OK, I take it back, you're not pitching for dragon's den, your auditioning to play 'Q' in the next Bond movie. 🙂

Rinspeed did something lotusy with hydrofoils I think, or it went underwater, or both. Maybe it had machine guns or a magnet that undid lady's zips. Something like that

Did someone mention a mènage with a brown trout? Where do I sign up?

If we've learned anything from this thread it would be that, whatever you are mènaging with, try to avoid the biting end.

anything but wankwank (talktalk as you may know it) jut stay well away

Every telco I've had broadband from has been bought up and ruined by Talktalk a few months after I sign up (with the exception of BT who are so crap even talktalk couldn't ruin them). Quite funny really as I was at school with talktalk's chief exec, he was a nice kid and I've nothing against the guy. However although our paths have never passed since I've always resolutely tried to avoid giving his company any of my money, and yet reluctantly I often do. So while I'm keen to recommend Plusnet who are good value and have been painless to do business with, the fact that I've signed with them means that talktalk's chequebook will be getting dusted off again.

Just add pastry, bung it in the oven and bingo!

what's on my plate is mine!!

But in your vegetable-enfeebled state are you going to have the strength to defend it from a circling pack of hungry eyed ferocious meat-eaters? 🙂

Whats the demographic in your street? The grey haired tend to love charity bags (as long as they are legit) to offload their clutter and to clear the cupboards and lofts of the stuff their grown up children have left behind, so if you live amongst and older population the charity baggers are probably finding it pretty fruitful. My folks would probably fill a bag every fortnight, and they are of a generation that bought new homes for young families in the 70's so all the streets around them are full of retired folk with empty nests.

I used to deliver/collect charity bags a long time ago. Our ethos at the time was to try and avoid streets that we'd either collected from recently or who had already got bags from other charities, so having elected what streets to leave bags with I'd have to knock on a few doors to ask what the situation was before I'd distribute them, even then you'd knock every few dozen houses just to check you hadn't inadvertently strayed into someone elses patch. If streets are getting too many bags too often then you get very few back, and the ones you did would have very little of use to the shop in them.

I used to deliver 500 bags in one session, and if I didn't get around 100 well packed bags back (and most of the unopened sacks left out too – binbag fans) then that was considered a pretty poor return,as in loose-my-job poor, either because I'd worked on streets that had already been collected from or chosen streets that would give a poor return. The poor and the old are very generous, the better off don't really give it thought and they're not home to put the bags out.

The world is awash with second hand transits, so leave it be. Unless its already fitted out with other things you want (rear windows and properly fitted seats) that are rare to find ready fitted then the roller shutter isn't worth putting up with

Less convenient and reliable than regular doors, and probably hatefully noisy. Practicality wise you are left with a lower and narrower opening than the regular doors would give you, the roller mechanism means you loose nearly a foot off the top of the door opening and the mechanism intrudes into the load area as well, as the door either rolls up into a cylinder or runs along the ceiling. Either way a lot of clutter, and the runners are pretty dirty and greasy too

Can't imagine them being less secure, as long as there is a decent latch then they are as secure as the padlock you put on it. The handle will probably be lockable, but it will be a pretty feeble lock and the handle mechanisms on roller shutters are usually pretty awful. On the hire vans I use I don't ever expect the handle and lock to actually work. Also if you have loose items, or if the van is well packed then its easy for stuff to snag and jam the door mechanism, preventing you from being able to get the roller up. The shutters are also pretty easily damaged if anything does shift about

Is it ex-post office? they are pretty much the only people I've seen put roller shutters on the back of panel vans and I've never been able to suss out why they do it.

Whats the scope of the footage you're asking for, is it beautifully shot, broadcast quality work that wouldn't look out of place being narrated over by David Attenborough? Or some useful, competent, informative shots of educational / informative interest?.

If its the former then you'd be right to have reservations about sending full quality files out to a third party if you were worried that they might exploit it commercially. If its the latter (and given you've been happy up to this point the share the films freely and publicly anyway) then I expect they guy is pretty genuine.

I'm a meat eater and always have been but if you can't frequently put a satisfying meal on a plate for yourself without any meat on it then that seems a bit pathetic. And if you'd need to make special effort to cater for someone who doesn't eat meat then what kind of boring diet do you have. You don't need to make 'veggie versions' of things, just eat food.

