Steve Walker

I've just opened it in Gimp, cut out a chunk of square B and gradually moved it up the screen to overlap with A. At which point it seems to flip suddenly from different to matching. If you do a 'select by colour' and paste the result into a new image, you get this: Very, very odd. Funny thing the brain. [ 02. August 2005, 11:13 PM: Message edited by: Steve Walker ]

For sure... Paracetamol is a peculiarly dangerous drug to be sold over the counter, though, both in terms of the lethal dose being fairly close to the therapeutic dose and because the victim of an overdose can suffer liver damage without necessarily feeling ill. quote: http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/publications/article...dMedication.pdf That's interesting. "probably safe in overdose". quote: Tobacco's too slow, alcohol's too messy... More fun, though...

Nice. Want one.

Yep. Like most of these things, taxation and spending needs to be seen as fair, pretty much irrespective of whether it actually is or not.

As I understand it, carrying a knife with a blade more than 4 inches long without good reason already is. The only situation where I can see this preventing injury is the spur-of-the-moment domestic. Unpremeditated and, to all intents and purposes, more accident than malice. So it may help in those incidents where someone loses self control, there's a knife to hand and no scissors / screwdriver / meat cleaver / blunt instrument available as an alternative weapon. I wonder how many cases a year this represents, and whether the cost of policing a kitchen knife ban might be better spent doing something more about domestic violence. Frankly, if I had to live with someone likely to behave like that, I'd hide the kitchen knives myself. For any situation where premeditation is involved, this will have no effect whatsoever. Ban the sale of pointed knives, and the person who wishes to obtain one as a weapon will make one or use a screwdriver, chisel, stanley knife, bankstick etc. Since illegal firearms seem to be very easy for criminals to get hold of, I can't see that controlling the sale of carving knives will keep them out of the wrong hands. So, the only solution I can see is to enforce the existing laws on the sale and carrying of knives and to deal with the root causes of why people want to stick them in others. In the case of "accidental" domestic stabbings, I think we just have to accept that some small degree of risk is a corollary of living in a society in which we are treated like reasonably free adults. Speaking of which, Tesco wouldn't sell me three packets of 16 Ibuprofen last night. I'm not even sure that ibuprofen sales are legally restricted in the same way as paracetamol sales, but putting that aside, I was free to purchase as much tobacco and alcohol as I liked... [ 02. August 2005, 04:04 PM: Message edited by: Steve Walker ]

I'm not even sure it would improve the state schools anyway; once most of the people who pay most of the tax (the poor have no money, and the rich are too few and have good accountants) have removed their children from the state system, the political pressure for better state schools and the arguments for tax to be spent on them are undermined. By and large I'm fairly relaxed about the amount of tax I pay, but even I still have a little rant every time I get the council tax breakdown and find that most of what I pay is spent on things I don't use. Imagine the situation when most of the middle classes start pointing to the education budget and asking "what do I get for that?".

There is a reel feature, but it's a Morritt.

That's what I assumed it meant, but there's no way I can see of doing so. I wondered whether they had a rolling access code in each issue or somesuch, so you could access the archive as long as you remained a subscriber. They do sell back copies, but then it should say "to read the rest of this article, order the issue it was in, cheapskate".

On WaterLog's website, in the archives, there's a snippet of each article in the issue, followed by: To read more of this article, you need to subscribe to the Waterlog Magazine. Well, I've subscribed, I've got a copy, I'm none the wiser. Anyone know?

Fished an over night session on one of the tench pits on Saturday night. The plan was to fish a short evening session from about 7pm to get the swim baited up, get a couple of hours kip and then bag up at dawn. There wasn't much sign of activity when we got there, with no bubbling going on. Not a good sign on these lakes. When it went dark, we fished on with starlites until about 1am when Iain went to get his head down. I decided to fish straight through; I've never done well with tench much after dark, but we'd not had a fish yet. At about 3am I started getting bites, which soon turned into a couple of 1/2 pound tench. Iain emerged about 5, and between us we managed to catch another ten or so tench, not one of them over 4oz. Again, not a sign of a decent fish. I'm not sure whether the recent cooler weather has put the larger fish down, or whether the swim I picked is always like that, but I must confess to being pretty disappointed. I've never caught so many tiny tench in one session. There were some highlights, though; the perfect peace and quiet of a lake in the early hours, turning round and catching a very surprised looking fox in my headlight beam, and a nice 1 3/4 pound perch for Iain. I wish my first ever perch had been that size! I netted it and unhooked it, warning casually that as well as the spikes on the fin you must be careful of the gill cover because it's very... at which point the fish convulsed and gave me a nasty inch-long slash on the hand. I suppose I could have claimed I was giving a demonstration... Still, a poor night's fishing is immeasurably better than a Saturday night watching TV, and from the sound of my snoring that my dear wife thought it terribly amusing to record, I made up for the loss of sleep on Sunday afternoon.

