Verbal

I'm genuinely surprised. This sort of stuff rarely gets to a day in court.

So how's the court case going?

It gets worse. Barclays tried to get a gagging order issued against the Guardian to stop them revealing the tax avoidance 'scheme'.

That last one's true, by the way. Try googling 'Foxbat' and 'Japan'.

The Americans tried figuring out how to protect the solid-state electronics in their military aircraft from being fried from the electro-magnetic forces unleashed in a nuclear blast. The Russians flew their planes with the 1930s technology of valves, which were immune. I speak as a secret member of the military-industrial complex.

I was hi-jacking the thread.

Then there's the utter crap uselessness of some space-military technology. In the early days of the Apollo programme, the Americans spent millions trying the develop a pen that would work in the weightlessness of space. The Russians took a pencil.

Taking your own timeline, the military would have come up with the technology equivalent to that necessary to produce the iPad in 1971. I don't think so.

Says the lumpenposter who now runs everything through a spellchecker before hitting 'post reply' out of sheer naked terror.

Finally. I thought you boneheads would never get there.

This is not even up to your usual dumbass standards.

While everyone is in this jobs-cutting frenzy, let's dump the royal family asap. You couldn't even give that inbred crowd reasonable-sounding job descriptions. Then renationalise or sell off the Duchys of Cornwall and Lancaster - whose combined value is in excess of £1bn.

Run that by me again.

You're a what? Anyway, I expect amiable toffs to be able to spell 'consensus'. I think you owe me a percentage of your banker's bonus for helpfully pointing this out.

You should quit while you're only losing by a country mile, trousers. This coalition is 'special' when it comes to making vaguely rational decisions. As the sense-deficient Caroline Spelman illustrates, taking a dive into the torylib talent pool is risky - you'll only bump your head and won't even get wet.

You sure dune didn't write that guff? One of many giveaways as to its political stance is that it describes the Conservative think tank DEMOS as 'Marxist'. Far from being an example of mind control, the attempt to flog off the forests is just a piece of bumbling incompetence.

Timberlake in The Social Network is surprisingly good.

Or: this was one of those reckless, stupid decisions which even this reckless, stupid government could see. I think you must have missed the bit early in the story when nice, Tory local residents near a forest to be sold off were described by their Tory MP as a 'baying mob'. It may be small, but it's the first of many u-turns as the economy rides the wall of death.

It was more ambiguous than that I think. Saddam was constantly being convinced by his underlings that they had as much chemical armoury has they had in the 80s and early 90s (when they used it against Iranians and Kurds). No one wanted to tell him the cupboard was bare - so spun all these stories. At the same time, he was denying having any chemical capability - unaware he was telling the truth!

Which is one reason why curveball was so readily believed.

Arsenal will be so shocked that Tottenham won last night that they'll psych themselves up...and bottle it. (But then again my predictions are almost always wrong...)

Such old news, this. The only new bit, as far as I can tell, is his confession that he lied - something which everyone else around seems to have known for donkey's. There's a a book about him, called Curveball (after his code name), and Oliver Stone is supposed to be making the movie.

From rehab?

Did someone let the 1950s back in?

Point of order. If it's a hadith it's not in the Koran.