I clicked on this wondering what you had against the Germans

Well I’ve just been listening to an interesting interview with a female playwright who’s written a play about Boudicca

Was it about the difficulties of having to balance being an (ultimately) un-successful tribal war leader and heroine of the late Victorian empire with the demands of being a wife, mother and home maker?

My Ay-ups came with some snap-on light diffusers. They soften the beam and throw more light out sideways. Still plenty of light on the road though.

I’ve no idea if you can still get them.

Used to do a lot of that sort of backpacking in my late teens.

A full up load would be about 35pounds even with 1980’s kit (presumably heavier than modern stuff?)

First day used to be OK, the second day would be agony. After that it gets easier day by day. By the end of the first week you wouldn’t really notice the weight. I don’t think the sort of fitness required to run a marathon or ride a bike is that relevant. Its just getting used to putting one foot in front of the other for hours and hours every day.

The trick is to go moderate the first day, take it really easy on the second and then build your distance up again on third and subsequent days.

That’s not really the point. It’s the impact on South Korea (America’s ally) that gives cause for concern

Not to mention all those ordinary North Koreans who, given the choice, would probably prefer to carry on living.

These ballistic missiles go into low earth orbit

Just a pedantic point – ballistic missiles can go into space but at sub-orbital speeds. Once the power shuts off they follow a ballistic trajectory and gravity brigs them back down.

But that is stilly bloody fast (and hard to hit).

Human urine contains high level of nitrogen and significant levels of potassium.

Weeing on your vegetable patch makes a lot more sense than weeing down the loo.

Frankly, it seems to be the three most logical points for considering ‘life’ to have begun are birth, conception and perhaps 3 months.

That would make sense to me but I’m glad I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make a decision based on this.

it could be argued

but you’d loose that argument

I’m not arguing, I’m trying to question beliefs that are so ingrained the individuals spouting them don’t even realise they are beliefs.

But I’m interested in your opinion. When DOES a “clump of cells” become and “individual with conscience or self determination”?

(I don’t know. I would have said at about 4/5 years old)

His belief carries no weight, a clump of cells is not an individual with conscience or self determination.

Neither, it could be argued, is a newborn baby. So why is killing one murder and not killing the other misogyny? Why does your belief carry more weight than Rees Mogg’s?

However when conception has been violently forced upon an individual, then I don’t understand what kind of person, religious or otherwise, genuinely believes the correct thing to do would be to carry and raise the child..

On the other hand, if you believe that human life begins at conception, you may not understand why someone else might advocate the murder of a child that has committed no crime.

My cousin lives in Montana and her son is a trainee fire-fighter.

Surprisingly little about Texas on her Facebook feed at the moment….

I went through a phase of trying to take photos with so little colour in them that they looked almost black and white when printed, without the faf of using filters or manipulation software.

UK light is very good for doing that, particularly in mid minter.

That “even after rape” headline is a lovely piece of bias. The guy explained why he was opposed to abortion and it was pretty obvious it was abortion under any circumstances.

Its almost as if the Guardian had an agenda to follow.

Surely the “joke” is that the wearer of the hat is a bit of a gold digger (sorry if I’ve misunderstood the meaning of “footballer’s wife”).

Both males and females do marry other people for their wealth and fame.

The hat does not imply that all females are gold diggers (or even that gold digging is a bad thing).

The hat isn’t sexist, the joke is just quite poor. (especially if you have just bought it for your 6 year old daughter).

If they were paying tribute to the film, and the characters in the film, possibly the opposite of a “hate” incident?

A daft thing to do though, as someone was bound to be offended.

It’s all journeys and stories these days round here

And possibly a roadmap is involved in the journey?

Tuition Fees (which I think is what we are talking about?) were introduced in 1998.

It was Blair and his expansion of higher education. Which at the time seemed like a good thing 🙁

Henry V. The Branagh version not the 1944 Olivier one.

Failing that, Cross of Iron and Das Boot.

Has anybody else read the book of Das Boot? Its pages and pages of description of the sky plus the odd reference to the smell of stale semen in the officers quarters.

But everything else in the kitchen is related to food storage, preparation and eating…why would you put a clothes washing machine in there

Equally, everything in a bathroom is to do with washing and cleaning the human body. Why would you put a clothes washing machine in there?

If it’s sufficiently rare there could still be millions of them but they’d be so far away that their signals would still be in transit.

