Hey! I travelled on these back in 1984, on a visit to Leningrad, they were fantastic, typically soviet, a space-age concept, operated by a scruffy guy with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
The recording industry, that bastion of good taste, honesty, and fair distribution of costs and profits thinks file sharing is a crime! Well, we saw it with the book industry too. Once, nobody outside a monastery had the skills to make a book. Then along came that damned Gutenberg, inventing printing presses, and any fool could duplicate books. Even more worrying. Peasants eventually learned to read and write, putting literally dozens of scribes out of work. What really worries me though, is libraries, and the growing trend of book owners to lend books to others to read, thus depriving the publishing industry of profits and throwing the families of jobless monks into the street. A further worry to us is the open availability of pencils and pens. Using these, it is possible for criminals to copy whole sentences, and, with that other item, whose posession we'd like to see controlled, or restricted, paper, these people can pin up illegally copied words, sentences, even whole paragraphs in public places for all to see.
Furthermore, in a recent visit to an academic establishment I was horrified to find students being encouraged to learn and memorise, for instance, whole poems, and songs. I saw plays performed where actors and actresses had memorised the lines, not a single one was carrying, and reading, from an authorised text. I tell you, unless the perpetrators are given punitive fines and prison sentences, the book publishing industry is doomed.
Interesting, but a fair bit of inaccuracy. The British Navy did indeed use lemons, rather than limes, most of the time, but they also figured out that green vegetables, sauerkraut, apples were effective alternatives. Apples could be stored effectively in barrels of sawdust for a year or so.
Long sail voyages in square-riggers continued long after the steam-ships came. Their economic advantage remained until the second-world war, and on some routes, with some cargoes, they were cheaper to run. Most of the sailing ships involved in ocean trade were seized, interned, confined to port during the war,and received little or no maintenance during that period. Afterwards, the capital cost of re-equipping and repairing was just too great, the last grain-race took place in 1949, and then the long-distance, Cape-Horn voyages ceased.
The winners of the Grain Race, from the Spencer Gulf in Australia to Europe, came in at anything between 83 and 110 days sailing, far greater than the six weeks (42 days) quoted. Scurvy, by then, was virtually unknown.
If you've ever found your house being invaded by mice, you'll know that "ethical" as a consideration is only very temporary.
I had a green-minded, animal friendly girlfriend, vegetarian and deeply opposed to killing our little furry invaders, she bought humane traps, but the mice laughed at them.
They found her lingerie drawer, and chewed and shat their way through it. As mice do. That was the incident that gave me free rein to slaughter the little bastards. Spring "Little Nipper" traps everywhere, plus poison, plus water traps.... In a little over a week the score was thirty six to me, none to her. In another week, there was no further infestation. No sightings, no returnees. Dead mice are gone forever, and have no further offspring. Released mice? They breed like crazy and then come back with zillions of great-great grand-kids.
My advice? If you decide that you're at war with mice, then just eradicate them, any way you can. They don't read treaties or respect cease-fires.
It is indeed Lancashire, and it is also absolute bullsh*t. There are any number of ruined cottages scattered around the region, abandoned during the industrial revolution and left to crumble. Making sacrifices and walling living animals into buildings is an ancient practice. Bridge-pillars have been found with childrens' bones inside. However, as a person who works not so far away from Pendle, and having worked on many buildings of that era and older, I'd point out that local construction would have thick walls with void spaces within. Any builder in the modern era will tell you that cats just love to clamber into holes, and get themselves trapped behind drywall, in ceilings, and under floors. I once had to return to a house where the owner had heard a cat mewing from behind the bath panels. The cat was indeed inside, but the panels had not been off for over a year. This intrepid idiot cat had squeezed through a small hole in the floor, where pipes entered, beneath a kitchen unit in a neighbouring apartment, and crept under the floor for about thirty feet. Had a dead cat been found under the bath would it be proof of a witch?
Second point. The fireplace in the illustration has nothing to do with 400 years ago. It's later than 1860. Not that it disproves any witch habitation, but it's a poor choice of illustration for the muppet who's making all these silly claims. "an expert on the pendle witches" Ha! And he thinks he's Howard Carter. Muppet.
Children on flights are no problem if they're well-behaved, and well-supervised. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of children faced with long hours of nothing to do and being told to be still and quiet, to cease being well-behaved. Babies, of course, are unpredictable, unreasoning, and capable of being extremely loud, incontinent and disruptive, all at the same time.
Now a parent has effectively signed up for all of this. The other passengers have not. If I had the money to travel first-class, it would be beguiling to me for the extra levels of comfort and peace and quiet. A screaming child or a kid kicking the back of my seat, or a baby puking on my arm would instantly negate that. So. The baby ghetto? preferably behind a closed bulkhead door too. Look on the bright side. Your precious pumpkin is in the most crash-survivable end of the plane.
When reading any book, I lose my trust in it the moment I find the author telling me incorrect 'facts' of something I know about. Pickover's statement "One of the oldest machines is a potter’s wheel, and primitive gears associated with these kinds of wheels probably existed for thousands of years" is nonsense, which, sadly, would lead me to doubt anything else that he asserts, unless he can point to sources. Early potter's wheels consisted simply of a wheel and a pivot. Right up until the modern era, potters wheels had no gears whatsoever. During the industrial revolution, ropes and pulleys were used to allow another person to power the wheel. In the twentieth century, friction drives from electric motors, belt drives, but gears? I can hardly think of any. So, Pickover? one rash statement has undermined any faith I might have in whatever else you say.
