How do you cope with all that anger ?

Project dwells in a bottomless pit of misanthropy. And not only is the pit bottomless, it doesn't have any sides either. If you think think this is bad, just mention Christmas.

You've got some liquorice and celery stuck to your top lip. The people of glasgow, edinburgh and dundee have just been too polite to point it out. I live in Ayrshire and am therefore not too polite to point it out

People who beat their wives beat their wives, if the rate of incidents increases with booze or the hightened emotions of a football match then thats just a statistical blip. Blokes don't hit their wives because of football, they hit their wives all the time, and during the football and at Christmas and on his birthday and on her birthday and during antiques roadshow. They hit their wives because they are arseholes but principally they hit their wives because they can.

any alu frame you like and a chain tensioner?

Some forward thinking council tips host recycling charities, who collect, refurbish and resell the goods that people are throwing away. So when you arrive at the tip you have the choice whether to donate your stuff to the charity, or smash it all up in front of them then wave your cock about.

i am sure i saw somewhere that most charity shops won't touch electricals?

plenty do though, and more and more are doing so, mainly because we no longer wait for stuff to wear out or break down before we're itching to replace it, so a lot more electronic/electrical stuff is entering in to the charity shop chain in much larger quanities than used to.

Many charity shops are now WEEE recycling centres now too. British Heart Foundation were are probably more geared up than most for electricals and the now have shops that deal principally in electricals, white goods and furniture (rather than musty smelling clothes and incomplete sets of sherry glasses), but plenty others are geared up for electrical stuff now. Have a look at some of the shops in your high st. If they sell it they'll take it.

The one in the distance is still counting to 100

If you are only going to buy one drill then a reasonable brand, corded drill with hammer action is all you need. Theres a limit to the number of shelves anyone can put up in the one house. SDS drills are ace compared to a regular hammer action drill when it comes to drilling into tough walls, but useless for anything else, and you'll not find drill bits for them in the local corner shop. To be honest, with a decent quality masonary bit like those light blue coloured ones that bosch do I do most of my masonary drilling with a non-hammer cordless. Hate the sound of the hammer action, so I only use it if the job actually calls of it, and 90% of the time it doesn't. Its only in non-domestic buildings, drill into solid, rough concrete, drilling for sleeve anchors etc that my SDS drill ever gets taken out of its box.

If you can get a mains drill with variable speed – look for a dial on the trigger – then its versatile enough to do many of the jobs a cordless drill can do – drive screws etc. Not quite as elegantly,they aren't as well balanced as cordless drills so its a bit fatiguing, but it'll do it, and you are spending the money on the drill rather than the batteries.

When we left college a friend of mine got a job as a cold caller to pay off his debts. His brief – to try and sell sets of massive professional fireworks to old peoples homes. In June.

An old colleague of mine had a child born during quite a severe storm on new year, so named his daughter 'Storm'. Overlooking the more subtle Gayle perhaps

[/quote]I'd just stand and look at the sign for a while – it's got to be one of the UK's most glorious place names. I imagine if a Glaswegian said it he could be arrested for disorderly conduct.

Brooklyn Beckham should consider himself lucky he wasn't conceived in Ecclefechan

Theres not an awful lot going on in the immediate vicinity, but the M74 is about as pleasant a motorway as you could hope to travel, so there are quick easy daytrips to places like Moffat and Biggar ( pleasant towns) and perhaps New Lanark (big industrial history thang) to the north or the lake district to the south. Closer by though is Caerlaverock Castle, to the south of Dumfries, if you like that kind of thing. Staying in Galloway, the Galloway coast gets nicer the further west you go – starts quite wetlands/estuary like at the Dumfries end, gets sandier and more crinkly the further you go towards Stranraar. Kirkudbright is a nice destination town, Kipford and New Abbey are nice stop-off points.

so in the autumn do we get to reap the whirlwind?

Coffeeking

I just dont "get" the wire and chrome, poor performance, basic design logs on wheels

Thats because you're forgetting to factor in the lion, 'a basic design log on wheels with a lion', now we're talking.

RAWR!

its all subjective, but pre warhol, who else painted like that?

Quite a few people, especially in the UK. Its his art and his persona that gives him a place in popular art history. But for the purpose of art history he can also be used mark a progression form one era to another (regardless of whether that progression started without him). Some artists become 'great' relative to their contemporaries simply because they fit neatly into the story.

Hitchcock

Waiting outside a supermarket, a guy is approaching the sliding doors laden with shopping bags. The automatic doors start to close as he approaches so he breaks into a little sprint to nip through. Except he charges into the glass between two doors that are opening. His shopping explodes in two beautiful arcs. A lot of eggs and milk.

Only eighteen pre-conditions, Prince Buster managed to get by with just the ten

Still you don't need to go all the way to the US to find a control freak, we have our own home grown ones, complete with a table of suitable height-to-waist-to-hip ratios, and the requirement that you respect his wishes to have the queen killed.

I use xylene based paints and varnishes sometimes – look under french polishers in your local yellow pages, its used to thin heavier duty floor varnishes and the like

With mine its windows boarded rather than just blacked out (with window film you can just pull the window seal off and lift the glass out and open the door from the inside).

