An Unusual Car Number Plate
I was in Cambridge yesterday and I saw one of the world’s worst cars, a Bentley something, with the number plate HAS 2 NOB. It is in fact HA5, but then the banker who owned it had made the plate illegal with unapproved spacing.
The main reason I call the Bentley one of the world’s worst cars, is that it only does about seventeen miles to the gallon. For lots of reasons, such as climate change and saving fossil fuels for future generations, cars that cannot do more than forty miles to the gallon should not be manufactured.
Now if you think this is jealousy, you couldn’t be further from the truth. If I wanted a Bentley, I could definitely afford one, but I certainly wouldn’t be seen dead in one!
I’ll stick to my Lotus, which incidentally weighs only forty percent of the Bentley. Just as in people, being obese is not a good thing.
I think it would be interesting to see how which car to lap Nurburgring fastest in the hands of the owner.
Paul and Rachel Chandler
Paul and Rachel Chandler are the couple who were seized from their yacht by Somali pirates. This is the last piece of news about them in The Times on the 13th of December.
These two paragraphs admit the truth about the Navy’s non-involvement.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) yesterday admitted that Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, had authorised a Royal Marine unit that witnessed the kidnapping to intervene. But it said it was the ship’s commander who decided it was unsafe to attempt a rescue.
The RFA Wave Knight was within 50 yards of the pirates and had a marine unit and a Merlin helicopter aboard. But Sir Mark Stanhope, the first sea lord, claimed the ship did not have the expertise required for a hostage rescue.
After that nothing has been reported!
Whether or not the commander should have intervened is open to question, as every squaddie I’ve ever met, would have been up to do it.
But perhaps the question that should be asked is why were the Marines on that ship without the equipment and training to intervene in a safe and successful manner?
On a wider point, Somalia is an absolute basket case and is yet another legacy of the incompetent Dubya. Read what was said in The Times yesterday.
This is the first two paragraphs.
Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Britain.
It has delivered a people that practised a moderate form of Islam into the hands of religious extremists. Its efforts to combat terrorism have turned Somalia into a launchpad for global jihad. Somalia is now the ultimate failed state whose mayhem threatens to destabilise the region and whose pirates maraud the vital shipping lanes off its shores. Its people endure Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
What I find so sad about Somalia, is that in the past I’ve done business with quite a few Somalis over telephone billing systems. I’ve always found them a quiet and mild people, who were a pleasure to work with.
What went wrong?
Let’s hope that the Chandlers get a quick solution to their ordeal.
But I suspect that will not happen as the impass between the British Government and their kidnappers is just too great.
Should we pay a ransom? I’m afraid that I agree with the Government here, in that if we do, then any UK national will then be at risk. And not just in the troubled parts of the world, as there an awful lot of criminals all over the world, who would see kidnapping as a nice little earner.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion
When we think about green energy with a small carbon footprint, some ideas keep turning up. One is ocean thermal energy conversion.
It is a very simple idea in that it exploits the temperature difference between the surface of the sea and the depths. It needs deep water fairly close to land and the temperature difference is only large enough in the tropics. But as the article shows, there are a large number of places, where this method might well be employed in the future.
Is it feasible?
Perhaps not now! But as with many technologies there will be a reduction in costs and new materials and methods in the next few years.
One proposal for using OTEC is to use it to smelt aluminium from bauxite in places like Surinam. The aluminium would then be transported to places in need of power and burnt in a power station. This would produce aluminium oxide or bauxite, which would then be transported back to the smelter. Obviously, if smelters are powered by green energy such as hydro-electric, then they could be elsewhere.
I am a betting man and I reckon that we’ve not seen the last of OTEC.
Why I Wear Short-Sleeved Shirts
I nearly always wear short-sleeved shirts, except when I’m wearing a decent suit.
I usually say that this is the result of a bullying incident at school, where my arm was broken. I was left with one arm about a centimetre and a half shorter and this means they never fit properly. Until recently, I avoided use of my left arm if at all possible and this meant that I was even more lopsided.
So long-sleeved shirts never worked unless they were made to measure.
But now that a guy called Dave Southby has made the arm and shoulder work so much better by just a lot of simple exercises. That got rid of about over forty years of pain.
So I bought two long sleeves shirts from Marks. Nothing wrong with them and they fit reasonably well, but they have one major problem.
How do I wash up in them?
Thinking back that was probably the original reason I stopped wearing long-sleeved shirts. Not because of washing up, but from about fifteen onwards I was always doing lots of things with my hands and long sleeves just get in the way.
Hares in the Snow
I have about forty hectares of land by the house and today, I could see how many hares there were.
Hares in the Snow
Note the two brown piles are not hares! They are molehills.
