Hillonearth

The Russians will probably give him a medal...they seem big on that side of things.

Chimpfluenza?

70s bush: nature's very own censorship.

Seems to be BSC/Broomhill type split so a name change likely beckons for one of them. I suppose it's a process we'll see repeating itself with a lot of the newer football academy/former boys' club type teams...they enter ostensibly to provide a pathway into adult football for their academy players, perhaps naively thinking that their U21s or whatever will progress en masse as a group into senior football. Obviously that doesn't end up happening - in most cases if an age-group team produces three or four players capable of stepping up into semi-pro adult football, they've done well - and eventually what will happen is that the ambitions of the senior club's committee and management will outstrip the initial intentions and they'll start signing players with no previous connection to the club. Fast forward a few years and the first team's packed with players that have come in and the homegrown academy players don't get a look-in which causes the senior club's calving off from the academy.

I was there last week at the Cumnock game so couldny be bothered going there again so soon! A lot of of the midweek games have been treks down to Ayrshire this season, so I've not been at as many.

A lot of the Glasgow-based amateurs can probably be ruled out on account of not having a fixed ground - the Central Scottish is generally reckoned the pick of the amateur leagues in the area, but a quick glance at the sides involved reveal most of their first-choice grounds to be a mixture of public parks, municipal 3G cages and sports centres, very few if any with much scope for development into "proper" football grounds with the facilities and ancillaries that would be deemed necessary if they were to start charging entry. Even then, a lot of the clubs tend to use several "home" grounds over the course of the season depending on what's both playable and available on a given weekend. There would need to be a fundamental change of focus from amateur clubs considering the move to switch from essentially recreational football to a spectator-facing nonleague model...it's not, and maybe shouldn't, be as easy as securing a block booking on a school 3G and firing in an application.

I can imagine - the ones I was talking about are just standard office workers so no real problem where they do THEIR job...good luck in the new one though

I know a couple of people who work in the civil service and they've been working from home the whole way through apart from a week or two downtime while they waited for laptops to be delivered right at the start. The problems they seem to have encountered have arisen in areas like the passport office where parts of the job are still paper-based thanks to Auntie Jean insisting on filling in a hard copy application form from the post office rather than applying online.

I'm sure if they let it off at the mouth of an estuary or the like it would be capable of doing a lot of damage locally, but that Day After Tomorrow shite they're spouting is fantasy island stuff. In order to generate a meaningful tsunami, an earthquake needs to be of around 7 on the moment magnitude scale...translated into megatonnage, close to 2000? The Indian Ocean tsunami unleashed the equivalent of something like 10,000MT and we didn't see any 500m waves....compared to that, anything humanity is capable of making go boom is just a pish in the pool.

Pilger was a genuinely ground-breaking documentarian in his day - I picked up a box set of his best work in a charity shop a while back and a lot of it is essential viewing - but in recent years he seems to have jumped the shark into full-on useful idiot territory.

Flipping channels there and I momentarily landed on BBC Parliament which was showing the Welsh assembly. Brilliantly, the Welsh for minister is apparently "weinidog"

Been watching a pair of bullfinches bringing back nest material to a conifer bush in our front garden all morning. They're quite late starters - the great tits that nest every year in an old flue pipe at the back of the house have been hard at it for weeks now.

Great time to be doing your year's national service if you're a Russian I imagine though that the vast majority of the extra forces that would generate would only be trained to a fairly basic level, and that there wouldn't be much if any investment in more advanced and technical skills if they've only got them for a year. More than likely that the conscripts they throw in would mainly be a cohort of infantrymen at a basic level of skill whose main contribution to a modern technical battlefield would be their quick ability to convert themselves into 12 stone of airborne mince.

If they do mobilise it's a sign of complete desperation and more or less an admission of impending defeat. Militarily, reservists are very much a "in case of emergency, break glass" option only to be used in extremis...in Britain unless there was a huge and imminent danger they would only countenance using ones that have been out for a few years...much longer and they're no more use than grabbing some guys off the street. Maybe less useful, as sometimes a little half-remembered knowledge can be a bad thing. Factor in that the Russians have already expended a lot of their first-echelon equipment and continue to piss their remaining assets up against the wall over a broad front rather than concentrating force at one or two strategically important points, and you could be looking at them launching pointless human waves of barely trained troops at a dug-in and tooled-up defence a la WW1.

