Halo Stickman

Many years ago, having just split up with my girlfriend, some mates invited me along with them to a night club. They all took their girl friends, so I was the only single bloke in the party. The dance floor had a canopy that was held up with metal poles. Towards the end of the evening, when the slow music began to play, we spotted a young woman dancing with one of the metal poles. She wasn’t doing pole dancing like a pole dancer – she was just doing a slow dance holding on to the pole. Anyway, she looked a bit sad doing this, so my mates thought it would be nice if I went and asked her to dance, and, as she was quite attractive, I thought, why not? So, I casually sauntered across the crowded dance floor and asked her if she would like to dance, to which she replied: “F*** off, I’d rather dance with this pole than with you.” I think I’m over it, but every time I pass some scaffolding or something of that nature I do have a tendency to break to my knees and weep like a school-girl.

It used to be a requirement – and presumably still is – that all new aircraft had to undergo ditching and flotation tests, in part, to ascertain the optimum landing conditions – rate of descent, forward speed, nose attitude, roll and yaw angles etc – in the event of a controlled landing on to the sea. Until fairly recently, this was carried out using scale model aircraft and large water tanks, and one of the only facilities of this kind was located in East Cowes, Isle of Wight. See link from 2001 below. http://www.knight-gkla.co.uk/splashdown.htm

I used to be quite a nervous flyer, but it seems to be one of those things where the more you do it, the less frightening it becomes. Mind you, it set me back a bit when they banned smoking on planes! Nowadays, I enjoy flying and can happily gaze out of the window for ages if it’s not cloudy, including during takeoff and landing. I rationalised my fear by thinking that if the worse happened – as others have said, statistically highly unlikely – then at least it’s all going to be over fairly quickly, it’s likely to be final, and, if you’re travelling with your family, you’ll all go together. A couple of stiff drinks pre-flight used to help as well.

Aye, but not much of a consolation when you’re plummeting from 35,000 feet without a parachute Let's hope the poor sods in this latest incident didn't know too much about what was happening and died quickly

Move on, there’s nothing to see here – those stuffed toys were above legal age and gagging for it.

Like that. But if I may be pedantic, I didn’t have an exclamation mark or a comma to work with!

Been reading Execution By Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust by Miron Dolot – an eye witness testimony of the Soviet’s often brutal implication of collective farming in the Ukraine and the 1932/33 famine which followed, referred to as Holodomor (see link). This book certainly gives a good insight into some of the region’s historical tensions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Bondage Marina. 5 knots max.

Banana – she’s a fruit throwing racist. Bandana – she’s into All Kinds of Everything.

C u nt is lies or The Sun’s C u nt is lies.

Create a separate sub-forum for this stuff; call it ‘Forum WC for wums and crap – trolls and stools here’

With brown curly hair

I was gonna say that doesn't rhyme, but I see what you've done there

I've changed better to worse because it scans better, or worse, I'm not sure. Choose whichever.

That's quite bad as well

So when she met a young man (Am I allowed 2 lines in one go?)

The back looks worse than the front

Self Carolina

20/1, eh? Tell you what – put me down for a fiver, I like an outsider.

I thought I’d throw a bit of randomness into the mix. Why? – well, why not? Now, I’m not saying that the following applies to the temperatures listed above – they do indeed seem to be trending. However, I often hear people say things such as: 9 of the last 12 years have been the warmest for the last 130 years; therefore, it’s obvious that the trend is upwards. This could very well be the case, but how can we be sure that this isn’t an example of randomly produced clusters? Seems counter intuitive, I agree, but bear with me. Most people who have laid different coloured wall or floor tiles in a random pattern have experienced the counter-intuitive thought that clusters do not occur randomly – those people will probably have avoided laying the same coloured tiles next to each other. When confronted with the following two sequences of coin tosses: HTTHTHHTHT and HHHHHTTTTT most people will be suspicious that the second sequence was randomly generated; but, in reality, both have the same probability of occurring – just as 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 are just as likely as any other 6 numbers to come up on the lottery. If my house is stuck by lightening on average 12 times a year, and I tell you it was struck today (Friday), what is the most likely day for the NEXT bolt to strike: tomorrow, next week, in exactly a month’s time, or some other day? The answer is tomorrow (Saturday). The probability of that happening is about 1 in 30 (once a month), let’s round it to a probability of 0.03. Now, the probability of it happening the next day (Sunday) is also 0.03, but this time you have to multiply that figure by the probability that it hasn’t happened tomorrow (Saturday) (1 minus 0.03 = 0.97) to give an overall probability of 0.03 x 0.97 = 0.0291. For the day after that (Monday) the calculation becomes 0.03 x 0.97 x 0.97 = 0.0282, and so on and so on, making every subsequent day less likely to be the NEXT one when lightening strikes.* Oh, **** it, this is giving me a headache. Let’s just say clusters do happen in randomly generated numbers, and in nature. Just go out and look at the sky tonight – effectively, from our perspective, the positions of the stars in the night sky have been randomly generated. Have the stars got nice even gaps between them, or are there clusters? * I’m sure there are much better mathematicians than me out there who can rip my maths apart: they’re quite welcome to do so.

Metric? Yes, we were introduced about 40 years ago.

Puncheon – the bastards have just raised my tariff.

Apparently, she was slobbering all over him.

Fundamentalist? No, I don’t give money to those type of people.

Excellent work, Gianlarrahan! I thought all the participants performed their roles well, with MLT, naturally, being head and shoulders above the rest. It would be good to see the five parts spliced into one, with the repetitive bits deleted. Suggestions for a follow up: 1/ With a nod to bletch, above, it would be interesting to see those blokes answering the free will / determinism question, especially as regards to, say, MLT’s penalties. 2/ With a nod to Monty Python, you could ask: “Which great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena to a physical state and insists there is no point of contact between the extended and the unextended… and do you think HCDAJFU? All the best with the dissertation.