Re: OT. Freedom Of Speech

Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2006-07-06, Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

snip

btw, re: weapons in school and whatnot. My littlest brother nearly got
expelled for taking an axe into school one day - just for the hell of
it. Only a little thing for splitting firewood. I wonder why similarly
straighttforward approaches aren't used these days.

You can't confiscate what you can't find. A hatchet is tricky to conceal,
but a bread-knife isn't.

Oh, I dunno about that. Bread knives are quite long - I reckon it
wouldn't be hard to spot one in a bag.

Fits easily inside a foolscap ring-book - slipped into the rings, ideally.
A4 is a bit shorter, but I think it could be done.

Ah. I suspect that the A4 shrink is just enough to make it easily
detected.

There are seams and
folds in a briefcase or school satchel, too.

True, but no-one at modern schools uses either, do they?

Nor is a sharpened steel comb, which was the
thing in my day

Oh yes. I recall my dad mentioning that as one of the improvised
weapons that were around, by way of warning. *He* had grown up in the
50s with Teddy Boy razor gangs and whatnot. Razor blades sewn into your
cap brim, that sort of thing.

... let into the soles of plimsoles or DMs too ... nasty vicious sods are
nothing new.

Certainly not - on the whole, the further back you go, the nastier and
more vicious they are. Modern young hooligans are certain a bit of a
worry - but nothing like as bad as they were in 18th or 19th century
London, for example.

I'm sure some of those lovely mysterious tiny flint blades
that get dug up sometimes, were used in a similar fashion, even if they
were originally designed for something innocuous.

Hmm... Back in the days of stone tools, I suspect one was wary of
`difficult' behaviour from almost anyone he met.

(for the grammar pedants: that's bang on according to the rulebook)

[snip]

It was the school calculating machine that we weren't allowed to touch.
Only the maths dept teachers were allowed near it.

Blimey. btw, my dad got one of the most advanced mechanical hand
calculators ever built - bought by the firm just before the electronic
sort took over, and - well, he snaffled it when they got rid of it.
*All* the interesting technology thrown away by his place got snaffled
by someone.

Some of the last of the pre-electronic office machines are lovely things.
An actuary once showed me a mechanical calculator that could multiply and
divide and worked to ten digits, and was a cylinder about the size of a
small mug.

Blimey!

Built by a watch-maker, apparently, and when new it cost more
than a nice yacht.

Yes, it would do. They got some of the machines very nice to operate,
but `tiny' wasn't part of the spec on the whole. What my dad's got
looks a bit like a miniature mutant typewriter - a ten digit keyboard,
with various levers and a winding handle on the side, with three digital
displays along the lines of car odometers for the numbers.

snip

Creosote, arsenic, quick-lime, turps, benzine, nicotine bombs, camphor,
DDT, ... no garden shed was complete without a good selection of dangerous
chemicals.

DDT and arsenic were well out by my day and is creosote really that bad?
We had mercury in a Coleman's mustard jar - salvaged from mercury
switches out of old equipment, stored to be sold for scrap when he had
enough, and all manner of volatile chemicals. I think there was some
cyanide compound there for a while - used it for gold-plating, IIRC. I
was going to say that I was pretty sure that benzine was out too, 'cos
that was an identified carcinogen, but I do recall there being various
jars and bottles of organic solvents around that dad said of `Don't use
that stuff, it gives people cancer'. And there were others that I found
out were carcinogenic in school chemistry lessons.

I don't remember ever having been told about carcinogens.

The `public awareness' of that sort of thing kicked off in the late
1960s, I think - about when I was born.

I do remember
someone being told off for stubbing a *** out on one of the asbestos mats
used to moderate the heat of the flame of a bunsen burner, but that was
about smoking being forbidden the pupils as a status thing as far as I can
remember - like driving and voting and sex, it was only for grown-ups.

While the people who enforced the `no smoking for under 16s' stuff might
have viewed it that way, the actual reason behind the law was health.

When I first set up home for myself, asbestos was a normal part of much
domestic equipment.

Still is, isn't it? My parents have an asbestos roofed garage.

I once worked in a radioimmunnoassay lab (I might have put one `n' too
many in that; student job). Radioactivity and biohazards *everywhere*,
not to mention Otto the Dutchman's anti-personnel tobacco mixture for
his pipe (his horrible pipe and toasted Edam cheese sandwiches - they
smelt vile - meant that he could spent his entire lunch hour utterly
unmolested by any other form of life).

One day, someone dropped a 1 litre jar of reagent. Once dropped, the
writing on the glass could not be read. What was in it? Erm... I
can't remember if this was the radioactive one or not, said the clumsy
researcher concerned. Geiger counters do have a use :-) (turned out to
be okay, but... well, I kept plenty clear until the `all clear' was
given. Not that it was very risky - all the radioactivity was from
short half-life sources present in - by the time I got near 'em - very
small amounts. On the other hand, any `wax with carbon in it' was
likely to be a bit radioactive and rather bad to consume, and `wax with
carbon in it' was the standard muck that you found - oh, all over that
side of the lab where the assays were actually done).

Safety, eh?

[snip]

Those were the days when the navy used to take steel drums of radioactive
waste just out of sight of land and dump them overboard - and practice
their small-arms skills to make them sink.