I was initially thinking tundra and couldn't understand what it was censoring. Then I remembered the other name for boreal forest

I reckon the main issue is that in common with a lot of places there's a cohort of middle managers who are overly-wedded to office culture and politics and thrive on being present and visible because it's really all they've got to offer. They can't understand that the majority of people aren't champing at the bit to return to old ways when over the last two years they've been able to work just as well from home - maybe even marginally better. In future it'll be what informs people's decisions on where they want to work - I've already seen it happen when we were running some internal recruitments recently - the ones that the line managers were comfortable with primarily WFH going forward got plenty of interest, but the one where the LM's a well known old-schooler with a hardon for presence in the office didn't get a sniff.

That's wild. In terms of scientific usefulness it's right up there in Frankie Boyle "How many fruit pastilles would it take to choke a kestrel?" territory though. Hybridisation between two closely related species is of course possible and happens in nature - there's a bird that visits here in small numbers called the pomarine skua that there's absolutely no evidence of having existed any further back in time than maybe five or six hundred years. Current thinking is that small geographically isolated populations of two other species freely interbred and their offspring produced a third viable species. That being said, given some of the Russians' tactical awareness so far, maybe the experiments were more successful than they let on.

They've got previous for this type of batshittery of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog

Strange vibes in my place right now. We've been allowed back the last couple of months, but the vast majority of people have adapted well to WFH and have probably been a bit more productive in that setting without the distractions of open plan offices. It's been so successful that we've been informed from the very top that we shouldn't have "set days" to come in and should report any instances of staff being pressured into presenteeism....I'm guessing they can see savings to be made in real estate and so on in the future. It's some elements of middle management that seem to be losing their shit at these developments and are now in open rebellion...I think they've been projecting and telling each other that "everyone's desperate to get back into the office" for so long that they actually believe it was the case. Most people seem to have settled on coming in one or maybe two days a week to the utter impotent fury of the 2019 Reenactment Society who were gung-ho for everybody to be back in five days a week because they understood it better that way.

Forgot about that - I'd watched Midway a few months back as well! Yeah, that particular mission 4 out of 41 came back...

Absolutely - it was a more than decent plane in terms of performance by the standards of the time and the theatre of war it was being used in. You'd just wouldn't live very long flying one. In the Pacific theatre, the Americans were flying some real shiter planes in the early post Pearl harbor days too...you had the likes of the Vengeance which habitually flew so nose-up that the pilot was essentially flying the thing blind, and the ironically-named Devastator which was a torpedo bomber which had to slow down and fly low in a straight line towards its target at just over 100mph to deliver its torpedo...obviously most of them got blasted out the sky on their first mission.

Complete disregard for the safety of the crews can often favourably affect performance of military equipment - the one that I remember reading about is Japan's main WW2 bomber, the Mitsubishi Betty. They classed it as a heavy bomber although it was barely a medium bomber by Allied standards, but it was fast and had a long range. These characteristics were down to the fact that it was extremely light due to having absolutely no protection for the crew whatsover in terms of armour and not even self-sealing fuel tanks in the earlier models. The Allies came to know it as The Flying Zippo as it took only a hit or two to catch fire - there were even occasions where they were brought down by rifle fire from the ground.

TBH I did wonder if that had been the case, but there are so many hair-trigger irrational responses elicited on both sides of the Great Divide by now I wasn't sure. Figured it was somebody seeing the word "precautions" in my initial post and going thermobaric...that being said even when I was talking about precautions I was more meaning doing what I reckon most folk have been doing - a quick size-up of cost v. benefits and not doing anything that your gut reaction is that it seems dumb. I'd like to think the majority of people are intelligent enough to make their own decisions without recourse to government diktat. An example: in December we got an invite to one of my missus' workmates daughter's engagement. Wasn't a huge draw anyway as we'd only know a handful of folk there, and on top of that from talking to her we knew ahead of time they were one of those mad extended families that seemingly had been playing pass the parcel with the virus since Day One. Given their history, there was a sense that the evening wouldn't involve many fucks being given and also that one of us catching it might put the kibosh on Christmas for the second year running - her old man's immunocompromised due to arthritis medication he's on - so we said we already had something on that night. No big deal, and sure as f**k it transpired that one or more of those who did go turned up riddled and gave it to half the venue.

Some man. You'd think he'd have been happy with the first man up Everest thing.