Very ugly things will happen if the US gets downgraded from AAA. It’s hard to believe that responsible politicians would play so fast and loose.

As a former chorister, I can still recall fully a number of 15-20 minute pieces note for note and word for word that I havent sung for over 20 years, but they were favourites in the repertoire. For many others Id still need the score.

Hummel Trumpet Concerto. The brain cells that hold that will still recall it for several minutes after I’m pronounced clinically dead in some awful retirement home in fifty years time.

If you’ve got the tune you might have some chance of remembering what’s going on. But if you’re playing a harmony part, with rhythms off from the main melody, and weird key changes at odd moments, repeats thrown in, it gets pretty tricky. Plus quite often you will have pencilled-in notes about things to remember/change/whatever.

Plus if you’re playing the trumpet part it’s important to remember whether you have 65 or 69 bars rest before you come in on top C….

Cameron will survive just fine. No-one in the Conservative party is about to turf him out and force a general election. The Lib Dems know that they would be eaten for breakfast by Labour. So unless he has actually done something illegal (and trusting the wrong people is still not a crime in this country) the worse he will face is having to eat some humble pie, which he has already done and is adept at doing.

Interesting factoid: the Labour Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, back in 2006 knew that there was widespread illegal phone hacking, going much beyond the royal phone hacking charges, and chose to do nothing:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm110720/debtext/110720-0002.htm#110720110000002

There is a lot of twaddle on this forum.

I’m beginning to wonder if some of the ‘people’ on here are actually bots developed by some university research department investigating artificial intelligence.

Not bad.

Apparently witness that knew everything wasn’t very reliable and might not have been prepared to testify in court.

I have just been watching this from the visitors’ gallery. Cameron did not look worried at all. Milliband was much more effective than I expected after he got off his prepared speech. News international have not yet let their solicitors say what they know. I think they said there had been 40,000 phones hacked.

I seem to have fallen through a wormhole in the space-time continuum, and landed in an alternate reality where the United Kingdom is a borderline banana republic ruled by newspaper magnates.

Does anyone know how I get back?

PM’s have gone for less (don’t ask me for examples, this is the tinternet not the apprentice

I can’t actually think of any PM’s that have resigned mid-term since Suez (I’m not counting John Major’s faux-resignation or TB being ousted by GB). Before that, Neville Chamberlain?

So a disastrous war would be a problem, but suspect hiring policies? Probably not.

EDIT: What tyres?

Something with lots of grip and the ability to hold its line through any amount of slurry. Nobby Nics? Or Maxxis Swampthings?

Get everyone on STW to ride their local loop on a 26″ or 29″ bike and report back the distance, time and wheel diameter. Correlate the results and there is the final and definitive answer.

Good luck fella! That’s a looong way to go.

Sell all of them on the classifieds, then buy a Singular Swift, or maybe one of those On-one SS frames. Then you won’t have the ugliness of a chain tensioner clinging to the back of your bike like some kind of primeval parasite.

(Real answer: probably doesn’t make a blind bit of difference).

Ultimately it all comes down to sex, death, loss and regret. So yes, lots. Get over it.

I’ve bivied in Scotland, which is rubbish unless you like rain and midges and misery and regret. And Spain. Which is awesome.

That is depressing. Turns out I have to do some interviewing. So much for today then :-(

£30 for 3.5 hours – seems pretty reasonable.

If I had an afternoon to spend in Surrey I think I’d be tempted. I’d be paying £30 so that I’d spend my time cycling rather than wandering around lost.

:-)

**** it, I’m going for a ride tomorrow!

No meetings, so probably no-one will notice. I’ll tell everyone I’m in the test lab.

Get a decent rain coat, that makes it much more pleasant if it’s really raining hard.

Get a single speed, then you don’t need to worry about cleaning it when you get home.

Then rule #5 and #9, as above.

I ordered one a few weeks ago and it took about ten days to arrive. I had an email saying it had been shipped the Monday after I placed the order. I’ve since ordered another one (for a different BB).

I suspect your calculations are a mile off.

Could be. Care to explain where?