Some shows are available, partly or wholly, in podcast format aswell as on iplayer, so you could download that and play it back in your motor. Some radios now have the same pause and rewind of live broadcasts that you get on PVRs / Sky Plus and can record and store in the same way too. Not sure if there are any that are portable though, and whether theres anyway to archive programmes off the radio onto other devises.

Luther is very good. It seems over stylised at first, but you stop noticing that and get drawn in. I like the way it cuts out a lot of the cop-drama staples, most of what you'd see in a morse/frost type detective drama is despensed with in a few minutes, the rest of each story sits in a place after the credits would have rolled in a normal show.

The Wire is superb but you need to have the time to give to it, and you'll squander it if you don't. Its very good in its own right but its also good in a way that renders a lot of other tv drama redundant.

Old episodes of taggart are good for a laugh, just because they are so slipshod, some of the laziest TV making making you'll ever witness. Why shoot a scene in multiple takes and multiple angles when you can just cram everyone into one shot, usually talking to the side or back of each others heads. Sometimes they cram the cast so close together the look like they're going to kiss. That and clangers like car chases where both the chaser and the chasee are driving the same make, model and colour of vehicle make it strangely compulsive viewing.

You've got a hole in the ground? So you've got ground have you? Well let me tell you this posh lad- I don't even have a bum, let alone anything to point it at!

Whatever you do Bunnyhop, don't place your exposed bum over the bucket

Thats maybe how they got there in the first place ernie. Bunnyhop's a northerner – no indoor cludgey, hence the bucket in the garden. 😆

If its a van propper (ie no rear side windows) then as above there are lots of situations where you are going to be dealing with really nasty blind spots. Joining motorways for instance you'll have a blind spot directly alongside you on your right big enough to hide a 40 ton truck in.

If you can get it (I get it on Freesat) Al Jazzera's UK news channel is very refreshing. Reporting of actual events rather than the pre-announcing of announcements. You'd maybe not watch it every night, but its worth watching.

In the same way as 'Champagne' 'Melton Mowbray Pork Pie' and 'Nurse' are protected titles, I thing 'News' 'Journalism' and 'Documentary' should be too.

Trying to think of another sport where your body gets so visibly and dramatically transformed to fit its purpose.

One legged arse kicking competitions

Can't say I've ever heard that. maybe we don't have dull lives up here in the North.

…. or lifts
😀

once every 10+ years purchase

hmmm, i remain to be convinced you'll see anything like 10 years service from a flat screen TV

Once you have the badger you'll be wanting to collect the whole set (pardon the pun). Free binder with part one of Crappy Taxidermy

Any highflying ambitions I might have had about luxury, property, cars or lifestyle (and I didn't have many otherwise I'd never have gone to artschool) evaporated somewhere towards the end of my first term in student accommodation. From that point on the only real ambition or benchmark I've set for myself is to have a warm bathroom.

And if you've used those lifelines up you can still either phone a friend or play your joker.

Some of the pickups by Toyota, mazda and Vauxhall can be had in less cow-poke-alike 2wd versions. When you take away the bolt-on jewellery and big wheels they are actually quite sensible, useable vehicles (all be it built for midgets). But by virtue of being useful the challenge is to find one that hasn't been too well-used. Most of the 4×4 versions however will never have done a hard days work in their life.

Conn – Bridge, Bridge – Conn. Whatever the problem is in the end it'll be sorted out by remodulating, erm, something.

Depends really on just how much use you make of email. There are plenty of fairly basic phones that can access email, just not as elegantly as say an iPhone might. So a pretty basic phone on a cheaper package with a bit of data allowance is all you need to be able to monitor your emails for anything important, but the interface will be like looking at and replying to a text message, you'd only be able to send a few lines of reply before you thumbs get sore, beyond that you're better off calling someone back. But at least you can keep abreast of whats going on in your absence.

maybe drive part way to somewhere with a better train connect and take the train from there?

The makita orbital jigsaw is tremendous, other similar brand/pricepoint jigsaws are as tough/powerful/reliable but non are good to actually use. Bosch jigsaws have the reputation for longevity, but if there was one of each on the table I'd pick up the makita every time. You'd need to spend Mafell / Festool money to get anything better.

