Tripps Clipps

[Tripps]

I think I just 'reject' which I think covers both circumstances.

I'd say it covers neither case - but we are getting into head hurting territory so 'nuff said.

Today - If the cap fits. . . .

PS - I find today that this is a parody of the Al Chet - a Jewish prayer for Yom Kippur. Probably technically sacriligeous, but I like the Jewish sense of humour, and I love a religion that can make fun of itself. . Al Chet

A Tor-Ch Al Chet
For the sin which we have committed by responding too often,
And for the sin which we have committed by not posting at all when we have something valuable to say;
For the sin which we have committed by responding angrily in haste,
And for the sin which we have committed by posting private email in a public forum;
For the sin which we have committed by misinterpreting others' words,
And for the sin which we have committed by not expressing ourselves clearly;
For the sin which we have committed by being sarcastic to other list members,
And for the sin which we have committed by not being tolerant of their positions;
For the sin which we have committed by not translating Lancashire words,
And for the sin which we have committed by assuming others know as much as we do;
For the sin which we have committed by posting announcements directly,
And for the sin which we have committed by posting subscription commands to the list;
For the sin which we have committed by forwarding messages without introduction
And for the sin which we have committed by cross-posting our own messages to many other lists;
For the sin which we have committed by not using an appropriate subject line,
And for the sin which we have committed by having a long signature file; (Pleads guilty as charged )
For the sin which we have committed by quoting others' posts in their entirety,
And for the sin which we have committed by not providing context to our replies;
For all of these, Forgiving One, Forgive Us, Pardon Us, and Grant Us Atonement.


copyright 1995, 1998, Mark Frydenberg

[Stanley]

I don't recognise my behaviour in that list of sins....
"Probably technically sacrilegious, but I like the Jewish sense of humour, and I love a religion that can make fun of itself."
I totally agree with that David......

[Tripps]

I totally agree with that David.....

This is happening often now - quite worryng. . .

'Warmergate' Crisis Deepens as IPCC Figures Called Into Question
Iain Dale 12:57 PM

In today's Mail on Sunday there is a very interesting feature on what it calls "Warmergate". It reveals of climate change scientists have manipulated data to provide the answers they wanted. Here's an extract which refers to the infamous 'hockey stick'.


Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline.

The CRU’s supporters have protested bitterly about the attention paid to this message. In the course of an extraordinary BBC interview in which he called an American critic an ‘****hole’ live on air, Jones’s colleague Professor Andrew Watson insisted that the fuss was completely unjustified, because all Jones had been talking about was ‘tweaking a diagram’.
Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’
However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling.Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.
There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical - and much more significant. It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report - the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century. There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick. Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates. However, different proxies give very different results. For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998. Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America - who is now also the subject of an official investigation --was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa. Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple - I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist - Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre - wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] - I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem. According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed - but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive. All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase. On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated - but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’ Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.

On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines. By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.

McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’ Yet even this, Pielke told me, may not ultimately be the biggest consequence of Warmergate.Some of the most controversial leaked emails concern attempts by Jones and his colleagues to avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database - its vast library of readings from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world, the ultimate resource that records how temperatures have changed.

In one email from 2005, Jones warned Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, because ‘you never know who is trawling them’. Critics such as McIntyre had been ‘after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone’. Yesterday Davies said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted. But in the wake of the scandal, its reliability too is up for grabs.

The problem is that, just like tree rings or ice cores, readings from thermometers or electronic ‘thermistors’ are open to interpretation. The sites of weather stations that were once open countryside become built up areas, so trapping heat, and the type of equipment used changes over time. The result is what climate scientists call ‘inhomogeneities’ - anomalies between readings that need to be ‘adjusted’. But can we trust the way such ‘adjustments’ are made? Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.

This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.

In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007, the US equivalent of the Met Office had changed the way it adjusted old data. The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934. Now, in line with CRU and IPCC orthodoxy, it was 1998. At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared.But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done.

Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’ The consequences of that, Stott said, may be explosive. ‘If you take Darwin, the gap between the two just looks too big. ‘If that applies elsewhere, it’s going to get really interesting. It’s no longer going to be good enough for the Met Office and CRU to put the data out there.

‘To know we can trust it, we’ve got to know what adjustments have been made, and why.’ Last week, at the Copenhagen climate summit, the Met Office said that the Noughties have been the warmest decade in history. Depending on how the data has been adjusted, Stott said, that statement may not be true. Pielke agreed. ‘After Climategate, the surface temperature record is being called into question.’ To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media - a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.
Read David Rose's full article HERE.
Labels: Climate Change

[Tripps]

From around 2010


Goodbye to you, my trusted friend.
We owned each other until 09 or ten.
Together we overdrew the equity.
Learned to walk and live off cheese,
skimmed our milk and thinned our tea.

Goodbye my house, it's hard to buy,
when all the prices are up way too high,
Now that the spring is in the air.
Property porn is everywhere.
When you watch them I'll be there.

We had joy, we had fun, we bought villas in the sun.
But the bills that we signed
were just funded by our lies.

Goodbye, Job, please pray for me,
I was a driver for Greggs bakery
You tried to work me all night long.
Too much work, too little wong,
I wonder how I got along.

Goodbye, my Job, it's hard to lie
when all my bills are all up way too high,
Now that the bailiffs in my hair.
Little bedsits everywhere.
When you see them I'll be there.

We had joy, we had fun, we bought villas in the sun.
But the bills that we signed
were just funded by our lies.

We had joy, we had fun, we read ramping in the sun.
but like the headlines and the fun
our old home is all but gone

Goodbye, My car, my little one.
You got me laid and helped my business run.
And every time that I was down
QE inflation came around
and put the headlock on the pound.

Goodbye, My car, it's hard to drive
when all the fuel costs are up in the sky,
Now that the QE is in the air.
With green taxes everywhere.
check the bus, ill be on there.

We had joy, we had fun, we watched places in the sun.
But the level of our reach bought a cabin on the beach

We had joy, we had fun, we bought villas in the sun.
But the bills that we signed were just funded by our lies.

We had joy, we had fun, we read ramping in the sun.
but like the headlines and the fun
our old home is all but gone
This post has been edited by right_freds_dead: Yesterday, 02:32 PM

[Stanley]

A clever skit on the song but I don't understand two things, the last line and the mention of 'ramping' further back.

[Tripps]

I think you're doing well to get so much. As you say elsewhere today "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" Today's clipp is copyrighted - but I don't think the author will mind.

