quality ales, i will take a punt on suggesting that whatever your alcohol intake is at the moment, half it so you still enjoy a bevvy but less chance of it dragging your mood and motivation down.

was then surprised to hear that as an electronics technician I was well qualified and not infantry. He didn’t realise that you could do such a job in the army and thought that we were all thugs.

Indeed, many great non combat jobs in the forces. Hell, you can even be a mental health nurse for them!

Reminds me of an old acquanitance who was once a chef in the marines, although the way he spoke about his service to the crown you would never have guessed that’s actually what he did. His ‘office nickname’ is “Under Seige” :D

Good points in terms of army not being about killing people and there being no such thing as ‘poor people’ cannon fodder regiments.

What concerns me more now is that what science tells us now that science had not told us in the 40’s is that young men’s brains are not finished until into their early twenties. by this i mean neurologically speaking the connections that form through adolescence, and this means often very significant differences in risk taking, decision making and emotional regulation compared to men of say 24 and over. (Similar case for ladies but most science types think their brains are finished at a slightly earlier age).
In this light i am not so suprised to reas comments on this thread and in the link that younger soldiers are more likely to be killed in combat compared to similarly trained older colleagues. And in this light I reliase we have an armed forces to run, but do wonder how much better we would run it in terms of casualties and lives lost if we could keep all other things (training, pay, equipment, numbers etc) equal but simply raise the age of joining up, or perhaps more pertiniently the age you are sent out to combat.

Nothing stopping you using the bigger bb-tool-fit ring on a qr hub, it still fits and works, its just they are comedically overpriced as a spare from shimano and otherwise only come with front 15 or 20mm hubs. also note that you need a deeper cassette tool to clear the locknuts on rear certerlock hubs, i had to buy another one as the (park tools,no less) one i had was too shallow to engage in the lockring.

National trust.
Unison
Green party.
And from what the mail i get tells me it would seem that having a loyalty card from the co-op makes me more of a ‘member’ than a tesco clubcard does. :?

Ninfan, go on what are you a member of then?
Can we guess?

[edit] also remembered local cycling campaign group, local little arts theatre/centre, and lapsed membership of the mighty Gawton Gravity Hub.

So has anyone got any experience of claiming on a ppi policy for what it was actually intended for? Ie you had a loan, something happened that meant making repayments was hard/impossible, the policy helped you out until you could start repaying?

About nine years ago, my single-mum sister-in-law had a six month stay in hospital (nearly died a couple of times but i suppose the point is she didn’t die and returned to work) , crap-ish job where sick pay ran out very quickly indeed and she went on to ssp, and her ppi cover on a loan from a well known high street bank did nothing at all to cover her.
I have often wondered if this was an experience shared by other people who tried to claim on the policy as it was sold to them.

just5minutes – Member
The Telegraph is reporting Evans has been offered the same fee offered to Hammond and May – £4.6m which works out around £255,000 an episode, or just short of double for each 1 hour episode what our Prime Minister gets paid for leading a whole country for a whole year. Lord Hall is crackers and has just advanced the case for the early demise of the license fee.

Please answer other posters points about TG, rubbish though it is, generating revenue for the beeb to actually behave like a public service in providing educational or ‘niche’ programming for people that is not profit-making but still worthwhile? I don’t have to watch tg but i like the random stuff on bbc4 that would never get made if every individual programme had to be self-financing.

How is this different in principle from say an nhs foundation trust taking on extra profit making work in order to balance its books in other areas.

How different is the disparity in salaries contracts for the three presenters than for other contractors to government departments who supposedly help our economy and are considered by civil service and government to be ‘worth it’ despite the eyewatering fees they are paid?

(Also your argument would be better if you compared them to a carreer that is not associated with old money, privilege and of course the doors that it opens long after you cease to be pm and draw your unobtanium-plated pension. Any fool knows the ministerial salary is the tip of the iceberg as far as what you do afterwards or indeed during your time in cabinet or as pm, and the real money is made aferwards. See blair and brown for recent examples of people whose disposable income now does not match their salary back then. Try comparing them to the chief exec of an nhs foundation trust, a top brass military officer or head of a local authority next time)

Agreed with the relatively light body (sg stands for ‘small guitar’ iirc!) they are a strange instrument to hold and play compred to a les paul/335, let alone something bolt on with strings parallel to the body. Definitely try one sat down and stood up for a bit, fwiw the dip in the middle of the body is in a different place in relation to the bridge compared to many electrics so may feel a bit different sat down too!

