jonthebhoy

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek! :yucky: JTB

Many thanks to all those who bought tickets. Your support is well and truly appreciated and noted. JTB

The k800i is still the one that's grabbing me but I need to play a bit more hardball with my provider. JTB

1- Black Sub (Since had it modded over by Tommy) 2- Paul 3- Yes and Yes Cue for a song..............."Memories......like the corners of your mind" JTB

Thanks for your help guys. I currently have an LG 8180 on the Video & Talk & Text 350 tariff. The camera is crap quite frankly. Three are now messing me around a bit. The deal they phoned me about yesterday (half price rental for 14 months on my existing tariff) appears not to be available today (they now want me on a higher tariff to get the K800i). I’ve told them I’m no longer interested and am now considering going to another provider. I’ll let them chew on that for a while. JTB

I'd have their guts for garters. Bastards.

Looking forward to the pictures Michael. It sounds like it will be one mighty fine watch. JTB

Thanks guys..........most of these aren't available with my type of contract esp the Treos, however I have had my eye on the K800i as recommended by Everythingape. The 3.5 megapixel camera attracts me. @ Neil - Might be fine for the upwardly mobile tank commander in Thailand but can't see me doing a Dom Jolly down Dumbarton High Street with that thing. JTB

Well done Chris and to everyone else! JTB

Oh and while we're on the subject of songwriters my personal favourite is someone who most of you won't have heard of................Clive Gregson. The man is a melody magician as well as a mighty fine guitar player. http://www.clivegregson.com/ JTB

Having had Modern Times for a few days now I'd give it 4 stars. Never having been a great Dylan fan I have to say that this is very listenable. Some of the "old boys" like Dylan, Young, Stills in their dotage seem to be inspired by a submission to the realisation of what mortality really means and are able to muster one or two last hurrahs. True in this case although Bobby's never been stuck for a rhyming couplet or two in the past. Very enjoyable. Off to see Steve Forbert tomorrow night who has never had the acclaim he deserves. JTB

Admin - it looks the dogs [censored] but alas they're not offering it or anything similar. Don't really need the PDA side of things though. Many thanks for the suggestion. JTB

To earn a few extra pennies I used to do some trick cycling. JTB

Aye..........bikes have come a long ways. To think I used to deliver my papers in this: The eagle eyed among you will notice the holster attached to the frame! It was a tough area. JTB

As the title says, I'm due an upgrade from three.co.uk The tariff is sorted so I just need a bit of advice on what handset you might recommend. My main personal criteria are: Reasonable camera (>1 megapixel) Bluetooth mp3 capable Not too bothered about video. Any help would be appreciated. JTB

Are they AR coating headlamps? JTB

Simply aghast..............don't you know Ethal's music lives on and is quite de rigeur these days: Have a sample listen here. JTB

