Haloween Greetings

In his house in R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming! Iä, Iä, Cthulhu fhtagn!
Happy Haloween, Clutists! Wait until the stars are right!

Save Test Cricket!

There is a campaign starting on Twitter & Facebook to save Test Cricket as attendances outside the UK (& Aus when we play them) are going down.

Please support this campaign if you wish to preserve Test Cricket.

Premier League, Promotion & Relegation

It would seem that a group of overseas owners of a number of Premier League teams seem to be be looking to stop relegation & promotion.
Who do they think they are!
This is totaly stupid!
These owners need to be taken out, put up against the nearest wall & shot!
I am so furious I can hardley text!

OK, Villa lost their unbeaten record at the weekend, but I would prefer them to go down rather than lose promotion & relegation!!!

Piracy With Violence

As piracy seems to be becoming a major break on the profitability of world trade, perhaps the crime of Piracy With Violence should be bought back as a capital ofence? Would this act as a deterrent? I'm not in favour of capital punishment, but I could be convinced about this.

Return Of The 'Q' Ship

The Monsoon is ending in the Indian Ocean, leading to fears that Somali pirates will be back out in force. In fact an Anglo/US force has just liberated a vessel that had been recently hijacked.

To me it appears that the forces arrayed in the Indian Ocean to deal with the pirates are not suited to the job. Destroyers, frigates and the like are not suited to chasing fast skiffs or similar fast motor vessels, they are designed to fight large scale 'formal' wars.

At the start of WWI there was no easy way to engage submarines. This led to the creation of the 'Q' Ship. This was a medium sized merchant vessel, crewed by the navy, armed with a number of consealed quick firing guns. The ship was chosen to be just too small to be worth a torpedo, so the sub would surface to try and capture and scuttle it, or sink it with fire from the sub's deck gun(s), whereupon the 'Q' Ship would engage the sub with its weaponary. It proved moderately successful.

I would think a number of 21st century versions of such 'Q' Ships may prove a major deterrent against Somali pirates who are preying on merchant vessels. Perhaps such things should be deployed.

Via e-mail.

The Defence Secratry

Dr. Fox.
I was always very baffeled as to why a DJ was made Defence Secratry. Knowledge of cotemporary music should not give someone the ability to run our armed forces!

Joke!

Health Service Reforms

With the greatest of respect to the Department of Health, we do not want more meaningless 'Choice', we want decent care close to where we live!
The Tory's are trying to reintroduce the market, which will never work in an organisation that is mathematically 'chaotic', back into the NHS as the people who fund them would like it!
I trust my GP to treat me, but GPs are not trained to run the NHS, so they will have to outsource their provisioning to the private sector. Typical free market capitalist thinking!

Health Lottery

Why does the new Health Lottery have Erico Morricone tune the 'Extacy of Gold' (sometimes refered to as the 'Lust for Gold') from the classic 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly!

It would seem that the people who made that ad are trying to tap into peoples greed!

Could Christiania Happen In The UK?

I've just been happening to listen to a prog on Radio4 on the Danish comune cum anarcho-capitalist society cum hippy/squatter/leftist dreamer free area in Copenhagen.

I started to think, could a similar society take off in the UK? With the prevailing economic situation (which slightly resembles that which created Christiana) I feel that a social experiment like this may be viable, but would be an amathama to 90% of the political class, thus rendering it impossible as it would be stamped on very hard!

While it may not be possible to engender such a social experiment here in the UK, I would like to see such a thing happening, possibly in a neo-cyberpunk sort of way.

Posted by e-mail via mobile.

Faster Than A Ray Of Light

CERN researchers are baffled by measurements that appear to show nutrinos traveling in excess of the speed of light. Those of you who are familiar with Einstien's Special Theory of Relativity will realise that this should be impossible.

There are a number of possible explanations for these observations:
a) The distance between CERN and the lab in Italy has been incorrectly measured or calculated.
b) Timing between the labs had been incorrectly synchronised.
c) Other forms of systematic measurement error.
d) Nutrinos do not work like we thought they did.
e) Einstien was slightly off in his theory (but not to the extent a number of sensationalist journo's have suggested, otherwise sat navs and other stuff would have stopped working!)

A, b or c of the above are the most likely explanations. Nutrinos having a different nature to that which we have assumed they have, such as being able to take on a negative rest mass for short periods, would be very interesting. The most intriguing posibility would be that Relativity Theory is not complete & needs to be extended/reworked.

Posted by e-mail from mobile.