Pah a group of us on our SS would beat that, even with a cake rest

Assuming a 2:1 gear ratio on a 26″ bike, that’s a fairly awesome 220 crank revolutions per minute, or a bit less than 4 revolutions per second!

which would be?

SDW has a real sense (at least to me) of journey. You set off from Winchester, and gradually the countryside changes as you head East, the hills getting bigger and steeper (possibly a bit to do with legs getting worn out), passing through villages, glimpsing the sea, then finally finishing that last long brutal climb and then down into Eastbourne.

K100 in contrast feels a bit more artificial, if that makes sense. There’s a lot more gravelly fireroad and the K100 hills are smaller. There are some nice bits of single track but you don’t get the same sense of having traveled (but then that’s not their intention of course).

That probably makes no sense I’m afraid. You’ll just have to go and ride them yourself. Which you won’t regret (either of them).

I’ve done the SDW a few times now, some times with more success than others, and the K100 last year. They’re both hard, though in different ways, and not to be underestimated, but if you can complete one I would think you could complete the other.

SDW is a fantastic ride but the fig rolls on the K100 are beyond compare.

Abbreviations are acceptable, it’s “The OP” that isn’t.

so now ive annoied mtg lol! dunno how its so offensive though

lol!

I find it quite hard to read things that have glaring grammatical and punctuation mistakes like the OP’s example.

That’s because I’m below average intelligence, and so I don’t have enough spare brain power to cope with poorly written text. As a result of my impediment, I often just give up trying to plough through stuff like that.

I am actually just too stupid to read it.

My eldest son cares passionately about apostrophes. And knows far more than I’ll ever know about grammar.

So I suspect it’s not a generational thing, but more a how-good-were-your-teachers thing.

I always knew what Thatcher, Foot, Kinnock and Major stood for. And I knew what Blair and Brown wanted to do as well.

I have no idea what Milliband wants or believes in. And what’s more I don’t even care.

Bitchy posts depress.
Winter nights filled with scorn.
New name so care less.

Perhaps they were actually not roadies, but triathletes? They can be proper rude.

I went past a whole stream of them, with their fancy carbon bikes, aero bars and space-age helmets on Sunday. I said hello, waved, all sorts.

Nothing.

Unpleasant lot. I was glad when it started to rain on them.

Sierra Nevada in Spain. I can’t explain why footflaps had grief and I didn’t though. It seemed pretty rocky at the time…

Took a 26″ NN, snakeskin at the front, regular at the rear, to the Sierra Nevada. Didn’t have any problems.

…

Apart from finding that England is terribly terribly flat on my return.

”parents going in to help”.

Actually now I think about it, it sounds like a great idea. I’m going to go in on Thursday and teach those kids a thing or two. I’ve watched plenty of heart-warming films about off-beat teachers turning around kids from the ‘hood with their quirky sense of humour and unusual approach to teaching. I think I’m ideally qualified.

Quick question: can I assume that if I’m (obviously wrongly) accused of assaulting a child then the NUT will handle my case and ensure that I don’t spend months arguing about it in court? If I take them swimming, and a few of them drown, is there a lot of paperwork to fill out, or will Mr Gove sort that one out for me?

Mr Gove said the Government would ”do everything possible to make sure schools stay open” with arrangements which could see ”parents going in to help”.

That’s a pretty stupid thing to say. There’s no way I’m going in to help; it’s hard to know where to start with all the problems with this. Public liability insurance would be a good start though, and go on from there.

Well, I know this much.

It turns out that if you’re married to a teacher, you shouldn’t ask them if it’s OK for your take-home pay to be cut in order to keep their retirement benefits the same.

He was one of the greats. I’ve lost count of the number of wet Sunday afternoons I’ve spent watching him catch the bad guys.

Convert it to single speed? It’s just a commuter so it’s not like you will be losing races and stuff.

Could be annoying if you live somewhere with big steep hills and long flat bits, but otherwise should be OK.

My aunt and uncle had a ghost in a house near Sudbury. This doesn’t sound much like what they described, so I would guess it’s probably just plumbing gone bad.

He’s probably sensible enough to know that it wouldn’t be long between having another go at you and being charged with assault, losing his license and who knows what else.

EDIT: at least the only time I ever went to the police, the guy was prosecuted and I never heard from him again.