Cliched – "Lets make a bit that looks identical to '28 Days Later', let's make the blind people look like zombies, etc"

Err… isn't it more accurate to say that 28 Days Later is a clear rip-off of Day of the Triffids?

I used to love turkey dinosaurs, they go especially well with those smiley potato faces and baked beans. One of the things about having small kids is you get to eat that kind of thing… Might go out and buy some later now I've been reminded about them.

Sounds like you'd be better off staying in town and getting the tram to the gig IMHO… I can't see it being that much fun in the Premier Inn bar ;-) There are a couple of pubs near the arena, and a retail park with cinema and chain restaurants but that's pretty much it. Treat yourself to a ride on the tram and the late bars in the city centre.

There's an Etap next door and a Premier Inn not far away. But you'd have more choice if you stay in the city centre and take a tram to the arena (they run late enough to get back after gigs).

This happens in Sheffield every couple of years – rain followed by snow and ice in the afternoon, everyone leaves work early to beat the rush, gridlock. A few years ago thousands of people ditched their cars by the road and walked or stayed in hotels – obviously this caused even more traffic problems. The year before that when I lived in the suburbs it took me 4 hours in snow to drive 7 miles home. A lot of of the trouble is caused by people driving onto roundabouts or junctions when their way ahead isn't clear so traffic backs up in both directions, and once the inner ring road with all its roundabouts is locked, the gridlock just spreads.

Of course, a city the size of Sheffield grinding to a halt is less newsworthy than a town of the strategic national importance of Basingstoke, presumably because the BBC's intrepid "North of England Correspondent" didn't venture out of his bunker in L**ds.

Yeh but I've got an appointment in Glossop to do on route to Sheffield

I wouldn't count on the back road from Glossop to the Woodhead being open if the Snake is closed, so you might well have to back up as far as Mottram anyhow (that's what happened last time I had to come back down off the hill with a few hundred other vehicles following a police land rover anyway – and the Woodhead was fine on that occasion).

No mention of Woodhead on that site so presumably open. Check on RAC and AA websites tomorrow too. But generally they keep the Woodhead open in all weathers. And there's always the M62.

Is there not a good pub near by?

Oh wait, Bracknell. Maybe not ;-)

zaskar – let's assume your child is dying and some nutter tells her that she is going to hell for eternity unless she repents and lets Jesus into her heart, and that that upsets the child as she doesn't want to go to hell for all eternity. Are you saying you wouldn't be a little upset by that?

As others have said, there's probably more to this than that report says.

Was she praying for the sick, or preying on the sick?

Now, I like a pointless rant as much as the next man, but this "modern light bulbs are rubbish" thing confuses me. Why not simply buy a bulb that has the colour temperature and light output that you require?

Touch is great as a PDA / web browser / hand held games console / tiny computer, with music too, but if you want to listen to music while running you'd want a nano or shuffle as well 'cos the touch is a bit too bulky for that IMHO.

If you just want music and not the other stuff then I'd go for the Nano, especially as the 16GB costs less than the 8GB Touch.

how you ship ore from Australia to Europe when you haven't got any oil to power the ships? I guess nuclear container ships, but seems rather wasteful to use limited supplies to power a ship to transport a limited supply.

Leaving aside the obvious points about scale and energy density, how do you think they get oil from one side of the planet to the other at the moment?

The only good solution is cut down on the use of energy

This is code for stopping the third world having what we take for granted. Pulling the ladder up behind us. We need energy. Saving 10% here or there in rich countries when most of the world's growing population is dirt poor is missing the point.

The semi-nationalised banks are in a sticky situation as if they don't pay bonuses, their talent will leave

Talent?

That argument is like a relegated football team demanding a wage increase. Absolute garbage.

Besides, if the city wasn't such a big part of our economy, we wouldn't be in such a mess. Perhaps we should make stuff instead.

All this call for nuclear power, you do realise there's only enough world supply of uranium around for one more generation of nuke plants, ie, 30-40 years? [edit:prob less] Handy to have as a stop gap, but not a long term thing unless someone sorts a new process out quick.

Have you got figures for this? My copy of MacKay reckons we have hundreds of years of mineable Uranium at the current rate of usage. So you're assuming a 10 fold increase in nuclear power? Also, fast breeder reactors would produce most of their own fuel, there's probably more uranium in the ground to be found, there's uranium in the ocean, and there's also plenty of thorium.

