chrisp65

another one from the magazine rack in Asda, but no less gorgeous for it

I only like one of those.

Because the last thing Europe needs is an attempt towards working together on a shared set of values and objectives?

I can see how people can get angry at the UK appearing to need permission to wipe it's own arse. But let's not lose sight of the fact it's our own politicians that have been involved in getting europe to where it is today. Europe didn't suddenly declare itself the boss of us, we agreed to a thousand late night negotiated tweeks of legislation, to pork barrel agreements where we could drive to France without hassle in exchange for our VAT being similar to Ireland's. 

Lazy poor quality politicians that haven't had the mental capacity for detail have lead us here. Voted in by people swayed by newspaper headlines and jeering rather than thinking through the implications of things.

We weren't tricked in to paying benefits to the Portugese. There was something in it for us at some point, and we have agreed to it. What was in it for us? Probably cheap staff to work in Costa and a promise our awesome banking system would be allowed to ruin us. Whether we deliberately agreed or whether we didn't hang around for the small print I don't know and perhaps it doesn't matter.

What we are now doing is not reclaiming ingerland for King Harry and Saint Crispin, what we are doing is realising quite late that lots of other countries took lots more interest in small print than we did. Mind you, I bet we did better newspaper headlines and soundbites.

These negotiations damn our own little englander politicians, none of whom are able to explain what this is even really about, what it will really cost, what the consequences will really be. I'm a lot more interested in the real security and prospects for my kids than I am with the colour of the flag or where the guy in the suit sits that decides to bail out banks but not libraries.

It's a poor show. Remember that next time you're voting and you think 'I like Boris / Jeremy / Nigel / Galloway, he's funny on the telly'.

3 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

I confess I don't really understand. At issue is the criminalisation of local governments and other bodies, such as student unions, boycotting certain products, mostly agricultural produce grown in illegal settlements. Nobody, to my understanding, has actually proposed boycotting all Israeli products. However, even if they did, the types of organisation that are under discussion are not able to dictate which medicines are available on the NHS. 

As to whether any individual feels strongly enough about boycotting Israeli products to not use a drug that could save their lives, well, that's up to them and their consciences I guess. But that's not relevant to the legislation?

I'm sure I'm just being dumb, and missing the point here somehow. 

There's nothing much there to understand Hanoi. I repeated a point I half heard on the radio that I thought was interesting, then found myself suckered in to defending it where I should have made clear I was just repeating it for the point of debate.

I'm still interested in the ethics of it, the NHS bit wasn't the intended point of interest. The point I was blundering around was exactly how principled the people / students/ councillors making these decisions might be. It's easy to ban orange juice from the canteen, then buy sweatshop trainers and Saudi petrol and Chinese tat.

I think it's less about you being dumb, more about my point lacking any real focus or conviction!

17 minutes ago, AVFCDAN said:

Totally agree.

Any offence such as counterfeit goods being sold or tax being dodged while annoying should never be punishable by 5+ years in prison.

Killing someone by any means probably should but very often doesn't.

UK's biggest tax fraud was by Syed Ahmed, 185 Million. Would 4 years inside be sufficient for that?

Personally, I'd be happy with 185 million in exchange for sitting out 4 years of gardening in an open prison.

It's waaaay too complex a thing to give quick reactions to.

Just now, HanoiVillan said:

A bit of a straw man there. Nobody is talking about an NHS boycott of anything. 

no, no. not a straw man, not an NHS boycott

If you don't want an Israeli olive, would you personally accept an Israeli health product.

Israel discovers some extract in an orange that helps stroke victims to a remarkable recovery - now what?

That really isn't a straw man. It's finding out if it's a point of deep principle, bendable principle, or a fashion statement.

From a half listened to debate on Radio 4 yesterday evening:

Are we all agreed that if there was an effective cancer treatment or a miracle drug for stroke victims that came out of Israel that we'd boycott that as well as olives and satsumas, yeah?

26 minutes ago, Genie said:

I don't realistically see any reason why people would significantly change their buying or selling habits tbh. It won't be any more difficult to buy from the UK.

