ejstubbs

As a kid, my brother-in-law lived in a village on the north coast of Scotland. His journey to secondary school involved taking a bus the 25 or so miles to Forsinard, thence a southbound train to somewhere approaching a centre of civilisation. That was once a week, though, not daily! He has vivid memories of waiting on Forsinard station in the early hours of freezing winter mornings and seeing the steam-hauled train emerge from the whirling mists and snow. Very atmospheric.

I recorded the first one and deleted it after skipping through some appalling rubbish and a "highlights" segment that seemed to be more about drunken fans celebrating TDs than actual action. It's been deleted from my recording schedule. C5 had some kind of NFL show last season as well, which was cringe-makingly crass the one time I tried to watch it. They really do seem to pitch it at a lowest-common-denominator audience. IIRC C5 had live Monday night games last season as well. It didn;'t appeal to me, though, because I don't watch full game coverage as a general rule. I'm not going to stay up into the wee small hours to watch something where, frankly, not a lot happens a lot of the time and it's full of adverts. I could record it, but those objections still apply (and skipping the ads would still disrupt the continuity of the coverage), plus the missus would not be happy at having her favourite programmes bumped for an evening. Don't get me wrong, I think a live-as-in-being-there NFL game is a great spectacle and immersive entertainment, and well worth the time spent. When the World League of American Football was running in the 1990s I went to every Monarchs game at Wembley in the first two seasons. That said, when the league relaunched in 1995 and the Monarchs were playing at White Hart Lane - which didn't even have a large enough pitch to accommodate a proper NFL gridiron, and which never generated the atmosphere that Wembley did - my interest waned somewhat. But on a box in the corner of the sitting room with commercials every few minutes...nah. I agree that the ITV version of The NFL Show is a poor imitation of the BBC's from the last few seasons. And there's no NFL This Week, which was the main highlights package. Did ITV out-bid the BBC for The NFL Show? Or does the NFL think it'll get better ratings on more "popular interest" channels? The fact that C5 have got a show again this season suggests that they think last season's abomination was a success. Is the NFL trying to drum up enthusiasm by pursuing the Liberty Media Drive To Survive fabricating-drama-at-the-expense-of-the-actual-sport kind of nonsense? I think some of the best NFL coverage that's ever been done on free-to-air TV in the UK was when Channel 4 included NFL in its programme roster when it first launched. But they were forced to drop it because some OFCOM wonk decided that the other channels were already doing "sport", so it didn't fit with C4's mandate to produce "innovative and original programming". This was despite the fact that no other terrestrial channel had ever had anything but sporadic coverage of American Football - and that was usually the college bowl games. So now C4 fulfils its "innovative and original programming" remit with interminable property porn, tawdry "reality" shows like Naked Attraction (remember it was C4 that first foisted Big Brother on the UK TV schedules), and deformity exploitation shows about people suffering from obesity or unfortunate physical disfigurements. Nice.

It does say pretty much exactly that on the webpage: "above" being a graphical representation of the annual amount at the current cap, the annual amount at the cap from 1st October, and the annual amount at the cap from 1st October including the £400 rebate "below" being the same numbers rendered as monthly and weekly costs (which, frankly, anyone with a grasp of basic arithmetic could work out for themselves in seconds) , but not including the rebate. However, my energy provider is giving me the rebate spread over six months, so dividing the annual figure including rebate by 12 would give a potentially misleading answer - too high in the winter and too low in the summer. I believe that other energy providers may be doing it differently - and MSE can't realistically be expected to know who's buying their energy from whom (unless you are a member of their "cheap energy club" - and even then it might be asking a bit much). I also don't think it's realistic to expect MSE to know the details of your account with Octopus, how much credit you've built up with them and so forth. Equally, they can't be expected to know how much you get paid for electricity exported from your solar PV setup (unless it really is the same per kWh as you pay for electricity from the grid, which I don't believe to be generally the case anyway - it certainly isn't for the early adopters of solar PV who got the most generous payback terms, and again how is MSE to know?) What the calculator tells you is, for the kWh you buy from the grid (gas or electric), what that'll cost you - including standing charges. Basically, anyone could work it out for themselves given the basic tariff figures, but it seems that they vary by region and aren't straightforward to get hold of (but see below). So the nice people at MSE decided that it might be quite useful to have an easy to use ready reckoner available that looks all that up for you. It's not supposed to be - and couldn't possibly try to be - a personalised illustration taking each particular user's situation into account. People who do have more complicated arrangements can still use the basic numbers as a baseline, and then apply their own special terms & other considerations as corrections to get a number that's likely to be more applicable to them. In fact, you could do it all yourself, since MSE does actually give all the regional gas and electric unit rates & standing charges. How silly of them to try to make it a bit easier for people to get a quick idea of a ballpark figure based on their own usage, rather the spectacularly useless so-called "average" figure that's bandied around everywhere else including by the government itself. Remember also that, at the end of the day, these are only estimated numbers (again, like it says on the web site) based on past usage. One should not reasonably expect the numbers to be 100% accurate, since one's actual usage is unlikely to be 100% the same as in the last 12 months, especially if other external factors come in to play e.g. if this coming winter is particularly cold, or unexpectedly warm. TL;DR: it seems that some people are never happy, unless there's something they can find to complain about.

