Verbal

Invictus. Brilliant - and amazing that Clint Eastwood keeps turning out movies of such high quality. And the best sports movie since - well, Million Dollar Baby. Matt Damon is surprisingly convincing as Pienaar, even down to the SA accent - but Morgan Freeman is nailed on for a Best Actor Oscar.

First sentence. Are you blind?

But you can't put up a wishlist and then go and bump off everyone on it. That's not in the rules. (Although I'd be grateful if you could put RBS out of its sadsack misery. Thank you in advance.)

Borders is dead, as of today. Did you do that?

11. Your position is no longer available.

If that happened, perhaps it wouldn't be so worrying. But no, the species of trees that grow in secondary forests in Borneo are quick-growing deciduous trees. They're not the species you find in rainforests, which are adapted to growing over millennia on little more than mulch (hence their characteristically vein-like root spread above ground). Sometimes the two types of forest can look similar. But there's an easy way to tell them apart. We've watched enough jungle war movies to think that rainforests are full of thick, impenetrable undergrowth. But only secondary forests have this. Walking through primary rainforest is like walking through a gigantic cathedral, with long clear aisles leading in every direction. Thick undergrowth is impossible because the canopy cuts out all light. In Borneo's secondary forests, the light floods in - hence the temperature difference. I've seen far worse in Madagascar, where the primary forests are even more delicate. The mulch is so thin that it is usually washed away within a few weeks. So if you look at any aerial view of Madagascar - particularly in the highlands and the rivers - you'll see huge red scars in the hills and the water runs vivid red. Google 'Betsiboka' and you'll see what I mean - you'll get something like this...

Quite so. And forests do re-grow, even on the thin top soil (assuming it hasn't been washed away). But secondary forest has nothing like the rich eco-system as primary forest. In Borneo about ten years ago, I remember we measured daytime temperatures under the canopy of rain forest and adjoining re-grown forest. The rainforest was 6 degrees C cooler! You could see the effects in temperature difference by just looking at the forest floors. The secondary forest was parched and plagued with tangled undergrowth that drove out any diversity. The rainforest next door, of course, was a mass of mosses, tropical ferns, insect life - and you could see for what seemed like miles through the shaded interior.

Can I make a special plea to keep al Fahim out of this?

I have vague memory of seeing a potato in the shape of Iain Dowie, but it may just have been him.

Guilty secret?

Oh dear. We didn't evolve from chimps. We evolved from one small band of hominids - one of several that migrated from the plains of East Africa. We share a common ancestor with chimps - hence why we still have humans AND chimps. As for the rest, Richard Dawkins in 'The Blind Watchmaker' turns the Creationist argument into matchwood. But suffice to say: the human eye didn't evolve from a primordial soup in one easy step. Evolution is not really like that Guinness ad. So God - or son of - has nothing to do with it. Hence his absence in Cortese's highly evolved statement.

There are two other threads on this, but they are further down the page and therefore of inferior quality.

Why hasn't TDD commented on this?

I'm probably alone in this, but I find your posts utterly obnoxious.

Quite. Hague is by the far the Tories' most skilled debater - and used to wipe the floor with Blair.

Well that's the end of it then. Case closed.

Stop it. Stop it now.

Yep, I was going to avoid using the word 'efficient', for the usual reasons, but actually, it just came naturally to them to fix the problem.

Just got back from what was supposed to be a business trip to Cologne. All German airports seemed to shut down with an horrendous snow storm, and we landed at Paderborn, which is god knows where up in the hills. The tiny airport was crowded with jets that were supposed to have landed at Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Cologne. And I thought that was it: I'm going to spend a week in a half-lit airport lounge living off Turkish coffee and apple pies. There were no taxis leaving the town, and the buses weren't taking the risk. The hotels were full. Things got worse when the roads into town were blocked by accidents. But within two hours, Paderborn airport reopened - the slowploughs running up and down the runway continuously. We took off into a blizzard and landed in one - after an aborted attempt. I missed my meeting but made it to Cologne - and I was only about four hours late getting into the city. The Germans just made it work. When I got to Cologne, the taxi driver told me it had snowed only twice in eleven years, so snowstorms are not something they're used to. Yet they made things work without any real fuss - just got on with the job of solving an inconvenient problem.

He's busy on the main board calling Kelvin 'fit'.

Go for Carey Mulligan - a pretty safe bet after her performance in 'An Education'.

Apologies, Frank. I now realise you're really one of us, minus a spell checker.

The breakdowns aren't really the issue. It's that it took up to 18 hours to pull the trains out of the tunnel. Seem a pretty basic failure of common-sense health and safety to me.

No, the ice cores collected at the poles really do tell us interesting things about happened in the tropics, and other parts of the globe - and over several hundred millennia. That's why scientists who study the cores are so interested in them. I was in Svalbard in 1989, I think. I wasn't there as a tourist.