by having a ridiculously understanding boss (days off at an hours notice etc) and family (mum and sister) who bail him out of most of the scrapes he gets himself into

Its often said that people need to hit the bottom before they pick themselves up, if people catch you then ultimately you don't take responsibility as you can alway fall again knowing you'll be caught.

Perhaps there needs to be some co-ordinated thought between you and the others that look out for him that you let him fall whilst keeping an eye on him as best you can. Perhaps in the same way as there is councelling for alcoholics there might be similar support for the friends and family of alcoholics that can give you a bit of guidance.

EDIT blimey people wrote all that while if was typing slowly with cold fingers. So heres another slant….. Alcoholics seek the company of other alcoholics, i know of pubs where all the clientelle are soaks, some will travel a long way to be there. People seek these environments out because nobody judges you. When your pall is on his weekend benders is he on his own? With you and other friends and just drinking a lot more than them? With people who drink in the same way has him?

If its the latter then if he manages to make steps to dry himself out then try too create a social scene that moves him away from his drinking environment. If he's drying out but still in the company of drinkers it embarrases the drinkers as it forces them to think about what they are doing, and unwittingly or otherwise they'll try and tempt him back on the drink. (in the same way that smokers habitually, half jokingly, offer fags to people who have quite)

Not only should the people be fined for doctoring the plate, the company that did it should also be fined as there are rules now to getting new plates done, you have to produce your V5 along with 2 forms of ID, this all has to be logged if the DVLA do a check on the provider, PLUS even if you have a "P" plate its NOT your property, its DVLA property, you are just the gardian of it.(PS I have a "P" plate and it cost £143)before anyone has a go at me who knows me.

The non-standard spaced/font plates you see are sold as "show plates", they are nominally sold as being ornamental, stick them on your wall, stick them on a car in the forecourt or in a car show or in a museum. As such you don't need to prove anything about the car ownership to buy them as they are sold on the "understanding" that they won't be put on a road-going car.

If its only a £500 cover you'll probably find (in some cases) that the bike is only covered in the house too, not covered out and about being used as a bike.

You'd be better off getting stand alone cycle insurance in this instance, which if the bike is your only concern would be better value than something like M&S anyway. You could suggest that your landlady switches to M&S next time she renews and maybe offer to pay towards any difference in the premium if there is any.

hoody chav = hoody chav, tart = tart, clean cut youth = clean cut youth, anorak = anorak

reminds me of that old Lee and Herring sketch where a teacher was saying that they graded homework on the basis of the social status of the kids parents, reasoning that "I work from 9 oclock in the morning til 3 oclock in the afternoon, 5 days a week for 32 weeks of the year. I'm not going to waste what precious little spare time I have reading something thats been written by somebody half my age!"

Not that I really have the insight but a comparison of the varying national philosophies of education might be interesting.

For instance we all learn history in school in the UK but we don't really have a stated motive for doing so, whereas in the US for instance a pupil studies the lives of great people in the hope that they themselves might become great. Against that comparison we almost seem to look to history in the hope that we don't make the same mistakes again.

And as for people who 'home educate', words fail me:
Your children will ALL end up high in a clock tower, holding a grudge and a high powered rifle, so that's all going to stop.

amen to that, I ran a workshop once for home-educated children and their parents. One of the most upsetting things I've ever had to do

How to wire a plug, how to tell if your actually ill, not go the hospital at the first sign of a sniffle, etc etc.

you want schools to do this?

changing a plug with a butter knife is something your dad should show you, ignoring people who think they are sick is the job of every loving mother.

If you want the state to raise your children just have them put into care 😀

forget radios, a town cryer is the greenest option, or whistling a happy tune to yourself

Kim Jong il

it's not like those industries are dying off

if you are looking at avatar and madonna as examples of people being effected by piracy you're looking in the wrong place. There are lots of income streams aside from direct sales for the big players (all sorts of broadcast, licencing and merchandising) Its smaller jobbing musicians and middle weight films that take the hit. Bands that could maybe have looked to sell tens of thousands of records (rather than hundreds of thousands) and could have made a living, rather than been 'stars' are the ones that get mullered. Same with films, I've worked on films that have been popular enough to make the top ten in the illegal download chart but barely made their (modest) budget back from sales. The result is the production company aren't in the position to make another film, even though there is a demonstrable market.