At the risk of dragging this thread kicking and screaming back on topic: the Money Saving Expert web site has updated its "how much will I pay from October?" calculator with the new, lower rates: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/what-are-the-price-cap-unit-rates-/#tool It helps if you know your annual gas and electricity consumption in kWh. You may be able to get this from your energy supplier, or else calculate it from your past bills and/or meter readings.

Not according to these two articles from the day when the cap freeze was announced: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62831698 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/08/liz-truss-to-freeze-energy-bills-price-at-2500-a-year-funded-by-borrowing

I believe it varies by region - though for what reason I cannot say. The moneysavingexpert.com "How much you'll pay from October" calculator (which still has to be updated following the announcement on 8th September) asks what region you're in, as well as your annual gas and electricity usage in kWh. If you don't know which region you're in it points you another web site which can tell you based on your postcode. In my case it turned out to be "South Scotland (Scottish Power)". Note that Scottish Power is not my energy supplier - it just seems to be the way the region is identified.

I thought the motive was to reduce costs? I know there is the cost cap, but does that not affect only the wealthier/better funded teams who could afford to spend more if they were allowed to?

Didn't stop mine being nicked on a regular basis. Only ever one at a time, though, with a gap of several weeks between each disappearance. All rather odd. They don't seem to be interested in the black wheel trims I use now. It's not as if the silver ones were expensive: less than £20 the set from Halfords IIRC, hardly worth risking a police caution for you'd think.

I was surprised, when I bought a towball mounted cycle carrier from Halfords which required a registration plate, they did not ask for any verification of the vehicle id or ownership. This was in 2018 when AFAIK the 'new' rules had already been in force for quite some time.

In the majority of cases it was due to small domestic suppliers competing to supply energy under fixed price contracts (way below the then cap) without adequately hedging against possible rises in what the energy actually cost them to buy (very often because the cost of hedging ate into profits - which profits of course then evaporated when the un-hedged risk occurred).

From casual observation of the way that owners of vehicles carrying non-compliant registration plates seem to persist in doing so without any apparent sanctions being applied*, I suspect the probability of being pulled over is rather lower than that of being allocated a registration plate carrying one's own initials by chance. Especially given the fact that traffic patrols have largely disappeared. I suspect it's more likely to be one of those things that gets picked up if you get pulled for a minor moving traffic offence (though that seems to be vanishingly unlikely these days as well). Is the registration plate checked as part of the MoT? In my distant youth I did used to swap the rather, ahem, "under-sized" plate on my bike when it was getting MoTed, but one year I forgot and nothing was said - didn't even come up as an advisory. Maybe they've tightened up the rules since then. * Myself included 😯 see immediately above.

I can remember way back when I was a kid, the staff at the museum in the castle at Haverfordwest being extremely helpful digging through their archives for documents relating to Brunel's plans for railways in Pembrokeshire, including the 1845 planned line through Treffgarne Gorge to Goodwick, and an initial survey for the alternative route to Abermawr proposed in 1847, the latter complete with IKB's signature (work on both routes eventually being abandoned due to the Irish potato famine). Potentially priceless stuff to which they were happy to provide supervised access simply because I was interested in the subject. These days I am a member of the National Library of Scotland, which gives me access to a lot of online information sources, many of which would otherwise require a subscription of some kind (one of my regular haunts is the complete OED), and the ability to request access in their reading room to items from its copyright library (which reminds me, I do need to renew my reading room ticket). They have an online system for requesting material from their catalogue, and for booking reading room timeslots to view it. You turn up at the scheduled time and the book, or whatever, is at the desk ready for you to peruse. You're even allowed to take a "reasonable" number of photos with your mobile phone of the information you're after. It's all free of charge, and I don't have to provide any credentials or justification for this, just "private research". When this stuff is owned by public institutions, it's difficult to deny the public reasonable access.

