Tannhauser

Mine too. One of the funniest jokes in history. I was gutted when they got divorced. I also liked: 'Paul bought Heather a plane for Christmas. And a razor for the other leg.'

Everyone does, by definition?

x 2

What's the consensus on the Tamora? Does that suffer the same issues as the others? I always like the look of them.

Coincidentally, last night I dreamt that I wrote 'The Hobbit'. I don't remember it, but Mrs T says that I was Tolkien in my sleep.

Excellent.

I'm irritated just reading that, let alone experiencing it first-hand. Lovely car, though.

Any pun about feet would have to include 'feet' and 'feet' (i.e. employ homonyms), otherwise it wouldn't be a pun. It would just be a statement. But that aside, I would have thought you'd be a shoe-in for first place. You're being punished for not toeing the line (or did we do that already?)

FACT: Ewen commented on that WTC7 looked like a controlled explosion (but went on to say that it wasn't ), FACT: Rob and I have been defending the orthodox explanation to the hilt. FACT: Ewen scores higher than both of us despite a pun that independent experts have testified is worse than EITHER OF OURS! Coincidence????? Or could it be that LBM is part of a shady cabal of leaders secretly promoting Ewen so that he can later announce that the scoring system was rigged in a false flag operation to destroy Ewen's credibility???? And if they would do this to someone who only mildly questions aspects of the 'official line', imagine what they would do to anyone REALLY SEEKING THE TRUTH. Eh? Eh? There will now follow 341 youtube clips.

Quality. In that photo, looks like it's all hands to the pump.

There'll be trouble when that dude realises someone's been sailing around in his shoe.

Noam Chomsky, the political activist, put it like this: he is not in a position to do anything about, say, the Burmese government, so his efforts would be wasted in trying to do anything about them. But as a US citizen, he can at least try to correct any perceived injustices that they are responsible for. Also, he points out that as the US government is supposed to be representing his views, it is his duty to complain loud and long if he feels they are doing something immoral in his name, and not to do anything would be complacent and wrong. I think that's completely reasonable. I think most people who protest against their government's actions don't want to live somewhere else - they want to see their own country behave in a more morally scrupulous fashion - though see below. See, I have to agree with you here that it's nonsense to lay every problem at the USA's door. They certainly have a lot to answer for in terms of foreign policy; they have propped up some ghastly regimes, and perpetrated terrible crimes in the name of spreading or maintaining American influence. In this, they are no different from other empires, western or otherwise. However, it's just too simplistic to claim that they are uniformly bad. In many situations, there have been reasons to be grateful for American money, knowhow and firepower - or the threat of it. The quote was with reference to conspiracy theoies. I'm not sure what you're driving at here, unless you're claiming that all these conspiracy theories are actually valid, and that the common denominator is that they are American. The point I'm making is that every great event is attended by a host of outlandish counter-theories, because that's what people love - exotic nonsense over boring truth. The events I chose are the ones most familiar to me, being a Westerner. I'm sure that the arab countries have their own versions. Having said that, my suspicion is that in more religious parts of the world, there are fewer conspiracy theories and more stories about divine intervention. To me, that's what conspiracy theories and the like are - modern-day, secular versions of miracle stories. I'd take issue with this. Many atrocities have been committed in the name of secular ideologies. I'm not sure you can legitimately blame Christianity for the holocaust. Surely Nazism was centered on the social Darwinist theories in vogue at the time? And Nazism itself had very little by way of a religious component, if I understand it correctly. Also, the biggest mass murders in the 20th century, in the USSR and China were again perpetrated by secular ideologies, and profoundly atheist ones at that. I think there was some dispute about carpet bombing earlier, but we can say with some certainty that you're carpet-bombing this thread with youtube clips. The thing is that all these guys who make these vids, who propagate this stuff are in a circle-jerk. They all quote each other, they never check their sources, they're all in the same little cliques. None of them have any experience about how governments work beyond what they've seen in the movies, and as such, they get a stiffy every time Cheney coughs or Bush looks uncomfortable. Body language - c'mon, give me a break. Seriously? Their ability to connect disparate facts and see some sort of pattern in them is reminiscent of a schizophrenic, dropping acid, looking at a dot-to-dot puzzle. Their arguments are like trying to catch water, as hypotheses about what actually happened are exchanged with exhausting regularity. If there isn't any evidence for some looney-tune notion, then it has of course been hidden, the naked paranoia of which deserves no further comment. Anyone who is remotely qualified to comment sensibly on the issues is -of course! - just a government patsy, thereby hermetically sealing them off from those who could shine some light through their tightly drawn-down foil hats. There are many profound mysteries in the universe. 9/11 isn't one of them. What is, to my mind, is the inhuman patience and fortitude which some have shown in bothering to contradict such terminal silliness as the conspiracy theories. Those people who painstakingly find the origins of 9/11 rumours (like the flight rosters business), or spend hours of their time talking about nano-thermite. What a thankless hobby: it must be like calmly pointing out why unicorns don't exist, whilst a lunatic is shrieking in your ear: "But those aren't horse-droppings!!! If they're horse-droppings, how do you account for the fairy dust on them, EH, EH, EH???" And with that, I'm out of this one. Peace.