What's the effect of tramps and drunk stockbrokers weeing on the snow?

reduced property prices for houses with a view of the park

What if someone made a copy of a bike in a shop & kept it for their own use?
Is that the same as stealing the bike?

in effect, yes

edit: and it happens

I don't like the way it's ok with some people to steal software. It's the same with music downloads. What makes that ok but stealing from your local bike shop not?

because people place a value 'things' but not ideas, time or other people

I think the balancing act for the games industry is market tends to adopt the platform that lends itself most readily for piracy, so people buy the hardware but their piracy risks extinguishing the content.

It effectively covers any playing of recorded music or music videos in a commercial, non-domestic setting – so the back room of a shop, or even a home office, may require a licence (but a private wedding party at a hotel may not). It also covers playing recorded music on your premises via radio/TV.

Nice of them to use the word 'may' to prevent any risk of information being divulged

actually
sod it, I'm going to make some now

nyum nyum

why certainly, I keep telling you you don't need to sneak out before dawn 😀

– its a recipe with only one downside – handling chillis at 6 in the morning then later sitting in a traffic jam yawning and rubbing your eyes

Crumpets dipped in egg mixed with a little fresh chilli then fried.
bacon and maple syrup on top.

for the purpose of your MOT if its fitted it needs to work, if you happened to get pulled you'd get a producer and need to give evidence that its been fixed.

http://www.edwardboyle.com/perennial_snow1.html

There are a few snow patches in the highlands that sometimes make it right through the summer, they are sheltered from the wind and very big bodies of snow to start with, perhaps finding out their size would be a good start point then compare altitude and climate

I used to make big outdoor ice sculptures for music festivals and the like, sun was fine but rain would kill them.

Are you planning something like this?

I bought some thick ladies tights

She wasn't that thick if she got a decent price for some old tights

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t50zDEbLg5g

I left my phone in a jacket pocket once during an early morning sunday commute and something must have been pressing against it resulting in a guy called Ally getting text after text after text that all said 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' about sixty texts or so until I ran out of credit.

Only just narrowly avoided send a text to my sister-in-law-to-be that was intended for my GF, it was just a day or two before her wedding. That would have been awkward.

Colleague of mine replied over an email group to another colleague with "see you later, f*ck you later" which was a subtle a way as any of letting us all know they we're now an item.

she pulled her intercostal muscles coughing too much, so

When I was a student I was suffering from bronchitis, during a huge coughing fit set off by someone making me laugh I ended up collapsed in a heap in the floor. My friend Irene walked in and found me lying in quite a bit of discomfort trying to regain my composure and not cough or laugh or anything really just trying to breath as little and as gently as possible.

She wanders over to me and starts to chat, I'm not really responding I'm just trying to calm down. She feels I'm not really all that great company "you boring bastard" she says yawning and stretching, a very very long and bored yawn and stretch, hands up above her head. The yawn turns into a 'Yeeeeeeeeeeearrrrrgh!" and the stretch ends utterly inexplicably with her fists plunging down and punching me in the stomach with all her weight, just below the sternum. I had my eyes shut so didn't really see it coming.

She tore the muscles in my diaphram, and now I was coughing quite a lot! I was on fairly heavy pain killers for about a fortnight.

Years later when I'm living in a big shared house a letter turns up, on the back of the envelope was written, without much of a grasp of pharmacy ( and for everyone else to have a good laugh at) "Remember me? its Irene, the girl that put you on antibiotics"

Either his t-shirt matches the floor of that tattoo is being applied to a severed head

Don't recall anything good on ITV for a while. C4 has been putting out some good stuff, funded by advertising though; Cape Wrath, Red Riding, don't know if anyone caught Misfits on E4 but it was great.