This. It's fundamental, and I don't quite understand why the OP decided to throw the spotlight on Wikipedia in particular. Yes, it's popular and often cited but, as Johnster and others have said, there are a lot of other much less reliable and far more popular online sources than Wikipedia. In particular, anything that it is posted on FB/Twitter-style social media should be treated with extreme caution until verified from a number of reliable sources of a less transient nature. It should be possible to find out when and by whom the questionable passage was added to that article. At the top of the article page there is a "history" link, which takes you to a list of all the changes to the page back to when it was first created. For the article in question there are a lot. Given the size of the 'travels of D2860' section it should be possible to spot when it was added by looking for a sudden large increase in the article's byte count. However, there are quite a lot of other useful tools available in the article history part of Wikipedia which can help to make it easier to pin down things like this. In the case of the Class 02 article I looked at the page statistics (linked off the history page) and found that a user called "N1TH Music" had contributed by far the most content to the article. Clicking on that user's top edits for the article showed a significant dump of information into the article by that user in the autumn of 2021. By checking the 'diff' links for each of their edits of a reasonable size it becomes clear that the questionable information about D2860's travels was added on 5th November that year: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1053680398 Since that user has contributed the vast majority of the information in that article, sadly the questionable accuracy of that edit rather undermines one's confidence in a lot of the other information in that article provided by that user*. I note that the suspect information relating to D2860 is shown as having been removed at 22:12 on 7th September i.e. yesterday, by a user identified only by the IP address "80.1.163.170" - only for it to be reinstated two minutes later by a user called "Saintstephen000". It was removed again at 01:15 on the 8th by a user named "LRV1007", and reinstated at 02:37, again by Saintstephen000. Somewhat bizarrely IMO Saintstephen0000 then sent an incredibly patronising message to LRV1007 at 02:39 asking them, when making edits, to "make dam'd sure it's sourced" - which strikes me as being more than a little ironic in the context. It wouldn't surprise me if LRV1007 had deleted their profile after receiving such an ill-judged put-down. What the above shows is that, for all that may not be perfect about Wikipedia, one thing it does offer is a degree of traceability for the information presented in articles, together with the ability for people with better knowledge to correct inaccuracies in place (something sadly lacking in the FB/Twitter etc world), with changes being recorded and with oversight from both other informed contributors and the editorial staff**. Dismissing it out of hand as being inherently untrustworthy is, to my mind, a classic case of the perfect being allowed to become the enemy of the good. * I note that N1TH Music has contributed to a number of other locomotive and MU articles on Wikipedia. One would hope that their 'research' behind those contributions has been rather more thoroughgoing then seems to have been the case for D2860's supposed UK-wide stravaigings. ** Not dissimilar in that respect to discussion forums like this one, one might argue.

Three cars crash in Bromyard Co-op supermarket car park At lunchtime, so not a case of nefarious goings-on with "hot hatches" under the cover of darkness*. In fact, whatever happened to "hot hatches"? Is it still recognised as a category? * When I suspect most supermarket car parks are closed off anyway, these days, unlike when I were a lad - but let's not go there...

Including a bit of a swipe at Liberty...

Prompted by experience of Edinburgh's city centre during the Festival, I wonder whether a future cliche might be the tourist hauling a wheelie suitcase through crowded streets with their gaze fixed on their mobile phone as they try to locate their Airb'n'b? (Though maybe less so in Edinburgh in the future, with the new council rules on short term lets.) Further down the same street there could be another wheelie suitcase-herding and mobile phone-brandishing tourist standing at the doorway of a tenement building with multiple keysafes by the front door, desperately trying to contact their Airb'n'b host to find out which keysafe is the one for the flat they've rented and/or why the code they've been given for the keysafe doesn't work and/or key therein doesn't seem to open the door...

IIRC Alan Woods wrote in one of the RM articles about Bredon that he avoided putting figures on the model for the same reason. But he did include small details that suggested that people were 'present' and involved in activities other than just railway related, like having a bicycle propped up against a fence as if someone had left it there while they just nipped off scene somewhere for a minute or two.

Or use the forum's own "in the current thread" search option (like I did, and it worked just fine - though it doesn't seem to exist in the mobile version of the site).

