saintbletch

There is only one way...

Imagine how long she could hold her breath...

And I think Frankie Boyle got into hot water for that reason. But, shamefully, I found it very funny. Sorry if it overstepped the mark for you.

Apparently she's really dirty...

Look at the gradients today on stage 16. http://www.letour.fr/le-tour/2012/us/live/aso/ Nearing the second peak the average speed was down to 11 km/h.

Shocking. But not an isolated tale from the reports I've seen View From The Top. The question for me is whether this this was purely a logistical issue. Did they simply have too many people to deal with or hadn't thought about the logistics of keeping people updated on what was happening. Or did they feel that they could exploit the economic climate and that it would be fine for them to not communicate with anyone for months, and that out of desperation people would be queuing and ready no matter how shabbily they had been treated. Conspiracy or cock-up? It will also be interesting to see how insulated the government is from the blame for this. I watched a little of the select committee questioning of the G4S boss yesterday and he did mention at one point that the government had been regularly kept appraised of the numbers of people trained.

Then in base 9 you'd only get to the number 8 I'm afraid. You should really be known as The10. Sorry The9. Well, sorry The10 actually. saintbletch? Obvious really. As I'm sure you all know Bletch was beatified by the Roman Catholic church in 1548 and is the patron saint of pompousness, pretentiousness, pedantry and donkeys. His was a sad and regretfully short life. He was afflicted by the annoying desire to intervene and correct people in the conversations he would hear in the taverns of his native Ávila. He was obssessed with correcting grammatical errors and righting moral wrongs. He was understandably routinely beaten for this behaviour until one day, having tried to intervene in a dispute over the radix of the number 9, he was thrown from a church tower to a painful death. He was 29. His feast day is July 18th where in central Spain donkeys are pushed out of church towers in his honour. Why did I choose the name? Some people say that I resemble a donkey from some angles.

Ouch. Ears? I can edit the post. Agree about double standards. But, and here's the really difficult area for me, I also think that the majority in any society will always come under closer scrutiny. Assuming that we're setting our sights on a perfect world of race equality and harmony, and assuming that we agree that we're not there yet, then because the majority represents the status quo position, then by definition it is the majority that has to give more ground. I think that this can look like double standards, and I'm sure in some cases it is. This in no way excuses racial hatred on either side. But for me, the majority has a greater responsibility to help change the situation. Again that in no way suggests that minorities do not need to work to change the status quo, because they do.

Dribbles all over your hand before it gets anywhere near a mouth?

I'm white. I read it on Twitter. I'm not offended. I can't tell you why particularly. I can see that it's potentially offensive. But when I read it I see that the INTENT was to hurt a black person. I might call you a smug big-nosed t***. But if I did, I would be aiming to hurt you and not consciously aiming to hurt big-nosed people. They're simply collateral damage in my attempt to make you feel on the outside of the circle of perfect nose-sized people to which I belong. (I do hope you don't have a big nose Sergei Gotsmanov). I could imagine that others might well find the choc-ice term offensive. My position was that I, personally, didn't think it was a racist comment. As for the motivation of what was 'said'. I don't know who originally 'said it'. Do you? the Twitterer's name is obscured in the reports I've read. But when Ferdinand re-tweeted it I think his thought was to certainly hurt Cole by being seen to laugh at a comment that someone else had made that was clearly aimed to upset Cole.

Not if you do it with sarcastic exclamation!? There is obviously a race element to the term choc-ice, but for me it wasn't a racist comment. The problem in interpreting racist comment is that it isn't, if you'll excuse me, black and white. There's a lot of grey. You have to take into account intent, whether humour played a significant enough role to justify its use, and as your comment above might have shown, you have to consider the presence or otherwise of an agenda. Controversially I think the majority/minority status of the perpetrator/recipient has to be considered sometimes too. Ferdinand re-tweeted someone else's tweet. Not a defence in itself but an important distinction. And in doing so he re-started the term and commented that it was funny. His intent was to poke fun at Cole's expense. His INTENT was to hurt a black person. His INTENT was not to hurt white people. That he might have done this by implication was I'm sure far away from his thoughts. The motivation behind using a term like choc-ice is about defending a minority position and attempting to stress the value in being part of the minority. It does this by suggesting that being white is in some way 'lesser' but the motivation is some sort of warped positive affirmation of the black 'identity'. As I think Verbal said below, it's flawed logic. The hate in the comment is all aimed at the black man. It's certainly at the expense of casting white people in a lesser light. But there's no explicit or expressed racial hatred toward white people. The biggest issue I have with a comment like choc-ice is that it does nothing to further racial harmony in Britain, but neither is it a piece of racist hatred aimed at white people. It's somewhere in the middle for me. But I can certainly see that for others with different agendas from my own, it might be racist.

