pongo

I wonder whether that was enough for him to win back a couple of polling points from Labour.

I cannot help thinking that, whatever he says, it will really be about trying to seem like a serious leader at a time when it seems like the wheels have come off. I do not like to be cynical and hope I am wrong.

OK. All joking apart this is the gist: "The most popular view among virologists is that it spent months mutating in an immunosuppressed person with a chronic infection. Other ideas include evolution accelerated by the use of anti-Covid drugs, and crossover into an animal species that later jumped back into humans."

This may help make sense of that:

This is the gist of it:

It's not though in reality. Certainly not any longer. Racing is today, at best, a form of brand advertising. Bike racing is no longer a showcase for products which are sold in any significant numbers. That's why there is little money in it. And young people are not into bikes how they once were.

Speed is a pretty daft objective in many ways. The tortoise and the hare pretty much addresses this point. The tortoise is the cool guy in that story. Efficiency, reliability under all conditions, style and range - these things are a much more useful measure of a company's products.

The TT should have been been reinvented as a technology event. Interest in bike racing is dying off.

On the bright side: At least when they turn into grumpy middle aged people they will have their own hardship narrative with which to castigate future young. A tale of how hard they had it - because for a few weeks they had to have the windows open. They will probably remember it as always being like that. My school used to get fumigated in the winter - or something like that. I wonder whether anyone else remembers that stuff. Probably some kind of awful chemical.

You don't catch a cold from being cold.

That makes sense. It's an instruction to attend.

The issue is farming practices. I doubt that cat population has increased over the past few centuries. Likely more pet cats and fewer feral cats.

Why pointlessly over-complicate it like this? Your solution is vastly more difficult to do than you imply - as you would know if you have any experience at all of trying to implement booking systems. Why not just give people a time to turn up? ETA: you'd be whining about the cost of your solution when the bill came in.

Are you from a parallel universe with a different world history?

In the old East Germany you'd probably have got a medal for touting.

So can a single human.

Being smart, cats know this btw.

That's fine if your cat pops into town. Utterly useless if it heads for the countryside or away from people with iPhones. Because Apple tags depend upon everyone's iPhone effectively forming a tracking network. The range is very limited. So if nobody within a few metres is carrying an iPhone then your cat is no longer tracked.

@Manx17 - I dispute the idea that people moving here force down wages and salaries. Certainly not for people with any kind of skill or trade. The opposite if anything. Most people moving here in my experience are skilled people earning well above the average salary - spending some of that money back into the local economy. That ultimately creates work for people here with other skills. It also serves to expand the economy. Amazon cannot fix people's boilers, put in a new kitchen, do the garden, service their car etc. Or even deliver their own stuff.

Have you phoned them up to politely check? I have in the past and have found them very helpful.

It would be fun to see the villages and towns restyled as Communes. Kind of edgy.

Zoos seem like a relic from another era to me.

Everyone knew it was daft building in Kirk Michael too. I hope that govt do not end up being expected to pay for flood defences. It's a nice area. It would surely be much better to leave it wild and build somewhere more sensible - i.e. up hill a bit.

How many people are in the Alliance @Josem? Roughly.