broken piston rod

[James Wilkinson]

There's no such thing as a dry part of the UK. And haven't you invented irrigation?

[rbowman]

Drier... 600 mm is still roughly twice what we can expect. Yes, we've discovered irrigation, assuming you actually have water to irrigate with. A river flows through the valley and there is an extensive network of irrigation ditches. Get up on the benches a couple of hundred feet above the valley and water isn't that easy to come by. Even on the flat land a lot of the McMansion lots that were subdivided from old ranches do not come with water rights.

And, no, I'm not going to get into water laws in the western US. Suffice it to say where water is a scarce commodity without a well defined legal structure in the good old days you'd just go kill the bastard who dammed the creek flowing through your property.

[M.A. Stewart]

Nope. Did they even sell Chung King gens in 1998?

OT: I bumped into a guy at a car show with a vintage

1930's Ford 2 Ton truck. It had the original split-rim wheels on it. He had shod it with six 'Double Happiness' brand tube-type bias-ply truck tires. I asked him about the tires... he became un-happy. I then asked him what he paid for tires... he became happy again.