Quad or 4x4? Maybe in winter, but there's a perfectly good gravel track that goes past the front door. It looks no worse than - in fact in quite a bit better than - the one that we used to drive down to get to the family's holiday cottage in Pembrokeshire when I was a kid That had a strip of grass running down the middle, and well vegetated stone and earth banks on each side. I'm not sure it was ever actually maintained as such, beyond some of the vegetation being cut back from time to time. Cars used back then included a Peugeot 404 Familiale, Fiat 500D, Austin Maxi 1800, Austin 1100, Hillman Hunter estate, Mk 1 Ford Fiesta 950 and Austin Allegro 1300*. None of them exactly rufty-tufty cross-country vehicles. I suspect the £125pa is indeed a contribution towards the maintenance costs of the track by the landowner/tenant. I agree that the asking price seems a bit 'toppy' given the amount of work required and the lack of any services. Then again, being "off grid" is quite trendy these days. (The chimney stack obstructing the south-facing roof aspect might be a bit of an issue for installing solar PV though.) * Yes, the one with the "square" (or as BL called it, "quartic") steering wheel. I drove that car quite a lot when I was older, and I never really understood the hilarity this feature seemed to cause. I suspect it mostly came from people who'd never driven one, and quite possibly had never even seen one, but just thought that the idea of a square wheel was funny. It worked perfectly well for my Mum (whose car it was), me and my siblings.

I like the sculptures by Andy Scott - the artist who created The Kelpies in Falkirk - on the roundabouts on the Clackmannanshire Sculpture Trail: https://www.adventuresaroundscotland.com/scotland-travel-blog/photoblog-following-the-andy-scott-sculpture-trail Probably my favourite one is the "River Spirit", which has the figure holding a representation of the course River Forth to and through Clackmannanshire, from where it passes under the railway bridge in Stirling to where it flows in to the inner firth at the Clackmannanshire & Kincardine bridges: (The sculptures also help with navigating around Clackmannanshire, which can otherwise seem a bit lacking in landmarks to remind you where you are!)

That seems extremely unlikely, I'm afraid. The expression appears to have come in to use in the 1940s, initially in the RAF, so it's hardly likely to have had anything to do with sail-era warships. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/gone-for-a-burton.html The only meanings of the noun "burton" in a nautical context listed in the OED* are basically the same as those given in the above link: "A small tackle consisting of two or three blocks or pulleys used to set up or tighten rigging, or to shift heavy bodies," or: "A term denoting the thwartship stowage of casks, bags, etc." There's certainly no mention of a reinforcement for yardarms. (Note that the OED cites, amongst other references, the same sail-era contemporary sources as the linked article, one from 1769 and the other from 1846.) Neither of those meanings can easily be related to the actual meaning of the phrase "gone for a burton", which the OED defines as: "...(of an airman) to be killed; (of a person or thing) to be missing, ruined, destroyed." Finally, the OED defines "last-ditch" as: "Of or relating to fighting, resistance, or opposition to the very last; maintained to the end," or: "Made at the last minute in an attempt to avert disaster; resulting from desperation." Neither of which meanings seem to relate easily to the actual nautical meanings of the word "burton", the alleged but undocumented meaning, or the meaning of the colloquial phrase "gone for a burton". I would also refer readers to this entry on the Phrase Finder web site, and in particular the tongue-in-cheek mention of CANOE. * The full, online version.

Lewis Hamilton reveals he dislikes driving outside of F1 Can't say I blame him, to be honest: there may be a few whackos on the track but nowhere near as many as I seem to encounter on a daily basis on public roads. And at least everyone's going the same way (most of the time). On a separate note: those who moan about the inconsistent enforcement of track limits in F1 (which I have been known to do myself from time to time) will no doubt have been heartened by the example set in the Commonwealth Games Women's 4x400 relay final...

Actually that's about the only reason I can think of for doing anything other than simply putting the phone down on these people: that you might be able to monetise your 'public service' by putting it on YouTube. Then again, we pretty much never get any such calls because our phone automatically intercepts calls from numbers not in its contacts list and routes them to an automated 'secretary' who asks the caller who they are, then keeps them on hold while it calls us to ask if we want to speak to that person. That immediately puts a stop to scammers (because their auto-diallers immediately disconnect the call if they detect a machine at the other end) and we've never missed a genuine call from a number we weren't familiar with.

It was only recently that I realised that they can use DRS in qualifying. Presumably (a) you can only use it in the designated DRS zones, but (b) you don't have to be within one second of the car in front. Or is it sillier than that?

I don't know whether this has been reported before, but just now I was trying to reinstate some images which had gone AWOL from a post of mine (this one) and, although most of them did not appear in the actual post itself, they do all appear in the "UPLOADED IMAGES" section of the edit screen. So they're on RMWeb's hosted server, and I can reinstate them in the post without having to upload them again from my computer. Might it be that some of the photos that people think are still missing have actually been recovered, but just not put back into the actual forum/blog posts that they are supposed to appear in? (I've left half the photos still not restored into the body of my post so that the Admins can see what I mean - if they haven't seen such behaviour already.)