£180 a month on insurance? Holy mother of god. It just astonishes me that anyone would pay out that much, unless you're pretty well off. No criticism at all implied, it's your money, but I'd be weeping into my Pringles if I had to pay that just to get it on the road. Nice car, by the way.

OK, so if the 9/11 attacks are an 'inside job', then the US government is complicit in the murder of thousands of its own citizens in a most ghastly way. It seems a bit strange that having committed such an atrocity, Dick Cheney and co have qualms about taking an oath. In fact, it seems ludicrous.

I think Rob's post sums up the problem with this idea. But just to add that in the event of any sort of failure, everyone involved in the project would be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of their countrymen. They would be lynched, metaphorically, and maybe literally. It's hard to imagine that (a) a huge number of contractors, who must understand explosives in order to plant them, would be willing to expose themselves to such risks and (b) somebody wouldn't blow the whistle on such an irresponsible plan. Just seems incredibly implausible, when we already have an alternative hypothesis (the official explanation), backed up by vast numbers of professionals, all of whom would need to have been bought off in order to keep quiet about the truth.

That's fantastic. EDIT TO ADD: I went to bed chuckling about that, and I'm still chortling away this morning.

Frank Greening's report Interesting technical paper here on the physics of the WTC collapse.

You need to sort out your feculent bodily excretions, Steve. That's sebum, not pus. I can well believe that there could be competition for your decaying leg-skin. And if that's not an excellent chat-up line, I don't know what is.

Lots of people say I remind them of that, including my loved ones. That's a terrific video.

Whoooooooosh!! "Spectator's hair left unruffled by low-flying concept." You know you you are. Or rather you don't.

With just a hint of 'organzola.' LBM - job done, I feel. P.S. Just steer clear of stilton + broccoli. Three words: lanced sebaceous cyst.

You're a bad man.

I look at conspiracy theories like this from two points of view: 1) A historical point of view. Every major news event generates its own set of conspiracy theories. In recent history, we've had JFK, Marilyn Monroe, the moon landings, 9/11 - to name but a few. And of course, they didn't start with JFK. The next huge news item will also generate a set of exotic explanations. Now, in itself, this doesn't make a 9/11 conspiracy theory untrue, but we have to see that it's part of a pattern in events like this. 2) A balance of evidence point of view. In the case of 9/11, there are two competing hypotheses: a) The 'official explanation' - that three buildings were hit by planes, causing the wholesale destruction of two (plus WTC 7). b) An alternative explanation, in which at least some of the destruction was caused by explosives or other means, as part of a covert operation. In order to believe (b), I have to accept a number of postulates, such as: i) In order to force a war on Iraq/Afghanistan, the US government selected Saudi Arabian hijackers. Given that Saudi-Arabia are cheek-by-jowl with the US, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Why not choose Iraqi hijackers? ii) The US government would murder thousands of its own civilians. Apart from the colossal risk for the perpetrators, it just does not fit with the American psyche at all. Their talent is for murdering other people's civilians, if I can put it that bluntly. iii) That a very large operation could be carried out secretly. Democratic governments, as Chomsky put it, are leaky at all levels. iv) that a very large number of motivated, patriotic professionals, cooperating in 'the biggest criminal investigation in history' have all been bought off or coerced into toeing the 'official line' about the events. To me, it's Occam's razor. Hypothesis (b) obliges me to accept several ideas which I have no substantive evidence for, and which seem to me to be extraordinarily unlikely. Any putative anomalies in hypothesis (a) pale into insignificance in comparison. I can't get worked up about WTC falling in their own footprint and so on. I haven't got a PhD in structural engineering, and I'm not qualified to judge what happens when a plane hits a building.

Scott - it was Morrison's own bakery. To be fair, the nail was free from varnish and was quite clean. It was embedded in the top crust. Paul - comestibles = edible items LBM - you know if you have a cast on your leg for six weeks or so, the skin underneath becomes thick, yellowish and cheesy? Well, that's what Lidl make their bread from.

On the subject of unnecessary fillings in comestibles, I'd just like to say that I found a fingernail embedded in my Morrison's loaf last week. It was a good 1 cm long (the nail, not the loaf). I know Morrison's aren't the most upmarket supermarket, but come on. It's not like it was Lidl.