WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Tizer]

RAF planes were intercepting Russian `Bears' yesterday off the Scottish coast. Two jet fighters, Tornados or Typhoons, zapped over us in the afternoon going east, perhaps also going after Russian interlopers off Cornwall again. NATO warships and aircraft are carrying out an exercise in the Norwegian Sea to test their ability to detect submarines. The part of `enemy' sub is being played by a modern German U-boat...like old times! A US commander was asked if they'd detected any Russian subs; the answer was `no comment'. Apparently Russia now has 60 submarines and they spend most of their time sitting on location in deep water, recording everything happening on the surface and around them. They are said to have better subs now than we or the US. Curiously, Japan now has one of the most advanced military submarines and is selling the same model to Australia. It's also making a play to sell military aircraft to the UK, Canada and other countries. Putin spent a lot of time with the Chinese premier during the Moscow parades last week and they've hatched various plans for cooperation which will take some of the pressure off Russia that we in the West applied after the Ukraine trouble started.

[Stanley]

Russia announced the other day that it has launched its quietest submarine ever. Shades of The Hunt for Red October! Janet and Harry's work on Battle Space Management will be getting upgraded! Subs lurking on the bottom and listening is common. When the Kursk went down and the US denied it had subs in the region after being accused of an underwater collision Harry told me that there was always an LA Class sub sitting on the sea bed monitoring Russian Naval movements in that region. Turned out he was right, it was their recording of the sound of the Kursk exploding that pinpointed the cause of the accident, hydrogen peroxide fuelled torpedoes failing.
The confirmation of Richard Milner's win in Craven Ward in the local elections. Barlick is now a LibDem power centre! Well deserved, they are the driving force behind all the recent successful initiatives in the town. A shining example for the wider party of where the LibDems traditionally fit into our system. The number of MPs isn't as important as what's happening on the ground. Remember, in the final analysis, all politics is local!

[Tizer]

Here's one of those "I just don't believe it" moments. A BT Openreach engineer visited today after my warning that the phone cable running down our lane to about 30 houses has heavy trees leaning against it and will soon break. As well as the trouble caused for those householders the cable is above the lane and could injure pedestrians or damage vehicles when it falls. For two more months we have heavy traffic on the narrow lane due to the main road being closed. Now here comes the interesting bit...BT now won't cut trees until the cable breaks! He agreed with me that it's crazy but they are not allowed to touch the trees until the damage is done. The land on which the trees stand is not owned by anyone and neither the council Highways department nor the Environment Agency will take any responsibility. So we have to wait until the cable comes down and then start the process of contacting BT...the world is going bonkers!

The council Highways department have already made enemies locally. The lane which is getting all the diverted main road traffic runs for two miles from our village to another one across the moor. The traffic is causing lots of trouble, stress and danger with most vehicles driving far too fast. The parish councils of both villages have, separately, asked for the Highways manager responsible to come to the parish council meeting and explain what they might be able to do to slow down the vehicles and ease the problems. He has refused in both cases. We did get a Somerset county councillor to attend the meeting and he was as annoyed as we were with the Highways lack of response. He also explained that just about everything that might be possible couldn't be done in the time available anyway, and some things were simply `not policy' or `not allowed'. We had asked for the police to put a speed check unit in the lane but the councillor's reply was another "I just don't believe it" moment - the police said it was too dangerous! Apparently they also consider it too dangerous even if the lane was receiving only it's usual light traffic. Time for a lie down in a darkened room....

[Stanley]

Kafkaesque.... You give a perfect illustration of what happens when central control has no appreciation of local problems. Just imagine how different it would be if the local authorities had power to act under the umbrella of overwhelming local need. As things stand you only have one alternative, direct action.... A few energetic young lads with chain saws..... As for the traffic, a few strategic holes in the road......

[Nolic]

I got a message from Mo yesterday via Facebook saying that she is OK but just waiting for another skin graft. Nolic

[Marilyn]

Good on you, Moh.
Hang in there. I know your lovely hubby is taking good care of you.

