Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Not in the least OTT, Greek.
Merely an adaptation of an existing UK policy. Just that we don't apply it to murderers and rapists. We reserve it for the more henious crimes like speeding and smoking, except in Oxford where the local council have deemed it more appropriate for parking offences.

B****y H**l I am out of touch. If they shoot you in Oxford for just parking I will stay in my nice quiet corner of Yorkshire with me sheep.

Note.... I did say a bit OTT. Must not upset the locals, some who think all prisons should be emptied and all prisoners given therapy to change their evil ways.

Don't forget there is some good in everyone (trouble is in some no one can find it).

You're a Yorkshireman?????
Good grief, I thought I was the only one on here from Gods own country!!!
Musn't disagree though.
Good in all. The Matthews family are obviously a well balanced, slightly misunderstood bunch who are kind to animals, needing a little guidance on family matters.
Abu Hamza is a pleasant chappy who helps old people with their gardens, and donates much of his time to charitable work, occassionaly lapsing into rhetoric demanding two thirds of the population be destroyed as sub human. Think of it as a kind of Tourettes syndrome.
And Myra Hindley would have made a really good Brown Owl at the local Girl Guides had she ever had a chance for a cup of tea and a biscuit with her local social worker.
And how could we all misunderstand Mussolinni and Hitler so much? Just a pair of loveable rougues in the same vein as Abbot & Costello. Not quite as funny though. More like Les Dennis & Dustin Gee.
No. The more I think about it, the more I think the average hand wringing liberal has it right. We should empty the prisons of petty offenders, like murderers, rapists and terrorists. That would leave us more room to deal with the real scourges of society, like drivers, smokers and those who dare put salt on their food. Bas***ds.

I'm from Leeds - the heart of God's Own Country.
Left for the South many moons ago.
It's the self-righteous, self-regarding left-liberal socially engineering pious government and their dependent structures which create the sociological ills of this country.
Home rule for England and self-rule for Yorkshire.

How can this bunch of winkers throw out decent working immigrants from India, genuine refugees from Zimbabwe and keep foreign born criminals and terrorists - and on social security?

I'm from Wales. God made Wales ................... and sheep .....................

You're dead right Kim. God made Wales.
But think back to your own career. There must be some points you are proud of and some you are a bit embarrassed about.
Same with God.
He looks at the Maldives, the south of France and Yorkshire with great pride at a good job well done.
Then he considers Afghanistan, Australia and Birmingham and realises we all have bad days sometimes.
He is then cheered by the thought that his greatest achievement (Humans) tried to copy him and create wonderful habitats of peace, industry and harmony and only came up with Milton Keynes, and the M25.
Wales looks very pretty by night, by the light of blazing holiday homes.

Oh yes, the blazing holiday homes! Don't get that so much these days; shame really, there's nothing like the ruddy glow of a fire reflecting off the wool of a good sheep.

How come the mere mention of Sheep brings forth more debate than politics, religion and sex put together. (No sex and sheep jokes please)
Also if Leeds is the heart of Yorkshire, and Barnsley is the Sole, what part of the body is Hull, (I'm going to regret that question).

The ars*hull Greek?

Hull is a brilliant piece of design.
It is the first thing northern Europeans see as they enter this sceptered isle, and therefore everything that follows, even Dewsbury, birmingham and Newport Pagnall seem wonderful by comparison, making the Nordic races think England is a fantastic country.
One of Hitlers better ideas was getting rid of his unused ordinance by dropping it over Hull on the way home. Its not that he disliked the city, he was just very farsighted and knew that somewhere in Hull John Prescott was being born and he couldn't stand the competition for centurys worst politician awards.

A Yorkshire contribution to the Battle of Waterloo, being a poem entitled

'Sam, Sam, pick up tha' musket'

It occurred on the evening before Waterloo,
As troops were lined up on parade.
And sergeant inspecting 'em, he were a terror,
Of whom every man were afraid.

All excepting one man, he were in't front rank,
A man by t'name of Sam Small.
And he and t'sergeant were both daggers drawn,
They thought nowt of each other at all.

As sergeant walked past he was swinging his arms,
And he happened to brush against Sam.
And knocking t'musket clean out of 'is hand,
It fell t'ground wi' a slam.

'Pick it up!' said sergeant, abrupt like, but cool.
But Sam wi' a shake of 'is 'ead.
Said 'Seeing as tha knocked it out of my hand,
P'rhaps tha'll pick t' thing up instead.

Sam, Sam, pick up tha musket!
The sergeant exclaimed with a roar.
Sam said tha' knocked it down reasonin'
Tha'll pick it up, or it stays, where t'is on the floor.

The sound of high words very soon reached
The ears of an officer, Lieutenant Bird.
Who says to the sergeant 'Now what's all this 'ere?',
And the sergeant told what had occurred.

'Sam, Sam, pick up thy musket !',
Lieutenant exclaimed with some heat.
Sam says he knocked it down, reasonin he picks it up,
Or it stays where't is at my feet.

It caused quite a stir when the Captain arrived,
To find out the cause of the trouble,
And every man there all, excepting old Sam,
Was full of excitement and bubble.

'Sam, Sam, pick up thy musket!',
Said Captain, for strictness renowned.
Sam says he knocked it down, reasonin he picks it up,
Or it stays where't is on the ground.

The same thing occurred when the Major and Colonel
Both tried to get Sam to see sense.
But when old Duke of Wellington came into view,
Well then the excitement was tense.

Up rode the Duke on a lovely white horse
To 'Find out the cause of the bother.'
He looked at the musket, and then at old Sam,
And he talked to old Sam like a brother.

