Oh, the irony of it..

[Ed Sirett]

ROTFL

[Andy Hall]

... and your regular and useful contribution is what, precisely?

[Andy Hall]

"Four legs good. Two legs bad"

(Trouble is that it snowballs)

But there is life beyond Bury St. Edmunds.

[Andy Hall]

Clearly they weren't uk.d-i-y regulars where this wouldn't be tolerated.

Did you try looking outside Milton Keynes at all?

[Andy Hall]

It's funny in so many ways and so sad in others.

I think that one has to begin by realising that the northern hemisphere/western Europe way of life is a comparatively narrow perception of humanity and that outside it the boundaries are hugely wider.

I've been going periodically to southern Africa for over 20 years and have numerous friends in various sub Saharan countries. The changes that have happened and continue to happen are minimally good but maximally bad from the perspective of the benefit of all of the population.

For example:

- At a land crossing between South Africa and Botswana a large sign warning the hapless tourist that the HIV infection rate in Botswana is

1 in 7. This is a country with relatively good economy, education and small population That was a few years ago. Almost certainly worse now.

- In the men's toilets of a major corporation in South Africa, condoms in baskets free for the taking, not even machines.

- Street names being changed in order to erase history. Mugabe began that idea in Zimbabwe.

- People being held up at gunpoint in their homes. Black people in middle income areas.

Dried banana skins are but a short step from this.

Look across the skyline at any township from about April onwards and it is thick with smoke from the burning of coal. Look at black fug belching out of trucks and vans because nobody is policing emissions or fixing vehicles.

This was the developed world in one sense. Has it moved forward? In one way yes. In many ways it is moving rapidly in the opposite direction.

All of that is before the profligate use of fuel in oil producing nations is considered. Petrol prices in Russia are around a third of those in western Europe, for example, and in Gulf states even less.

I don't see people in these places giving a shit about carbon emissions or anything else.

Yet we continue to believe in the north west part of the world that we can lead by example. Frankly, we are kidding ourselves because the other three quarters is laughing at our stupidity.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Of a sort..;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Indeed. If you are living in a tin shack in Soweto, and its down near freezing, you are going to light up some coal.

The future of the planet takes second base after your own personal survival.

We can lead by example, but what a sorry example we are setting..

[Jon Green]

Not for St Edmund...

Jon

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 10:59:50 on Fri,

8 Feb 2008, The Natural Philosopher remarked:

Not helped by people thinking they've done everything they need to by buying a few paper garbage sacks, a couple of CFLs, and that a Prius has some sort of mystery negative carbon footprint.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Precisely.

I want a BEV. Probably only a couple of years away.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Bipedalism was a big step forwards...

[Andy Hall]

I want a bevvy. Probably only a couple of minutes away.

[The Medway Handyman]

Anyone else remember DJ Johnie Walker reading out a request from someone at;

Bury St. Edmunds. Suffolk.

[geoff]

No - just an afterlife

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well I had a 1/3d bottle of a very decent Chianti.

So alls not totally awry in the world.

[Andy Hall]

There's bunch of Russians (

[The Natural Philosopher]

They don't

Is that Russian for Polonium 238?

;-)

[Andy Hall]

?????. They

I'll Czech and ask them.

They're on bottle 4 now. The bar people had been bringing glasses of orange juice for the ladies. This time, the ladies asked that less ice was put into the orange juice because it didn't allow enough space for the ?????

The scary thing is that they are showing no signs at all of becoming pissed.

[Mike Barnes]

AAMOI how? I can't even get a glass of rubbish Chianti these days, never mind a bottle of the decent stuff, for 1/3d.

[John Ionides]

Fri,

=C4=C1=D2=D4 =F7=CF=C4=CB=C1. They

It is something strange I have noticed about drinking vodka Russian- style - it seems perfectly possible to drain a bottle between three people and still feel just slightly tipsy, and annoyingly chirpy the next morning too. If I tried drinking that in pints I would be a blithering mess, and probably a write-off for a few days.

Maybe it is just the quality of the hlebnoe vino, though.

J