I spotted this on the Barristers menu recently, and thought it might be of some use one day.
A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.
It’s from American humourist Robert Benchley.
(He was born 8 days after Sheffield United’s first ever match) (we lost 4-1) (it got better) (a bit).
He may have a point on that cure thing, although the symptoms can be readily relieved by taking copious amounts of Red Bull and Corenza C and spending several hours in bed.
I’m currently on a local flight, assuming that all has gone well with the somewhat radical plan of waking up and getting to the airport. My last few tripss have been intercontinental behemoths, with door to door journey times of nearly 24 hours. But they each included two flights, and door to door means getting to airport, checking in, connecting and catching a train at the other end etc etc. It could have been a lot worse. I could have been on one of these flights – the top three longest commercial long haul flights… IN THE WORLD [/clarkson]
Straight In At Number Three: Los Angeles to Abu Dhabi on Etihad is 8390 miles and 16.5 hours (LAX-AUH, EY170, B777)
Pros: You go pretty much right over the North Pole. Abu Dhabi is an awesome connection hub.
Cons: You have either been, or worse still, are now in Los Angeles (Where the helicopters got cameras).
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A New Entry At Number Two: Atlanta to Johannesburg on Delta is 8439 miles and 16.5 hours (ATL-JNB, DL200, B777)
Pros: Kruger National Park. Africa!
Cons: No flat topped Mountain.
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But Your Number One Is Still: Dallas to Sydney on Qantas is 8578 miles and 17 hours (DFW-SYD, QF8, A380)
Pros: None.
Cons: Dallas. Sydney.
This is the world’s biggest airliner on the world’s longest route. The A380 carries a massive 323,000 litres of fuel for this trip.
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Compare and contrast these with the shortest scheduled commercial flight in the world: The 1.7 mile hop between two Orkney Islands just north of Scotland: Papa Westray and Westray (PPW-WRY, LOG358, Britten Norman Islander). Operated by Loganair, the flight duration is officially two minutes. Here’s a video indicating the distance between the two airfields:
There’s also a video of the Sydney – Dallas flight, but that’s a whole lot longer and has Americans and Australians all over it.
I don’t read enough, apparently.
I don’t do a lot of things enough, according to some people. They like to judge me by their lifestyles and can’t understand why I don’t read enough, watch movies or spend every Saturday morning at a hipster market. I don’t think that I don’t read enough, I just think that I don’t read as much as they read. And that’s an altogether different thing. By the same criteria, they don’t blog enough. I’m just saying.
Anyway, maybe “I don’t read enough” because the stuff that’s out there to read isn’t very good. (I did make it through this abridged version of Grey last night though, so, you know, be proud of me.) But now, I have discovered this:
Redcliffe banged the original version out in 1949, but it was this 1985 revised impression which took the proverbial biscuit, thanks in part to the input from renowned potato scholar and Emeritus Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Birmingham, J.G. Hawkes, and – many believe – the additional chapter on INDUSTRIAL USES by W.G Burton.
This is a book filled with facts and figures:
But being of scientific bent, that’s just fine by me. Facts and figures are my bread and butter. Although, being that this magnificent tome was first published in the 40s, there is a certain dated style of language. I find it intriguing that Salaman borrowed descriptions from other crops though; the extent of cereal crops, for example, was always described as, say, the area “under wheat”. Quite how he got away with “under potatoes”, this being a subterranean crop, is rather beyond me.
It’s these sort of foibles that intrigue me and, despite the somewhat extravagant cost, I’m going to be reading all about spuds and how they’ve affected all of our lives, very shortly.
The practice of cat-calling – allegedly socially acceptable in the 1970s – has rightly come under the spotlight of late. The difficulty, however, in socially outlawing this practice is the challenge of radically changing such a deeply engrained convention with any immediate effect. Despite the (loud) wishes of the feminists, that’s actually not so easy to do and consequently seems likely to fail.
So how about some baby steps towards a mutually acceptable conclusion? Perhaps it should begin this way, but for me the smart progression in cat-calling would be something along these lines:
And if it’s kind of difficult for you to imagine that a hunky, macho builder would call his cat “Fluffy”, then try to imagine one not wolf-whistling at a passing woman.
After yesterday’s Malan’s Dairy post, here’s another dairy issue.
This time it’s at Woolworths.
And they’re not even kidd… they’re not even joking.
When it comes to cattle, this isn’t a problem. Consumer comes before calf. It’s the natural order of things. But when it comes to goats’s, it seems that the kids are alright. Their need is greater than yours – and it’s a well known fact that baby goats are fully dependent on a reliable supply of Chevre.
Damn this nanny state.
Fortunately, as the notice suggests, once September comes, the shelves will once again by laden with goats’s’s milk products. Until then, you’re going to have to just go all mainstream and bovine, hipster folk.
