Ken L

How can it be to early ? The full on Xmas deccies have been up in all the big shopping centres for a couple of weeks now.

In Aus the stop littering campain has a great slogan. "Don't be a tosser". Kinda sums up my thoughts on the folks that leave litter behind them.

However just his current cause*, he is part of an organisation and they must have been collectivly very silly or very nieve to think that his past wouldn't get dragged up with a statement like the one detailed in the article. How difficult would it have been to get someone with no record to make the statement on behalf of the group ? *I personally don't see that much difference between being one of 20 people maimed by a terrorist bomb and being one bloke maimed by a nutter with a knife outside a chipshop and fail to see the logic of any special compensation.

I once had a variation of the classic chase dream. I recall being chased down a dark ally by someone or something really nasty and discovering that it was a dead end. I put my back to the wall at the end so that I could dodge left or right as the bad thing came and discovered that I was stuck to it and that no matter how much I pulled or thrashed I couldn't get off it. At that moment, the bad thing caught up with me and was rearing up for the final strike when I woke up still strugging to get off the wall. The transition from dream to waking was seamless and the panic was there because gravity was of couse holding me stuck to the wall/bed and I couldn't get off. I would have been about 12 at the time and it's still fresh in my mind.

Great. Alien invader death match. Signal Cray v Mitten Crab. Ruddy Duck v Inland Cormerant. Mink v Coypu Any other takers ?

Yep, I've had one possible sighing in the Severn Valley and my father had a rather close call with a cat that he reckons was at least alsation sized backed up in brambles 6 feet from him in daylight and growelling at him. He backed off sharpish.

I can see it now, Prince Charles and Osama Bi Laden doing "Duelling Bango's". No, I have seen it. It was a flash animation but it was Osama and good ole George W. Davey, I didn't know about the chappatti four. What a cack handed solution to the problem. Surely it would have been better to scream, shout and put up billboards saying "Get those stupid tents off or you will have bandy legs and deformed children".

And that's the problem. They think that they can keep on squeezing people for cash without there being a counter reponce. CD's arn't expencive to produce (They give three or four away with some computer mags) but they want the public to pay 15 quid for something that's maybe worth a fiver. If they had lowered their prices, CD piracy would be a smal industry (who whould pay a bloke in the pub 2.50 for a copy when you can pay a fiver and get the real thing) but their money grabbing attitude has spawned first Napster and now a bunch of other P2P networks where people know they can get music for free. That technology will die a death because it's too easily traced and the record companies are using the courts in an ever more draconian way. the replacement is going to be direct swapping of recorded music via portable HDD's, DVD's etc which will be all but untraceable. The ultimate irony is that the greatest single tool to facilitate this kind of music swapping will be the 50 Gig next gen DVD's (About 20,000 songs will fit on one of these babies) that are soon to be launched by SONY !!!!

On top of this we have the issue of the burka's. It's been suggested that one of the reasons for the very high levels of psychotic illness in the black community is a lack of vitamin D durring pregnancy - because the pigmentation doesn't allow the body to produce enough in a northern winter. If that's true, we have a community that's not only marrying first cousins but which is also covering it's women from head to toe whenever they're out in daylight and potentially storring up a whole raft of mental health problems for the future.

I saw this on the BBC site this morning. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4441102.stm The raw statistics are worrying with 30% of the country's recessive bith defects being concentrated in one small section of the community, things are looking bad. I suspect though that even if legeslation is enacted, folks will simply get married in Pakistan instead of the UK.

Could be an old hammer for doctors to test reflexes with.

Foo Fighters is also a band/GROUP so my guess is that the suggestion is right. So do we get a full set of the questions and correct answers ? Oops, was replying to the last post on page one. I supose I should have checked to see if there was another page...

I smell a cockup (no pun intended). The guy being found HIV+ means that he tested positive for antibodies to the HIV virus, last I heard, there was no direct testing available for the virus itself so the lab was only testing for the usual antibody reaction. Even if it is true that his body has cleared itself of the virus (and this may be possible in a very small number of cases), surely he whould still have antibodies present when the second test was performed - especially given that the timespan between the two tests was relativly short. My money would be on a slip up in the lab and hence his potential compo claim but it sounds as if the medical proffesion would rather close ranks and claim "Act of god" than admit it.

There are probems with Mat's programs. Not enough angling, lots of bad editing (I've lost count of the number of times that he casts out with a baitcaster and lands the fish on a fixed spool outfit) and to many daft interludes like the pork pie thing but at least it's fishing. I don't think I can agree about him always fishing exclusive locations. He's regularly shown fishing sections of the Severn that are available to anyone who's prepared to spend 20 quid for a years BAA membership - unlike some of th echalk streams and unfished estate lakes favoured by other TV anglers.

