bignumber5

vinceayre Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Good riddance to scum with this dead drug dealer. > He was dealing in Heroin so deserved all he got, I > wonder how many of you actually know the misery > that drug causes to so many normal families here > in the UK. I don't think that anyone here is condoning heroin dealing/smuggling...

SteveT Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Where does this guy get off insisting he is > British? > > He was born in Pakistan has a Pakistani name and > looks like a Pakistani.............. British citizenship/passport maybe? Let's not go down that route yet again, SteveT...

Atila, read that back to yourself... you believe in the death penalty but you think the Chinese authorities have acted inappropriately?! That's the thing about the death penalty, you can't do anything about it after the fact, you can't take it back and you can't restore a wrongly taken life. If you lock someone up for 25 years and it turns out to be "inappropriate", you can let them out sooner, or transfer them to a more appropriate facility. But, essentially, to believe in the death penalty, one is pledging one of 2 things to be true: 1. Legal process is absolutely infallible, so noone innocent or 'inappropriate' will ever swing... or 2. occasionally, innocent or inappropriately sentenced people will have to die in order to maintain an overall average of justice in society... The first simply isn't true, human error and all that, and the second is absolutely unacceptable to me. Back on-topic, however, whilst I'm anti-execution myself, I believe in respecting the laws and customs of any place where I am an outsider, and I generally have low tolerance for the public appeals of people that break laws in other countries that enforce such sentences and then scream human rights violation at sentencing time. I have no idea whether or not this chap's mental illness (which seems to be front-and-centre in his defence), or any other factor, should have been taken into consideration when he was sentenced, because I don't know enough about the specifics of the case. But that only debates whether or not the sentence was appropriate under the chinese legal system. My own anti- stance is one that the people of China, and anyone breaking the law there, do not have the luxury of. If the man was found guilty following a fair trial according to the Chinese system, and if the sentence was appropriate to the crime according to the Chinese system - and these are 2 big "if's", I realise - then there is no further case to answer. Should there be doubt over the "if" points, a very different story. I have no idea which is the case here - are we up-in-arms about the process or the outcome? ...or have I totally missed the point, and this fella's story is just a vehicle for debating the reporting styles of the British media?

a slight misunderstanding, keef: the individual midwives are not to blame, the service is. A confusingly close distinction, but an important one. Should these (no doubt) fully qualified and highly skilled midwives go and work for King's, under their supervision, instruction, practicing according to King's policies and with the educational support of an internationlly reknowned teaching hospital, they could join the happier statistic group quite easily, I'm sure. I'm sure that many have had great experiences with Albany and it's service, but the statistics above represent an unacceptably high complication rate.

the medical analogy only goes so far, daveR: Certainly, some doctors will recommend certain types of chemotherapy for lung cancer, others will not. None of them are denying that lung cancer exists, can be fatal and has a single behaviour that can be predominantly linked to it's causality. I think the point I'm making there is self explanitory. I actually don't give a monkey's if people deny that climate change is man-made (however mental that makes them) as long as they conceed that the solution needs to be man-made. Don't get me started on the plebs that don't believe in it at all - I too had to listen to the insane ramblings of Johnny Ball earlier this week... [edit for typos]

The last 2 and a half minutes of the Usual Suspects Andy Dufrene standing in the rain as a free man in The Shawshank Redemption The skiing off a mountain then union jack parachute moment in The Spy Who Loved Me

wash rice. put rice in rice tray of steamer. follow "how to cook rice in the steamer" section of destructions. 45-50 minutes later, eat rice-included dinner. have i missed something?

sorry to hear that, eels. when you get a new one, unless you plan on moving soon, take a sharpie marker to it: your postcode in big letters. might deter the opportunistic toe-rag.

pish, you looked fabulous

Agreed, Santerme - Enough. This is being driven by "neutral" 3rd parties - me as mr.j, tonyw3 as, I presume, mr.ladymuck. Enough. Public demands for the way we each think this should end mean nothing, because we're all upset on behalf of the person we care about. Each person has said what they feel that they want to say, need to say, and latterly should say. Each has had a say in public, each has yielded some ground in the interests of attempting to make nice. I can appreciate reports of how upset LM is, because I know how upset annaj has been since friday night, and remains. It's the third parties that now need to step back, myself included. So now could we please just drop it? [edit for the usual clumsy typos]

Fine flaming. Helpful.

2 people interpretted something differently. Both have had a say. Honour preserved. Now let's stop it, shall we... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Graham_Chapman_Colonel.jpg ...this is all getting rather silly

Pot. Kettle. And not really called for, MrBen.

mockney piers Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > If even Wolfie and Jah Luh can get on like the > gentlemen they are over a hot toddie then there's > absolutely no excuse for anyone else to behave > like that. Quite - even the wolf undrestood that having the occasional online barney with someone didn't mean you needed to be rude in person. Civility: an advanced concept, it seems, and not one that all have grasped.

haven't seen it - it's never really appealled...