That's not my understanding of the term. Isn't it an insult from one black man to another whereby one believes the other is less 'black' than him. Hence black on the outside, white on the inside. Which is how it was applied to Cole - he stood up for 'white' John Terry. Also it is my understanding that Ferdinand Retweeted someone else's choc ice comment. He didn't initiate it. Small point, but an important one I think.

I think high-profile cases like this can make the general public jaundiced toward the courts. Watching judge-led enquiries into dodgy dossiers and media standards happily accepting "I cannot recall" as a valid answer from a stream of politicians doesn't help either. I don't know about being an ass, but the law is a puppet of a good lawyer and a trained witness. I don't for a minute believe Terry is a racist. Neither during that same sixty seconds would I believe that he was asking Ferdinand sarcastically if he had called him a black ****. That the law instructs the Magistrate to find Terry not guilty is lamentable but perhaps it's the only way greater injustices might be prevented in other cases. What would have been interesting is a civil prosecution brought by Ferdinand where I believe the burden of proof is less than in a criminal trial. But as others have said on here, Ferdinand didn't start this thing so I doubt he would have an interest in that. Given that I would imagine most of the football-watching public would believe that Terry used the term "****ing black ****" NOT in sarcastic exclamation but as a simple, but not expressly racist insult, I think the FA should take some sort of action. By the way I don't think Ferdinand comes out of this looking like a choir boy either.

Well the next time I go out on the lash on a Saturday night and start to spout racist hatred, I'm going to make sure I shout the insults as sarcastic exclamation. In fact I wonder if I'll be able to get away with similar insults on here if I simply end them with a question mark? F*** off you bunch of f****** black c****?

I can tell you're ill Bearsy because to my eye you forgot to add a single superfluous ess to any of the nouns above and the verb tense is consistent too. Hope you pulls throughs mate. We is needing you. But I'm going to have to go now. The thought of "The Dark Knight" being "sick" is a bit too much for me.

As your post was typed "in the mornings" Bearsy, please tell me you didn't type "one-handed" with the "Dark Knight" looking over your shoulder.

This. Apparently Verne Troyer was in talks to play Reacher but the Director is a Scientologist so Crusie was a *cuban-heeled" shoe-in.

Never been a massive fan of professional cycling but always had immense admiration for what these guys put their bodies through. Drugs or no drugs, it's an amazing feat. And as for that saddle... Anyway, since Wiggins has been at the front I've found myself glued to this excellent visualisation of each day's race. A cracking bit of web and visualisation design. http://www.letour.fr/le-tour/2012/us/live/aso/

As others have said it depends what's important to you. I always buy Dell business laptops (not standard consumer stuff). Dell puts more effort into its business kit than the consumer stuff. It costs slightly more as a result but if you need the laptop to last you then it's worth it. I've had a couple of hiccoughs along the way but in the main I've been very pleased. My advice if you want to save money would be to look for retailers that sell "as new" and "refurbished" manufacturers stock. I've bought 10+ Dell laptops from Europc over the years for my company. They sell what purports to be refurbished kit but in my experience it is always brand new. Manufacturers like Dell get returns for many reasons and it is cheaper for them to pass them on to outfits like Europc to re-sell than it is to check them over and put them back in 'stock' themselves. To make you feel comfortable buying 'refurbished' kit, EuroPC includes (at no extra cost) a Dell 3 year, next business day, all parts and labour warranty. On three occasions I've contacted Dell and had an engineer turn up and replace bits the next day. Great service.

All the best!

