WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[Stanley]

Mine has a new Duracell battery in it now......
What grabbed me was that clown Trump advocating banning entry to the US for all Muslims. The man is dangerous!

[Tizer]

He's also a blatant liar but his followers are too gullible to notice and too keen to believe his pronouncements. He even makes contradictory claims in consecutive statements. He bellows out all these claims and statements to his followers and they just cheer. In a childish `mine's bigger than yours' claim he said his private jet is even bigger than Obama's Air Force One when the truth is that Obama's 747 is 232 feet long whereas Trump's 757 is a measly 179 feet. But at least some of his own more influential supporters are getting cold feet and with a bit of luck he'll implode soon!

[Stanley]

I talked to an American friend I trust and he says that despite the fact that Trump is a jerk, he is voicing what many main stream Republicans think. They never got over having Obama in the White House! Don't write Trump off too quickly, there is a swing to the far Right. Look at France..... This is very dangerous stuff and of course it is just the reaction that Daesh was aiming for, spreading internal dissension in the West.

[Tizer]

As I wrote in the Politics thread, Trump will self-destruct. If he doesn't blow up soon then other republicans will carry out a controlled explosion!

[Stanley]

Tiz, I would love to see that happen but Trump is only a symptom of a deeper malaise. It is frightening how many people sympathise with his attitudes and I know that my friends in the US view him as a real threat. Not because he might get elected, Hillary Clinton is favourite for that, but because he and his supporters encourage the worst aspects of intolerance which is unfortunately a very real aspect of American thinking. For good historical reasons there is a very durable undercurrent of racism and fascist tendencies in the American psyche.... Quite instructive to see how popular comment on the song 'Strange Fruit' is at the moment......

[Bodger]

Maybe just coincidence but when i was a lad in the West Riding Trump = a Fart

[Stanley]

Quite!

[Moh]

Just filled the car up with petrol at Asda - down to 99.7p per litre for 3 days only - Morrison's down to 99.9p.

[Stanley]

The price of oil is a big problem Moh, good for the motorist at the pumps but in the long run the lack of stability in the market is immensely damaging. It is skewing both investment and the rest of the energy market.
What got my attention was a series of three loud beeps repeated every minute.... It was the CO2 detector in the bathroom which monitors the air quality near the CH boiler. It's a sealed unit and the three beeps indicate that the detector itself has reached the end of its life... No alternative but to replace it. It took me ten minutes to work out how to switch it off.

[PanBiker]

Our youngest, Jack, moving out into his first step on the housing ladder. He has lived in rented with his mates but has bought a nice tidy house down on South Avenue. He has been back at home since last New Year and has managed to save for the deposit (with help from the bank of mum and dad). There will probably be one or two jobs for me no doubt. He did tell me not to put my tools away when I finished the kitchen.

[Stanley]

Good lad! I've just remembered those folk that had mortgages 1% under bank rate. I wonder if any of them are still being paid by the bank.....
The fact that it isn't raining and we have a proper frost!

[Tizer]

Some interesting photos related to the topic of `signs': LINK

[PanBiker]

Buying is a no brainer if you can stump up the deposit. Jacks house is a sensibly priced small terrace with an attic conversion. The mortgage he has secured comes out at less than what he used to pay in rent. The stumbling block is always the deposit for first time buyers, although a modest purchase, Jack's deposit was over three times what the total of our first house cost!

[Stanley]

Tiz, the 'All Directions' sign reminded me of the road sign I saw repeatedly in Holland. 'Anderes richtingen' which I think means 'all other routes'. The joke there is that a tourist had a miserable time trying to find the village named Anderes Richtingen.
Ian, Hey Farm cost me £2,200 including ingoings. I doubt if that would be a deposit for a garden shed these days..... ( '[ngoings' was the amount on top of the sale price to cover the value of things like the muck in the midden or any hay in the barn. £200 in the case of the farm.)

[PanBiker]

£2995.00 for my first house on York Street.

[Stanley]

This grabbed me yesterday! How often does one have to buy a new fire shovel these days? £5 invested at Shambles on the Square on a well made and presented shovel, it should last me out! The old one had worn to the extent that a crack and a hole were developing at the root of the junction of the handle with the blade. It was second-hand when I got it so it owes me nothing.

[Stanley]

Jon's latest image of settlement at Stock.... Absolutely amazing and I can see that I am going to have to revise my view of that period. No shame in this, I have always said that research continually changes our perspective. Looking back over a thousand years is not an exact science!