Actually, I write of the 1980s, not the 1950s. While it might sound as
if they were very lax on safety, they weren't: levels of radioactivity
outside the `hot' lab were in fact very low, and the half-lives of
everything they brought upstairs from the `hot' lab were very short (a
few hours or a few days at most). I didn't ever bother to find out
about what sort of emissions they gave - but it's not hard to find
something that'll kicks out a set of particles with energies that are
lower rather than higher risk.

It really wasn't very risky at all.

Now, when you've got drums of miscellaneous radioactive waste from a
nuclear weapons programme - well, that's a very different matter
entirely. Keep well away, that's the ticket.

And our loving government
deliberately had conscripts stand around in the Australian outback while
'atom bombs' were let off, to see what happened to them.

Yes, they did. Do know what the Yanks and Soviets got up to in that
line? Makes our lot seem like saints, and our lot were in fact total
fucking shits.

btw, I've long wanted to visit Novaya Zemlya. I changed my mind
recently - it turns out that the biggest ever nuke exploded was exploded
above the island. 50 megatonnes - only half its ultimate yield, 'cos
they'd decided to detonate it with only two stages rather than the full
three. Good job too. Windows blown out *hundreds* of kilometers away.
Militarily completely useless - there was no sensible way of delivering
such a thing to a target, no way at all of dropping it on the USA, and
even if you could drop it on Europe - well, say you drop it onW.
Germany. The Iron Curtain nations next door would all suffer
catastrophic damage and the USSR would have got a really nasty dose of
fall out. Even an attack on the UK with such a weapon would have hurt
the Warsaw Pact.

And sailed a
ship up the English Channel spraying some undisclosed virus or chemical
agent into the wind to see how far inland GPs and hospitals reported
people being unusually ill. They've stopped doing things like that now,
though. Probably.

I strongly suspect that they have in *this* country - they tend to give
up on that kind of thing once they realise that it just gets them into
trouble and doesn't produce any useful results at all. I'd not want to
bet that they're not doing it in China or the USA.

The UK doesn't have military stocks of chemical and biological weapons
because they're bloody dangerous things to have lying around, there's
almost nothing you can do with either of 'em in a war, and they'd get
into trouble if they got caught.

Of course, the UK does have *some* stocks of such weapons for `testing'
(so they say) at Porton Down. I suspect that they're telling the truth
- but `testing' covers things we might not think of as such.

snip

I recall the day I learnt to ride a bicycle (I *think* I'd probably
started school, but I'm not sure. I was certainly swimming well before
I started school - but with a swimming teacher for a mother, I didn't
have any choice at all about that one). Lots of falling off onto the
grass verge, and then I `got it'. I'd had stabilisers up until then,
which possibly made it harder for me to learn 'cos steering works
completely differently when you get to lean.

I learned to ride a two-wheeler at a very early age; certainly before I
started school. I never had 'stabilisers', and they still look dangerous
to me. They teach you how /not/ to ride.

Quite. Rebecca never had stabilisers. Or rather, the bike she started
out with began with stabiliser wheels, but they didn't turn round and so
needed removing rather early on. (it was a Chinese bike - when you're
on Mauritius in the 1970s, you have to take what you can get)

Do the kids on mopeds in your area habitually ride with one or both feet
almost scraping the road, at anything less than 'full speed'?

snip

One thing to bear in mind is that an automatic transmission on a
motorcycle makes it harder to control a bike at low speed,

True, but it can be done by 'balancing' the throttle and brakes.

Yeah, but that's a job needing a fair bit of control and `feel' doing it
with throttle, clutch, and brakes and no mechanism that'll suddenly
declutch you or change gear.

as does
putting the rear brake control under a hand rather than a foot.

I disagree about that. You just learn to use the controls you have.

Mmm.... I'm not sure about that. Some control patterns are more
convenient than others. I began with brakes on the handlebars of my
bicycle, and I recall finding the `Japanese pattern' motorcycle control
arrangement instantly familiar and `correct' as soon as I started
riding. I had trouble when I borrowed a BSA...

A
foot-brake on a 'bike can give you a nasty surprise if you aren't
expecting the side-effects that can make the bike lean and steer,

? How does that work?

and
steering a powered bike is a bit of a dark art in itself without adding
any more weirdness.

Erm... All bikes are powered one way or another - whether by
adenosinetriphosphate (sp?) or by petrol. I don't know of any
differences between steering a leg powered bike or a Honda powered one.
I've met many who reckon that motorbikes are easier to ride than
bicycles.

On the
other hand, having one trailing foot just buggers up your balance and
you can't control a motorcycle properly unless you've got both feet
planted on whatever's available for planting. I got taught slow riding
by some deadly experts.

snip

Having started with pedal-cycles probably helps, too; you don't get
anywhere until you get both feet onto the pedals.

You're also not frightened of a low-speed spill, either. At least, not
if you carried on cycling.

Then you progress to
toe-clips and find that sometimes it's just too much trouble to put your
feet down even when you have to stop. In London, you can see cycle
couriers riding fixed-wheel who keep both feet up while 'oscillating' in a
small arc at the traffic-lights. They are the 'real hard (wo)men' of
their profession, of course; most do have free-wheels and variable gears.

I'd hope so too :-)

Rowland.


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