Ferrets

I spent a lot of time with Ted Lawson, he and Joyce were living in the bungalow down Crow Row (Longfield Lane) behind the Dog. They had two children, Sandra and Philip. Sandra was to die of cancer shortly after she got married but I still visit Philip and his wife Julie and they look after my dog when I’m on my travels. Ted and I did a bit of rabbiting. I had a ferret and some nets and we used to pop off on Friday afternoon if he could get away early from the dairy. We’d go up the dale and net a few rabbits and then sell them in the Dog when we got back. This gave us some beer money. I can’t remember where I got the ferret from, I think it was from Marshall Duerden at Sough but it was a beauty. I called it Winnie because when I got it I thought it was a female. I later realised it was a dog ferret and so it became Winston but always called Winnie.
Ferrets are much maligned animals. Anyone who has ever kept one properly will know that they are very intelligent, clean and loyal. If you build the hutch right with dark sleeping quarters and put a three inch hole in the floor covered with chicken wire next to the cage door where it is light they will do all their muck through the hole and all you need is a bucket underneath. Their smell is their own and you have to get to like it but if kept clean it isn’t oppressive. I had Winnie for a long time and he grew bigger and bigger. I never had him on a lead or muzzled him and he always came back out of a warren, I never had to dig for him. When we went rabbiting I just used to put him down on the ground and let him sort out where the rabbits were. When he went to ground Ted and I would net every hole in sight and wait for the action. They would pop up into the nets and we would kill them.
Occasionally, Winnie would get a rabbit banged up in a dead end. Rabbits have no defence against ferrets except flight and if cornered they will just shove as much of their body as they can into a dead end and hope for the best. The ferret scrabbles at them and pulls fur out of their back end but usually gets fed up and leaves them. On occasion you would hear Winnie squealing with frustration down the hole and every now and again he would emerge from the warren and run round on his hind legs chattering with fury. You could tell he had one holed up, his front claws would be full of fur. He would dive in again and have another go and Ted and I would just laugh at him. Eventually he would either bolt it or give up, we always let him decide when he had had enough. We used to gut the rabbits and examine the livers. If the livers were good the rabbit hadn’t got mixie. We’d always keep a couple for ourselves and I’d give Winnie the livers out of these and then shove him inside my shirt. He would coil himself round my back next to the skin and go to sleep.
I remember we got back into the Dog one evening after a profitable night out and we were having a couple of beers before going up home and frying some home cured ham. One thing I have always known is that no matter what field of human endeavour you are operating in, there’s always some clever bugger who knows more than you. On this particular night, Old Sid Demaine was in the pub and started to tell us about his ferreting days. He said he used to have the biggest ferret anyone had ever seen and I asked him how big it was nose to tail. He put his hands on the bar to illustrate the size and I said “I’ve got one that’ll beat that” and, reaching inside my shirt, brought Winnie out and laid it across his hands! Winnie was full of liver and half asleep and displayed no aggression at all but Old Sid went rigid! It was quite evident he had never held a ferret in his life. What was even more interesting was the reaction of every one else in the bar. The landlady, Lily, jumped on a chair and started screaming. Every woman in the bar tried to get in the ladies toilet at once and most of the blokes were laughing. There were glasses flying all over the place and you could safely say we had caused a stir! The upshot was we were barred for about four weeks and it cost me 30/- in breakages!
Ted and I once went with his brother John to buy a couple of ferrets from a farmer at Airton. They were in a 17 gallon conical railway kit and when John asked how much they were the farmer said he could have any he could get out of the kit for nothing. John reached in and stirred them up with his hand. When he pulled it out there were three ferrets hanging off his fingers, “I’ll take these!” The farmer couldn’t believe it and we left with three free ferrets. John was a hard man!
Winnie was more than just a working ferret, he was one of the family. I used to bring him in the house and give him a bath in the kitchen sink. Ferrets hate water but if they get used to it, love a warm bath. I used to rinse him off under the tap and then holding him by the neck, run my fist down him to squeeze off the excess water. When you do that you are always surprised by how thin a ferret is, it’s about the same as a piece of ¾ inch water pipe. Then I would let him run around until he was dry. A clean ferret is one of the most beautiful animals on earth. They are creamy white and have lovely inquisitive faces. He used to sit on my shoulder grooming himself, chattering and nibbling my ear. The kids had no fear of him and played with him as well. Visitors used to be amazed that we let such a dangerous animal loose round the children, they thought we were mad but the same people would think nothing about having an Alsatian in the house!
Eventually, when I went to my next job, I hadn’t time to go out rabbiting and so gave Winnie to the local bobby at Foulridge. He had just moved to the country and was interested in field sports. I took him out and showed him how to use the ferret, gave him the hutch and the nets and left him to it. About three weeks later I was passing and popped into the backyard to see how Winnie was going on. He was dead in the hutch and had obviously never been fed, watered or worked since he had left me. I left quietly but was so angry with myself. It was a horrible way for a lovely mate to end his days and affected me just as much as if it had been one of my human friends, perhaps even more. I have never forgotten this and faced with a similar situation not long ago, put a dog down rather than risk it being ill treated.


