chrisp65

I'll give that a listen this evening - prepping for the football right now, by which I mean eating carbs and booming out some Super Furries and a dubby version of Yma O Hyd.

ahh, cricket, yes. I presumed it was just something a bit more...niche.

shower pull cord switch went bang this morning A nice sunny bank holiday Friday spent doing chores and teaching myself all about electrics in rooms with water in them - what could possibly go wrong... Eh guv, pass me that LAP 50 amp DP RCD load side flip flange isolator next to the breaker breaker 4 pole MCB. Yeah, I got the skills.

Agreed. It got like that due to government incompetence, year in, year out. The NHS doesn't work properly either, due to incompetent management and poor investment decisions. Do we sell it off? We can't keep running our prisons and schools and everything else in to the ground then pointing at them and saying the only way to fix this is to sell it to my mate Sir Wankalot, 4th Count of Toffsbury and his hedge fund chums.

Yeah, Qashqai would be the choice if money wasn't an issue. The car she's got at the moment is a Nissan Tino, it's the model before the Qashqai, so same dimensions, same camera and all that. Just looks utterly anonymous. But she bought it new 12 years ago and it's been brilliant. It's broken down twice in 12 years - both times I'd borrowed it and it was me wot broke it. Who knew it doesn't automatically shut down and switch off! Mine does, so I got out of it one night after borrowing it and walked off. Turns out you need to switch the lights off, close the windows, all that old tech stuff. Turns out you need to put the hand brake on too, it doesn't work it out for itself. Mine just says 'dickhead' in German and does all that admin stuff for me. But the Qashqai with a few bells n whistles and a camera is over £20k new. The equivalent Suzuki is £16k. The Suzuki is 'new' so there's no second hand or used equivalent. A Qashqai that isn't a base model that comes in under the new Suzuki price is 3 years old. We keep on delaying and delaying. We're actually now considering just spending something like £1,500 getting the current car totally sorted and keeping that. If we can afford the £2k deposit on new, surely we can afford the £1,500 repair but then without the £150 a month for ever afterwards. Buying cheap used, i.e. something for £6/7/8k feels like a risk, we could end up repairing a £6k car just as soon as the existing 12 year old bugger. Who knows, we've agreed not to discuss it this bank holiday weekend! Hired an Astra for a few days to stay mobile, but that's not a long term plan. Plus of course, the more family budget goes on the family car, the less budget will be available for mine when mine eventually dies!

Yes, that's interesting, I can't get it to open so I'll have another go later. But it does lean towards the theory of a bias.

Out of curiosity, is there any study of this in any numbers? Is the a reputable statistic showing a pattern of similar offences being given different sentences? I don't mean one selected newspaper story compared with one other selected newspaper story. I mean, like, proper data analysis. I don't know, and I'm not arguing a position. I'm just interested if the huge disparity is real, or one of those things that gets repeated. I might be naive here, but I suspect there will not be enough female cases to build a decent comparison.

we all know how this will pan out: March 25th - no news March 31st - no news April 7th - no news April 16th - 1:00pm - some random team somewhere announces Moyes as new manager April 16th - 5:45pm - Aston and Remi agree to 'amicable' split, Villa announce they are now actively looking for a proven gritty ginger Scottish Manager September 4th - meltdown r7.0 as McLeish announces a chance to finish unfinished business

well that's not bad BOF Moyes isn't even here yet and already you're sticking the boot in jeesus H paddythwack, only on VT

I used to be him, down the park.

I've tried to read the Guardian. There's the occasional interesting bit, but it's not for me. The fact that it's free in Waitrose and is the same size as our pet cages base means it is the paper I pick up. But 3 or 4 times out of 5, it doesn't even get opened until Basil's cage is cleaned out. Basil is my basement gimp, by the way.

Well I think Blandy just summarised, wrapped up and closed the thread quite nicely there.

Yay! Phaddywak office pranks. Years ago (when computers had integral roller ball mouse things built in to the keyboard and we thought we had to wear Space 1999 suits to drive a computer), we had a little spinning device installed in the CAD office for us cutting edge space dudes drawing on a screen not on paper. It was supposed to de ionise the air or some such aromatherapy crap. Anyway, we quickly discovered that touching the little spinny thing with one hand and touching someone else with the other caused a zap. A little static charge. Within the hour, I got to thinking, what if I kept my hand on the spinner, and waited, and waited.... Well it turns out that what happened was the guy I eventually zapped got blown off his chair and sat on the floor for about 15 minutes shivering whilst we all tried to reassemble his desk.

