mockney piers

Maybe there's something to be said for having to do it all through a crappy iPhone after all. They think the proverbial sinshines at work... If only they knew.......

Slightly ironic that the first thing I managed was hit the 'delete this thread' with my fat fingers. Thank god for the cancel!!

First one is react. Can someone else dig up the crossword thread. Have you any idea how long it took me tontine the music one on page seven on this little screen?

All what ifs are speculatio. Quids but I think this ones fairly robust in terms of historical analysis. Yalta was the penultimate summit (a term coined by Churchill I believe) and Roosevelt's last. Potsdam was the last one set amidst the destruction of war. It was where Truman was informed of the success of the Manhatten Project but uncle Joe knew all about it anyway 'use it we'll I think he said. I think the cold war more or less kicked off in '47 as Truman was never able or willing to understand the complexities and a them and us interpretation was much easierto understand than the panoply of grievances, complex internal politics of countries, not to mention the legacy grievances and unfinished businesses of various occupations/resistances/cooperations and collaboratons that fed the many crises and conflicts across Europe, Asia, North Africa and the middle east that were burgeoning everywhere. Communist aggression was so much easier to understand. For us or against us, sound familiar. clever people rarely achieve a great deal as they try to negotiatethere way through difficult roads. It's always the simple guys looking for simple solutions that look like they're progressing more but actually causing more trouble than they can predict. I refer as much to Blair as to Bush. Both intelligent blokes by all accounts, one trusted his advisers, like Truman, the other trusted his own instincts and principal while famously knowing very little about history. Anyway I blather, this story is much more entertaining http://news.BBC.co.uk/1/hi/England/Dorset/8272799.STM

Naa I'd got them all apart from olive oil. Can anyone make this be something like subsidiary though? Major wouldn't describe this, his old Eye feature, after deputy is nobbled (10) I'm pretty sure it ends in diary

Spot on!

Nope. Oil as in grease, olive as in girls name and of course the two together can be virgin.

Ooh I liked these... Premieres of actor Michael Caine's Rocky he can't bring himself to recall(8) Be a luvvie - drink is a pain in the arse (4,2) they're actually textbook clues, it's just the eye gies for rather more flowery phrasing than other papers. My colleague and I used to get weird looks on the tram in Amsterdam as we read them out loud and pondered the clues.

Sorry thicko attack, of course it's olive oil, well done quids.

It is old team. Not sure of the first one yet

I see wolfie managed to start a thread about an esteemed (well heeled?) organ nevertheless! Before "Grease" a girl could be a virgin (5,3) About time a model screwed fondly remembered bunch of co-workers? (3,4)

News then Street of Shame, Dumb Britain then Letters taking in Colemanballs. Then just wander through the rest at random, some satire followed by northwest frontier say. Crossword currently propped open on my desk wih a paltry five clues complete so far. Best paper in the country by a err country mile.

Interesting question Santerme. I think Roosevelt had been manoevering that way since '39 but without Germany's declaration it would have been a much harder sell. Sympathy with Germany was wider than that for Britain despite the best efforts of Greer Garson, but Roosevelt was well aware that betterthw devil you know and was determined not to allow Europe to be the property of Nazi Germany. One of the great tragedies was his death, I think the whole cold war could have been avoided (I'm not saying the US and USSR would have been pals or anything) if Truman hadn't come to power with little knowledge of the wider world and happy to listen to a bunch of advisers equally out of their depth interpret everything through a bipolar lens.

I'm obviously having a mid life crisis and listening to pop drenched lo-Fi garage rocksters Japandriods and Waaves. The former is particularly good and gets a big thumbs up from me though sometimes I feel like I really should have a skateboard to hand, so Brendan, right up your street ( I'll put it on that key I promises you). As antidote to that i'm also dosing myself up with the amazing, and probably incomparable Wildbirds & Peacedrums new album The Snake. Proper beautiful, complex, pounding and ethereal. Marvellous. Ps page 7!?!

More accurately if they hadn't got involved the French would be speaking Russian, well, in the Warsaw pact. We'd have probably been finlandised and with a full Germany and France (which is downright commie at the best of times) communism may well have been successful (it was always intended for Berlin Paris and london, Marx never intended it for a backward agrarian economy) the cold war would have been a case of containing US power and the world may indeed have been a different place. I'm pretty sure central America would still be screwed but the Vietnamese would have been much happier.

Mind you I still managed to get my knuckles rapped by admin on this one, but I think you're pretty safe there sophiesofa!! Where we again, was it flower arranging or something?

loved the comment from the manager on the lines of ' we were away at Macclesfield and the reality of it sunk in' made me chuckle. What was he actually expecting? Nice thT the real world encroaches on their ivory towers every know and then. Not like good old Sheringham who'll play anywhere that'll have him, where is he now, Dagenham or something?

Oh deary deary me. Let it go Mike, just let it go. You said elsewhere that it was like you went into the wrong pub, that's a good attitude, you're a nice guy, just walk away. Especially after enlisting self important juveniles to 'bring the forum' down. Let ... it ... the ... fuck ... go !!

Assuming the second coming* of snorky hasn't come to pass, then I'll happily recommend Hoopers On Ivanhoe Road for the above requirements. You'll have change to spare from your two hundred quid too, which is nice. *ok, fifth

Ha ha ha, thanks for that Ted, I can't stop chuckling at that. Damn will have to change my vote too.

It does seem like a win win all round despite the difficulties you mentioned. Weird. If general European cooperation projects like airbus, eurofighter are anything to go by it'll get done, done well, overdue, over budget, and innthe case of the latter already obsolete, but we can do these things together. Fingers crossed.

I'm willing to bet that a future proof flood barrier to protect london will be costlier, and mistake me if I'm wrong but insurmountable political problems don't seem to matter when we're monkeying around in a neo-colonial fashion, but paying a few African countries a bit of cash to stick some mirrors in the sand is? Yours unconvinced piers

Interesting. So for the price of some underwater boats with some toys we'll never use and a glorified one day funday, we can secure Europe's energy needs cleanly. Chuck in another funday and that's africa's needs sorted too. But instead we're building a bunch of coal fired stations, huge gas pipes under the noth sea, very expensive liquid gas centres to import liquified gas from the middle east and we're helping African countries build lots of...wait for it....coL fired power stations. Do you think sometimes we probably deserve exctinction?

I've a brand new quad core system with 6 gig of fast ram and a low to mid range card thinking I wasn't really going to do gaming, and lo first game I do buy makes me start looking for a proper graphics card as it's really struggling with textures. When you look at the side of the game box and it recommends a quad core just to play the damn thing you k ow it's goin to hurt. ODST looks cool. Haven't given up on trials just not had much time of late and what little I have has been ARMA led. Just surviving getting across town alive is hard, arcade shooter this isn't.

And we're not even getting started on the digestion of an average Half-man-half-biscuit, saarlac pit eat your heart out, no geekery pun intended