It truly was View From The Top. I must have been a pretty poor dinner companion because I just kept asking stupid question after stupid question and you soon realise that there is such a gulf in knowledge between the layman and these guys that finding some form of common ground upon which they can start to build my knowledge took forever. One of them urged me to read Richard Feynman's : QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. In the grand scheme of things it's not very advanced at all (I suspect that is why he recommended it) but is well written and it set me on a journey of discovery ever since. Anyone who has seen the double-slit photon experiment and doesn't spend some part of the rest of their days wanting to know "why?" is a better, or perhaps lesser man than me. I can't do the scale of CERN justice - I don't have the words or the time but the LHC ring itself is 17 miles long and crosses between France and Switzerland a number of times. It's all deep underground so that interference is minimised and the detector I saw being built (can't remember which one it was) is about the size of a small block of flats in a hollowed out chamber underground. Each collision they engineer generates terabytes of data that has to be stored and archived and dispatched around the computers of the world for simultaneous processing. But to me the most impressive thing about their discoveries is not that they understand some really hairy-arsed maths and physics, but that they create engineering solutions to what appear like impossible challenges. So how do you go about building a machine that can detect the neutrino - a particle that famously interacts so weakly with everything that it passes straight through matter without even wiping its little neutrino feet? And when these particles collide travelling at near to the speed of light, how can you capture the impact and resulting carnage such that a human can 'see' the results? You can't use a camera with 1600 ASA film and you can't just put a microscope at the heart of the collision and watch. These things are small and fast. Very small and very fast. They simply are not visible in the conventional sense. Instead you have to build experiments and equipment that looks for what isn't there, and you have to imply by tiny changes in magnetic fields that something has or hasn't passed through. And you have to do all this with such precision that you can be sure that the blip on the chart is a Higgs Boson and not just a train on the Geneva underground system - seriously the detectors are that powerful that changes in electrical current miles away have to be accounted for. Mind-blowing.

Agreed Verbal. The people I met were very conscious of the inter-governmental funding of the place and as a result were very keen to show where the tax money goes. My company supplied some technology that ensured that the magnets in the ring kept the electrons turning left (or right - can't remember) instead of making a break for freedom and punching a hole in the tubing at ~99.9% of the speed of light. We supplied it free of charge, as do many companies, in order to take advantage of the publicity we could garner by using CERN's name. The CERN purchasing people do not want to pay for anything and far from living in cushy luxury, they count every penny/rappen/centime/whatever. A quick look a Wikipedia tells me that the UK's contribution to CERN's funding in 2009 was €106.5M - now about £88M - or roughly one Christiano Ronaldo, half Balotelli's worth (according to his agent), 3-4 times Bob Diamond's likely severance package or 3 times the Queen's annual expenditure. Bargain.

I was going to try to correct you, but if you've truly met them all then that is impressive. I had the great pleasure of visiting CERN a number of years ago and it is also very impressive. I met a number of the research scientists and they all seemed unbelievably passionate and ridiculously dedicated - to my mind worthy of my trust and indeed my friendship. Whilst it might sound like a build up to a joke, I had dinner with a French, German and Finnish physicists while I was there. It was one of the most amazing and humbling evenings I've spent in my time on this planet. I walked round CERN whilst the current LHC was being constructed. Everything there is on a huge scale. A monumentally huge scale. And because of this step-change in scale, every supporting technology and process pretty much has to be invented from scratch. This is expensive but also means that new ways to do things are being invented all the time. This in turn creates spin-off jobs and industries and pushes us forward as a race. This, to my mind is a good thing. I love knowledge, and I love learning. I love the process of realising that there are things that I don't know that I'd really like to know, and I enjoy setting about changing that. I love the realisation that there are things that my tiny mind may never be able to grasp, and I love trying to get my tiny mind to bend to accommodate models that have no reference for me in the here and now. So for me, If the governments of the world can write blank cheques to the bankers and armed forces to shore up balance sheets and wage politician's wars, then I'd vote that we write CERN a blank cheque and give them no further instruction other than to "stay curious".

Yes it could be hardware related but It could also be that the settings in your BIOS are screwed. Especially if your disk had some form of complex driver configuration (RAID/SCSI) which has been lost. Although if it booted straight away on you FiL's machine then that suggests it must be pretty standard. It might be worth going into the BIOS setup and restoring the settings to factory conditions.

My apologies suewhistle, my information is 10+ years old. But I would have paid BIG money to be an observer on the roads in Italy the day that law changed!