Stanley Challenger Graham

[Stanley]

It's a good story and a sad one David. One of the big mistakes of my life. That young bobby had no conception of responsibility.
By the way, as far as I am concerned that isn't copyright, anyone can reproduce it if they so desire....

[Tripps]

Bad weather holds up cremation

New Delhi: Strong icy winds have held up the cremation of meteorologist Kuldeep Wali, who died of heart attack a week ago at India’s research station in Antarctica.
Mr. Wali, a meteorologist with India Meteorological Department (IMD), died on June 1 at Maitri, India’s research base on the icy continent.
IMD reports said strong icy winds with an average speed of 50 km per hour were blowing over the research station putting a spanner in the arrangements for cremation.
“We were told that bad weather was delaying the cremation,” Mr. Wali’s family said. Mr. Wali (57) was actively involved in research until the last, said a spokesperson for the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research , Goa, which sends expeditions to Antarctica. — PTI

[Stanley]

Well, the one person who would not be worried is Mr Wali! As it's cold there will be no problem in waiting for the wind to drop!

[Tripps]

This dates from 2009, and is just the next one from the list but considering the ongoing Angela Rayner saga It's incredibly timely.

The Chipmunk bites back

Roy Hattersley last night savaged Hazel Blears for avoiding paying capital gains tax. "Its inconsistent to be a member of the Labour Cabinet if you consciously try to avoid paying taxes," he told Newsnight.
But today Westminster's most famous chipmunk has bared her teeth. Or at least her spokesman has. Referring to Hattersley's penchant for writing in the Guardian, he tells me: "She will not dignify the comments of millionaire journalist Roy Hattersley."
Blears is today out and about in her constituency, attending a community fete in the sunshine. Although many colleagues have doubts about the wisdom of her cheque-waving photo-op, Blairites are increasingly annoyed that she is being dumped on by G Brown. Blears is being picked on for her criticism of Gordo's YouTube performance and her general reputation as a moderniser, they say.
The 'we were only following the rules' defence is no defence these days, of course. But Blears insists that she was simply following her accountant's advice on how to minimise her tax bills. The main charge against her is that she claimed a CGT exemption because she classed her London home as her main home to the taxman - while simultaneously designating that same home as her second home to the Commons authorities. It was this that G Brown famously described as "unacceptable" conduct.
But Blears' pals insist she was following guidance from HMRC which says MPs can choose which home to designate for tax purposes. The relevant bit is page 31 of the HMR&C document ‘MPs, Ministers and tax’ issued in July 2005:
"If you have more than one residence you can choose which one is to qualify for the exemption from capital gains tax. It does not have to be your ‘home’ for the purposes of the ACA and travel. It must be a property which you actually occupy as your home for at least some of the time."
Still, she accepts that the case for the defence won't work with the public, hence the £13k cheque to the taxman (it is now in the HMRC general fund).
Friends dismiss as "groundless" reports that Blears is to face a vote of no confidence at her CLP meeting next month.
29/05/2009 | Permalink
Comments
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Have HMRC reassesed her tax liability and increased it? If not, the money will have put her in credit with HMRC and be paid back when she fills out her tax return for 08-09

[Stanley]

Then as now, a storm in a teacup compared with the other 'scandals'.

[Tripps]

Demonstrates the duplicitous self serving nature of these MP's. We thus have "Shrodingers residence" where a property can be simultaneously a 'principle residence' and not a 'principle residence' . Guess who makes the rules that make this nonsense possble. Oh yes - it's the MP's that benefit from it. Well I never.


Top of the list today - Misapprehensions- a bit ragged but collected over a long time..