Generally I think the BBC's downfall of late has been one of trying to make UK perspective versions of the kind of show that work well in the states. Spooks is perhaps a UK transcription of something like 24, but it just seems kiddy-on when you do that. Its not a budget issue its just that UK productions look foreign when you put them up against US ones. The beeb is still turning out some good stuff like the Office and Extras, which although comedies rather than strictly dramas they are still well produced pieces of TV.

The Beebs emphasis has been more on comedy than anything else in recent years as it sees comedy as a more valuable vehicle to test, discuss and represent contemporary british issues than either drama, news or current affairs.

But if they are making fewer dramas they should at least be making ones that are good. The first series of Life on Mars should have been a turning point, just in terms of Production Design even if nothing else, but it didn't even seem to leave an impression on the second series of Life on Mars let alone the other one I forget the name of.

think beyond the first response. If you're not an action hero who can drag the dying out of the wreckage then your time to get involved isn't right now. But recovering from this is going to take Haiti years and long after we stop reading about this in paper.

Helping people pick themselves up doesn't require a skill or qualification. I met some young architects who went out to Pakistan after the earthquake there. Oddly they were working with the local equivalent of English Heritage as they had realised that it was the traditional vernacular architecture that had killed a lot of people (heavy flat roofs that came crashing down when the walls were shaken). Their aim was to instill a new tradition as they knew that most people would rebuild their homes form the rubble of the old ones. The key was a simple timber ring beam that would hold the roof together and up, even if a lot of the walls fall down.

Annnnnyway, these architect went out with the view to help this agency spread this news to the people who would be building, as the the tradition and economy was based around people building their own homes. But what they found was people doing nothing, just broken really. There were faced with so much to do quite aside from who and what they had lost, that nobody knew where to start. So the architects just started shovelling rubble, with their soft CAD-jockey hands. But starting, and making a bit of progress was all it took to stir the locals into action.

Take a look at people like Habitat for Humanity perhaps, I've friend who works for them, they had people out in Haiti already but of course they'll have no means to contact them just now, and their time isn't right right now either. But for the next few years they'll have their work cut out I reckon.

They only need heros for the next week or so, after that they'll need friends.

I used to have an old MGB and the fuel pump had gone. Recovery truck arrives and because the MG had a funny wee spoiler on the front there was nothing to attach the winch too. Tried pulling it backwards but the front just grounded instead

So the recovery driver hatched the plan to drive it up the ramp on the starter motor, balancing it on a few planks of wood to make the transition onto the truck, and decided that it was best if he watched as I did it.

Well blow me if the fuel pump didn't decide to revive itself halfway up. I was leaning out the window to see where my wheels were, so my foot was off the clutch when the engine started in gear. That was a bit brown trousers.

Also had a car trashed by an attempted theft in the early hours of the new millennium, leaving it un-securable and un-drivable. When I discovered it in the morning it looked more like it had been in a RTA. Had to get it towed to somewhere secure. How many call centre operators would have turned up for work that day do you think? My phone records showed that I spent over 2 hrs listening to a loop of "Come on and Rescue Me"

he might be rather tight for cash,

well he hasn't got any pockets

OK. How about Argent Content like the best bits of the french connection compressed into a 10 minute film and all on rollerskates. Lovely punchline.

The Fall[/url]

BigDummy – Member
If you carry on being so brave and manly I will trombone you.

Don't you mean tuba?[/url]

is there such a thing as a decent handheld vacuum?

Just turn your spam filter off, you'll get adverts for them all the time 🙂

Basically powder coat is a cheap and fairly ubiquitous service, its tough but where it fails it can fail more considerably, the coating isn't as 'stuck' to the metal as paint is, so once its breached corrosion can take more of a hold. Less of a problem with alu, but a small nic can still spread as moisture gets under the coating

But as its cheap, you can just go get it done again

Whats that guy standing behind the Joker doing? Is it a reference to brokeback mountain?

EDIT Oh hello…… he's disappeared

What will be interesting is Apple's next big speech, not so much for the announcements of anything new, just the reports on market share.

Whenever Apple releases a new operating system theres a corresponding spike in apple hardware sales, whenever Microsoft releases a new operating system…… theres a corresponding spike in apple hardware sales.

Will be interesting to see if the same is true for Windows 7.