[Tizer]

As things stand you only have one alternative, direct action.... A few energetic young lads with chain saws..... As for the traffic, a few strategic holes in the road......

The way the branches have grown it's now going to be very difficult for anyone to cut them off without the risk of bringing the line down. No-one else would want to touch them for fear of being sued for compensation by BT. (Catch 22.) As for the traffic...the county councillor suggested we leave our vehicles on the road to slow down the speeding vehicles...we had to laugh, he doesn't seem to have got into his head the fact that it's a single track lane. And some residents have already had their cars damaged even though they are parked alongside the lane and not even encroaching on the tarmac. We asked for speed bumps but they can't fit them within the time scale. (Yet the Highways people had planned the diversion a year ago and could have fixed them in advance.) So much for `localism' - I wonder what happened to that buzzword?

[Stanley]

It was an 'aspiration' not a 'policy' and so never was regarded seriously. The greatest use of localism has been to transfer responsibilities to local authorities without funding to have any effect on them. Get used to it, there will be more.....

[Stanley]

The Battle of the Bikers in the US. I once met a biker at Rio Hondo College in LA. his name was Chainsaw and he was due in court the following day on a murder charge. I have a pic but can't find it! Very strange people.....

[plaques]

Waterfoot used to stage a bikers day. The town centre was closed off with all the bikes lined up on show. There must have been hundreds of them. The bikers themselves looked like they had suffered very hard lives. I doubt if any of them would have made it into a beauty contest. Having said that, the atmosphere was open and friendly and you could talk bikes to anyone. The only person I saw with a can of beer in his hand was one of the local drunks. When you are sat astride a £10 grand+ machine with the performance of a formula one racing car the last thing you want to be doing is drinking beer. Real enthusiasts of any following are generally no trouble its the hangers on that cause all the bother.

[Tizer]

Bikers come to our village street fair and take people on rides to make money for charity.
With talk about halving the drink-drive blood alcohol limit the bikers wouldn't be able to even have that one can of beer! I think for my next business enterprise project I'll launch canned drinks which contain lemonade but look just like strong beer on the outside, then market them to bikers and football fans so that they can still look tough. The labels will feature brand names like Killer's Brew and graphics mimicking the new Mad Max movie!

[Stanley]

I suppose it's a matter of personal preference but I have always suspected many clubs and gangs as often being the refuge of basically insecure individuals who need the reinforcement of others. All right, I know it's a flawed theory, I'm all in favour of the WI! I think I follow Groucho's dictum and refuse to join anything that will accept me as a member.... 'Chainsaw' disturbed me, he struck me as being a very dangerous individual and best avoided. My mate Susi had got him to in to college to speak to her class and answer their questions but I think he was hard core and not representative of the sort of bikers we have in Britain.
See THIS for a BBC report of the arrest of nine men who might be the Hatton Garden burglars. If so it's an impressive bit of police work. I wonder how much of the loot will be recovered? Also, what embarrassing stuff might come to light. It was reported that a family regarded as possibly the most criminal in Britain had boxes in there....

[Bruff]

On Hatton Garden, a father and son are included among those arrested. For those of a certain age, the name of the father reported in the press might ring a bell. He was/is an associate of the notorious Kenneth Noye and was at Noye’s house when he (Noye) killed the undercover policeman post the Brinks Matt heist.

If these are indeed the ‘lags wot dun it’ so to speak, then they are ‘old-school’ London villains/robbers and the type the fictional Regan and Carter took down in 'The Sweeney'. An interesting fact about these old school robber-types is just how many of them come from the SE London/Kent hinterlands. I imagine that the police very quickly had a good idea who was behind this, despite the press speculation it was a gang of Eastern Europeans.