Pssst.............anyone wanna buy a ticket? JTB

Bettered only by the classic Saving Ryan's Privates. JTB

You're having a laugh. He's having a laugh. Theakston's Old Peculiar Old Speckled Hen Deuchars IPA We're supposed to be talking about beer! Ten good reasons to drink real ale by Charles Foster Britain is rediscovering, just in time, that some good things are not mass-produced, pre-packaged, hysterically advertised and celebrity-promoted. One of those things is real ale. The stereotype of the real ale drinker is laughably out of date. If you think of matted beards, mucky cardigans and huge bellies, you need to get out more. Real ale is live beer which continues to develop in the cask. This further fermentation makes the beer naturally lively. It is either pulled from the cask by hand-pump or, even better, simply runs out by gravity. Its blasphemous caricature, keg beer, is dead, pasteurised and filtered. It undergoes no secondary fermentation, and often nestles under a protective blanket of inert gas. It fizzes with injected carbon dioxide. Lager is a different style of beer, in which the fermentation happens at the top rather than the bottom of the vat. There is an honourable continental tradition of lager-making, and there are some magnificent cask-conditioned lagers to which all the real ale plaudits apply. But they are rarely seen here. The fair name of lager has been demeaned. The obscenely overpriced lad-fuel of the world has as much in common with real lagers as keg beer does with real ale. Here are ten reasons to reject what passes for beer in the licensed ale-houses of Britain, and to ask for the real thing for once. 1 - because real ale tastes of something In a recent Hobgoblin advert for real ale, a grotesque figure in a pub, cradling a pint of beer, sneers over his shoulder at a group of callow drinkers: "What's the matter, Lager-Boy? Afraid you might taste something?" The gibe is just. Have you ever wondered why the lager mass-producers market their stuff as best drunk ice-cold? It is because cold anaesthetises your taste buds. To chill beer to near freezing point is like injecting lignocaine into your tongue. It stops the punter finding out the depressing truth - that there is nothing there to taste. Drink lager at a temperature at which nerves work, and the manufacturers would be rumbled. Real ale, though, is more confident. Although the old obsession with warm beer is, thankfully, long gone, at physiological temperatures you can get an explosion of complex tastes. Of course you might not want that: you might want something which tastes of nothing, is more expensive than real ale, and eventually makes you fall over. If so, a simple intravenous injection of phenobarbitone would be more sensible. 2 - because real ale tastes good Not always, of course. Since real ale, unlike dead, pasteurised keg beer, is a live substance, still developing in the cask, it needs to be kept properly so that it develops properly. This demands skill on the part of the cellarman. You can load keg beer straight off the lorry, connect it up, and drink it. Since it is dead, it keeps for ever. But real ale is temperamental. If it is badly treated it will not taste good. Many a drinker has been put off real ale drinking after a visit to a pub which doesn't understand real ale. But to go back to keg beer is like opting for a lifetime of necrophilia because of one nasty experience with a living human being. But when it is good, it can be very, very good. The most pretentious vocabulary of the most poetic wine-tasters fails when confronted with good real beer. There is some memorable stuff lying in England's beer engines. One of the enduring caricatures of real ale drinkers is of the Reminiscer - the man who sits in the corner of the pub and tells you, sip by sip, of the pint of Old Scrotrot which he had in the Anencephalic's Head one June in 1972. The picture embodies and generates all the English prejudice against obsessive train-spotting types, but there's a reason for it. The reason is that there's something to remember. No one has ever said: "You get a marvellous 500 ml of EuroPiss in the Happy Slapper. Amazing, it is. Can't think quite how to describe it." The keg or lager drinker's Friday night diary reads: "Had 10 pints of the usual. Threw up. That left room for a Cat Vindaloo." You need 10 pints of that to create some sort of sensation, even if that sensation is simply nausea and eventual oblivion. You only need one cc of well-kept real ale. 3 - because real ale is good for you Strange but true. Since it is a live substance, each mouthful is a fecund soup of medically helpful micro organisms. I spend a lot of my life in fetid squats in hot, faraway places. The best possible training your gut can get for that is a regular diet of the real stuff. It will mean that you spend a lot less time squatting fetidly. Real ale is also heaving with B vitamins, iron and anti-oxidants. You will want to live longer in order to drink more beer, and are likely to be able to. Drink lager, and your quality of life will be miserable. Mercifully, since it is biochemically obnoxious and more often the drink of choice of violent people, you are likely to put out of your misery sooner. 4 - because you drink real ale in good places By which I don't just mean chocolate-boxy thatched pubs with real fires, and clay pipes, and steak and kidney pud, and parrots, and resident ghosts, and fiddlers, and farting wolfhounds, and skittles, and freezers full of wildlife, and huge-breasted bar maids with PhDs in Anglo-Saxon. But all these things are splendid, and you don't get any of them if the pub doesn't take its real ale seriously. What you can be sure of is that if a landlord can be bothered to nurture his real beer as he needs to do in order to keep it right, he can be bothered to nurture the other things in his pub, and is likely to nurture you too. 5 - because you don't drink real ale in foul places Sadly, of course, if the landlord couldn't give a toss about his beer, he is unlikely to give a toss about the pub, except as a mechanism for extracting money from the pockets of the gullible and ignorant. Real ale is like many rare and sensitive animals. It is driven out by noise and smoke and bright lights. It thinks that pubs are places in which to drink, talk, laugh, sing and play darts, rather than places for standing sullenly, fighting, and catching herpes from teenagers. 6 - because every pint of real ale is a blow for the little man against the huge multinationals Real ale is political. The multinationals hate it, and can't produce it properly. They have persistently bought up real ale breweries and then shut down the real ale brewing. They buy real ale pubs, and smash them up, banishing the real ale and making them conduits for their own beer. The pub chains hate real ale too. It requires skill and time to keep it well, and it therefore demands managers who are take an individual pride in their product. That sort of anarchic, workmanlike character doesn't fit well into the culture of grey, corporate blandness which organisational bureaucrats love so much. The profit margins on pasteurised beer and lager are always going to be bigger than on real ale. You never have to pour keg beer away: it emerged, tasting of nothing, from the vast chemical plant where it was manufactured, and, unless the pub is at the epicentre of a major nuclear catastrophe, will continue to taste of nothing whatever you do to it. Real ale goes against the trends. When the tendency is towards centralized mass production, generally abroad, real ale tends to be produced in small plants by eccentric individuals who talk anachronistically about "craft brewing". It is resolutely and distinctively local. The barley often comes from the farm next door, and the yeast was often swapped in a dark wood for a coracle. When the tendency is towards the production of absolutely uniform products, the real ale world glories in thousands of different brews, some of them only produced in volumes of a barrel or so. Drinking a pint of real ale from a micro-brewery is as effective a blow against globalisation as heaving a breeze-block through the window of the World Bank. 7 - because nice people drink real ale I think this follows from everything above. It is certainly my experience. With one caveat. Quite a lot of people haven't heard the real ale gospel. Those who have not heard cannot be damned. Of those who have heard and drunk, there are no decent people who go back to the ways of keg and lager. 8 - because idiots don't drink it Nobody, but nobody, really drinks keg beer or lager because, having investigated the matter fully and tried out real ale, they genuinely think that keg or lager tastes better. It objectively doesn't. But lots of things come into the decision about what to drink. If you are a philistine, you will like the things which go along with keg. You will like smoke and footballers' haircuts and fruit machines and big-screen TV and smelly toilets. If you are so lacking in conversational confidence that you need music thumping out in the pub to cover your embarrassing silences or stuttering ventures into speech, you are unlikely to want to, or to be able to, grapple with the complexity of real ale. If you are a sheep, you will, despite your basically decent urges, want to follow the people who opt for keg. Which brings me to my next point. 9 - because drinking real ale shows you're an individual There is strong cultural pressure to pretend that keg and lager are good things and that real ale is the province of folksy, smock-wearing mediaevalists. Millions of dollars of advertising money scream that lager is cool and gets you laid. Real ale, which is made by people rather than balance sheets, can't compete. In a face to face battle based on taste, quality, interest and basic bloody integrity, keg and lager don't dare to mince out of the corner towards real ale. There's no contest. But there are few voices at the moment which point out that the Lager Emperor has no clothes. Let it be shouted from the rooftops: he hasn't. Until the crowd acknowledges it, though, listening to the evidence of their senses rather than the cynical voices of the advertising boys, real ale will be the secret drink of a resistance army. 10 - because it is real ale The name says it all. It is real stuff for real people, drunk in real places for real reasons. Case rests JTB