[Stanley]

How ridiculously mild the weather is. All down to the jet stream tracking to the North and shielding us from Arctic weather. Met office are predicting the possibility of the warmest December ever recorded. Weird....
Today is going to be a good day for doing my annual backup of data from the FM3 to two external drives. Better safe than sorry!
09:00. Postman Pete delivered my CI casserole this morning. He said he'd been considering dropping it at Happy Shopper, he is evidently active and reading what's going on..... Only one problem, due to bad description on the website it's a lot deeper than I expected, another stewpot! No matter, it will serve.
I've done my annual backup to my oldest external drive, the Samsung, no problem. The newer hard drive, a Seagate, failed completely. I shall get another Samsung and archive the lot!

[Tizer]

My Toshiba external hard drive is still going strong.
Casseroles and ovens...when we bought a new oven recently Mrs Tiz looked at those dual ones but when I measured up we wouldn't have been able to get our biggest casseroles into them, so we bought a normal single oven. Even then, some had a fixed tray which would have prevented us using the big casseroles.

Down here we often say "Anything can happen in Bridgwater". Here's an example of why we say that...Dragon

We've had one of those "What we did this year" Christmas cards from a friend. It describes how she took a holiday in Nepal and stayed in a village. Three weeks after she returned to the UK the Himalayan earthquake took place...the village was destroyed, only one house left standing.

[Tripps]

I saw my friend Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury again this afternoon. Striding vigorously along, at the back of Kings College. He was windswept, and dressed all in black with a long overcoat. Unworthy thought - but I could just picture him as the next Doctor Who.

[Stanley]

Not unworthy at all! I think he would be a natural....
Well done the Toshiba drive!
How good my pot of proper coffee tastes first thing in the morning..... It's the simple pleasures that please most....
THIS news item grabbed me. Remember this bloke trying to jack up the price of drugs? Martin Shkreli has been arrested on unrelated charges. I know that we are warned against making instant evaluations of a person's worth on slim evidence but I refuse to stop doing it. As Hawkeye said to Winchester when he complained that people seemed to take an instant dislike to him; "Look at it this way, it saves so much time!". I have this young man marked down as a thoroughly venal, self centred brat who was lucky enough to stumble into wealth and it went to his head. I regard news of his arrest as good news.....

[Tizer]

More on charities from The Times: Times
`Charities cash in on relatives of the dead'
"Charities are trawling through public records of wills so that they can chase bereaved relatives for gifts, an investigation by The Times has found. The practice, which helps them to claim the estimated £2 billion a year they are left in bequests, emerged after a grieving daughter was sent a letter by the RSPCA asking whether her father was dead yet. Fundraisers defended the process and said that it prevented unscrupulous families purloining money intended for good causes."

And it follows this 2 days ago: Charity salaries
`Anger over six-figure pay deals for charities '
" More than a thousand charity chiefs are paid six-figure salaries by voluntary organisations dependent on donations, endowments or public funding, The Times can reveal. The first investigation into executive pay at Britain’s 1,000 highest-earning general-purpose charities reveals that 1,080 executives at 390 organisations receive salaries of at least £100,000 a year. In some cases pay has soared even as income or donations have slumped."

[Tripps]

In fairness, - someone on the radio has pointed out that they don't 'chase bereaved relatives for gifts'. They contact executors of wills when they see in the public record of the will, that there is a bequest in the will to their charity. He said they were obliged by law to see that the will was executed as per the deceased's wishes.

[Stanley]

I've set up and run charities and had dealings with the Charities Aid Foundation who are basically the final arbiter. None of mine have ever paid salaries to anyone, all run by volunteers. What surprised me was to find that there were no rules at all capping the salaries that could be paid to administrators. There is a whole tranche of very old charities who are well endowed, their job is simply to disburse the income from investment to applicants and in effect they have complete autonomy. I doubt if some would stand close scrutiny, the salaried posts are sinecures and in effect they are a private club. Many of the normal charities that exist on donations have levels of 'administrative expenses' that are quite amazing...... There is also the separate matter of the oddball organisations who do not disburse funds, but are in effect businesses taking advantage of being a 'charity', like schools and universities....
I always suspected that the regulations protected elements of the establishment who had carved out a niche for themselves.....
I came across one during my fund-raising career that was run by a golf fanatic. The registered office was the clubhouse of a private golf club!

[Tizer]

He said they were obliged by law to see that the will was executed as per the deceased's wishes.

That sounds odd. I would have thought it was the solicitors responsibility, not the charity's.