Temporary rest bite. Unless we find alternative energy sources crude will soar again
Rest bite also spotted on NRS delivery note.......
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He is towing the line
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"Tarnished with the same brush" ( Radio 5 live presenter Aug 2010. Corrected later in programme.)
Lancashire Telegraph Re - Darwin market "You need to get your facts completely right I am a stallholder and we came over and said how well your stall looks and hope you do really well and so did few others, there might of been the odd one but do not tarnish all of three day market traders with the same brush!!!"
**********************************************************
Come Dine With Me Oct 2010 Contract of addiction used for contradiction.
******************************************************************

From Iain Dale blog - Oct 2010
There is the old adage to finding who is behind the smears and that is Qui Bono - Who Benefits? Whoever did this would also have form as well, although I have to admit that whilst I suspect one individual, it could equally be someone who is good at not leaving their fingerprints about :-/

(Actually should be 'cui bono' 'to whom the benefit' (That's Latin pedantry - extra house points. . . .)

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Share ›
Heals Library desk review

This is our perfect desk. Having looked at many desks we kept returning to this one. It's a bit pricy, but you get what you pay for. This will definitely be a family air loom in yours to come.

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Headline from Royston Crow Oct 2011

MP tows the line on EU referendum.

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Ad on Gumtree
Stainless steal dining set.
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News Feb 2024
"I've had the carpet swept from under me"

Nice conflation of "rug pulled from under me" and "swept under the carpet".

[Stanley]

" Guess who makes the rules that make this nonsense possible. Oh yes - it's the MP's that benefit from it. Well I never.
So you've noticed as well?
Nice collection of typos and malapropisms.

[Tripps]

Site still intermittent to me this mornng.

Trigger warning.

This is posted with some reservation, but posted for reasons of inclusiveness - it's next on the list. Giles Coren overcomes his cripplingly massive low self esteem issues and bravely says -

'Nosh', as I'm sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German 'naschen'. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, 'nosh', means simply 'food'. You have decided that this is what I meant and removed the 'a'. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, 'nosh' means "a session of eating" - in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of 'scoff'. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentence so that it meant something I didn't mean? I don't know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of f*** up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it's easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.
2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've f****** stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, f****** Christ, don't you read the copy?
3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not f****** rocket science. It's f****** pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. F***. f***, f***, f***.
I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it f***** up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing Joe and Hugo and maybe they just file and f*** off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on Sunday and f****** lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.
It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. i've got a review to write this morning and i really don't feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the pay-off, and i'm going to have another weekend ruined for me.
I've been writing for The Times for 15 years and I have never asked this before - I have never asked it of anyone I have written for - but I must insist, from now on, that I am sent a proof of every review I do, in pdf format, so I can check it for f***-ups. and I must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. It is the only way I can carry on in the job.
And, just out of interest, I'd like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.
Right,
Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming f****** anger can make a man verbose.
All the best
Giles

[Stanley]

I think he was upset!

[Tripps]

After and as a result of this post I have been informed of a website which covers the action in which my step grandfather perished. I have some letters written pencil, from him to his wife. I copied them once but the file has disappeared, I might even have put them on here a long time ago. I might repeat the exercise.

Find it here. http://www.1914-1918.net/meso_bat9.htm

Attempts were made to relieve the troops at Kut al Amara from December 1915 to April 1916. All failed and the Garrison surrendered.

I read this, then read the letters again. What on earth was a little working chap from Salford, with three young children and a wife at home, doing in this hell hole? No wonder he was not worried about going to France next, and was just concerned that he might not be fit enough to work on return home.


The 6th (Poona) Division retreated into Kut-al-Amara following repulse at Ctesiphon and became besieged at Kut as Turkish forces surrounded the town and cut off communications along the Tigris back to the base at Amara.

6 April 1916 . Without maps and without prior knowledge of the ground, the Meerut groped their way foward before dawn, into a hornets nest. 1200 men fell in 20 minutes. An order to renew the same attack 24 hours later came to nothing, as a strong wind made the waters of the Suwaikiyeh Marshes rise, flooding trenches and drowning wounded men.