Individuals might not consciously change their buying habits, all things remaining equal. But would they even now be deliberately paying a premium for a particular product? The majority of people buying a kettle or a toaster just want a red one, or a black one, or one that's twenty quid. I've never gone out to buy a Turkish fridge, or a specifically British washing machine. High end stuff, I admit is a little different. How many of us would like to see Smeg on our fridge door?

But that mid range Hoover white goods purchase? Don't care. So if British goods are penalised with a tariff or a joining fee and costs rise by 1% people might buy a shit Beko freezer instead of a shit Hoover one. Then, eventually, Hoover will think to itself 'we could actually be making these in Macedonia'.

No conscious change in buying habits. 

Would europe allow it's financial services to go through a differently regulated non-EU London? Or would it be 'easier' to build up Frankfurt? Remembering, that Germany would want some payback for having to either up it's own net contribution to offset the loss of ours, or, would have to sell the poorer countries the idea of having less hand outs.

I'm not saying what would or wouldn't happen, I'm accepting it's an unknown and that people should be careful what they wish for. 

Chris Grayling!!!!

Of course! This could all have been resolved so much quicker, so much more simply.

Just find out what Chris Grayling would do, and do the absolute opposite.

That's a life tip, not just an EU referendum tip.

that's a lot of gut being sucked in by the middle aged fella in yellow underpants

Cardiff to London by train - 235 quid including parking a car as I'm 12 miles from the station (door to door approx 2.5 / 3 hours each way)

Cardiff to London by car - 61 quid including petrol, parking in London and tolls (door to door approx 3 / 3.5 hours each way)

I'm out.

If either private or public could get the cost of that train ticket reduced by 170 quid (and I still arrive before lunch and am allowed to leave before 7:00pm) I'd be interested. 

(my local daily commute, just over a fiver a day by train, or less than 2 quid petrol)

Trains are a great idea, I can't get my head around how I could use them though, regardless of who owns what bit.

More like this tortoise sized behemoth. But not that actual one, that's a library photo of a Costa Coffee tea cake.

I like to buy utterly impractical food as meeting snacks.

It's going to prove difficult to take a photo of the ones that I bought.....I put them in the kitchen with a hand made sign that said 'free!'.

The Polish living wage cad monkeys now love me like a god. They won't be getting that sort of treat if we vote leave.

full posh

Hand made organic fair trade biodegradable freedom tea cakes from the up itself yummy mummy Deli up the road that Cerys Matthews and James Dean Bradfield et al use. Yes you do know who they are.

25 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

it's a shame VT lost its yawn icon but have an amusing jpg instead

if you're not going to bother reading what's being said just tell us and then I can save my time and go to another thread and have stimulating conversations about bands and rappers I've never heard of

I wasn't referencing you there Tony, or your bendy banana, I was just generally monologuing. 

If I wasn't to ignore or misread other people's points and only write worthy and relevant new comments I'd have finished 9,850 posts ago.

But nothing can get me down today, I bought posh chocolate tea cakes and big bags of posh crisps on expenses for a meeting and the meeting just got cancelled. Win win.

has anybody voted against their established VT persona yet?

Just now, tonyh29 said:

presumably these people would have needed a passport to get to Ireland in the first place , unless Ireland has an open border for Syrian refugees ?

My point was that we won't know if they are Syrian, Irish, British or Vulcan unless we set up border controls and physical check points all along the Irish / Northern Irish border.

Whether we are happy to let them in, whether we want to allow Irish in but not Algerians etc., is for a later debate. But first, for this to make any sense and to have 'control' we need to set up a physical border with check points from Newry, Crossmaglen, Garrison, and Derry / Londonderry.

Once we have physical border guards we can decide on the entry criteria.

Do we really want to go back there?

I haven't voted yet.

I'm waiting to see how the 500,000 Irish passport holders resident in the UK that are eligible to vote in the referendum, how they vote. or indeed, the 7,000 Poles that are eligible to vote...

