100.0

Welcome to my rotten borough.

Are you Colin the dachshund?

I’ve never really liked Howies. It stems from way back when Mrs SWSD tried to buy some size 16 stuff and found out they only went up to 14. Their reason was something along the lines of “fat birds don’t exercise” (I may be paraphrasing there). It kind of jarred with their “we’re so cool and trendy we kayak to work” website. I prefer Rapha’s cheezy marketing.

I see they go up to (but only up to) size 16 now. Perhaps somebody had a word.

my vote is only worth 0.064 of a vote!!

Ooh get you with your high numbers. Mines worth 0.040!

I particularly like the fact that he needs £500 on clothes. Is this to fit in with roadie haute couture?

to be fair, if that includes helmet, shoes, race cape, a couple of bibs and an jersey you wouldn’t be far off £500. But you wouldn’t have to replace them every year.

Ooh, I’ve just seen they’re doing a long sleeve wool jersey for £60. Thats actually quite cheap for a wool jersey.

I’ve just slid down the road and ripped the arm off my aging rapha “fixed” jersey. I’m quite tempted.

Rapha isn’t the only expensive/niche cycle clothing company around, it just seems to be the most well known (on here anyway)

Check out some of the brands they sell at alwaysriding.co.uk. They don’t make Rapha appear particularly expensive.

Feel free to name a country that has a bad economy and failing businesses, which doesn’t’ have high levels of poverty?

Feel free to name a country that has reverted back to a stone age culture and commensurate levels of material poverty?

edit:

Chances are that agiculture, art, architecture, religion and warfare all developed before anything remotely resembling our modern mixed market based economy.

It a shame that politics now means no more than how much money the next stuffed suit promises he can put in you pocket.

Weird idea as without businesses doing well and a thriving economy we’d all be back in the stone ages and everyone would be in poverty.

Weird idea, assuming that the whole of human progress is due to business doing well and to thriving economies.

Personally I’m hoping nobody gets a clear majority.

I do like a well hung parliament.

In the same way all drivers get disrespected because a few of them go round driving dangerously and killing people? Oh wait…

Things is, when people find out I ride a bike for fun, its not unusual to get moans about how they were held up behind a group of cyclists, buzzed too close by a mountainbiker, sworn at by a roadie etc. etc. (and we don’t pay road tax, we jump red lights)

When people find out I drive a car I don’t get moaned at about someone one else reckless driving.

Cycling is a sport and a minority activity, so yes, we often do get tarred with the same brush. A bunch of riders behaving badly in a particular area WILL affect how other riders are seen in that area.

Take a walk round the outside of Reading Jail (where Oscar Wilde was locked up), followed by a tour of Abbey Gardens, (where Henry I is supposed to be buried).

I hear some of the people involved in the Richard miracle are going for the remains of Henry I next, reputed to be buried in Reading Abbey.

If all this dead celeb chasing is useful to raise funds to do some proper archaeology, all well and good. Otherwise it just seems bit low rent Indian Jones.

Mind you – The ex-head of the national trust has just been on radio 4 talking about rebuilding Stonehenge. I suppose it all fits nicely into the the plan of making the UK a huge tourist theme park.

However, people died to earn us the vote,

Genuine question:

I always thought that the extension of the franchise to universal adult suffrage was a long slow process of parliamentary reform.

So, apart form the odd lady who may or (may not) have thrown herself under the Kings’s horse, who actually died to earn us a vote?

Is there any practical use for any of this though?

If everyone thought like that, we would still be running around in the woods, pissing and barking and clubbing small furry animals over the head.

They did “find” him a bit too easily didn’t they?

Its normally bloody hard to link any sort of archaeology back to the historical record.

The Roman Army used a sponge on a stick. One shared between 8 men.

Just stop teaching, and claim your pension at a later date, though you will need to fund the gap between these two dates.

I assume the teachers pension is a defined benefit scheme? You need to do the numbers on this as taking a reduced pension early may mean you are better off in the long run than waiting for normal pension age.

You need to know your minimum pension age, your normal pension age, the method of calculating the defined benefit and the actuarial reduction tables. All scheme have different rules, but you might be pleasantly surprised.

not sure they count as vermin but grey squirrels are invasive alien species if you didn’t know.