Also not all epis are/were created equal. There are some fantastic quality ones and some really bad ones out there (my brother once had an epi lp studio and it was bolt on, bendy neck and terrible pickups and hardware compared to similar priced squiers at the time))

Not seen/had a go on the g400 pro, but wilkinson tuners and alnico pickups suggest that it will be much more the real deal in terms of tone and build quality. I Also wonder if the quoted ‘lightweight’ wilkinson tuners will balance it out a bit better versus big chunky grovers. Also coil taps very useful ime, especialy if you can get bridge and neck tapped together in middle position. You could ask your wife to spend the difference between the epi and the gibson on a nice little valve combo.

I believe every town has someone like that. Would be morally wrong to go into detail but i am (professionally!) aquainted with someone with a very similar story/pattern, but different garments and different high street chain.

Big Jeff to the thread please! You don’t see him waving his phone around or spilling his pint on you.

The Brick +1

My ‘life bike’ AKA ‘getting around and getting stuff done’ bike is a 2000-ish hardrock frame, on which everything bar the sti’s and brakes has been replaced for reasons of fit or worn out-ness with fairly bargain parts and 1.75″ town tyres. Having a proper set of eyelets and crazily overbuilt box section seatstays, it also has proper sks mudgards and a proper chunky rack. What matters for me is its comfy, it fits properly (have done 100 very hilly loaded-up miles in a day on it and lived) it works, has cheap to replace drivetrain and handles well even with a great deal of weight on the rack. It has normal and not-cowled dropouts so you can fit any type of trailer hitch to it. 3×8 gears means a crawler gear for big hills and loads but I ‘spin out’ on the flat at about 34mph. And also I can lock it up anywhere as it looks most unimpressive, and i wouldn’t be too distraught if it was stolen as it has a very uncool name in rather large writing on the downtube, and looks like i built it in the dark! Also somewhat embarrasingly, when unloaded, strava tells me my average speed on it on my ride to and from work (8 miles, 200m or so of climbing) is only 1 to 1.5 secs slower than same commute on my proper road bike!

Sc superlight.

Shimano made a 29er ‘specific’ slx hub a few years ago. Although i think that was more about them worrying about their freehub life/durability with what were then ‘larger range’ (11-36!) cassettes.

Whatever happened to the 29er specific saddle? (Not joking, this was in the proper bike news and everything).

https://www.facebook.com/groups/150658971765826/?fref=ts

Url button on here crashes my browser, but on our local buy/sell facebook page there is a 54cm via nirone in celeste, carbon seatstays with oldish 10sp ultegra/fsa/noatec wheels. Personally i think he is asking a bit much for it but again you could sell the parts to fund the frame.

Rockets and rascals in Plymouth had a via nirone full campag build in celeste and i am sure it was 54 seat tube (which is 55/56 top tube iirc)
This was a couple of months ago and it was well discounted, sell parts to fund the frame?
The shop are hosting/marshalling/arranging a 100mile sportive/gran fondo this weekend though so don’t expect much detail from them if you phone on sunday!

That is just lovely!

Road bike, (and later road pedals) cx bike, armwarmers, 29er mountain bike. I can’t believe i just typed that!
However, I haven’t really noticed the difference in my local woods with tubeless having just done this: same rims and same tyres just tubelessed them the other day. Perhaps tyre pressures still too high? And i often get home after a nice rattly rooty ride to find the clutch mech is switched off and i never noticed.

ninfan opined

:lol:
Nice to find common ground in the chat forum every so often.

I have had a professional interest/concern in drugs through the class b/class c/class b years, and certainly some of the problems we have seen arise from the illegality of drugs. I mean particularly legal highs which would have no market at all if there was a safe legal market for more ‘predictable’ ones. The first object of making a legal high is the dodging of the law, the effect on your brain and body is secondary. I have never seen drug-induced psychosis and rapid loss of concsiousness quite like the cases in more recent years on legals. However, similar thoughts here about the rise of very thc-heavy skunk grown in the uk, and the shockingly poor and adulterated cocaine and heroin which is dangerous because of the nature of the supply chain as much as the pure chemical itself.

Some of my colleagues would call my work/practice “creative”. That is not necessarily an endorsement of it!

I used to write and perform a lot of songs as a younger man. Plenty of musicians in this forum though.

The STW massive seem quite keen to pay more tax to cover these bills.
All sorted!

Original post included this:

A five year ban on income tax, VAT and NI???

The three largest revenue earners capped.

As i have no inheritance any time soon, i don’t run a business and i do a very few thousand miles a year driving, i am not sure how this government is actually going to allow me to pay more tax.
Beer maybe? Better start panic buying now ;)

nach – Member

Reading comprehension is so poor on the internet nowadays.

Que :?:

Thread on here recently mentioning how cheap secondhand 26″ forks and wheels are getting these days now everyone is all about the bigger wheelsizes.
Post something up on ‘wanted’ section of classifieds, there will be lots of folk willing to offload cheap ‘old’ wheels and forks.
You will have much more choice of your frame can accept a tapered steerer fork too.