Slight misinterpretation of the role of Vit D, but happy to clarify: Vitamin D is one of the primary mechanisms of maintaining a stable level of calcium in the body, by regulating how much we absorb, pee out and turnover from bone. Both D2 and D3 are formed naturally in the body following exposure to UV light, so we get our fill by making our own and by eating things that have already made it. The daily need of vit D in a human being is roughly 5mcg/day, which would translate roughly to 200iu/day of synthetic Vit D, rising to 400iu when over 50 and 600iu when over 70 respectively. This is enough to avoid the consequences of deficiency (rickets in children, osteomalacia in adults - essentially, not enough calcium in the bones, making them weaker), and in the UK both of these conditions are pretty rare. Crucially, however, Vit D is one of the vitamins that you can have too much of: more than 10 times the RDA (so >2000iu/day for most of us) over a prolonged period is enough to increase your chances of having too much calcium zinging around in your body, of which there are potentially dangerous consequences. Hypercalcaemia can cause disturbances in the way your gut absorbs other things, it can play merry hell with your blood pressure, your kidneys, and can actually cause depression through chemical imbalance in the blood supplying the brain. It can start to deposit in lumps causing kidney stones and various other things, and it can bring about abnormal heart rhythms. This dangerously high level of Vit D is a level that you can never really achieve through diet and sunlight alone (unless you have some other disease process going on that throws the system off-kilter). That's why the big-pharma aren't very interested in making a Vit D supersupplement, and why nobody should really be interested in taking one. All we need do is get some sun (without burning, of course ;-) - this doesn't mean sunbathe, just go outside occasionally!) and make sure that we get a good dietary intake of vitamin D. SAD is a whole different ballpark. Yes, it's related to sunlight exposure and lack thereof in the winter months, but as far as I'm aware it's got no known connection to Vit D per se. I am more than happy to be corrected if that's not the case. edit for typos

hardly cheating - figuring out lineout calls is one of the hidden challenges of being a lock, and so much the better if you have a rough idea what they might be based on. If the saffers were daft enough so assume that the irish not speaking their language was enough cover, they deserved to lose every single one of their throw-ins.

Looking at this forum and the amount of whinging we do about the area, you might have your doubts. But we all keep living here, so there must be something in it! It largely depends how you quantify good, but the threads in one section or another should cover your specific criteria.

Agreed on the disaster prone area version: I think the lake district and tewksbury might consider something similar. My emergency plan is based largely on friends, family and neighbours helping out for the few days following - if the whole town has been swept away i'd imagine slightly more subtantial prep would be a good idea. The same probably applies to if you have young children: reloading the nappy bag and adding some warm mini-kit would make those horrendous few hours a little easier to manage, i should think.

Smoke inhalation can kill you in 2-3 minutes: I'm not sure stopping for ones filofax and a bumper bag of pedigree chum is especially sensible. You can get strongboxes that are fireproof that you can stash legal bumf etc in, and then they don't need to come with you but will still survive a fire, as, hopefully, will you. We're pretty fortunate that all of the doors in our place are fire doors, so even if our kitchen was ablaze the wedding photos would hopefully survive. Trainers and a warm jumper live next to the bed (but not between me and the door), glasses and mobile on the bedside table. Capable of carrying unconscious wife if needed. Cats bolt out the cat flap if the alarm goes off from burnt toast, they'll look after themselves. Insurance details in mobile.

Be good to yourself?

You know what I mean, though. It's a risk assessment, like in any job, based on experience in the industry - you accept that your boss may bugger it up but you try to limit the chances of that by giving the post to someone with relevant experience in the industry. Unless you work in a reality TV show where dissatisfied members of the public get to run a supermarket chain. Although if local knowledge now trumps experience in the industry, perhaps an EDF candidate... ?

The "man who refuses to be stereotyped" certainly seems to wear his demographics front and centre, though that is just as likely to be due to the reporting as the man. My main area for thought is that knowing first hand that life is a bit pants in a certain constituency does not necessarily qualify one to represent that constituency in Parliament: the man's CV seems relatively devoid of significant work in government of any level, vs. the other candidates for C&P this is amplified. HH's CV is pretty well established, and I understand that Columba Blango is a councillor for the borough. Yes, everyone has to start somewhere, but straight into national government, as an underdog posterboy avec disability and God (which smacks fairly heavily of Cameron puppetry, his inspiring mentor) isn't going to be about issues, it's personalities/personal stories vs. traditional principles/voting trends. The CV point, for me, is that being an MP requires a certain knowledge of the system which he has yet to prove. To metaphor in my usual clumsy style, when going to court, one gets represented by a lawyer, not the bloke from flat 29c that has been sued a few times and survived so knows what you're going through. Personal experience isn't enough - proven knowledge of the system is a necessity, and one that Stranack appears to lack. Certainly an interesting question MM, but as *Bob* says, voting based on issues rather than personalities or principles is a long way from the priority list of many at GE time, and it seems unlikely that we'll see a blue C&P constituency any time soon, based on previous polling results.

you get windows to gleam by polishing them with a little bit of vinegar on newspaper - would that work on glasses?

errr... no