These tracks though were everywhere and as we had had snow last night, these were just the tracks of a single day.
To me, the hare is the most interesting of all of the animals that inhabit our countryside. I say that too with a lot of respect, as for seventeen seasons I hunted with the Easton Harriers in East Suffolk. You get entwined with them and those who are anti-hunting will never understand the respect hunters show.
The snow reminded me of one day at Tannington, where the weather was so cold, that we hunted hounds on foot. Tony Harvey was at one end of an immense field and Jimmy Wickham was at the other with the hounds working between them. It was a memorable day.
There was also the day when I was privileged to follow three packs of hare hounds in one day. Few have done that.
It was at Tannington again, and we started with our own harriers before an alcoholic breakfast. We caught nothing. I remember, I hunted one of my son’s ponies called Bluebell. She was a mare and I always found them a better mount for my skills. In later years, I used to hunt a thoughbred mare called Censella and she never dropped me. But could she go if you asked her!
In the morning it was hunting bassets on foot. It is strenuous work, even if bassets are slow. But once on a hare, they never give up and just keep going. Well some do. My solitary example might follow a scent for twenty metres or so and then it’s time for a snooze or the next meal. She’s never caught anything and we didn’t on that day either with the bassets.
Another alcoholic meal was followed by beagles in the afternoon. Now these were small and angelic beagles, but they were serious too. After perhaps two hours nothing had been caught, although we had seen a few hares.
The day finished with a formal dinner. Tony had suggested that we all go ratting round the stackyard to finish it off, but it was assumed he was joking.
One thing that sums up the day is Tony asking, if we had all had a good day. He got a resounding yes. He then said that is the difference between hunting and shooting and asked how someone would feel if they had gone shooting and hadn’t killed anything!
Birds in the Snow
Or rather some imprints of them in the snow.
Bird in the Snow
Unfortunately, this picture only shows where the bird was sitting. I actually saw the marks of its wing tips where it had taken off. I could make excuses, but it was just a badly taken photo.
Wingtip in the Snow
This picture shows the marks a bird’s wingtip had made. There was no other marks in the snow for some metres around.
It may have been the same bird as the other as these marks were similar to those just outside the other photo. Perhaps in its flapping to get airborne out of the snow, it just touched the ground.
An Afternoon Walk in the Snow
I took a walk this afternoon. It was cold and sunny.
The aim of the walk was to take a suitable picture for next year’s Christmas card.
Did I get the picture? Who’s to know!
A Sensible Approach to Climate Change
You can take what I said about Climate Change Deniers and Fascists with a pinch of salt or tongue in cheek, but in some ways they are part of the problem. Politicians poncing around in Copenhagen are another part. Pictures this morning of Obama coming out of Air Force One just don’t go down well with me, when the conference is all about cutting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
I hope that Copenhagen completely fails.
Only then, we might get some sense, as those that are worried about the future, will be given another kick to do something positive about it.
Politicians should keep well clear of the free market, as their meddling and well-meaning initiatives at best come to nothing and at worst they distort everything and push us down blind alleys.
But what they should do is nudge not corral us in the right direction.
For instance, every country should raise the price of carbon based fuels, in much the way that Kenneth Clarke did before Prudence removed it to court popularity. It must also be done on a world-wide or at least continent-wide basis. At present aviation fuel is untaxed and this should also be changed as soon as possible.
I don’t think there is much hope for this sensible measure, so that is why anything more savage that might be proposed will always be destined to fail.
It will be innovation by engineers and scientists that gets us out of this mess. And this is something for which no world-wide consensus is required. So if an engineer in Britain or Denmark say, has a brilliant idea, it is in their country’s interest to support it. Think of all those exports and licences.
We have a technological race, where the prize will be immense in monetary terms. It will also be very good for the world. Is that a win-win situation? I do hope so.
Climate Change Fascists
I really get sick of selfish Climate Change Fascists. They feel that they have a right to stop everyone enjoying themselves and curb their lifestyle. Some have an awful lot in common with the Taliban and want us to live back in the Stone Age.
I’ve just been listening to the phone in on BBC Breakfast on Radio 5 and you can just see them sitting there, picking at their lentils, drinking carrot or cabbage juice before they walk or cycle their kids to school.
Climate Change Deniers
I really get sick of selfish Climate Change Deniers. They feel that they have a right to continue to pollute the planet, use up all the resources and generally give two fingers to anybody who wants to curb their lifestyle.
I’ve just been listening to the phone in on BBC Breakfast on Radio 5 and you can just see them sitting there, fat or even worse, smoking their heads off and wheezing as they struggle into their 4×4 to take their fat kids 200 metres to school.
The Anonymous Widower 