A personal note from Mike Smithson – politicalbetting.com
A personal note from Mike Smithson – politicalbetting.com
PBers will notice that I have not been active recently. Just over a fortnight ago I had a fall which is not a very good thing for someone approaching their 78th birthday.
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It is the only thing that will save us from Global Annihilation.
@TSE running PB!?!? Sell everything! To the bunkers!
The thought occurs that there are quite a few of us on here who are retired with a bit of time to spare, and many with IT skills and experience. If there's ever a need for more support or input to keep the site going I am sure there would be willing and skilled volunteers (or semi-skilled in my case).
Just put the call out.
It will be nuclear war by January. Or aliens, natch
Hope the recovery continues, OGH
Nuclear War with Aliens?
Looking forward to next year's frenzy of political betting.
Sorry- thought you were proposing a toast.
Beyond that, get well soon OGH, for all our sakes.
Pool or sea?
So my dilemma is private pool, big pool, or sea
How the fuck are you meant to know what to do? It’s ridiculous.
Seems we have both been in the wars recently Mike, and best wishes to you and take care
I have had a couple of falls recently, but fortunately did not end up in hospital, and I am more aware and pleased I fitted handrails everywhere in the house and garden recently
It seems our family are going through a phase of emergency hospital visits with myself a month ago, our youngest granddaughter 10 days ago who is now OK, and last night another of our granddaughters admitted at 4.00am and is waiting for the surgeons to take out her appendix later today
You can sit around and do stuff, especially if you have some kind of towel or rug. Sometimes have a drink
Then you can walk over and go in the sea and then come out again
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
We are all very luck to have @TheScreamingEagles running the site.
If anybody has ideas for guest threads message me.
I reckon I’m the first person to realise this: beaches are nice. Lots of space and you can swim and stuff
Could be money in it
It's not always about you. Where's the "off topic" button? Oh it's gone.
Best wishes OGH.
You find a really nice beach, like this one, with warm sun and soft surf and white sand. Then you build a hotel RIGHT BY THE BEACH!! Call it a “resort”
So it’s easy for people to go down to the sea and come out again and sit on towels or special long chairs
Message me on vanilla
Also, beaches. = nice
hope you have a speedy recovery
Take it easy for a bit
Why be such a sourpuss? In a very real sense you are with me, via my endless descriptions, pointless comments and annoying photos
I’m going for a swim IN THE SEA
https://www.mediastorehouse.co.uk/science-photo-library/1838-megalosaurus-iguanodon-martin-6346659.html
Best wishes Mike, hope my colleagues are treating you well.
I suppose TSE has done well. Still has terrible fashion sense, mind. 😂
As an aside, ULA is currently up for sale, and the rumours are that the buyer is going to be Bezos's Blue Origin. Which will be quite a shake-up of the market. I really hope Bruno stays on.
An 87-year-old friend recently fell backwards on the stairs and hit his head. His wife drove him to the local hospital, which checked him out and said he was OK. The next day he had a headache and felt woozy. She returned him to the hospital, which this time carried out a scan. They found he had a fractured skull, a bleed to the brain and a fractured hip.
I do hope your hospital was more efficient. Best wishes for speedy recovery.
And thanks to TSE too, who does and sterling job and takes my teasing well.
In additional insanity, they also believe that ULA shouldn’t do reusability, since that’s what they (the parents) think they can sell to the US Taxpayers. See the X38. Yes, this completely ignore the large, stainless steel, elephant in the room.
Blue buying ULA - not sure that will improve either. The management at Blue could do with wholesale replacement - but it would be unlikely to be Tory bringing in his guys.
The hedge fund buyout sounds horribly plausible - fly the Vulcan contracts out, gut the company.
A potential cover-up I unearthed in the weeds of Nadine Dorries’s book remains a mystery. It has damaged the BBC, the broadcast regulator, and the process of public appointments
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/63982/boris-johnson-nadine-dorries-ofcom
Not much unearthing required by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. He read about it in Nadine's book, or possibly the serialisation or coverage of the serialisation of Nadine's book.
Anyway, Nad got her way over the wily fixers and Boris appointed her nominee, Michael Grade, who luckily enough is a Tory anyway.
"Today 𝕏 and Elon faced a lot of adversity. Apple, Comcast, Disney, IBM, Lionsgate, Paramount, Warner Brothers, NBC universal, and the European Commission all pulled advertisement funding on 𝕏 because Elon has taken a stand against every form of racism.
This will not stop Elon however.
Tomorrow at 8am EST Starship will once again rise as a testament to adversities inability to stop Elon.
Nothing will stop humanity, nothing will stop SpaceX, nothing will stop 𝕏, and nobody can stop Elon.
Elon, you’re a hero of mine. It’s incredible to watch the work you do!"
No, they pulled advertising because your hero is an @sshat.
(BTW, I really wish I'd chosen a PB username of sshat, just for when people @'ed me...)
https://www.npr.org/2014/04/18/304552322/steely-dan-on-piano-jazz
Starts out a little slow, but picks up fast. Includes Josie and Black Friday performed live.
*basks in welcoming smiles*
*politely asks PB to stop cheering and sit down*
As an aside, can you remember how people said that SpaceX's Artmeis lander would require 16 refuellings in orbit? And Musky Baby said, at the time NASA awarded them the contract, that it would just be three or four? Well, SpaceX has now admitted it will be "high teens", which will have to be done quickly to avoid boil-off in orbit.
It wasn't even a good lie; it was a stupid lie. Especially when Blu Origin made this infrographic. How the Musk Fanois laughed at the time...
https://twitter.com/astrogrant/status/1725533704246939719
https://t.co/Twi4W2epdQ
No suggestion of anything too catastrophic though.
Koh Rong island in the Bay of Thailand
I STRONGLY recommend Cambodia at the moment. It is still empty post Covid. So it’s cheap and the beaches - as you can see - are blissfully quiet
I met a French couple kayaking today and they said even Angkor Wat is quiet. They had Ta Prohm (the famous temple with the tree growing out of the wall) to themselves
That’s basically unheard of. And paradoxically travel WITHIN Cambodia has never been easier, thanks to gleaming new Chinese roads. And the food is vastly improved from 5-10 years ago
So what is the definition of “fixing”?
Choosing a candidate the guardian doesn’t like?
Every sympathy, Mike, wish you well. My troubles are not only the result of a fall, but the fall exacerbated them.
People over 70 should avoid falling!
The scheme was planned over a number of years, and planning granted. Then, at the last moment, an 'environmental' group put in a legal challenge to stop it. Then when that lost, they appealed. This challenge delayed work six months, when they were just about to start work.
The builders, Skanska, got awarded £24 million to compensate them for the delays.
That's £24 million, on top of the legal and other costs to fight the challenge.
This fuckwittery is one of the reasons why our infrastructure costs so much.
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/national-highways-pays-skanska-additional-24m-for-a428-black-cat-scheme-after-legal-delays-16-11-2023/
And Angkor Wat was indeed busy.
You have to admire the relentless British tourist. We’re everywhere. Either we still have the imperial spirit to conquer everywhere, and it is now sublimated into tourism, or we still have the perpetual and pathological need to escape our climate
Perhaps it is a mix of both
I’m pretty sure the reality will be revealed quite soon