WHAT ATTRACTED YOUR ATTENTION TODAY?

[David Whipp]

[Pluggy]

"Pluggy Memorial Smartphone" ?

Here's me naively assuming I hadn't kicked the bucket yet........

[PanBiker]

They obviously haven't looked at the street map. Unless they have moved Cornmill Terrace of course. A lot of cars to shift.

[Tizer]

I've seen some interesting behaviour on the roads in the last few days. During the week I made two journeys to a local town on different days. On each day I passed the same elderly gent on one of those mobility scooters on both my outward and homeward bound journeys (and he was likewise on his outward and homeward bound journeys). Because of seeing him at different points on the road (a fast class A road) I know he was travelling at least 5 miles each way. He was going at about walking pace and my first encounter was when I drove up onto the top of a bridge and suddenly found him in front of me on the other side. The scooter is so low that I hadn't seen him and I was only going at about 40mph at the time but it meant some emergency braking due to traffic coming the other way. There are white vans and boy racers driving on that road at 70mph and I'm surprised the man has survived this far. At least cyclists are higher up and mostly going faster. But it made me wonder - is it legal to drive those mobility scooters on fast main roads outside towns?

Then this morning I travelled to another local town for my flu jab at the surgery. This is another country A road and has many bends and hills. I found myself in a queue of cars behind a gaggle of cyclists, about 12 to 15 of them. The cars couldn't pass the cyclists because of the bends and the cyclists were slowing down because of the steep hills. There were some straight stretches when cars would have been able to drive past but the cyclists at the front were bunched up so that there wasn't enough space to safely pass. So the queue got longer and slower. And, again, that had me wondering - why were the cyclists at the front preventing the cars from passing them? Surely it would be better to get rid of the cars on the straight stretches? Or is there some sort of policy among cyclists now to deliberately obstruct cars when it suits them?

[Stanley]

Pluggy, that phone will always be associated with you and a kind deed. I tried my old number from the land-line this morning and it works! The Lady at EE did not lie!
Tiz, in a world where we mix slow and fast traffic on the same road the miracle is that there aren't more accidents....

[chinatyke]

The scooter is so low that I hadn't seen him...

Remember the Sinclair C5? A fraction of the height of a truck wheel and I always thought that it was so low it was just sheer stupidity. I think it was just the doggedness of Clive Sinclair that ever got it launched.

[PanBiker]

Here are the rules for mobility scooters (or a charter for accidents) depending on how you look at it, its pretty scary...

Mobility scooters and powered wheelchairs: the rules

[Tizer]

Thanks for that Ian; as you said, it's scary. On the road where I've seen this man and his scooter there are blind bends and the rise over the bridge and people frequently breaking the speed limit by a wide margin. It's a busy road and it also has artics and tractors with trailers. Personally I think the man is either mad or losing his mental faculties. I wouldn't even ride a bike on that road.

[Stanley]

I was looking through the adverts in a 1961 Car Mechanics magazine, fascinating! I found that the Elora socket set I bought nearly 60 years ago was top of the range and cost under £9. Today a roughly equivalent set is well over £700. I did well because they are as good today as the day I bought them and they have done a lot of work!

[Tizer]

An aerial view of Blackpool taken recently. I spent many a happy hour on the beach there in the 1950s, but I recall it being a straight beach, not a wiggly one!

[PanBiker]

The wavy beachfront is actually part of the coastal defence for the town. The frontage has been remodeled with a series of stepped breakwaters from the promenade down to the beach. The wavy effect is not particularly noticeable when the tide is out and viewing from the promenade, still plenty of room for a straight run for the donkeys.

[Tizer]

It wouldn't be Blackpool beach without the smell of warm donkey poo!

[Stanley]

This caught my attention on Blackpool Pier in 1977.....

Samsung declaring the new Galaxy 7 phone dangerous, advising people to power them down and retailers to stop selling them. There is speculation that this goes beyond a simple faulty battery issue and may be a bug embedded in the software. Apple must be ecstatic!

[Stanley]

The Samsung phone disaster moves on. The news this morning suggests that they have ditched the design completely and are going to rethink their response to the Apple Threat. Commentators are looking at the failure in terms of the massive contribution that Samsung makes to the South Korean economy.....

[Bodger]

The family who run Samsung have 688 billion dollars in their family bank , so i don't think they are worried too much !

[Tizer]

This is the second big problem recently for South Korea's image as an efficient industrial nation. It's only weeks since that big shipping company ran into trouble and ended up with its giant container ships stranded around the world (and threats that we wouldn't get our Xmas pressies because they're stuck on the ships). It's owned by the same family that has the South Korean airline where one of the family members forced an airliner to land because they served her peanuts in the bag and not in a bowl.

The mobile phone business seems to have become an oligopoly where a few giants control the market...but then everything seems to be heading that way now. At the same time it's creating people who have more money than the GDP of whole countries. Too much power in too few hands.