Yep, looks from that photo like bog standard brick spall. Ice has popped the front off the brick. So you can have a couple of new bricks, some brick slips, or some brick coloured filler. But....a good repair man / builder might point out to you that it looks like your damp course is a bit low. I'd guess it was the right height but then you covered the garden in brick pavers for ease of maintenance. Ideally, the dpc would be at 150mm (two bricks high). Rather than dig down and lay to the original height, they've laid the pavers on top of the existing ground level. So now the damp proof course that used to be two bricks high, is now only one brick high. The rain that used to absorb in to the earth or the flower bed, now bounces up and over the damp proof course. Probably nothing. Possibly have no effect ever whatsoever. A zealous surveyor could pick it up and mention it to potential buyers. But yes, painting the bottom two rows of bricks a different colour would cause most drive by surveyors to think everything is fine. Or, your house is sinking.

I've had to politely tell more than one person from one project management company (E C Harris) that I will not have meetings in Starbucks. It ain't appropriate. I will meet up in Starbucks if we must. I will chat some work chat in Starbucks if we must. I will not sit around a cluster of laptops and paperwork in a Starbucks that has been replanned as a conference venue by a prick in a shiny suit.

we didn't have prizes at my school, or competitions, we were a proper 70's comp and we didn't want to upset the lazy, losers and lesbians No Tony, of course you don't win, the bees made it ok to say swarm, they actually made it slightly funny, context again. Also, that link was to the Daily Mirror. That's like, you know, a bit shit.

If there was a rally in London with thousands of disabled or nurses or pensioners protesting about something, would we need a single word like swarm to describe them? Or would we possibly use the word 'thousands'? Who knows, it could even be more descriptive, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. I have no idea how many are in a swarm. A hundred and twenty three maybe? But I have just looked at six different online dictionaries, Collins, Oxford, Cambridge etc.. and they all gave insects or flying insects as the first definition.

I take your point. But we have to consider context. Swarms descending on the beach on a sunny bank holiday is just a description. A bloke that cheats on a girlfriend is a rat. Describing refugees or immigrants or whatever as swarms or rats is deliberately provocative. I think it's ok to describe somebody as black if giving a description of, say, a black actor in a film. To front up to someone on the football pitch that is patently black, and call them a black whatever, is probably racist. Context. It's tricky and there can be misunderstandings and well meaning blunders. Use of terms like rats and swarms in the context of this current topic is unhelpful at best, deliberately offensive racism at worst. But probably somewhere in between. The Daily Mail knew what it was doing recently with it's cartoon of rats. Not quite blatantly racist enough to get prosecuted.

yeah, I think we're talking about euro passport terrorists Like the ones from Leeds, Bradford and Aylesbury that carried out the July 2005 tube and bus bombings in London. If we vote leave, that couldn't happen.

trip to Bristol for me to see the Knife this year

Is he the one from space that doesn't understand where underpants go in relation to trousers? Or the posh one that lives in a cave that doesn't understand how to wear underpants? I've missed out on a lot of this stuff. I was putting up a shelf. A solid straight shelf.

Agree with CED entirely, just because somebody isn't mature enough to be a real adult, or can't get a woman or doesn't have fully functioning genitalia is no reason to single them out for ridicule as an inferior manchild, some sort of half complete failure, content to sit at home, often it's actually mommies home, probably on a bed with a super hero themed duvet cover, playing computer games and looking at porn. It's not easy to be a real man these days. Cut them some slack. Often times they have other redeeming features. They may be very good at i.t., or know the entire train timetable for Bristol without having to look it up. I have friends that don't have their own kids, often times they are very, artsy. I know our local amateur dramatics society would be under tremendous strain to find male leads in many a musical production if it weren't for these types. It's just not our place to judge or punish, that's for God. That's my little rule anyway.

My two little cherubs have brought nothing but joy and hope to the world. They put a sense of the wonder of nature in to people. The miracle of life. They have given and given and given. Everyone they have touched, everyone that has met them has been made a little happier and a little more enriched by the experience. Anyway, that's what I call my testicles, what do you call yours?

We need to be careful of extremists on both sides. The sort that want to invade and blow us up and undermine our way of life. But also the nasty snidey little ones that refer to rats and roaches, that whisper in our ear that bad things are coming. These people are just as bad and would have us dance to their different but equally evil fiddle.