Crikey. High-attract glug, halibut pellets and PVA bags, indeed! I'm really giving serious thought to buying a cane rod & centrepin, you know. And some porcupine quills, I haven't fished with those since I was a kid. I should never have thrown that wicker 'bum-crimper' basket away, either. Not having a go mate, I'm just starting to turn into an old fart.

Marry an English graduate with a similar attitude to never throwing books away, and it's inevitable. I've still got textbooks from my own degree, some of which (the biochemistry shelf-buster for example) I don't think I even read at the time.

You haven't seen our bookshelves... We're soon going to need a bigger house.

Yes, I've dipped into Paxman's book, and it's fascinating. Unlike Confessions not one to read cover-to-cover in an evening, though. When I was a youngster, our kindly elderly next door neighbour gave me a pile of angling magazines from the 60's. There just isn't that sort of thing in the mainstream angling press these days. I've recently found and subscribed to Waterlog, however, and have found that the popularity of Ebay means that when friends ask about christmas or birthday presents, "anything I haven't got by Walker or Yates" brings about wonderful surprises.

Of course they do: [dog] I hear digging. What's the nasty little bleeder up to now? Oooh... Digging... Burying something... What do I bury? Must be... FOOD! I'll just wait until he's gone and I'll have that! [shortly later] Well, that tasted like sh!te, but just wait 'til he comes back and finds out I've had his stash! That'll teach him. Moral of the story is never pet a dog with cat litter stuck to his nose.

Treated myself to a couple of new fishing books today; I've just read the 2003 reprint of BB's "Confessions Of A Carp Fisher" with foreword by Chris Yates, and I've got Paxo's "Fish, Fishing And The Meaning Of Life" to read next. Almost as good as fishing

I think you misunderstand the mindset of these people; getting everything they want won't make them happy, not in the long run. I'm convinced that they're driven by the basic need of some humans to disapprove of their fellow man and try to make him change his ways. Whether this helps them fill empty lives or just bolsters their self-esteem by feeling superior, I don't know.

Fishing pornography. I'm not following any more of those links, I don't need a rod like that, I can't justify spending that much money on one and yet... It's all that Chris Yates' fault, the swine. I wonder if I can find 980 quid for a Merlin down the back of the sofa?

There was something on the radio about this last week. It looks as if there's a solution coming up with a topical anaesthetic, which will hopefully overcome the animal welfare issues. The current alternative (do nothing and have the sheep eaten alive by maggots)is hardly appealing. While I think there is a good case for this particular issue being addressed, I can't take PETA seriously. Bottom line is that they don't think we should use wool at all. Ever.

Hmm... I'm more of a dog person than a cat person, but when it comes to little dogs I think I'd rather have a moggy. I was bitten on the ear by a Yorkshire terrier when I was a nipper, and I've hated them ever since. We've got three cats, but that's entirely down to my wife's powers of persuasion. Quite fond of them now, mind, but she's not having any more! Now, a proper dog, that's a different matter...

Andy, I think some more research is in order before you hand over any cash! You've got some good advice from the people here, you should also call in at your local tackle shop when it's not busy and have a chat with the staff. They should be able to tell you what kinds of fishing are available locally and point you in the right direction for tackle.

My folks used to have trouble with cats molesting their fish, so the last pond I designed for them was specifically engineered to prevent feline-fishing. The trick is to make sure there's nowhere they can get close enough to fish without falling in. Cats which did fall in (my kid sister's mostly) got out easily enough, but didn't do it again.

Probably not the best solution for a confirmed cat-hater, but one way of keeping cats out of your garden is to get a big ugly tom-cat of your own... Cats don't crap within their own territory, they do it to mark the edges, so provided that you get one that's big and nasty enough it will drive the neighbour's cats out of your garden and leave it's own calling cards in theirs.

Fantastic. I like to think I can see a bit of their great aunt Clarissa in those commons. What's the story with the eel, though?

Pretty sure, yes. They're very distinctive, and I've never seen them occur in waters which don't have a head of good-sized tench. When the water has been more coloured, they've also been a reliable indicator of imminent bites. You also get far more of them in a fed swim than in an unfed one; we're talking often five or six sets going concurrently, which you very rarely see otherwise, and you don't usually see them outside of normal tench feeding times. The case for the prosecution rests, m'lud. It woz the tench wot done it To be honest, before I moved darn sarf, I'd never seen bubbles like this, despite 20 odd years of fishing sometimes on waters containing a lot of small tench. I'd watched carp in clear water kicking up huge mushroom clouds of silt, but no bubbles like this. First session on one of the tench pits down here, and there they were, exactly as the books describe them. I don't know whether it requires a certain kind of bottom, or a certain size of tench, but they are unmistakeable. The only other thing I've seen raise similar bubbles (but in smaller patches) is a duck diving and feeding off the bottom.