Fullerene

Jupiter, Saturn and Mars in close proximity. In other words not a star at all. Oops.

It is worse than that. They claim their book is the word of God which would suggest he didn't know where the sun went either. Maybe a more convincing holy book would have been one that accurately explained stars, planets and other astronomic bodies thousands of years before we learn these things for ourselves. Maybe not for me but it would be a start.

Really? Presumably Homer and Marg put a stop to that.

There are all sorts of famous people taking serious medication to cope with having a more fulfilling life than everyone else.

You missed out Manny from Runaway Train. Great role model again.

Conversations over the dinner table must be fun when Angelina comes to visit.

You are totally correct here but in my experience America is full of people who are slow to adapt. "If it good enough for grandpa then it is good enough for me". Not all of them but certainly some. Some of them think fondly of the confederacy.

Like you I am not religious and I don't give a shit what anyone else believes if it does not impose on me at all. I do object when they insist I believe in their nonsense too. When they torment impressionable children with stories of woe if they don't believe in the same thing too. When the laws of the lands are define according to superstitious bullshit. When they claim a monopoly on morality and commit the most heinous crime against anyone with different beliefs. When different strands of the same religion kill each other because they have no way of proving whose right and whose wrong. When they oppose any science that conflicts with their ideas. That's when it gets too much.

America is full of people whose descendants fled to America to escape religious persecution. They are religious because Grandpa was religious and he was religious because of his grandpa and so on and so on and so on. If you fled to America tomorrow because you believed in the Flying Spaghetti Monster then within no time at all they would have a law to ensure the right of your descendants to believe the same.

The Setif massacre in Algeria took place on VE Day. The French could celebrate victory over the Nazis but if the Algerians thought they could have their freedom too then that was a different matter. The French film "Outside the Law" includes this and is worth watching.

Curious to know how you can have capital punishment without invoking the "thou shalt not kill" clause. Also puzzled how that clause came after a previous clause saying this is precisely what to do to anyone who doesn't observe the Sabbath. (I still recall a debate about Sunday Ferries to Stornoway. A member of the Sabbath Day Observance Society declared "we can't have that. Otherwise the islands will go the way of Inverness where the Gospel has marched out of town".)

Including Cherilyn Sarkisian and Andre Aghassian.

.. does that include your daughter's boyfriend?

It is quite simple. A lot of foreign countries are full of .. er .. um .. foreigners. However some foreign countries are not really foreign at all. So basically this is an alliance of not really foreign foreign countries. Makes total sense to me! .. until you discover that these not really foreign foreign countries are full of foreigners too!

"Munro bagging" involves climbing to the top of mountain in Scotland that is at least 3,000 feet above sea level and then reciting a poem. If you forget to recite a poem then the whole thing is ruled invalid and you will have to do it again.

France has a larger GDP than all of Africa.

They should care. Nowadays Question Time is total crap because of the person who is in charge of it. A big fan of Nigel Farage. It would be a shame if more and more programs went the same way.

Not sure you got this right. George Lucas was a big fan of Dad's Army and said it inspired him to write Star Wars. "May the force be with you" was first used by Captain Mainwaring. Alec Guinness got to appear in Star Wars because Lucas thought he had been in Dad's Army. There are dozens of connections. I am surprised you don't already know that.

While cinema goers await the next James Bond film, work is already underway developing the screenplay for the one after that. "Snap, Crackle, Pop" is one of Ian Fleming's lesser known stories. In it Spectre attempt to gain control of the world's supply of breakfast cereals. Only 007 can stop them. Billy Connelly has been recruited as the arch villain and Iron Maiden have been asked to provide an upbeat theme song. You will never look at breakfast the same way again.

Surely it is not just one woman involved in the fishing industry!

Yes. He opened a can of worms here.

I know what you are saying but I never had to live through a war like that. He was not alone. I met several people of that generation who had the same attitude. "You started this war. It is now obvious you are not going to win it. Why don't you just give up." Lots of wars are like that. It is obvious who is going to win but for some reason it takes years before they do. When Hiroshima was bombed, I suspect lots of people welcomed the end of the war that happened soon afterwards. I doubt they considered the true horror of it all or whether it was even necessary. That discussion happened later.

Everybody behaves badly during a war. However there were two countries who were definitely the agressors and definitely wanted a war with everyone else. Even when Nazi Germany was at war with a dozen countries they were looking around for a dozen more. Whenever I spoke to my father about the war and mentioned Cologne or Hamburg or Dresden he was adamant that they deserved whatever they got. If they didn't want to be bombed to bits then they shouldn't have started the war in the first place. It is easy with hindsight to say some actions were excessive but at the time a lot of people were fed up with the war and didn't care what happened to the Germans or the Japanese if it meant the war would come to an end.

Actually I do know what Imperial Japan did. They were a bunch of evil shit who committed atrocities against everyone including their own people should anyone step out of line. The Nazis were evil shits as well. Both lots were definitely the bad guys and everyone fighting them was definitely the good guys, including Stalinist Russia which was pretty brutal in its own way. It's brilliant that the Nazis and Imperial Japan were defeated. The world is better without them. That said, there is no need to go on and on and on and on about it like somehow the world has stopped. Even in the defeated countries there were lots of men, women and children who were not inherently evil but they suffered and died all the same. Other countries would like to think of the war as a nasty experience best forgotten. Why can we not do the same?