8 April 1916. The attack went in at dawn . Some men penetrated the first Turk lines but were bombed out in intensive close fighting. Many men did not get that far: the Division lost another large part of its fighting strength - another 1600 men. British losses in this action were thus some 4800 killed and wounded. They had achieved nothing in terms of ground gained and Kut was still besieged. The weather suddenly turned to violent storms. The misery of the men of the British Army on the Tigris could not have been more complete.

During the night of 8 - 9 April 1916, the 13th Division relieved the 7th (Meerut) in the trenches and at 4.20am advanced to the assault of the Sannaiyat position. When within 300 yards of the enemy fire trench they were discovered, and a shower of Turk Verey lights and flares exposed them to heavy small arms fire. Nonetheless, detachments of the 6th King's Own, 8th Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 6th Loyal North Lancashire and 5th Wiltshire managed to penetrate into the enemy lines. Unfortunately, the supporting second wave of infantry lost direction in the glare of the flares, leaving those initially successful parties alone. A Turk counter attack drove all British troops out of their trenches, and back some 500 yards. It was clear once again that the enemy positions here were immensely strong and could not be taken by frontal assault.

One last effort to resupply Kut was made, most gallantly, on 24 April 1916 when the fast steamer Julnar set sail from Fallahiyeh carrying 270 tons of goods under command of Lieutenant H.O.B. Firman, RN. Despite being covered by artillery and machine gun fire, aimed to distract and keep under cover the enemy, Julnar was seen, shelled and captured some 8.5 miles from Kut. It was all over. To the shame of the British, the Kut garrison was surrendered.


After the surrender
But worse was to come. Townshend himself went into a comfortable if isolated captivity. The sick, unfit, undernourished men of the garrison were force-marched, many beaten savagely, many killed by acts of wanton cruelty. More than 3000 of those who surrendered at Kut were murdered by the Turks in this way, while in captivity. Those who survived were little more than skeleton when they were 2 years later released or exchanged.

[Stanley]

As you say David, a hell hole. I wasn't aware of it. Or perhaps have forgotten what I did know completely.....
I agree, the trenches in France would look very attractive!

[Tripps]

Just as they come from the list - this I find is from Dominic Lawson whose sister runs a TV cooking programme and his father wrote a best selling diet book.


A wave of contagious obesity is, apparently, sweeping the country from top to (ever-expanding) bottom. Yesterday's Guardian declared that "Obesity epidemic spreads to new areas in the south", while simultaneously pointing out that "the worst obesity hotspot is Shetland". Meanwhile the Financial Times warned, rather in the style of a Meteorological Office alert, of "a belt of obesity stretching across Wales, the north Midlands and northern England".


Yes, it's still August, and even the more unsensationalist newspapers are prepared to swallow whole the sort of statistical surveys which would normally end up impaled on the news editor's spike. For both of these stories - and many others, along exactly the same lines – are a regurgitation of a report from an organisation called Dr Foster Research. What some of these supposedly terrifying reports fail to tell us is who paid for this research. It was funded by Roche, the pharmaceutical company which developed the anti-obesity drug Xenical.

This does not in itself discredit the survey – but it's still useful to know what its ultimate purpose might be. A year ago, for example, Dr Foster issued a report which complained that "around 3 per cent of Primary Care Organisations do not fund the use of drug therapy for obesity, despite the recommendations of organisations such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence." With a crafty eye for the prevailing political wind, this press release from 'Dr Foster' was headlined "New audit reveals inequality in NHS services to tackle obesity across the UK."

That particular "audit" was funded by Abbott Laboratories, developers of the anti-obesity drug Reductil; it was obviously not designed to address the question of whether the 3 per cent of PCOs which chose not to prescribe pharmaceutical treatments for obesity had decided that there were more urgent or deserving causes to be treated by means of their drugs budget, or perhaps simply took the view that these slimming drugs had side effects which could outweigh the benefits.