I also want to know, once we have control of our borders, what exactly that will mean. I guess it must mean a return to actual passport checks at the Irish border? Or are we just concerned about the Calais jungle?

I'm a spectacularly intelligent person, I can't tell if I would be better off financially in, or out. I suspect that due to where I live my hometown is better off 'in' as when London was solely in charge of our affairs they attempted to close us down as a region.

So I'm a big fat don't know, with a leaning to wanting to remain in a reformed europe.

I was drifting along on a low slow boat when I dropped my arm in to the water to see the ripples and cool down a bit.

A flying fish shot out of the water and skimmed the surface in a silvery flash.

**** **** **** see the youtube Hippo video above for my reaction. 

Later on the same day trip I got stuck underneath a glass bottomed boat full of Germans.

I wonder if the best decade for music might just be now, the present.

I know that anyone over the age of 12 thinks the charts aren't as good as they used to be, and anyone under 40 thinks that Radio 2 should be burnt down. But there is a diversification now that we simply couldn't access before.

In the 60's there was the buzz of knowing someone that knew someone that could get hold of R&B imports. In the '70's and '80's you could be in your little gang and wait to be told where your trousers should end in relation to your ankles.

But now, with internet and social media, my kids are able to bypass the once a week pop TV programme, they can ignore MW radio and tap in directly to what they like. They've just recently been to a gig in London for a couple of singer song writers that I had never heard of and have never had a 'hit' or been played on the radio. But through links and contacts, my kids have heard of them. The artists themselves have worked out that there was demand for a gig in London at a 250 capacity venue, did the sums and made it happen. The band have basically tweeted and facebooked a tiny fan base and crowd funded a gig. Needless to say, it was sold out in advance, the guys had a pre gig meet, drink and selfie session with the fans before the gig proper got under way. 250 people thought it was the best gig ever, nobody outside the room had ever heard of them. 

Crowd funding, social media access, downloads, live feeds and every genre and sub genre under the sun all available to you, whether you live in Falkirk or Hammersmith. You can get to London for a tenner, download a wav file, send your mp3's off to be transcribed on to vinyl or just stay up until 2:00am and watch a live feed from Wyoming.

The good music is out there, it just won't pop up on Heart FM, so you still need to work a little, which is a good thing. I think now might be the best.

We just need to be careful that the shared experience of the venue is under threat. I can see it in Cardiff, it's happening in London. Flats and developers creep in to an area and then somehow, because of messed up planning and development rules, once a new flat pops up next to an established music venue, the tenant can complain and get the volume turned down. It suits the developers to put 'apartments' in to edgy (cheap) areas. It suits the authorities to then be able to close down or severely restrict the perceived trouble of a noisy venue. But yeah, other than that caveat about venues, now is pretty good.

Oasis got dirty basic rock n roll nailed down. First album is great pub rock.

Many bands were better technicians, smarter programmers, more complex lyricists etc.. But I'll take the dirt over gsce's in music every time.

But hey, personally, if my Primal Scream stuff, SFA stuff and my Oasis stuff were washed out to sea, I'd rescue all the Scream and Furries stuff first.

If the Scream and SFA stuff caught fire whilst I was drying it out, I'd rescue the Furries.

When I was a kid I used to spend hours trying to replicate that Roger Dean drawing style.

The whole bird skulls, monsters and floating space islands thing with the loop filled calligraphy.

4 minutes ago, Xann said:

Rang my dentist to book a check up appointment last Friday.

Two hours after the call, I swallowed the largest repair in my gob whilst eating cheese and crackers.

Mine was as a result of being an idiot.

I used a table as a ladder, rather than walk the 3 metres to where the ladder was resting against a wall.

The table gave way but luckily I broke my fall on to the concrete floor with my face. Cracked one tooth and kind of 'moved' two others.

A little while later, with everything out of shape, I decided it was a good idea to try some M&S black liquorice toffee.

Pulled a whole root filling out on a chunk of toffee.

A couple of injections, two teeth 'persuaded' back in to place and a new white root filling, scale and polish - forty three quid on the NHS! 

something something something, desecrated coconut