My dad used to have a mate who was a caretaker in a special school. Part of his job was to look after the school pets which inclided a small flock of gease. He'd throw corn out onto the ground and then release the birds every morning and of course the local wild birds had long ago spotted that they could get a free feed if they were quick. It was apparently a regular thing to have the gease come rushing out, snap at the sparrows and both catch and eat them if they got the chance. If gease will do this, I've no doubt that gulls are more than capable. Its a bit like people thinking that roach, rudd, dace etc are plant/inset eaters but the reality is that they will all eat fry given the chance to do so.

No problems at all with the 90 days - Particularly as ongoing detention would have been subject to weekly judicial review. As for chucking people out, again no problem with doing that on balance of probability (as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt) and don't see any problem with recinding right of abode for non-citizens or removing UK citizenship for anyone who holds dual nationality. Obviously, with people who hold only UK citizenship, due legal process is required and the range of options simply does not include chucking them out - however, the ability to travel and hold a passport is a privilage rather than a right and I've no problem with removing passports.

Not sure about the spyware but I did borrow the best of Bjork CD from a library a while back and it contains some very nasty and malicious code. Every time i tried to play it on my PC (that's play not copy) , it locked up the drive so that I couldn't play or eject the disk. The only way to get it out was to power down the machine and eject the disk whilst it was rebooting. I haven't brought a Sony branded CD since because I listen to 95% of my music either directly on the PC or via a portable MP3/WMA player.

I'v e just seen my sister because she wanted me to try to sort out media player on her PC. I discovered that although she had had some free antivirus software installed for her, she never updated it and never actually ran it. Well, I got on the net and updated it (which took just over an hour on dialup) and then set it running. 40 minutes latter, it had removed 126 viruses and trojans. Well, it impressed me !

I hate the winter. I especially hate the dark nights in the run-up to Christmas when the only daylight that you can get out into is at lunchtimes and at the weekend and there is less and less daylight as each day goes by. My solution ? Well in 24 hours time, I'll be on my way to India for 6 weeks. I've timed the trip so that I'll be there for the next two full moons so there should be plenty of oppertunity to catch some Barramundi. I'll also be taking a few trips inland to catch the sights and leave a few of the tourists behind be and have a play with the camera. I've just e-mailed myself a page of links to various sites including AN so I'll try to post regular updates on how the fishing attempts are going - the low-fi version is going to really help with access. The only downer is the mad rush when I get back on 20.12.05. I've managed a bit of Christmas shopping, but a few people will be getting "ethnic" gifts or duty free specials this year.

Nice trick. I bet you could drive cryptographers completely buggo if you wrote your message like that with the middle letters jumpled completely randomly and then used a cypher on top of it.

I know 4 people who suffer with MS and two of them are very ill indeed. Of the four, three were obsessively "clean" and got through ridiculous amounts of bleach, washing up liquid and other cleaning products prior to the onset of their symptoms - an unending bone of contention because most of that stuff eventually ends up in our rivers. Most (but not quite all) of the kids that I know with asthma were never allowed to play in the dirt as toddlers or young children and were constantly having their hands wiped with sterilizing wipes whenever they touched something that mom perceived to be "dirty". Conversely, almost all of the kids that would be unleashed to play pretty much unsupervised in the park or garden are in splendid health. New research indicates that our bodies are actually designed to constantly fight infections and parasites and that without this stimulation, our immune system is apt to turn on itself - so much so that they are now deliberately infecting people who have certain autoimmune bowel disorders with worms so that their bodies will target the "invader" rather than turning on itself. So the question is; does to much clean living make people sick ?

Oh dear oh dear. Half way round the world and the only fish that people seem to be able to get their heads arround is carp. I can't blame the bloke that's running the company because he'll be making a living out of it but are British anglers now so unimaginative that the only thing that they can consieve of is sitting behind a pod with three boilie baited rods on it, waiting for exactly the same species of fish that they can target at home ?

No horns but how about this for an evil Kangeroo ? http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=h...%3Doff%26sa%3DN

I'm not sure about the temprature issue. It's true that growing seasons appear to be getting longer as a result of climate change but peak summer temps don't seen to have changed that much. In other countries to the south of the UK, pike do very well (I belive the Italian record is well in excess of 50lb) but then again, those fish don't have the pressure that they get in the UK.

Those microsoft guys were whacky back in the 70's. They'd dress up as women and go to parties all the time. What ? They're your daughters ? They look lovely.