Craig Sawyers

How do you guys keep weight off? Everything looks absolutely delicious, but I know for a certain fact that I would end up barrel shaped if I put those dishes away frequently!

Bloody hell. Block! He did a section on Top Gear a few years ago, showing what you could do with one of his more outrageous cars. But to go from a snowmobile accident is in the same ironical class as Yuri Gagarin dying in a plane crash (aged 34). RIP Ken Block. Driving legend.

Happy belated!

Belated because it is Boxing Day here - but a truly Happy and peaceful Christmas to all.

Happy Birthday Marc - hope it is an awesome day!

Happy birthday your Dustyness!

It's an ONSemi part. I really don't know what has happened with ONsemi. They bought Fairchild and Sanyo, and have obsoleted most of the really useful audio parts. Anything remaining has ended up on ridiculous lead times. We're well beyond the Covid excuse, and I'm left with bungling corporate incompetence as the only explanation remaining

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/11/angela-lansbury-the-smart-scene-stealing-grande-dame-of-our-screens-for-75-years Last full stage role was in 2014 at the age of 88, although she continued with voice acting until 2018.

Or a portmanteaux version - discordello 🤡

I was Project Manager for an instrument on board this bad boy https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo The Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS). Due to get into Mercury polar orbit in 2025 after a 7 year journey. So far two flybys of Venus and two of the overall 6 flybys of Mercury as it brakes on its way in.

Also not real, but again I wish it was Kind of in a similar vein. In the Chaplin silent movie The Gold Rush, he eats his shoe. That was in fact liquorice. Apparently sourced from a UK company who made the stuff, and made the shoes that Chaplin ate. Enough of them for several takes.

Must be the middle of the night where you are, Tice?

Oh my word - they look completely awesome!

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest won a whole raft of Oscars, including one for Louise Fletcher as best actress.

RIP Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, and his slow fall from grace with Henry VIII to execution at the stake (in Oxford). She was age 70, and died suddenly. One of the very few people to have won two Booker prizes. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63005841

Happy Birthday you long British thing!

We dumped health insurance (we used to have BUPA) four years ago. We don't have anything equivalent to Medicare. The NHS is free anyway - like totally free. Any shots you need are free for anyone. And if you are over 60 any prescription drugs are free too. The only downside is the length of waiting lists for what the NHS see as elective procedures (like hip replacements). And anything we need that is elective we'll pay for. So far an operation on a finger which cost £2k, around a third of the annual BUPA insurance cost. But is our NHS in crisis? Well yes. They are currently a total of 40,000 short in staff numbers. And ambulance response times, supposed to be less than 15 minutes are currently around an hour. And that is a critical problem if you have a heart attack or a stroke. Why are the NHS short of staff? Well - underinvestment by successive Tory governments as a result of an "austerity" program post 2008, and Brexit (also a Tory failure piled of failure). I'm starting to sound like a Johnathan Pie rant! Or as my son says, an old man shouting at clouds. I remind him that once I was a young man who also shouted at clouds!

This was actually yesterday. We went to Oxford to a concert by this wind quintet https://lumaswinds.com/ . First rate professional musicians. Three fiendishly difficult pieces https://lumaswinds.com/concert/university-church-oxford/ Astonishingly for such amazing musicians, the concert was free! And because we are now "senior citizens" we have a bus pass that gives us free travel. And the bus stop is within a hundred yards of our house. What is not to like? We got away with "free" before we blew out on a meal at Quod https://www.quod.co.uk/ 🍽️