Point taken if you like fizz and barfing all night............me I don't so I stay away from fizzy beers and lagers. Strangely enough I drink Oirish and the occasional Scottish Real Ale like Greenmantle or some of the Bellhavens...............so I fart all night instead! JTB PS - I used to frequent this little hostelry on a regular basis: http://glasgow.openguide.co.uk/wiki/Bon_Accord

I could be here all day but to save you and me the bother, go here: http://www.beers-scotland.co.uk/ JTB PS - Budweiser is closer to lager than beer IMHO.

And when did lager (gnats [censored]) ever become a beer. Educate yourself man!!! JTB

On the MacD thing we're trying to wean our people off this crap by hiking the prices. On the beer thing........quality costs just a little more. JTB

We are a witty race who have an uncanny ability to find the humour in pretty much anything, no matter how mundane, serious, tragic or just damn pointless. We like to laugh and by god above the rest of the world provide us with an ample supply of reasons for doing so. We find it easier to get through day with a laugh or two rather than a blabber. Try telling me that this is wrong. Our world reknowned Edinburgh festival pops out new comedic talent faster than Roger Federer’s tennis ball machine, year in year out. Some of the worlds funniest men hail from these shores……Chic Murray, Stanley Baxter and Billy Connolly to name only a few. I could go on with lots of other reasons but I’m sure Neil will chip in with more. An America poet, E.E. Cummings (I’m sure he’s of Scottish ancestory) put’s it best when he says: “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.” JTB