Walsingham

Story However, given the glorious leader's penchant for cinema, I'm betting a quid that this is an elaborately staged dramatic twist. He will rise up behind the international community with a pair of pruning shears in about 2 minutes just after someone cracks a joke.

LOL I can't believe how sad I am that I found that funny.

LOL. Oh I see. The great lie that if you don't agree then you don't care. I find all this sincerely amusing, since I dare say I've seen more human suffering and pitched in to help than 90% of the socialists I meet or talk to. Indeed, looking back at my early years I'd probably be defined as a socialist. Yet over the years my stance has changed in a way I like to think of as maturing. Although you will no doubt consider it merely rotten. The great failing of socialism, and your own messianic green tendency, and indeed your anti-Christmas stance, is that you propose solutions which need to be applied uniformly and dramatically to the entire human race, against its strongest natural inclinations. And perhaps if applied across the board they would achieve the object you have in mind. BUT THEY CANNOT, because thankfully the human spirit is too trenchant to be swayed by a tyrannical imposition. The result instead from partial application is the breaking of current institutions and oppression of a minority (those you can lay your hands on) for the simple purpose of depriving what alrready is and subliming it into so much hot gas. Your crusade - and I use the word in its fullest sense - against Christmas may serve to make particularly sensitive souls lose their taste for a holiday they might otherwise enjoy. It might wreck some cheerful congregation's intended public artwork. It may even, with the greatest determination, reduce global economic activity at Christmas time. But it cannot achieve its aim of solving the global warming issue. So whom does it serve? You will bridle, I'm sure at my insinuation that it only serves your desire to place your morals publicly above mine. But as Hurlshot has already said, your entire line of reasoning directly assumes that when I celebrate Christmas I only do so out of a blinkered and fatuous contempt for my fellow man. So this makes us even.

I'm with you, Gortho. And Noah S. Sweat:

And finished it with kind of speaks volumes. :D You've consumed a small pouch of speed?

I should add that UK members will find Rio Bravo going out free on ITV4 later today.

Decided I had to get better quick, so unusually I took to the couch with blankets and TV, rather sit at the PC or head out and about. Glad I did because I caught John Wayne films The Alamo, and Rio Bravo. I'm real glad I did, partly because ever since reading Preacher I've been determined to watch more John Wayne. But also because I now rate Rio Bravo as in my top ten films. I guess because it's so perfectly well rounded as an example of cowboy movies. And you have a multiplicity of sub-plots (not very inventive) played out to satisfaction over the course of the film. There's John Wayne, Dean Martin, and an actress I didn't recognise but immediately had the hots for, Angie Dickinson: It also has a great tune, which really should have made it to New Vegas: My Rifle, My Pony, and Me.

Was that satire or were they actually serious as cancer? When they say rhythm is a dancer?

Good to hear you're moving on, Nep. I think i can say that I've made the jump from my own exes. By which I mean I still miss them. But it's a healthy ache. Like a mending leg. The solution, besides the walsausages, is to throw oneself into sorting out your life as it stands. Fix the roof, get exciting work, chat up new ladies. Curiosity and excitement about the future is the light to banish the shadows of a fading dawn romance. I also have a cold.

Yes, but their case is better. I would love for them to be wrong though. The priority of placing religious or metaphysical traditions or thinking at the top of the list of apparently irrational behavior in others to be addressed is effectively an endorsement of more real problems in mass popular behavior such as consumerism which are far harder to tackle and far more widely enabled. In this way I find atheists particularly bothersome when vocal, because they tend to single issue crusade something they mistake for not being piss-ant relative to their own contributions to our problems. We can point our fingers in the mirror for the walmart, over population, EU zone, BP etc rather than at Jesus or Ganesha. Christmas trending from the religious to consumerism is just well rationalized degeneracy. Good point! What I DO find interesting is that just as there seems to a sybaritic instinct native to a certain percentage of humans, so too seems the puritan ecstacy of self-denial and other-denial. IT's just that the sins have changed. Not the beards and pointing.

All this war talk segues neatly into results on the 'lightsaber versus taser' testing.

I'm really not losing any sleep even if it was espionage. Although there's **** all along that border that I know of so would be pretty boring. Unless it was searching for infiltartors. My point was really that the best programming in the 21st century won't fix a map drawn in the the 19th century.

My God, this soup is good! I mean, just staggeringly good. ~ Re social stuff, of course we can plan as much as we like, but the more impromptu a party or gathering is the better it gets. Every time.

ROFL. Brings back memories.

On the subject of butter, and my incipient sore throat, I made an all butter and wholemeal roux as the base for a soup I am now enjoying. Mostly swede, carroway seeds, ground mace, pepper. Lamb stock. bit of carrot for sweetness. small quantity of sausage. Red lentils for unctious weight. Blended up before serving with a dash of dark soy sauce. Unbelievably good.

Glad it made you laugh!

I still play Civ5 to cope with hangovers. But the military component is completely bungholed. It desperately needs more Panzer General elements like entrenchment. At the moment you just hit anything with three times its number and it's dead. The strategic map becomes simple geometry. There's no strategy to speak of, as I'd understand it. Still, nice and simple. Good to play with some tea and a radio murder mystery on.

What I love is all the halfwits sounding off about how it couldn't have accidentally wound up in Iranian airspace. As if the Afghan border is some neatly defined Euro stateline. I'm not saying it WAS accidental. Just, you know, Volo-tanting.

Some township guitar playing. Drives me nuts to see talent like this sitting in a dusty alley and half-baked greenhorns flooding the domestic airwaves.

I can understand your confusion, but maybe it's because it's the other asking you to. If he subsequently fails to do any good then that's his bad karma. Becomes his problem?

Buying and installing Borderlands appears to have cured him. Thought I'd say.

I've discovered that I ca nstay logged into a running game of Borderlands, shoot for five minutes, then get back to work. So my stats are off the charts on that. Although this last week has been so busy I haven't even had time for that!

Fixed yet?

I smell an app in there somewhere. Something using linear programming. I could certainly use one for meetings. ...By which I mean my social life is simplicity itself. I know where my friends are. They're in the pub. Or at someone's house. Or gone to town. To a pub.