mockney piers

Touch? ;-)

I did use the word 'threaten', and that sounds like binning in everything but name as divorce wouldn't look good electorally (goodness knows why in this day and age), so no smell of roses there either.

I'm not keen on fisking at the best of times, but sometimes, if it's a long post that needs to be addressed on a point by point basis; but seriously Louisiana do you have to fisk everything? It was just one short sentence! Couldn't that have just read: "Well Jacquie says we have paid for it, and she says that she's paying the money back. But how can you say it's none of our business?" So much more conversational. --- As for your latter point, each of the recent cases the women in question have all been stained with their own sleaze and dubious self-interest, often following the letter (juuust) but never the spirit of the rules. They've all also threatened to bin their men which doesn't say much about their personal integrity either does it.

I'm there with guest who met a few of you at the wedding and is looking forward to saying hello.

America, fuck yeah!!

everyone is someone's kid charliecharlie. But seriously, I don't think there's any room for complacency, I'm always banging the drum of the need for a seismic shift in the way we live our lives to prevent future catastrophe. I'm merely pointing out that to a certain extent this is preordained on a macro level, it's simply the way life itself functions. It's happened before to humanity, most populations in the world suffered catastrophic decline around the 15th century BC, probably down to climate changes, that's not to say that this one isn't man-made, it is, and not to say we can't do anything about it, though nooone knows if we've passed tipping point or not, and by the time we do, it will be too late of course.

Good films (mostly, but not exactly laugh a minute in the BigBadWolf lair is it :-/

I think successive gov'ts showed willing to the Argies that we'd be happy to cede sovereignty should the islanders give it the ok. The islanders never gave it the ok, and a junta on increasingly shaky ground took a stupid populist move and took (back) the islands. I think there was a fair bit of noise that the invasion could happen that the government either ignored or just didn't pay attention, civil service underestimated the possibility that it might happen and hence it didn't really make a big profile on politicians radar. I really don't think the war as a cynical play by Thatcher, indeed it was a costly and risky enterprise that came closer to failure than we'd like to think.

When you think about it global warming and the ensuing drop in population is just natural cycle of life. A species is created, if it's successful enough it dominates its environment and expands its population, it requires more resources than that available to support its population and produces pollutants that restrict the ability of said environment to support it. Population plummets until environment is capable of supporting species successfully again. Population increases to more sensible levels, but it will still overpopulate leading to a more moderate population crash, leading to a more sensible increase, etc, rinse and repeat until population finds equilibrium in about 8000 years time, assuming superior species hasn't wiped out planet with dangerous technology, or buggered off in pointy things with flames out the back. Classic lifecycle; we are but bacteria in a petri dish, nothing to see here, move along (just glad I won't be around when the first and biggest crash begins). Of course, all that said, we are blessed with intelligence and should be capable of breaking this, just all the evidence points at us being too selfish to do anything about it. The same reason why free markets won't solve anything, they positively rely on that selfishness!!

Watched King of Kong at chez SMG last night. Highly, highly recommend. Think The Office meets Spinal Tap, but without the M in mockumentary, though part of me still finds it hard to believe these were real people. "Walter Day: I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, "Hi, I see that you're good at Centipede." I mean...really?

nooo nooo, she's just visiting a friend of hers who emigrated. Yeah BBW, got me on that one. I just had to share that bacon with someone though and the house was echoey in my solitude.

"as fast as her little legs can carry her" You've met her then? I'm sure she'll be gutted she's missed out, well as gutted as you can be when you're having the time of your life down under :( *blushes* thanks for the compliment though, feel better now :)

As I'm all on my lonesome have just done a grouse, caramelised red cabbage, roast spuds and carrots and jerusalem artichokes (the secret is start em before hand for at least 2 hours on a loooow heat (100ish), then once they're soft yet crisp, quick pan fry at the end). Just snacked on the streaky bacon that barded the game, dear god that's guilty pleasure food, heart attack awaits (i used goose fat from my christmas bird liberally). *sigh* now to eat it on me tod, how sad and lonely, come back missus mockney, all is forgiven!! :(

Oh wow, big congratulations Buggie!!!

and your reeves?

Well the parallels are rather startling, but of course it's a very different world now. What would and wouldn't have happened? Blimey impossible to say. If there had been no confrontation with the unions, a la miner's strike, then the Callaghan gov't could conceivabley have been rendered impotent and a Conservative gov't more inevitable than it had been in '79 led by an even more strident thatcher, so that one might have been delayed by a couple of years. Also difficult to say how Labour would have responded to the Falklands, but traditionally the left has been happier to go to war then the centre right, so again, it would have been a possibility. Big Bang was a technological revolution, I think sometimes it's conflated with deregulation, and of course those bankers were portrayed as Thatcher's front line warriors, but really was just the birth of today's flavour of bubble of wealth through speculation, which is more attributable to the gov't than installing a load of glass fibre cable and transaction processing software (which is all terribly dull isn't it). Difficult to say how different things would be but politics in the entire 'western' world has shifted to the centre ground and policies driven by dull pragmatism rather than ideological zeal, so chances are it would be a recognisable Britain to some dimension traveller. We might not have had the poll tax riots though, and alternative comedy would have missed their anti-hero!

I have CS3 but probably use about 10% of it's features. I will check digikam out, cheers for the suggestion Sensei. I had a look at GIMP, and found it a little bit wanting in places, but would probably suit the needs of 95% in all fairness.

?!?! really, because of the Leona Lewis cover presumably? ffs, how easily are people offended these days? Sex scenes, a blue penis, questions about the intrinsic self-destructive nature of man and graphic brutal violence are fine, but a bit of Leonard Cohen? Wooooah there, think of the children... :-/

S'all relative though innit. I reckon last thursday is my first cousin once removed, and I quite fancy 15 April 2140, though that's breaking at least two taboos.

more if enough take up, but consider yourself there if so.

What snorky said, boy talk's sense more often than not, you just sometimes have to apply the snorkyfilter

what quids said

top prize goes to PGC :)

1 player I agree, though competitive co-op and nazi zombies are pretty good, and the multiplayer I reckon is on a par, and less punishing to the lower levels with the default weapons. Tommy gun and aperture sight will frankly do fine at any time.

Mum's west indian, but if we trace her family back then my folks were carousing around here in the 1600s, there's even a pub named after my great ... great grandfather in Deptford. Dad came here in the 50s to escape Franco as soon as he was old enough (via Paris and Rome, a proper autodidact having had to leave school at 12 to take care of the family, grandma having died in the civil war, grandad having been jailed for the crime of owning a local newspaper and wanting it back, it having been stolen by the junta). For some reason he moved back to Spain in the seventies had a couple of brats and then moved back here when Franco was dead during the tricky transici?n, ostensibly to give us a better education, but i think to make sure he wasn't there should Spain slide back to civil war, a very real possibility were it not for the consumate political manoeuvring of King Juan Carlos, a genuine great man. So been in the UK since I was a young lad and in London as a default choice when I left university. Love it, would love to stay were it not for the fact that I'll die on some godforsaken farm in the backwater of south east Ireland.