As, of course, are rabbits. They’ve just been here a lot longer

Terrible news for our native red squirrels

I’ve seen a few red squirrels. They are kind of cute and fluffy. I suppose thats why nobody ever describes them as “rats with fluffy tails”.

what makes an animal “vermin”?

ne’er-do-well

Higgledy-piggledy

hugger-mugger

Oh FFS. I thought it was all about an age of austerity in an effort to get the deficit down and reduce national debt.

A bit of spare cash and an election coming up and its all poncing about with stuff like a penny off beer duty.

Nice to know we’ve all been suffering these past few years so the likes of Kryton57 gets some pre election bribes.

1. It is as flat rate and not income related. (not saying we should have a income related sales tax that would be crazy.)

I dunno. 25% VAT on bikes and TVs over 2k, 30% VAT on cars over 20k, 50% VAT on yachts ? Bit like the old stamp duty on houses.

Not sure you can call VAT a progressive or regressive Tax. The VAT you pay is related your expenditure NOT to the income you receive. So treating it as a percentage of your income is irrelevant.

Yup, gov.uk employee here – can switch on PC, do the bitlogger thing then go and get showered/changed before my desktop is ready for logon.

Used to take me 15 minutes every morning when running XP. They recently switched to windows 7 and a different HDD encryption type which has sped up the login to normal. But funnily enough it now takes about 10 minutes to shut down, unless I’m working over a remote connection, when can take up to an hour!

I’m talking more about something that would benefit everybody

How about world peace, sustainable growth and the more equal distribution of wealth?

I like to think of him as pausing in Death’s mansion. To share one last fry-up with Albert.

This is a corporation that has recently been criticised for ignoring allegations of much more serious wrong doings by its stars, precisely because they were big popular acts.

To suggest that they ignore allegations of a criminal act because the perpetrator is “funny” and earns them lots of money strikes me as extremely ironic.

Given the BBCs history regarding Saville, Stuart Hall, DLT, etc. its the only thing they can do.

Plenty of people still remember what we did.

I wonder why nobody still remembers what the Romans, the Mongols and the Assyrians did.

I wonder if they would be a threat to domestic pets?

Be good to see one in the wild, but I imagine they are so shy you would never catch sight of them.

Well hypothetically, the meat wouldn’t have to break down completely to allow the poison out, in fact it probably wouldn’t have to leach at all as the poison presumably dissolves into the juices in the somach. Assuming that the dog died before the digestion of the meat was complete – and as anyone whose ever had an ill advised kebab can tell you that takes a while – there could still be evidence in the stomach.

Probably more detail than I want when just about to sit down to lunch, but yes, that would make sense.

On the radio this morning one of the owners said that there was meat in the stomach which had been sewn together with poison inside like a pouch.

That sounds a bit odd. If the meat was still intact, how did the poison harm the dog? If it had been digested, releasing the poison, how do they know the meat was sewn together?

Wouldn’t they just test for poison in its bloodstream?

For me the fact that as a country we are lending billions to governments that we will never see back, adding aid on top of that etc leaving sod all in the pot here.

I think a lot (most?) foreign aid isn’t “no strings attached” and sometimes it will come with quite specific conditions. (although I can’t think of any examples at the moment)

Foreign aid isnt just about the Uk government being all altruistic and lettig us feel warm and cuddly. Its also a tool of foreign policy.

Fable III?

Its a bit twee and the combat is dead easy, but it has a lot of humour. And all the accents are british.

The thing about Quidditch is that it doesn’t actually work as a sport. I mean, the team that catches the snitch always wins, so why bother with all the other stuff?

It made me laugh. And highlights some of the weird standards in our society.

It’ll be a few sad, middle class tossers judging others by their own, self imposed rules.

I’m confused. The road group, or Singletrackworld?

Apparently he liked to rub whisky on the arse of the spankee.

I hope it wasn’t his best malt!

If you’re interested apply here
I like that there’s language alternatives so you don’t have to be able to speak English.

I wouldn’t bother. Most of the high rollers on STW wouldn’t get out of bed for the money MI6 offer.

looks laterally stiff yet vertically compliant.

But will it make the trails come alive?

He’s a teacher I doubt he planned anything!!

Well, at least he’ll have time to catch up on his marking.