Phlegmatic

As it happens, a Honda S2000 seems a good car to do an emergency stop in. When the rush hour traffic in front of me on the A38 dual carriageway in Plymouth went from 30+mph to nil suddenly, I was able to stop and maintain control. In fact, the ABS didn't even kick in.

The motorcyclist in front of me (middle-aged bloke, biggish bike) was also able to stop in time.

Unfortunately, the motorcyclist in front of him (18 year old on a 125cc with skinny tyres) wasn't. He didn't hit anything, but he lost control of his bike and slid along the road.

( Read more )

I've been playing a lot of Forza Motorsport 3 this weekend on the XBox 360:



Really, really great driving game. Lots of (real world) cars an lots of tracks, many of which are real tracks. So I can, for example, drive a dark blue Honda S2000 around the Nurburbring. Which is fun. Every time you pass a certain number of points, you get given a new car to play with, so there is an element of driving just one more race to see what you're gonna get. My last car was an Alfa Romeo 8C - the fixed-head version of this: http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/109506.html

One track that Forza does not have is Dunsfold Aerodrome, and one car it doesn't have is the Chevrolet / Daewoo Lacetti. However, with a mod available at simracingworld.com, the PC game 'GTR2' can have both these. I've just driven around that track a few times trying to improve my lap time.

Why is that a particularly interesting combination of track and car? Well, let's just say that the Lacetti is not an expensive car (you might call it "reasonably priced") and in my best lap so far, I have managed to drive it around that circuit in the same time as Ewan MacGregor.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370266968824=

These made me laugh. Taken from "F In Exams: The Best Test Paper Blunders" by Richard Benson.

( Read more )

Did some late-night Christmas shopping in Plymouth tonight after work. Spent a lot of time wandering around one of the two branches of Waterstones because much as I like Amazon, browsing in a real bookshop is actually much easier if you don't know what you're looking for.

Anyway, careful study reveals that what seems like 80% - 90% of all books now fall into one of four genres:

1. Celebrity biographies (or more accurately, 'celebrity' biographies)
2. Historical fiction set somewhere in the Roman Empire
3. Novels about good-looking teenage vampires
4. Top Gear and spin-offs

If someone could write a book that combined all four elements, they'd sell millions.

Conversation at work today about the game Modern Warfare 2:



amy_chaffinch was saying that her boyfriend has bought it and likes it a lot. This prompted littlebrother to ask if this was not like one of us playing some kind of auditing simulation. You see, amy_chaffinch's boyfriend is a Royal Marine. Apparently most his fellow marines are fans of the game.

This got me thinking. Do pilots play 'Flight Simulator' in their spare time? Do doctors break out the wii and play 'Trauma Centre'? Do town planners play 'Sim City'? Do football managers play 'Football Manager'?

It also got me thinking what an auditing simulation would be like. This isn't a bad thing since I've rashly decided to rewrite the JOLF challenge for this year's You're Hired! heats and I want it to be an auditing simulation.

On January 19th 2003, the Oakland Raiders were the best team in the NFL.

Then their starting centre, Barrett Robbins had a complete mental breakdown and went missing in Mexico. The Raiders lost Super Bowl XXXVII 21-48 to a Tampa Bay side coached by the man who had coached the Raiders in the previous season.

Since that date, the Raiders have a worse record than any other NFL team. This weekend things got even worse.

( Read more )

This is definitely my favourite sitcom right now. If you haven't seen it, it's sort of an updated Yes, Minister.

Anyway, I thought I'd share an especially funny scene with you from the second episode of the new series. The bit I'm talking about starts at about 18 minutes 30. The minister (Rebecca Front) has just been briefing some journalists from The Guardian off-record about the problems in her department. Unfortunately, on the way down the stairs she carried on talking to a journalist (played by Zoe Telford from another of my favourite sitcoms - 'Absolute Power') who she then realises was not one of the off-the-record journalists. Peter Capaldi plays Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister's press secretary. I think Capaldi as Tucker is up there with Corbett as Steptoe or Cleese as Fawlty or Gervais as Brent or Coogan as Partridge. Or of course Hawthorne as Appleby.

( Link behind the cut, but only if it's after the watershed... )

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8361486.stm

To be read in conjunction with:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/rainforest-treaty-fatally-flawed-1809412.html

If Copenhagen produces anything at all, it will be an agreement for lots of nations to spend lots of money achieving almost nothing. "Something must be done" is not the same as "Anything must be done".

The team from JOLF that included bunn and me won the 2007 edition of this quiz, beating 47 other teams of five people in the ballroom of the Plymouth Holiday Inn:
http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/33260.html

Last night, a JOLF team of me plus four others won the 2009 edition.

Yay us!

'King Hereafter', by Lady Dorothy Dunnett

and

'Game Night', by Jonny Nexus



( Read more )

...and you were holding a concert in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, how would you make sure that only people with tickets could get in?


That's right, you'd build a big wall around the Brandenburg Gate to keep people out.

U2 and MTV.

Class.

http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/117639.html


I think I have more work for my twelve squaddies-of-justice...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/8342191.stm

I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Birmingham last night.

( Read more )

Former French president Jacques Chirac is likely to stand trial for corruption. He is accused of creating fake jobs to give to political allies and their relatives.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8333352.stm

( Read more )

There are more on Facebook if you're interested.




( More photos... )

Video footage of the golden eagles and otters I saw on Lewis and North Uist respectively. OK, the camerawork isn't exactly BBC Natural History department, but the footage of eagles was good enough for an RSPB guy to confirm that they were golden eagles rather than white-tailed or even just buzzards.

On North Uist, I stopped to take a wide angle shot of a large herd of mute and whooper swans. Basically a big bunch of not especially uncommon white birds.

Examining the photo on the camera's own screen didn't reveal anything extraordinary. Getting the camera home and looking at the photo on a 24" monitor revealed an extra bird in the bottom-left corner... (Click on the photo to make it bigger.)




That, my friends, is a male hen harrier.

Rumours apparently of a 'Dallas: the Next Generation', all about John Ross and Christopher but with maybe JR and Sue Ellen also appearing. I'm not one to say "squee", but I wonder what the Texan equivalent is. "Squee-haw"?

Ken Livingstone is very much of the opinion that Nick Griffin should not have been allowed to appear on Question Time and be allowed to share a platform with mainstream politicians since it serves to legitimise his cause.

Consider the photograph behind the cut...

( Read more )