My father was a prisoner-of-war in the far east. As they were being systematically starved to death, with the daily food ration being a ball of rice about the size of an orange, the prisoners soon reached the state where anything which walked, flew, or wriggled was food. He told me that rat baked in clay, in the embers of a fire, was a delicacy. An added advantage of baking in clay was that plucking or skinning wasn't necessary, the skin peels off with the clay.
The Cap Slock key, as we all know, was named for the first solo circumnavigator of the globe, Captain Slocum. It would be very disrespectful to his memory to remove his key.
Well, we saw it with the book industry too.
Once, nobody outside a monastery had the skills to make a book. Then along came that damned Gutenberg, inventing printing presses, and any fool could duplicate books.
Even more worrying. Peasants eventually learned to read and write, putting literally dozens of scribes out of work.
What really worries me though, is libraries, and the growing trend of book owners to lend books to others to read, thus depriving the publishing industry of profits and throwing the families of jobless monks into the street.
A further worry to us is the open availability of pencils and pens. Using these, it is possible for criminals to copy whole sentences, and, with that other item, whose posession we'd like to see controlled, or restricted, paper, these people can pin up illegally copied words, sentences, even whole paragraphs in public places for all to see.
Furthermore, in a recent visit to an academic establishment I was horrified to find students being encouraged to learn and memorise, for instance, whole poems, and songs. I saw plays performed where actors and actresses had memorised the lines, not a single one was carrying, and reading, from an authorised text.
I tell you, unless the perpetrators are given punitive fines and prison sentences, the book publishing industry is doomed.
Long sail voyages in square-riggers continued long after the steam-ships came.
Their economic advantage remained until the second-world war, and on some routes, with some cargoes, they were cheaper to run.
Most of the sailing ships involved in ocean trade were seized, interned, confined to port during the war,and received little or no maintenance during that period. Afterwards, the capital cost of re-equipping and repairing was just too great, the last grain-race took place in 1949, and then the long-distance, Cape-Horn voyages ceased.
The winners of the Grain Race, from the Spencer Gulf in Australia to Europe, came in at anything between 83 and 110 days sailing, far greater than the six weeks (42 days) quoted.
Scurvy, by then, was virtually unknown.
I had a green-minded, animal friendly girlfriend, vegetarian and deeply opposed to killing our little furry invaders, she bought humane traps, but the mice laughed at them.
They found her lingerie drawer, and chewed and shat their way through it. As mice do. That was the incident that gave me free rein to slaughter the little bastards.
Spring "Little Nipper" traps everywhere, plus poison, plus water traps....
In a little over a week the score was thirty six to me, none to her.
In another week, there was no further infestation.
No sightings, no returnees. Dead mice are gone forever, and have no further offspring. Released mice? They breed like crazy and then come back with zillions of great-great grand-kids.
My advice? If you decide that you're at war with mice, then just eradicate them, any way you can. They don't read treaties or respect cease-fires.
There are any number of ruined cottages scattered around the region, abandoned during the industrial revolution and left to crumble.
Making sacrifices and walling living animals into buildings is an ancient practice. Bridge-pillars have been found with childrens' bones inside.
However, as a person who works not so far away from Pendle, and having worked on many buildings of that era and older, I'd point out that local construction would have thick walls with void spaces within. Any builder in the modern era will tell you that cats just love to clamber into holes, and get themselves trapped behind drywall, in ceilings, and under floors. I once had to return to a house where the owner had heard a cat mewing from behind the bath panels. The cat was indeed inside, but the panels had not been off for over a year. This intrepid idiot cat had squeezed through a small hole in the floor, where pipes entered, beneath a kitchen unit in a neighbouring apartment, and crept under the floor for about thirty feet.
Had a dead cat been found under the bath would it be proof of a witch?
Second point. The fireplace in the illustration has nothing to do with 400 years ago. It's later than 1860.
Not that it disproves any witch habitation, but it's a poor choice of illustration for the muppet who's making all these silly claims. "an expert on the pendle witches" Ha!
And he thinks he's Howard Carter.
Muppet.
Unfortunately, it is in the nature of children faced with long hours of nothing to do and being told to be still and quiet, to cease being well-behaved.
Babies, of course, are unpredictable, unreasoning, and capable of being extremely loud, incontinent and disruptive, all at the same time.
Now a parent has effectively signed up for all of this. The other passengers have not.
If I had the money to travel first-class, it would be beguiling to me for the extra levels of comfort and peace and quiet. A screaming child or a kid kicking the back of my seat, or a baby puking on my arm would instantly negate that.
So. The baby ghetto? preferably behind a closed bulkhead door too.
Look on the bright side. Your precious pumpkin is in the most crash-survivable end of the plane.
However, I'll follow the link to her site and see if she does better songs.
Pickover's statement "One of the oldest machines is a potter’s wheel, and primitive gears associated with these kinds of wheels probably existed for thousands of years" is nonsense, which, sadly, would lead me to doubt anything else that he asserts, unless he can point to sources.
Early potter's wheels consisted simply of a wheel and a pivot. Right up until the modern era, potters wheels had no gears whatsoever. During the industrial revolution, ropes and pulleys were used to allow another person to power the wheel. In the twentieth century, friction drives from electric motors, belt drives, but gears? I can hardly think of any.
So, Pickover? one rash statement has undermined any faith I might have in whatever else you say.
He told me that rat baked in clay, in the embers of a fire, was a delicacy. An added advantage of baking in clay was that plucking or skinning wasn't necessary, the skin peels off with the clay.