Thomas Jefferson

You tell 'em, Mr Meldrew!!!!

You can be a tit after 21. How old are you? 73.

Just raise the age to 21. There's no need for teenagers to drive when we have a perfectly good public bus service.

According to today's IOM Examiner (page 5): In September, Andrew James Reeday, aged 19, of Ballakillowey, Colby, who owned the Ford Fiesta car, was handed a 180-hour community service order and disqualified from driving for nine months for his part in the crime. He pleaded guilty to allowing Bridgewater to drive his car without a licence and wasting police time. On March 8, Reeday had spent the afternoon driving around Peel, Douglas and Onchan picking up a number of teenagers aged 14 to 19, including Lucia Porter. At some stage arrangements were made to meet up later that evening with Bridgewater at a friend's house in Oak Road, Peel. On arrival there were already six people in the car. Bridgewater, who only had a provisional licence, offered to drive. He drove with eight people in the car, including two people in the boot, on to the Switchback Road...........

Is that photo doing the rounds on Facebook genuinely one taken an hour before sentencing? Surely he'd be within the grounds of the IOM Courts of Justice with his family an hour before sentencing? If genuine, it's in poor taste and insensitive. I just can't understand people sometimes.

I don't envy Deemster Montgomerie his job when it comes to handling difficult no-win cases like this. All things being considered, I think he made the right decision within the remit of the options available to him. The only silver lining that might come out of this case is that young people might learn from it and think twice before behaving in such a reckless manner and thereby prevent further tragedies such as this from happening.

speak for you? to achieve that I'd have to have a lobotomy. And to achieve that, you'd have to have a brain. Never mind.

Was that a new cruise ship docking facility shown in the image of the future plan of Douglas?

The last film I watched was The Hunger Games. Not a great film but I think I'm in love with Jennifer Lawrence.

My mouth was closed when I typed that.

'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' Jiddu Krishnamurti

'It is ironic that persons in whom the evolutionary processes of Nature have begun to operate more rapidly, and who can be considered as advanced mutants of the human race, are institutionalized as subnormal by their 'normal' peers. I dare to guess, on the basis of discussion with my psychiatrist-friends, that this process is not as exotic and rare as one would like us to believe, and possibly 25 to 30 per cent of all institutionalized schizophrenics belong to this category -- a tremendous waste of human potential. The reason for this is that they have been catapulted suddenly into a situation in which they are functioning in more than one reality. They can see and hear things occuring in our neighbouring realities, that is the astral or other higher realities, because their 'frequency responses' has been broadened ... The onslught of information may be overwhelming, and they begin to mix and confuse two or three realities.' - Itzhak Bentov

Ragged

A questionnaire which is fairly useless at detecting risk of self-harm because it assumes people are going to answer the questions honestly. I think most people with any common sense know better than to say something which will end up getting them sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

I accept that but do people who hear voices go and kill themselves because the voices tell them to or do they do it because they're generally just fed up of years of their life wasted away hearing voices and with the accompanying parnaoia, anxiety and delusion which must preclude them from a normal life? I think it's probably a combination of the two so I wouldn't arbitrarily say someone who is aware of their own condition is less likely to top themselves.