'Sam, Sam, pick up thy musket', the Duke
Said as quiet as could be,
'Sam, Sam-Sam-Sam, pick up thy musket.',
Come on lad just to please me.

All right Duke says old Sam just for thee I'll oblige,
And to show thee I meant no offence.
So Sam picked it up. 'Gradely lad.' said the Duke.
'Righto boys let battle commence.'

I've got a very rare book of Stanley Holloway monologues, and they are fantastic.
Remember Albert and the lion????

Here you are Alan, the man himself. Great stuff.

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And here he is again - Old Sam and Young Albert (Pick up Tha musket)

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Brought a tear to my eye, Oblo.
That was entertainment!!!!
The book is one of all his monolougues, now sadly out of print, but there is a lesser known one in there about (if I recall) Noah trying to buy some wood from a Yorkshire timber merchant who won't negotiate the price and ends up having to swim when the floods come.
Wonderful, and very funny if done in the right accent.
Alan

My apologies.
Just dug the book out of my library and the character is from Bury.
He is called Sam Oglethwaite.
The Story is called Three 'apence a foot.

'ere tis:-

http://wuff.me.uk/monologues/P10.html

The following are computerised images showing the amount of debris in space around planet Earth:

The final frontier teeming with man-made rubbish: The incredible pictures of 'space junk' swirling round Earth's orbit
By MICHAEL HANLON
Last updated at 00:55am on 15th April 2008

From http://www.dailymail.co.uk/....

Not only our atmosphere and oceans are being polluted by billions of pieces of junk.

As these computer-generated images show, Mankind's seemingly insatiable desire to litter has now extended out into space, with potentially devastating results.

Rocket scientists call it 'orbital debris'; everyone else calls it space junk. And it is becoming a problem.

The computer-generated images show the mass of swirling debris that has formed around the Earth

We put our first object into space just 51 years ago - Sputnik One.

But in just half a century we have created a swarm of perhaps tens of millions of items of debris, all circling around the planet - rubbish through which the 600-odd operating satellites, one space station, one space telescope, an occasional space shuttle, interplanetary probe and Soyuz rockets have to negotiate a safe passage.

As the images show, these form distinct rings and spheres around Earth.

Most hug close to the surface, 200-300 miles up in low-earth-orbit, where they pose a potentially deadly hazard to astronauts and their spacecraft before they burn up in the atmosphere, usually a few months later.

About 50 per cent of all trackable objects are due to in-orbit explosion events or collisions

Millions more swing round in 'geostationary' orbits, more than 20,000 miles up where they remain.

The debris consists of derelict spacecraft and dead satellites, bits of rocket casing, pieces of metal ejected during collisions and docking procedures, nuts and bolts, dropped tools, frozen lumps of rocket fuel and human waste material from manned spacecraft.

In 1965, during the first U.S. space walk, the Gemini 4 astronaut Edward White, lost a glove.

For a month, the glove stayed on orbit at a speed of 17,500mph, becoming the most dangerous garment in history until it burnt up in the atmosphere a few months later.

The geostationary ring, at an altitude of about 36 000 km. This orbit is heavily used by telecommunication satellites

The Russian Mir space station generated more than 200 plastic bags of rubbish, simply thrown into space. And in 1994, when a Pegasus unmanned rocket blew up, it created more than 300,000 fragments more than an eighth of an inch across.

Amazingly, Nasa and other agencies have catalogued much of this debris, piece by piece. Objects as small as a tenth of an inch or so can be tracked by the radar of the U.S. Space Surveillance Network.

Space junk is important because it is so deadly. Even tiny flecks of paint are travelling fast enough - tens of thousands of miles an hour - that should they hit the International Space Station, for example, they could easily put a dent in the skin or even crack a window.

If the tiniest nut or bolt were to collide with a space-walking astronaut, it would kill him or her instantly.

The number of objects in Earth orbit has increased steadily - by two hundred per year on average

Whenever a space shuttle is in orbit, the Surveillance Network regularly examines the trajectories of known orbital debris to identify possible close encounters.

If another object is projected to come within a few miles of the space shuttle, it will normally manoeuvre away from the object if the chance of a collision exceeds one in 10,000.

This occurs infrequently, about once every year or two.

Perhaps surprisingly, harmful collisions between space junk and operating spacecraft have been rare.

Modern spacecraft are equipped with shields which can deflect objects measuring up to half an inch or so across.

Fortunately space is very, very big and the spaces between all these bits of junk remain large, and the probability of a hit very small.

But it is only a matter of time before an accident occurs. Sadly, cleaning up space is going to be a lot harder than clearing up litter down here on Earth.

Glad you brought it to our attention, execline.
I am now going to contact Harrison Ford and ask if we can book the millenium falcon for a couple of weeks to clear it up.
It begs a few questions though.
1) will it spoil my suntan when I go to Cleethorpes for my holidays, with all that crap blocking out the sun.
2) If it will, is this an example of how we can slow global warming.
3) Do half witted Californians who think they have all been abducted by aliens believe this to be the USA's modern version of putting mines in the English Channel in 1938
4) Will ET ever get home
5) What makes the US so confident it can spot and avoid a two inch bolt 2000 miles away and avoid it, when on earth they struggle to even get the right country.
6) Should we paint a union jack on every bit, tell the yanks we are on their side and that we have declared war on the moon. Watch 'em blow all the bits out of the sky.

Alan

As usual you have made an excellent point or two and have you thought of having a body spray instead of going to Cleethorpes or maybe going fox hunting instead?

There's a lot of it about too.