I used to leave the glass clear for a while and with it being quite a tall van (sprinter) any stuff I did need to leave in it could be sat close to the back doors – if you peaked in it looked empty. Not the case with bikes obviously.

People will break into vans just to see if there is anything in there. Better to let them see that its empty if you routinely keep it empty, or armour up a bit. Putting some film over the window does neither.

I've got ply covering the windows and have Armaplate lock protectors, which cost an arm and a leg but no break-ins since I fitted them. The armaplate site is quite good for highlighting each model of van's vulnerbilities.

Are the machette-carrying cultures in africa more polite?

Despite the 'IT JUST GOT WORSE!' headlines and political lines the past was not a nice place to be. Life in the past was brutal, abusive, arbitrary. The hills around my house are dotted with the graves of preachers killed by the government and buried where they had stood, for instance.

We live in an incrementally safer, happier more comfortable world, even if you just compare decade for decade. I heard an interview with Sanjeev Bhaskar recently where he told of his childhood in the UK in the 70s where his mother kept a packed suitcase on top of the wardrobe in constant preparation that they might need to flee the house in the middle of the night. When he first started working on Goodness Gracious Me and he chatted with the cast about the quirks of their upbringing and background they suddenly realised that they'd all had packed suitcases. Imagine that, the fear that you might have to just grab the case and run, and that level of fear was the norm for many people.

In the OP's position – buying for his company, rather than for himself, perhaps the 'buy what you like' approach doesn't really help. It depends on how much is being spent and how important the work is going to be in terms of where its going to be placed and perhaps the statement is expected to make. If its going to flower up a corner of the staff room thats one thing, but if its going to loom over the reception desk, or frame the director in the board room thats something else. There are some schemes / services / advice around that fit that corporate buying position better, google words like 'art for offices'. Some galleries and dealers have portfolios of work that can be hired as well as bought, so you could have a changing set of works over a period of time, printmaking studios and galleries are particularly well set up for that. If you are looking to decorate with arty looking stuff thats something that is pretty well catered for, buying something with a bit more authenticity takes a bit more care and maybe some expert advice if you don't feel confident enough.

How involved do you and the company want to get? Echoing the degree-show buying mentioned above some companies set themselves a budget and commit to buy from their local art college every year in the form of a 'purchase prize'. Doing so usually gets them first dibs, they can buy before the hordes decend, gets your name on the wall and a group of you from the company can get together and discuss/ decide what you are buying, so its more involving for you all. Similarly most cities/town/regions will have some kind of annual 'Open' exhibition, a royal-academy-summer-show-esque local all-comers exhibition, again many of these have 'prizes' sponsored by local businesses which are infact a way of those businesses to buy work for their wall every year, but again a bunch of you can get together to make the choice, you get to make your choice before anyone else buys and you get a press release and a photo out of it too. Your local council's arts development officer should be able to point you towards any annual open exhibitions.

But in the end, even if you have organise it, try to get a gang together to make the actual choices

If you ask them to, the agency is obliged to give you contact details for the owner. Contact the owner and advise them to find a better agency.

they plug in?

yes, but it tends to make them jiggle about a bit. A cure for melancholy apparently, so an ideal birthday treat

one of these, anything else is spoiling them;

But if its here birthday she's allowed to fit the plug as a treat

The City has a super sexy fold, but in reality the Y Frame packs up just as small, the wheels pop off with little quick release buttons and the towing arm can remove too. Although the big and small versions are described as 90 and 45kg respectively the small is actually stronger, its just that something that heavy and small enough to fit on the trailer isn't really something a cyclist is likely to travel with.

I use the small for touring duties and opted for that with a view to packing onto trains and planes with minimum fuss and as a way of forcing me to limit what I pack. However for general dogs body/alternative-to-a-car duties the large is probably a wiser investment. Both are sized to work with either standard eurobox sizes and also with Ortlieb rack-packs, and having a wooden load bed to can strap/screw/bolt anything you like onto them.

Try contactingcarryfreedom[/url] direct if you are struggling to find one in stock, they might be able to point you in the direction of where they are still available

rajapack[/url] for boxes, but for anything but the most delicate stuff I'm a big fan of the 40p blue ikea bags that you get by the checkout. I buy them buy by the hundred, they stack well, are stronger than boxes for heavy stuff (I've used them to move a riverbed) and more flexible than boxes so you get fewer voids. Pick carefully though they now have them in three different sizes, the smallest and largest are often the most useful. The small good for book, stops you packing too many heavy items into one bag, the largest are good for things like bedding and both fill out to quite a boxy shape so they stack well, the mid-sized one is nearer in shape and size to a bag-for-life shopping bag and you'll find fewer uses for them. But when they are folded in the rack its tricky to tell them apart

Attach it to a barrage balloon, resulting in a new mountain being mapped. Have than mountain named after you.

I've not got a problem with them going up (although the billboards by the motorways are a bit dodgy), but I wish the party faithful who are so enthusiastic to put their posters up on lampposts were similarly enthused to take them down again afterwards. They hang around for months sometimes and I wonder whether its left to the council to clear them all up in the end.

