MarkW

We've got around 2 million honeybees on site at the moment, so we can spare a few! Thinking about it, bumblebees would be better though. We also have those on site and they're much, much worse than honeybees: once they get cross they stay cross for a long time, and just like wasps and hornets they can sting repeatedly. The inevitable honeybee escapes that occur in the lab every so often are neither here nor there, but the last bumblebee escape incident caused a site evacuation.

I salute your intention, but you're talking to the man who got a thread announcing the reappearance of a forum member on to photography via cats, dogs, reptiles, taxidermy, amateur hairdressing, haemorrhoids, anal probes and religion.

The big problem for businesses around here is travelers pitching up on your land, with all the theft, vandalism and intimidation that inevitably entails, coupled with a police force that stands idly by as they trash your property and only seems willing to get involved to stop you intervening. Luckily, we have our PEAP (Pikey Eviction Action Plan) ready to roll, and Mr Plod won't be required. It involves all 27 of us turning up in the middle of the night in bee suits, barricading them in their caravans and dumping a full hive of very pissed-off bees in through the skylights. Bye-bye pikeys... don't call again, and don't forget to tell your friends about the warm welcome you got - we've got plenty of bees for all of you...

Years ago I knew a bloke who had a shotgun certificate for clay pigeon shooting and the like. After a spate of burglaries in the area and the usual pitiful police response he applied for a Section 1 firearms certificate, which allows you to own pump-action and semi-auto shotguns. When they asked what he wanted it for he said "To do your job for you when you lazy bast*rds can't be arsed." Not only did he not get his S1 certificate, they revoked his shotgun certificate pretty much on the spot as well!

When I visited Arlington Cemetary a couple of years ago it struck me that if you're a US serviceman sent into conflict the worst thing that can happen is that you come back alive. If you get killed in action they'll lavish millions on your beautifully manicured grave and endless solemn military ceremonies, but if you make it back alive they won't give a toss about you.

With my special knack for completely derailing threads I thought I'd just mention that all this talk of Ray Mears reminded me that I have been meaning to buy Les Hiddins' old 'Bush Tucker Man' series for years. So I just did.

Ah, proper bushcraft, now you're talking Yup - Mears vs Grylls is like Attenborough vs Irwin: one is a genuine expert who does his audience the courtesy of assuming they have the intelligence to absorb information about the natural world without having to wrestle it to the ground or back-flip into it off a cliff, and the other is a brainless pseudo macho-man whose sensationalist drivel panders to the leg-jiggling ADHD generation.

Hurrah indeed! It goes some way towards making up for the fact that that pointless piss-drinking poseur Bear Grylls has also been honoured. He has always struck me as a w**ker of the highest order. Give me Ray Mears any day.

Yup - you'll never convince me that these bast*rds didn't have something to do with it. Very suspect, if you ask me...

This seems like the appropriate moment to introduce one of my favourite bands: "> There just aren't enough jug solos in music these days.

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/brexiters-excited-to-vote-on-thing-they-know-jack-shit-about-again-20190523185875

I think [mention]Six30[/mention] has the right idea. A lad I went to college with was so anxious about taking his driving test that he took acid beforehand. He wrote off his instructors car by stuffing it into a Mr Kipling lorry. But a couple of years later I saw him riding one of those big council mowing machines in a huge cloud of weed smoke. I have no idea what point it is I'm trying to make.

If you want a straight bit of road with cones where you can only go fractionally faster than Mod 1 almost any stretch of our motorway network should suffice.

If I was into naming bikes (which I'm not) I'd have called it Jasper, after the colloquial name for a wasp.

