MarkW

What has how well he can knit got to do with it?

It's just one of life's many imponderables, like why there's no such thing as mouse-flavoured cat food, or what an 'occasional table' is the rest of the time.

I'm not lovely. I've got my doubts about Six30 as well, to be honest...

Do the general publics powers of citizens arrest extend to knocking them off? My battered old XC90 would be perfect for the job.

It costs about £80,000 per inmate per year to keep a murderer in prison. Let's hang them instead and give the money we save to the NHS, and then be free to assert our own moral equivalence with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen and North Korea instead of being slaves to the bloody Human Rights Act. Come on snowflakes - let's make Britain great again!

I can't say I've ever been very keen on the idea of giving a bloke in a silly wig the power of life and death over his fellow humans.

Don't worry - they'll soon get the hang of it.

Tactical contact head-on with a f*cking SWAT truck moving at speed is what they need.

Since [mention]goat[/mention] has already got in with a plug for his vids, does anyone want to buy a Trace Elliot AH1200-12 head with 1015H cab and a 4052H bright box? It's a beast - everything from classic Trace Elliot punch to growly overdrive from the valve stage, and with 1200 trouser-flapping watts on tap you can instantly punish your guitarist at the first sign of any widdly-widdly nonsense. I'm also flogging a load of my old basses (Clover Avenger 5, Cort A5, Cort A4 fretless, MusicMan Sterling etc). I'm hanging onto my beloved Stingray 5 and Fender P though! Perhaps I'll post a proper ad with some photos...

I'm still enjoying not being in a band to be honest, having quit the one I was in for six years back in December. I got fed up of playing the same shite over and over again to pissed-up punters whilst simultaneously putting up with the tantrums and histrionics of our prima donna guitarist. He stormed off stage in front of hundreds of people at one of our biggest gigs last year - proper Nigel Tufnell style - which really signaled the beginning of the end as far as I was concerned, especially as our normally placid drummer had chucked his sticks across the stage and gone home half way through the sound check the previous evening. And it's not as though I'm not used to it: my first band back in the late 1980s was The Nun F*ckers, which played various condemned and illegal drinking establishments and was regularly chased around town in the middle of the night either by irate skinheads who thought we were shite or by the police following a raid. So, I have hung up my bass and picked up the sticks again, and won't be looking to join another band any time soon. At least not until I've mastered the half-time shuffle...

Time is necessarily linear and incremental for the watch-wearer, and as I refuse to be shackled to a linear existence I don't wear one.

OK, that's it - I've had it with this place, and I'm leaving. What's the point of being on a motorbike forum if you can't even get advice on studio recording techniques? Bloody useless, the lot of you.

My wife used to be an intelligence analyst for the police some years ago, and some of the 'crimes' that were reported by members of the public were hilarious. I think her favourite was the daft old biddy who phoned in on an almost daily basis one Halloween to see if there had been any progress on the recovery of the pumpkin that had been stolen from outside her front door. She gave up when my wife told her that pumpkin-rustling was such a serious crime that the amount of police resource being dedicated to it was detracting from the investigation of murders and muggings, and that in order to get hers back she'd have to be able to pick it out of one of their regular pumpkin ID parades down at the station. It was a pretty cushy job because rural Suffolk was a very low-crime area: the headline in the local paper once was "Boy questioned by police for shouting abuse through girlfriends letterbox."

Morning all! I'm toying with the idea of upgrading my old Zoom R24 for an audio interface and laptop approach to recording acoustic drums with multiple (>12) inputs, and am looking for a bit of advice on suitable approaches. Before I post a load of tedious questions is there anyone on here who could help? Ta!

And the random post in a thread award goes to @Slowlycatchymonkey

This is exactly what I was talking about when I said we accept any old guff if it's dressed up as security or anti-terrorism. I can't remember the last time I saw a proper policeman in Harrogate, and then we get the whole bloody armed response team and their various toys deployed at the Christmas market. If I was a pick-pocket or a drug dealer, an armed police presence wouldn't deter me any more than a regular police presence (unless of course I was also guilty of the greater crime of 'looking a bit foreign' in which case I'd probably steer well clear for fear of ending up like that poor bast*rd at Stockwell). That market was absolutely heaving yesterday, as it is every year, and getting around it was a slow shuffle pressed up against everyone else - absolutely perfect pick-pocket territory. Nobody would have known if they were being frisked and nobody around them would have been able to see, and as all the police were patrolling around the perimeter their presence would be utterly irrelevant. And what about protecting us from terrorists? The lone wolf with a kitchen knife is a common enough scenario, and there is nothing they would have been able to do about that: there wasn't a single police officer in the market, and it would have taken them so long to locate and then reach a lunatic in the middle that it would all have been over by the time they did. And what would they do then? Open fire with their H&Ks into a crowd of Christmas shoppers? It's all utter bollocks, and goes back to what I said in my first post: proper policing is what's needed, not the occasional bit of high-profile poncing around.

My father-in-laws xenophobia extends to plants and animals too, and he drones on endlessly about the 'non-native' invaders that should be wiped out. I tried explaining that the only truly indigenous wildlife in the UK is what little was left immediately after the last ice age retreated, and that most of what he thinks of as 'native' either arrived or was brought here subsequently, but it made no difference.

I'll pass on the fondue, but the Jaffa Cakes are a splendid suggestion!

We now seem to live in a society where we'll willingly accept any absurdity if it's dressed up as 'security' or 'anti-terrorism'. I got on a short flight in Amsterdam a few days after 9/11 on which the cabin crew announced that they wouldn't be serving any hot drinks or snacks 'as a security precaution'. And nobody questioned this bullshit. What the hell did they think a terrorist could get up to with a paper cup of lukewarm tea and a Twix?

My next door neighbour had one of the stalls in the market, selling his prints. He said the police had wanted to put security fencing around the whole market area, but the council wasn't having it. Doesn't sound as though there was any great security threat if they capitulated that easily. The best friend of my ex-neighbour on the other side was a firearms instructor for NYP. I only met him a handful of times, but I'm not sure I wouldn't feel safer taking my chances with the terrorists!

Yes, but Harrogate isn't Berlin. Or Paris. Or London. I can only assume that we would have been the dress rehearsal for their main target: the Women's Institute garden party in Chipping Campden.

Indeed. Cops can't sit in everyone's house to prevent or arrest burgalers, but they can attend public events. Fine by me. That misses the point. Completely. I have no problem with the police attending public events - in fact I'd expect it. But sending a dozen heavily armed officers to a Christmas market in Harrogate? And barricading it with concrete blocks? What the f*ck were they expecting - a terrorist attack launched from Betty's Tea Rooms?

If anyone immediately outside of Harrogate fancies committing a violent crime today you're in luck, as the entire armed response unit from North Yorkshire Police appears to have been deployed to guard the Harrogate Christmas market. I wasn't aware that Al-Qaeda had the HG1 postal district in their sights, but the number of officers who are armed to the teeth as they patrol the perimeter of the concrete barricades they've set up around the market suggest that they are expecting some sort of hit on the coach loads of grannies that are infesting the place, or possibly an assault on the Cheeses of Yorkshire stall. Muppets. Given the spate of burglaries and antisocial behaviour in the area of late, I think that given the choice most residents would opt for a bit less of this pointless posturing and a bit more proper policing.