There are certain types of film that you can get an audience for whether its good or bad. If you make a martial arts movie (as in a white-guy martial arts movie, ala Chuck Norris), or a Weirwolf movie, or a Zombie Movie theres an audience that will watch just so that they've watched all the Zombie movies, or all the White-guy-chop-socky movies. Thats why a lot of these films are so formulaic, they only need one action or horror scene to distinguish them, the rest is just filler. I also wonder if people just watch segal because he's funny. I can't remember the film now, but he was doing Chop-Socky moves in black pajamas and he looked like he was directing traffic.

Riding near Portpatrick on a beautiful sunny evening. The low sun was sparkling off the sea and it was so beautiful that people were just stopping to look. Overlooking a bay a small crowd had gathered i in silence to drink in the view. We freewheeled up to join them, a bunch of strangers all enjoying a silent appreciation of the world around them. Dismounting from the bikes, leaning them up against what proved to be an electric fence I ruined the moment a little by involuntarily yelling 'F********cking Hell!"loud enough for it to echo.

I'm 6'1" and a bit

I'm 6'1" and a bit…..what? 6'1" and a bit indecisive?
🙂

marmite

and for dealing with the bites – those little electric zapper things, stops you scratching

Tyres wise Schwalbe Big Apples work well – big air volume but quite a small contact area so they roll well, not super light but you're trucking, not sprinting. Very comfy and I've never had a puncture with them. If you're happy that your full sus bike is going to be reliable / servicable enough in the environment where you are riding (ie if you break something complicated you can buy parts and get them fitted) then why not ride it. The load is totally isolated from the bike with a two wheel trailer (with a one wheel trailer twisting forces are going through the frame so you might worry about wear and tear on the moving parts of a full sus) so if you are happy to ride the miles on the full sus then just do it. Spend the money on the trailer and kit, or on more holiday time, or on fabulous meals.

Anyway if you're going to buy something then an Inbred is a good choice for what you have in mind, comfortable enough for the miles, cheap and cheerful and strong enough to be sacrificed to the baggage handlers, train compartments and all the other indignities faced by tour bikes, fun enough when you unhitch.

Aye, a lot of steel frames have the richie style cowled dropout (look at the back end of a cotic soul for instance), but the preference for attaching a hitch is something flatter. For which the (any) inbred is totally fine. Most, if not all alu frames should be fine as well. But theres a good chance whatever bike you already ride is fine too. Thats the point of trailers, you could tow with whippet-skinny road bike, a monster downhill bike or a brompton. You don't need to spec the bike in any special way at all, just have it as you'd like to ride it when the trailer isn't attached.

If you want to alternate between on and off road on your tour then I use a set of adjustable travel forks. Set them for longer travel (120 i think, they are a set of Recons) then lock them out on the road to get your head up a bit, but I actually prefer to reduce the travel off road. Don't sweat about it too much though, if the bike is comfortable its comfortable. Unless you usually set your bike up very aggressively head-down for off road then your usual setup will be fine for long days on the road. You want to be happy with your saddle, and something like a pair of ergon grips at the front helps, but otherwise just ride your bike.

The pleasure of touring is stopping, looking, doing things. So you might be covering 50 miles a day, but not 50 miles in the saddle in one go.

My top trailer touring tip is get a decent hip-pack like bag (I use one of the ortleib ones which is quite capacious). I allows you to keep all your valuable/delicate/important stuff together and to hand, so if you walk away from the bike it all comes with you. When the riding is stop/start just wear the pack, but on longer stretches just clip the pack around the pack on your trailer. That way the important stuff is still closest to hand.

On the road two-wheel trailers are better than one-wheel trailers. With two wheel trailers (attached at the dropout) no meaningful forces are transfered to the bike other than a bit of drag. So the bike doesn't need to be special in any sense, as the bike isn't carrying any weight (and unlike with one wheel trailers theres no twisting forces through the frame either) other than it helps to have flat dropouts rather than cowled ones to get a good fit for the tow hitch.

So the bike can be whatever you are happy to ride for 50 miles on the road and blat about with afterwards.

I went with an inbred pretty much because I wanted a steel frame and a flat drop out – works out lovely. I'd just stick with a sus fork and lock it out on the road. A change of tyres isn't a bad idea, but don't let the load carrying capacity tempt you into carrying too much.

Now now, there's nothing big or clever about spiking seagull's food with mind altering drugs.

Black up and go as Jay Z

plenty of problems can be overcome, and empathy is no bad thing.

Given how common depression and mental health issues are, and how many of us might be touched by them at some point in our lives, if you restricted the caring proffessions to practitioners who'd never personally experienced such things then you'd be fishing in a pretty small pond.

But looking to teenagers in particular – kids make their career choices on two things – what they are good at in school and the people they meet who they want to be like. I didn't follow a path based on what I was best at at school (science) because I never met, and still have never met, a scientist I wanted to be like/live like. Your depressed teenager will have met one or more councellors, been appreciative of what they've done and seen it as life choice that would suit them.

Perhaps fill it with anti-environmentalist nutters who think that nothing we do has any impact on the world.

Problem is you'll never find enough of them