[Stanley]

Can you remember my daughter Janet flagging up this problem last Xmas when she said that she had identified four international companies who she is convinced are working on world domination as a business model? Perhaps we are seeing her forecast come true....

[David Whipp]

Woke up to news that supplies of Unilever products on Tesco's online store were going out of stock.

Apparently Unilever are asking for a 10% increase in wholesale prices due to the drop in the value of the pound. Tesco are resisting this and Unilever are holding back further deliveries...

Interesting to see Brexit chickens coming home to roost.

[Stanley]

'The Law of Unintended Consequences'. Who'd have thought it!

[Tizer]

Premier Foods, who like Unilever make many of our well-known food brands, report that sales of Oxo cubes are declining and those of Mr Kipling cakes are soaring. I regard this as evidence of the state of the nation - depressed and saying never mind the meat and nutrition, give me more cake!

[PanBiker]

We'll keep them propped up Tiz, we probably have every flavour ever made. They are all OXO's of course even if produced by Knorr or other manufacturers. I think we have Beef, Pork, Lamb, Chicken, Veg, Fish and a Mixed Herbs offering. More spices and grinding mills with interesting stuff in as well. I'm afraid Mr Kipling makes exceedingly small cakes and in the main if I want a bun I will make it myself.

[Tizer]

Until today I didn't know that Nottingham stands on sandstone which has had hundreds of caves cut out in past centuries. About a thousand years ago people used the caves as houses, then later for storage and as workplaces. Malting, brewing and tanning were carried out in the caves. Metal works, wagon works, monastic chapels, butchers, cisterns, ornamental follies, wine vaults and grocers' cold stores were among other uses for the caves, along with just a few access tunnels. More information is available on this site: LINK

[PanBiker]

You learn something new every day, that's a new one on me also Tiz, interesting link.

Had my flu jab this morning, nurse managed to make me spring a temporary leak, never bled before with my jabs.

[Stanley]

Stockport stands on soft red sandstone and it has been cut into many times but not on that scale. During the war the caves made handy bomb shelters. After the war Manchester University used the caves for experiments on gravity that involved spinning a large metal sphere.
The fact that Talktalk email servers are AWOL. No doubt they will come back on line shortly. [Came back online as I typed that....]

[Stanley]

I thought you might enjoy this. I wonder what his family's reaction was?

OBITUARY. PRACTICAL MECHANICS FEBRUARY 1955

In 1955 the old established magazine 'Cycling' was incorporated in Practical Mechanics, published by Newnes. The editor was F J Camm and I think he wrote this obituary. I can't help thinking there is an element of revenge here!

'Around the Wheel World' by 'Icarus'.
The late B W West.
BENJAMIN WOLFE BEST, for a short time on the staff of The Cyclist, passed away towards the end of last year. He was a most extraordinary character, with a wide knowledge of cycling sport but very little of cycles generally.
I found him abysmally ignorant on the technical side of cycles, and in some respects he achieved an undeserved reputation for a prodigious memory of record figures by trotting out some particlar time on occasions when his statements could not be checked. On one or two occasions when I have checked up on his figures I have found him wrong, as indeed I did in the case of H W Bartlett the press cutting historian.
Besat was an independent thinker, of untidy appearance and of weird ways. He endeavoured to impose his will by subterranean methods and in this way made himself a large number of enemies. He ad been trained in the militant school of cycling , that is to say he was trained to find imaginary grievances and to believe that cyclist's rights were always being attacked.
He was of course well known as a timekeeper and here again achieved an undeserved reputation for his knowledge of watches, which I have every reason for knowing was precisely nil. I have a quite considerable knowledge myself and so I am well able to judge. Whilst it would be true to say he did a lot of good in the sporting realm of cycling it would be equally true to say that he sometimes did much harm. He did not have a distinguished career in cycle racing. He was a member of a comparatively unimportant club – The Century – which owed its existence to a newspaper. To become a member you must have covered a century of miles in one ride. Like many others he worked through the Bidlake idiom and liked it to be thought that Bidlake's mantle had fallen on him. Although he was official RRA timekeeper he was notoriously bad at keeping appointments, if he kept them at all! His personal idiosyncrasies caused great fun. There was one occasion when he wanted to become an RTTC delegate but couldn't find a club to sponsor him. He promptly formed the 'Hornchurch Wheelers', had notepaper printed and appointed himself as a delegate!
His personal dislikes often landed him into trouble and on many occasions he did not exhibit that impartiality of comment which is the making of the true freelance Journalist. For although Best served for a number of years on a contemporary and for a short time on this journal. It was quite obvious that he was unsuited to inside work.
But he will be missed in the cycling world if only for the reasons I have given above, for in spite of his intrigues and sub-rosa methods, he was soon found out and no one was really deceived. The cycling world is poorer for his passing.


Transcribed by SCG, 14/10/16