Skiing on Christmas day with my son in France 2 years ago. He normally spends christmas day with his mum so that was the best christmas for years for me…

Plus we saw Santa skiing!

Arctic Monkeys supposedly supporting Maximo Park just after Arctic Monkeys' first single came out. Maximo Park ended up having to go on stage before them and didn't look too impressed about it…

Decathlon ski socks. Cheap but toasty.

Adrian Chiles couldn't look more annoyed if West Brom were relegated again ;-)

It's just a small town in Sheffield…

Environmentalists stop posing and start lobbying for nuclear power, particularly in China India and Brazil.

Is anyone else finding it difficult to w**k properly with cold fingers?

You can get a converter to fix the charging issue for 20 quid

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/TW126ZM/A

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/TS696LL/A

I cook sausages, that I froze myself, in the oven. Gas mark 5, 30 mins. No problems yet.

I wonder if it will be a bit loud for a 7 year old?

If you take some ear defenders, you could fight over who gets to wear them.

So, was Thatcher right to reduce the UK's CO2 output by "closing all the pits"?

Discuss…

(runs away and hides)

My Mark 2 black prismatic is now rescued from the parental garage where it lurked behind an old wardrobe for 20 years, and is in my dining room awaiting some attention with the wire wool. Which it is far too cold to go into the garden and do. And yes, it seems to have shrunk!

Regularly used to get 40mph on the speedo going down Sheffield's hills when I was about 10… (though the accuracy of an analogue speedo fitted without instructions by my dad may be questionable)

Farmer's Blonde and Farmer's Bitter are firm favourites in my local…

Eggs for brekky. Smoked salmon in sarnies for lunch.

Or even better, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon on toast for brunch.

+1 for Muppet Christmas Carol

OT but The Rambler doesn't seem well liked:

http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/comments.shtml/6895/

I had a pint and some food there after a bike ride 18 months or so ago and it was OK, but not brilliant. Wouldn't have gone there unless it was convenient (which being near the bottom of Jacob's Ladder, it was).

Do people not have proper hifis they can connect ipods to nowadays?

Weirdly not only is Killing In the Name top single on iTunes, but Rage Against the Machine is top in the album chart too – are people really hearing the single for the first time and then buying the album?

I predict this thread will not end well.

Isn't this thread redundant as the judge pre-empted it in his summing up?

"It may be that some members of the public, or media commentators, will assert that the man Salem deserved what happened to him … and that you should not have been prosecuted and need not be punished,” he said.

"However, if persons were permitted to take the law into their own hands and inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse."

You're lucky to get a 330ml bottle in city centre pubs these days, I've noticed a disturbing trend toward 275ml…

Our lives may not have been improved by the invasion, but they may well have been maintained. If petrol was £3/gallon, we'd be fecked in many ways.

Petrol in the UK is currently over £5 per gallon… did you mean litres?

It seems to me that oil prices went up in the years following the invasion of Iraq, so if the intention was to maintain a cheap supply of oil, it was a very bad plan.

This oil thing is a red herring. If it was about oil, shouldn't we have invaded Venezuela instead?

IMHO Blair, at least, really did think that Iraq would turn into a stable democracy a bit like Turkey, Lebanon would follow suit, and the people of the middle east would see an alternative to corrupt dictatorships or theocratic revolution. Suddenly the breeding ground for Islamism would be no more, and just as happened in eastern Europe, liberal democratic capitalism would ensure peace and freedom for all.

Of course, this was magical thinking.

Like the Germans who still have a guilt complex over WW2, we still have one over our imperial past, which is why we are not keen on intervening in other countries. Something we need to get over.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the thought process that affected Blair and others with the concept of liberal intervention. Did NATO sending the Luftwaffe to bomb Belgrade not strike anyone as being in bad taste?

wow, his personality is really coming through…

it still pained me though, to see a "Labour" government so enthusiastic to go to war.

But the policy was one of liberal intervention – i.e., it came from a social democratic perspective, an idealistic belief in using military power to make the world better. A pity that Blair never seems to have read The Quiet American.

ernie – whilst it's true that some of the emptiness of the New Labour project arguably stems from the need to have a broad appeal (but then, no government gets elected by only appealing to their core voters do they?), Blair's foreign policy of going to war constantly (Desert Fox, Sierra Leone, bombing Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq) seems to have something to do with his belief that things could be made better by interfering rather than not getting involved. I don't think that aspect of his policy had anything to do with appeasing Daily Mail readers.