Richard Broughton

[chinatyke]

Russian Antonov AN-30 spotted over Colne. The Russkis are after Sabden's Treacle Mine secrets.

click here

[Stanley]

Richard.... Very impressed by your memory, yes I remember Noyes.... Impressive how fast the police got onto them.... I hope they have the right target and can make it stick but I wonder how much of the loot has already exited the country......
As for the Antonov, we have a reciprocal arrangement with the Russians so I don't see what the fuss is about. Menwith Hill and Salmsbury will both be on Google Earth.... I suspect that much more intrusive monitoring is being done on both sides by satellite and interception of communications....

[Big Kev]

It's all happening in the Town Square this weekend Bands on the Square 2015 Bryan Fieldhouse has been out with the drone accompanied by the excellent Suburbam Symphony.

[Stanley]

Quite brilliant but being an old dinosaur I'd love to see the footage of the town more clearly, fascinating technology....

[Big Kev]

Quite brilliant but being an old dinosaur I'd love to see the footage of the town more clearly, fascinating technology....

Here you go Town Square

[Tizer]

On my broadband connection some of the OG pages with a lot of graphics (e.g. Shed Matters) are taking a long time to load. It wouldn't matter if I was opening the page to read a lot of information but often it's just to view a graphic or a some brief text. And there are a lot of topics to check out on OG! Is it possible to make the pages shorter so that they'd load faster? Is there a way to set a limit in megabytes on the contents of a page so that when the limit is reached the topic automatically starts a new page? I suppose the problem would be that the graphics are not physically stored in the page, and therefore the software wouldn't know the MB size of the page.

[plaques]

I've just checked out the last 'Shed Matters' Seven images plus the text. The total loading time was about 8 secs. My broadband speed is about 6.4 Mbps. An oldish Compaq with XP. (dinosaur that I am). Really no complaints.

[Big Kev]

Page 29, of "Shed" loaded in just over a second on my phone. I get about 20mbps when connected to the wifi.

[PanBiker]

It is all the images on the page Tiz, the page has to pull them from the gallery and resize to the default settings for the page. I know Stanley usually resizes his before uploading as do I when I post. Default for the page is 800x600, so any lag is a combination of the number being pulled and rendered from the gallery and of course your broadband and processing speeds for graphics.

What attracted my attention today was the run down to Stratford and back - 2.5 hours down and 5.5 hours to get home. No accidents just odd 50mph roadworks more like 10mph and the sheer weight of traffic, stop, crawl, start, stop, repeat all the way from Cannock to J21 for the M62. No point taking to the A roads this time as the M62 was jammed as was the M60 round Manchester so all A's gridlocked as well, ready for my tea if it is three hours late..

[Stanley]

Kev, thanks for that.... what a wonderful tool.

Sorry If my image rich posts are causing a delay. Ian is right, I render most of my OG images to 800dpi width unless I have something that can really be viewed better when you click on it and get a larger image, like some maps. Thanks to P for his patience, 8 seconds would seem a long time yo me! The other thing about 800 is that it's a practical size if someone wants to download the image and print it. I'm sure that many of the pics on forgotten corners are copied and I have no objection to that. It seems to me that this is one of the functions of OG, making rare images more easily available.
Looking forward to F1 practice later today, from the reports, Lewis is smoking!
But one thing struck me yesterday as I was reading the depressing accounts by Stiglitz of the extent of inequality in the world today. I shall be watching images of the most expensive sport in the world in the most affluent piece of real estate on earth. I shall still watch it but it gives me pause for thought.....

[Big Kev]

Kev, thanks for that.... what a wonderful tool.

Here's another, from Letcliffe this time Drone
Barlick based company, The Reverb Factory, produce a lot of locally based videos The Reverb Factory

[Stanley]

I remember seeing that one before. Wonderful clarity! Have a word with him and ask him if he could do a flyover of the Shitten Ginnel area where I am positive that Barlick's ancient Saxon church was. Who knows, it might give us some clues.... I've been shouting about it for years, even tried to get Time Team interested but no joy. If we could ever prove it it would give Barlick even more street cred because these early churches are so rare. We've plenty of documentary evidence but nothing on the ground.....