I think a lot of the people who gleefully remind us how dangerous motorcycling is don't appreciate the distinction between hazard and risk. Motorcycling is undoubtedly an intrinsically hazardous thing to do, but there is a lot we can do to mitigate the risks associated with doing it: being appropriately trained, wearing protective equipment, not riding too fast or beyond our individual abilities, riding defensively, not riding at night or in poor weather conditions - that sort of thing. Obviously that doesn't make motorcycling any less hazardous, but it does reduce the risks associated with doing it. Petrol is another good way to look at the distinction between hazard and risk. It's an intrinsically very hazardous substance (it's highly flammable in liquid an vapour form, explodes in confined spaces, is toxic, neurotoxic, genotoxic, carcinogenic and teratogenic) but none of us bats an eyelid at driving around with 10 gallons of it sloshing around under the back seat. That's because the risks associated with using it are relatively low, due to the fact that you can only get access to it at proper filling stations where you can't smoke or have other naked flames, where engineering controls on the pump prevent it overflowing out of the filler pipe and spraying all over you, and because modern petrol tanks are designed not to rupture and leak all over the road in a crash - all of which constitute risk mitigation. Unfortunately in my industry (crop protection) we have moved from risk assessment to hazard assessment. Most pesticides are intrinsically hazardous (their purpose is to kill things, after all) but the risks associated with using them can be mitigated in a variety of ways: only making them available to properly qualified professional users, limiting where and when they can be used, specifying Maximum Residue Levels on a crop-by-crop basis, not using them on flowering crops where pollinating insects may be foraging, establishing no-spray buffer zones around surface water bodies - that sort of thing. That meant you could take a horrifically hazardous pesticide, conduct a risk assessment and still establish a perfectly safe use, say if it was for use on ornamental plants that are not going to be consumed, grown in a glasshouse where there is no exposure to wildlife or the wider environment, and applied by automated spraying equipment at night when there are no workers around. Now risk mitigation plays less of a role in the approval process, which is a fairly significant retrograde step. Anyway, neither here nor there - that was another of my famous tangents.

As a pioneer in the field of scuba fly-fishing (and also the niche sport of car park fly-casting) I'm now thinking about borrowing a club and inventing motorbike golf - like polo only much, much better.

I think you get about 10 seconds before unconsciousness, so definitely plenty of time to think "Ooh - this is strange..." During the French Revolution there were several reports of the faces of guillotined prisoners making conscious movements (or at least looking distinctly miffed) after the blade fell and their heads were held up to the public...

I know this is in really poor taste, but what the hell... Many years ago a friend of mine witnessed a horrific bike crash when a speeding biker overtook him and a few more cars in front on a right-hand bend and was still so far over the centre line on the exit that he head-butted an oncoming vehicle. My mate dialled 999, asked for the police and an ambulance, but said the latter wasn't urgent because it was a fatality. A pissy operator said "The paramedic will make that decision sir, not you" to which my friend said "Well, I'm not medically trained of course, but his helmet has come off and his head is still in it."

My personal view on this spate of milkshake-chucking is that it's a pathetic and juvenile insult to our democratic freedoms, and that it should stop immediately after someone chucks one over Ann Widdecombe.

Who knows - they're all tossers.

Quite sure. It wouldn't have been pool if it had been Blair, it would have been air guitar to Oasis tracks whilst pretending to be their biggest fan.

Prime minister of what ? There'd be f**k all left to govern if that c**t got into power . Yeh thinking about it , perhaps Corbyn and Abbot are a better option At least Diane works harder than Farage. She regularly puts in 28 hours a day, 9 days a week.

One of my friends is a pro-Brexit journalist who has had to spend quite a bit of time with Farage over the years. They've played pool together on several occasions, and by Farage's own admission he's just having fun. He doesn't have the best interests of the UK or its people at heart and never has had - as evidenced by his truly pathetic record as an MEP - and is only interested in shit-stirring. But he knows full well that his 'maverick-man-of-the-people-who-isn't-afraid-to-tell-it-like-it-is' act goes down very well with a certain section of society, and that simplistic dog-whistle politics are enough to get them to salivate. He's like a more intelligent version of Trump: lies, simplistic slogans and appeals to idiotic nationalism are all it takes.

You should try working with me: In meetings I'm (in)famous for my digressions, tangents, diversions, marginalia and interjections of obscure bits of information that are totally unrelated to the matter at hand.

Yup - this is a quick snap from last weekend: Naked Bass Fishing.jpg Yeh right... heres the real photo Right, that's it - I'm updating my flounce status to 'Amber: possible risk'.