Or just lost against the general background noise.

There are plenty of stupid crashes at the end of flat stages when the riders are knackered and racing for position.

If you really want to improve safety, get rid of the sprints as well the mountain descents.

Organisms evolve into more complex life and become self contained

I may be wrong, but evolution doesn’t just happen does it? Isn’t it a result of outside factors meaning that certain mutations are more likely to survive and pass on those mutations. If those ecosystems are perfectly balanced and never change, those microbes in the moons of Saturn won’t evolve into anything else. They’ll remain happy little microbes for all eternity.

I lived like a monk for six months and still had “dangerously” high cholesterol.

I saw a heart specialist about it as there is a history of heart disease in my family. She looked at my numbers, everything on the healthy side of normal apart from the cholesterol, and told me it was nothing to do with diet. Its just bad luck in picking your parents.

Do you check your blood pressure regularly? High blood pressure + high cholesterol is not a good combination.

Most people are already satisfied that we’re not, I think.

But without proof, this isn’t any different to any other unproven belief. A bit like religion really.

A little while ago there was no proof that planets existed around other stars. Now we take it for granted. That discovery didn’t make much a difference to most people but I think, over the long term, discovery of extra terrestrial life will make a huge difference to our outlook as a race.

but why don’t the RMT have a go, sure they could manage it better

I imagine they probably could.

some kind of broad winged BoP circling over head like a drone over Afganistan

A good trick is to lie very still in the middle of a field. See how close the kite gets before it realises you’re still alive (or your bottle goes and you shoo it off).

I know Red Kites are supposed to be mainly scavengers but I swear rabbits have become rare in places

I’ve never seen a Red Kite take a rabbit, but I’m told they do take the babies and I know of at least one warren with a nearby family of Kites where there seem to be less rabbits around than there used to be 10/15 years ago.

But Kites are probably a better way of controlling rabbit population than Myxomatosis.

However, if they take baby rabbits, they’ll also take leverets, and I don’t think we suffer from an over population of hares 🙁

Oppidia were isolated and cl;eared farmland was an exception not the norm.

My knowledge is about 15 years out of date, but isn’t there evidence that most of the Roman farmland reverted to woodland once the empire collapsed. The most common Anglo Saxon place name element is “Ley” which is specifically a farmstead clearing in the middle of woodland.

Whether naturally re-grown woodland counts as wild or not is another argument.

Look up cassettes for youth gearing

Yeah, a “schoolboy block” as we used to call them. I never found one that went over 25 though, so I gave up looking.

Is it possible to get cassettes that don’t start at 11?

I’d like one that was something like 14-30

Only bearings I had that never needed adjusting and never wore out were unsealed cup and cone chorus hubs with a grease port.

I suppose the design of the bullet would also make a difference. Some will go through things more easily than others.

are you for real?
is it half term or are the primary schools off for the holidays?

So care to explain it to us primary school kids?

There is a Victorian copy in Reading Museum. Reading Museum is also famous for its collection of Huntley and Palmer biscuit tins.

I quite like it but it is definitely over priced

But what if its arisan coke, made in a small town in Yorkshire?

At least where we live most of the permanent TA positions are filled by people with QTS and these are highly over applied for and wherever possible nonsalaried.

Whereabouts is that stevxtc? Thinking of moving out of the SE and always assumed Mrs SWSD would be able to walk into a teaching job. There’s always loads of vacancies round here.

Lots in SW/Wessex/Mercia/Wales and very few in SE

Its possible that the a lot in the SE have been lost through intensive farming or being built over so there isn’t much evidence left.

I’m glad they’ve included one of my local ones – Calleva Atrebatum. Its a Roman town, but underneath that there are pre-Roam defences and an Iron age “town”. However they only know that because there have been about 20 years of intensive excavations!

Second, if I asked you to pickle a shark and suspend it in a glass case could you do that for me?

I’m not sure Damien Hurst could either. Didn’t he pay people to do it for him? It cost an awful lot of money, I seem to remember.

I doubt he caught the shark himself either.

The response is usually along the lines of “so why didn’t you?.

To which my reply would be, “Because I didn’t go to art college, the establishment wouldn’t take me seriously”

And people hate Vettriano because his paintings are creepy and sinister.

Funny, I quite like Vettriano because his paintings ARE creepy and sinister.