Dr Foster's latest "audit of obesity" has at least attracted some criticism, following its initially uncritical reproduction by the press and broadcasters. The MSP for Shetland, Tavish Scott, said that it was "absolutely ridiculous to suggest that Shetland is an obesity hotspot". NHS Shetland declared that Dr Foster's audit was based on "flawed research". Well, they would say that: but there does seem to be something fishy in a report which has Glasgow well down the "obesity league" with a figure of 6.6 per cent of the local population, while Shetland comes out worst in the entire country, at 15.5 per cent.

I do have a doctor friend, a great worrier about obesity, who claims that the further north he travels in the United Kingdom, the wider people's bottoms seem to be – especially among the female population, he insists – but even so I can't help feeling that the people of our most northerly outpost do not merit being stigmatised as the tubbiest in the land. And even if they were indeed so well-layered, they have a particular requirement for such internal lagging which provides much needed warmth for the inhabitants of a cold and remote spot; they therefore deserve our understanding, rather than our criticism.

More pertinently for us all, there is nothing wrong, or even unhealthy, in being obese, at least as defined by the official measurement known as the Body Mass Index. Admittedly, I speak as a man of average height who weighs 15 stones; but on current BMI definitions George Clooney and Russell Crowe are clinically "obese" while Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson are "overweight". Meanwhile another doctor friend of mine points out that many of his anorexic patients would be classified as very healthy according to most conventional measurements, such as blood pressure; but clearly their attitude to food is anything but healthy.

Do not expect such arguments to weigh heavily with the political class. Both the Government and the official Opposition are engaged in a battle over which of them can appear most productively concerned about "the obesity epidemic". The Conservatives have found it a rewarding way of scoring easy points off a punch-drunk Labour administration. A few weeks ago, David Cameron declared that the Government had failed to stress personal responsibility for obesity: we should stop talking about it as something that just happens to people, he said: they needed to pull their socks up – specifically, to eat less and exercise more. This week, however, the Conservatives seem simultaneously to be taking the completely different tack that it is all part of a growing inequality between the various social classes which it accuses the Government of failing to address.

There is, in fact, almost no difference in the rate of so-called "obesity" between people of different income levels. It is possibly true that truly morbid obesity is now more common among the poorer, when once it was the exclusive privilege of the most affluent – Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII both boasted figures which did not deviate much from the spherical. This modern trend, which differentiates the developed world from less fortunate nations, is not a result of increasing relative poverty in the UK, as so many insist: instead it demonstrates that, at least in terms of food purchasing power, we have, after the US, the richest poor people in the world.

In any case, what are we supposed to do for those who choose to eat vastly more calories than they burn up through work or exercise? When the Government imposed Jamie Oliver's "school dinners revolution" on the state education system, it backfired almost comically, as increasing numbers of pupils abandoned the newly "healthy" school canteen, while their anxious mothers pushed Big Macs at them through the school railings. Anyone who has attempted to persuade their own unwilling child to eat an unwanted salad or vegetable will be instinctively sceptical about the state's ability to succeed in enforcing dietary correctness.

Even with all the panic partially promoted by the manufacturers of slimming pills, we are at least a long way from emulating the law recently imposed in Japan: this requires all adult citizens to have their waists measured by order of the state, and if they repeatedly exceed the allowable limit – 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women – they are subjected to "health re-education" and their employers become liable to financial penalties.

An overweight nation might indeed be aesthetically less attractive than, say, the Nubian tribes whose physical perfection so transfixed the late Leni Riefenstahl; but we should still treasure the freedom to grow into shapes which reflect our own pleasures, rather than the requirements of conventional wisdom or the box-ticking desire of officialdom for a lower national average waistline.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk









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J

[Tripps]

I think I will discontinue this thread for now. The repetitive nature and the daily discipline of posting doesn't suit my character, and many of the 'clipps' are too long, and I doubt that many are reading them.

At least The Kazi of Bukkur, Jam Nando (Nindo) and Makli Hill have had their moment in the Barlick sun, which pleases me.

[Stanley]

Some of them were a bit long David...... But a brave try to get more content on the site!