Drill drivers are pretty much all of a muchness these days, all the brands are matching each other pricepoint for pricepoint, feature for feature. Dewalt stuff isn't bad, but it tends to be pretty heavy and clumsy to use for me, their drivers are too urgent, better geared for drilling than driving, like for like i think Makita stuff has a bit more finesse in use. The dinky 10.4v Li-ion kits shouldn't be overlooked (Makita, Bosch, AEG) loads more grunt than you'd expect for something that looks like its been pulled out of a handbag. For the price of a basic 18v driver you get two drivers – one regular drill driver, on impact driver. Teamed up you can work faster and easier with the pair of them than you can with one bigger one. You don't get the same battery life between charges but you need to be going some for that to hold you up.

Remember that list of BNP members that found its way onto the web a while back? Some of the those names and addresses were apparently people who'd simply put their name to a petition.

I don't sign them out of principle, if I feel strongly about an issue I don't really want my name added to a list of people who were too polite to say no, and have likely not given much thought to the issue at hand. My main beef with petitions though is that the number of signatures collected has no context. You could present a petition with a 1,000 signatures, but how many people did you solicit for those signatures? 1,001? – that would be evidence of a pretty strong public will. By what if you'd asked 2 million people to sign and almost all of them refused? Those 1000 signatures don't really mean much then.

Anyway we all know the real way to effect change in a modern democracy is to start a facebook group call "I bet I can find a million people who want / don't want {insert something glib or inevitable}" and then refer to this as a 'campaign'.

My supermarket ones always die within a fortnight despite sunny window and watering everyday.

Try reading the label then. Don't water them til they start to wilt, and then only a little bit. Its a mediterranean plant, it needs mediterranean amounts of sun and water.

Parsley can make a pretty nice pesto too

Ahhh, but if you put your luggage on a conveyor belt some of it will turn up in Alacante three weeks later, the rest well end up on the carousel, empty, with your pants snagged on everyone elses luggage

I can think of hovercrafts that are legal on UK roads, and ones that are legal on french roads, but I'll be buggered if I know of any that are legal on both. I think Andrewh is preparing his pitch to the next series of Dragon's Den. The multiregion-road-legal-hovercraft, a solution to a problem you didn't even know you had. This the same man who brought us the 'pay-as-you-go parachute' and the 'Gander Bender'

I'll sell you some, but they are pricy!

Its difficult for most people to make an objective comparison as the freshly built, taught, spritely new wheels they've bought will always feel better than the loose, tired, old wheels they are replacing. I've switched from old slender 517s to chunky new Big Fat Mammoths and been sure that the new ones feel both lighter and quicker, but if fact they've just been newer. The weight saving actually comes from riding with lighter pockets. 🙂

every other Beetle driver waves at you like they're your best mate and you have this bond, my reply was usually 2 fingers.

If you'd like to drive a 'practical classic' but never get waved at by fellow owners buy an MGB. I drove one for 6 years, as my only motor, 3 of those years with a daily 50 round trip commute and 400mile weekends to visit my GF. In all that time I was not once even acknowleged let alone waved at by another MG driver

It could be Linden trees

The stench of Vic(tory)ian rule

precisely

good find!

It came up in conversation once when a collegue of mine was saying that one of the benefits giving up smoking was being able to enjoy the smell of rain after a long dry spell.

I got to play my Petrichor card and this was this weird moment where everyone around the table was suddenly jotting it down or texting it to friends.

Then someone else piped up "theres another definition that I'm alway struggling to find the word for – you know when a man and a woman are sharing a bath, then the man farts and the lady has to try and bite the bubbles – whats the word for that?"

and with than the moment was gone

usually after the first rainfall for a while

my new favourite word
Petrichor

I want Project to smell the flowers. I'm stressed, depressed and anxious today, got that slightly electric feeling that I know means any attempt to sleep tonight will be fruitless, and tomorrow I'll be too tired to push anything to the resolution it requires. Its going to be a loooong night of too much to think about and no option to act. But I'm still more cheerful than Project is on any day of the week.

really ugly filmmaking, really ugly. documentry makers trying to be all gritty-bafta but it ends up like a wild life documentary, failing to make any of the experiences you see human. Shame really when a not dis-similarly themed and titled series of documentaries, set on a scottish housing estate last year (which I was coincidentally rewatching earlier tonight) was described as 'one of the most compelling, fascinating television programmes onscreen this year' and just about every review of it used the word 'beautiful'