Everyone loves a snow day 
It is astonishing how such a group of well meaning individuals can truly fuck something up – I was looking forward to this as my family used to go to Donnington to watch the BTCC and MotoGP when I was younger (Guinness sponsored a couple of different manufacturers = corporate hospitality )
Ok, so that wasn’t quite formula one, but they were giving the place a much needed refresh to welcome the British Grand Prix to its new home and everything looked quite exciting.. the track is well on it’s way to being finished and all they needed was the £135m to support the event but they couldn’t find it. What is sickening is that at least this figure was spent on legal fees and arguing over track designs / changes to be made before anything was even done.
Without Formula one, how will the place ever survive with the massive debts they must now have? A victim of the credit-crunch, or just cack-handed management?
Didn’t expect to be woken up by the fire brigade at 2 o’clock this morning!
Me: ‘Better check our car park to make sure our cars are ok…’
Sophia: ‘Ooh, fireman – look at their powerful hoses!’
Gemma made tea.
Typical!
“My personal opinion is that we should go to Finland and all those arab countries and just blow them up”.
This is a quote from “9/11: 102 minutes that changed America” – I’m just halfway through watching it and could not actually believe that these words came out of someone who, a business man, looked fairly intelligent.
It’s a properly shocking video timeline that really goes someway into showing just how horrifying the events were for the people who were there – I tried to imagine it at the time, but I didn’t even come close. If you don’t like watching people jumping to certain death, then this really aint for you (I have to admit, even I closed my eyes in parts).
It’s always been a wonder how the buildings managed to stay standing for so long after being hit by planes, but equally, how did they suddenly just collapse? After seeing them burn for so long, and having seen the footage of them just before collapse – you can see tower one ‘glowing’ from the heat of the fires within, and Tower 2 had molten debris flowing from it – it’s just amazing that anyone escaped at all.
All I can say is thank god for democracy – George Bush was pretty bad as presidents go, but from hearing the above statement, I realise that it could have been a lot worse. Finland should probably be thankful that ol’ George Dubya has probably never heard of them…
How on earth does does someone actually manage to do this?
This is what happens when you mash the last 30 years of pop songs that all use the same 4 chords together! (You need to skip forward to the part with the song!)
Wooo! All i need to do is make my car road legal again and then I’ll be on my way! (yeah, slight oversight on my part!)
As ever, the weather looks crap (see here) – But it can’t be worse than the floods of 2007 and the great storm of 2006..
Pics to come
Ok, so usually I just copy a template I like and I give it a few tweaks to get the look that I am after. This time I thought it was time to put what I’ve learned over the years to use and actually sit down with a paper and pencil and sketch out a design and then create it from scratch! Thus this new template is born; it isn’t quite how I planned it to look – for some reason some background colors and borders aren’t working – god knows why, they only rendered properly in IE 7 (ironically!) Now to make some money out of this… ?
Well it was another good race round the island this year – we didn’t do quite as well, but it was just as eventful!
We started at 0750 on saturday morning heading west from Cowes with very little wind and an easterly tide, but staying south and close in to the shore we managed to catch a back eddy on the tide witch gave us an advantage most of the way to the needles where the wind strengthened and we had to work hard to stop the boat broaching.
Rounding the needles, our spinnaker work from the day before paid off and we were able to sail almost the entire south side of the island with the spinnaker up, but here our course was further out and we lost a lot of distance on the front runners. On getting to bembridge, the wind stalled and chaos pursued as 500 boats (with another 1000 behind us), log jammed ,trying to round the buoy, flailing helplessly with no wind and no progress!
Eventually the wind picked up and we sailed as close to the shore to avoid the tide – other boats weren’t quite so lucky, with many getting bogged down in the shallows and many completely run aground – at this point there were a lot of shouts for ‘water’/'starboard’ and some close calls (check the pics!)
We made good ground on the last leg, but after 12 hours (!) we still only managed a measly 18th out of the 65 in our class (not quite the 5th that we did last year!).
See the pics here.
Not really sure what’s going on with bikers today – perhaps it’s the sun? Every single moped rider I overtook on the way to work seemed to see it as a challenge to prove that they could get through the traffic faster than me – even if that included cutting up lorries, skidding towards the backs of cars and generally weaving around the road like a total twat…
Whilst on the subject, it’s not just moped riders – most bikers don’t seem to like being overtaken by someone on a ‘little’ 650.. leave the ego at home – it doesn’t mix well with not being dead.