Craig Sawyers

Were the jaws on a separate order to the vice? If it was on a credit card, you can just cancel the order and get the money back from your credit card company.

Provided you aren't peeping through the knotholes...

Alternatively

Mad even got across the pond. I'm astonished that the responsible cartoonist was still alive and drawing at 99! 102 is not a bad age.

Wow. A speed icon passes. RIP Mr Breedlove.

Freddy Starr in his heyday And how he ended his life, broke, on the Costa del Sol, with a quadruple bypass and eventually died aged 76

Can't believe anything you read in the Sun. Tabloid rag, with "Shock! Horror! Probe!" journalism. Some classic Sun headlines. Topping it "Freddy Starr ate my hamster" Starr was a stand up comedian. https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/nationals/sun-readers-pick-freddie-starr-ate-my-hamster-as-tabloids-best-splash-as-charity-giveaway-marks-50-years/

Back in the day, I went on business to Israel for a week one January. It was anomalously warm, short sleeve shirt warm. I then travelled to Finland with a change of planes at Frankfurt, where it was snowing. Landed at Helsinki and it was -40C (the only temperature that it the same in C and F). I saw locals at the airport taking fearsome looking thermal clothing out of lockers and though Oho I'm in trouble here. It is nose freezing up inside when you breath cold. My clothing was inadequate for the ridiculously cold temperature. Eventually got to the hotel in a taxi with thick ice inside the windows, and our local marketer took me to the sauna there. So in a single day, I'd gone from +22C to -40C then to +100C.

Good grief - that is totally scary.

Back to cycling stories. Apart from Casartelli crashing out and dying in 1995, the only Tour death in modern times was British cycling legend Tom Simpson. He died on the upper slopes of Mont Ventou in the 1967 Tour. It is a ball breaker of a hill, the temperature was high, and Simpson had been taking amphetamine, and his water bottle contained brandy - both diuretic. So dehydration and high temperatures is what did for him Apart from Casartelli and Simpson, there has only been two other deaths on the tour - and those are from the really early days. There are however fearsome crashes. Who could forget Johnny Hoogerland being propelled at speed into a barbed wire fence after being side swiped by France TV car in Stage 9 in 2011. Even so, with blood running down his legs, he managed to finish the stage inside the cutoff time, and spent the night in hospital getting 33 stitches to the wounds on his legs. He still got on his bike the next morning, and went on to finish the 2011 tour. Tough fellas, pro cyclists. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-2013168/TOUR-DE-FRANCE-2011-Juan-Antonio-Flecha-collides-car.html

Same thing kind of happened to a mate of mine. Lifelong skier, really skilled. Skiing in Austria with his adult daughter, he was descending at speed off-piste, a ski hit a rock and pitched him downslope into a tree. He was wearing a helmet, but clobbering a tree with your head at 30mph is not going to end well. Helicoptered off the hill, he ended up in the neurology ward for quite a long time. He's kind of recovered five or six years on, but still has some problems in concentrating. Which is tough for a serial entrepreneur. He was CEO of his latest company before the accident. Nothing like as bad as Michael Schumacher's skiing accident which reduced him to being a pale shadow of his former self, wheelchair bound and with difficulty in communicating. He apparently manages to watch F1 on the television and understand what he's seeing. Or Fabio Casertelli in the 1995 Tour de France, who lost control while descending the col de Portet d'Aspet at speed (usually 50mph plus), and his head hit a concrete bollard at the side of the road. Dead at the scene. Not wearing a helmet, which was not necessary on mountain stages at that time.

I had no idea who Gary Busey was and had to look it up on Wikipedia. OTOH even if I knew who he was I'd have had trouble recognizing him from the photo with the gun.

OK - what is he saying into the mic?

Fired up by Dusty's link, I logged on to the OpenAI system. After an exploratory warm up, this is part of the conversation. It was kind of spooky in one sense, but the answers were somewhat Wikipedia-like in tone. But although I tried to trick it with acronyms, there was no fooling it. The detail was absolutely bang on. Have you heard about HAL? Yes, I have heard about HAL. HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence computer system that appears in the novel and movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, respectively. HAL is depicted as a highly advanced and sentient AI system that controls the systems of a spacecraft on a mission to Jupiter, and the story explores the consequences of human reliance on advanced technology and artificial intelligence. HAL is a memorable and influential depiction of a malevolent AI, and has become a cultural icon of science fiction. Does your language extend to science topics? Yes, my training data includes a wide range of topics, including science. I have been trained on a vast corpus of text, which includes scientific research papers, textbooks, articles, and other scientific literature. I can generate text on a variety of scientific topics, such as physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, computer science, and more. Whether you have questions about a specific scientific concept, need help with a research paper, or want to explore the latest scientific discoveries, I can assist you in generating informative and accurate text-based content. Have you data about the Bepi Colombo mission Yes, I have information about the BepiColombo mission, which is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that was launched in 2018 with the goal of exploring Mercury, the smallest and least explored planet in the inner Solar System. The BepiColombo spacecraft consists of two main components: the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) and the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). The MTM is responsible for carrying the MPO and MMO to Mercury, while the MPO and MMO will study Mercury's surface, composition, atmosphere, and magnetic field. The BepiColombo mission is expected to take seven years to complete and will involve several flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury before entering orbit around Mercury in 2025. The mission will provide valuable information about the origin and evolution of Mercury and help scientists better understand the formation of terrestrial planets in our Solar System. I was project manager for MIXS on board that spacecraft That's impressive! MIXS, or the Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer, is one of the instruments aboard the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) component of the BepiColombo mission. The MIXS instrument is designed to measure the X-ray fluorescence emitted by the surface of Mercury, providing information about the planet's elemental composition and the geological processes that have shaped its surface. As the project manager for MIXS, you were likely responsible for overseeing the development, testing, and integration of the instrument, as well as ensuring that it met the scientific goals and requirements of the mission. Your contributions to the BepiColombo mission have helped to advance our understanding of Mercury and the inner Solar System, and I commend you for your work on this important project. Thank you! You're welcome! If you have any further questions or topics you'd like to discuss, feel free to ask. I hope to interact with you again soon. Thank you and goodnight! You're welcome, and have a good night! Feel free to reach out anytime you have questions or need assistance. I'll be here to help.

And while we are on dog things

Not at all. It is simply that Hedy Lamarr is principally known as an actor. The equally striking lady below is the founding CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits, at the leading edge of product development in Quantum Computing https://oxfordquantumcircuits.com/ At the helm of a company currently with 79 staff and rising.

Hedy Lamarr. Apart from being drop dead gorgeous she co-invented spread spectrum communication as a secure communication method as WW2 was getting going.

Too fucking right Grahame. We have a morally bankrupt government here who have decided to deflect the raft of woe that they have inflicted on the UK population after 12 years in charge by adopting an inhumane policy and showcasing it. If it was easy to find a solution to dangerously overcrowded rafts crossing the busiest shipping channel in the world - why in fucks sake have they not done it before now? Answer: political expediency. Fuck fuck fuck them all.

A very belated happy birthday, Nate!

Happy birthday!

Had a great day and follow on. Went out for a meal on the day to a restaurant down a goat track. Serves devilled kidneys as a starter - what is not to like? And we have just got back from a walking weekend on Exmoor. Awesome walking, lots of hills - freezing cold (2C and a stiff wind) across the tops, including this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkery_Hill . Also spent a day visiting a cousin who lives in Plympton. Great guy, as is his wife. Ex Royal Marine Commando (the UK equivalent as a Navy Seal), long retired - he's 78 now - but has some really hairy stories of what he got up to back in the day.

Happy birthday, Naaman!