OK, this is a return to more serious and controversial issues.  I can’t help it, I find these debates interesting.  Before I start this rant properly, I should state that I am a perfectly normal heterosexual male, but that over the years, I have known and been friends with a number of gay people.  I don’t care what people’s preferences are; what two consenting people get up to behind their own closed door is nothing to do with me.  However, it should stay behind that door.  It does not need to become the defining characteristic of life.  I once had a work colleague who kept describing gay sex practices to me like fisting, and cottaging, as if these were going to be somehow attractive to me.  Quite the reverse.  I was naive enough to ask him what the hell he was talking about.  I hope my reaction was enough to communicate the message that I really wasn’t interested!  He did eventually give up…..thankfully.  Behind all that he ...

 Yeah, I know, my posts are much too serious, so here is something much less dystopian. Our solar panels have now been in place for 4 years as of April 16th, so I can now show some decent average figures.  Actually, it took me a few days to get round to connecting the WIFI dongle on the inverter to our router, and a couple of days more to be bothered to download the app, so these figures are very slightly low. In total we have generated 12.406MWh of electricity, that is an average of 3101.5 units (1 unit = 1KWh) produced per year.  The estimate when we were buying the system was for around 2700 units, so I cannot complain.  Peak production for a single day so far is 27.5 units but there have been grey and rainy days even in June where the system only produced 1 or 2 units, so if you wanted to live off grid, you would need a much more extensive and complex system that the one we have. Now the bit I hate.  Our local electricity supplier charges 29.06p per KWh, but...

  Sorry, this is just another cathartic rant. So, Trump and Musk call themselves businessmen, but anyone as supposedly intelligent as their egos are telling them that they are, should surely be able to see the difference between business and government.  It may be OK to cut costs to the bone if you are trying to sell a product at a competitive price and still make a profit, but that doesn’t necessarily work when in government. Think of where government money comes from, i.e. taxes.   Let’s assume a simplistic example where a government department employs a number of people, each earns $1000 at 20% income tax (this is basic stuff from John Maynard Keynes, BTW).   Before these employees even leave the building, the government gets their 20% income tax back, so their employees have really only cost $800 each.   Then, each one goes out and buys the things they need to survive, like housing, food, clothes, transport etc.   Notice that I didn’t mention saving...

I’ve missed commenting on this idiot because I was offline for a while.  I could not (and still cannot), comprehend how people could vote for this egotistical prat or his clownish sidekicks like JD Vance, Kennedy and Musk (OK, no one voted for Musk, we all got him anyway), but they did, so case closed.  Now come the repercussions. Unfortunately Trump is bombarding us with examples of his utter disregard for everyone but himself and his Russian paymasters, so only a few examples are below.   You will all know them, so just consider this rant as cathartic for me. Case 1:   Yeah, right.   The Palestinians are really going to give up (with no payment or even substitute land!!) their homeland just so that Trump and his cronies can then build holiday resorts and golf courses on it.   While you are at it, Trump, why don’t you ask some of your more hard-up supporters in somewhere like Kentucky or other parts of the rust belt to just walk away from their homes s...

  My brother died just before new year.   He was only 14 months older than me, and died from a heart attack, so from a self-preservation perspective alone that is pretty worrying. I got a call from his work early one morning to say that he had not weighed in for work, so I had the unenviable task of going to his house to check up on him.   After a few access issues, I found him collapsed and plainly dead for some time on his kitchen floor.   In later life he wasn’t the fittest of people since he exercised little.   He also chain smoked, which probably didn’t help him either.   There were reasons for his withdrawal from the world which I will write of later, but still, I was not expecting this.   ☹ My brother came in two distinct versions during his life, and I can place the cause of the change between these two fairly accurately.   From an early age he wanted to join the army, so while still in his teens, and as soon as he could break free of ...

  At an AA meeting:- And finally a Christmas one.  Happy Christmas everyone.   😊

  It’s almost Christmas, so I thought I’d test your knowledge, (or your guessing ability perhaps?).   Below are some quotes from the books, poems or short stories of famous writers through the ages.   It’s probably too much to expect you to be able to guess which story these quotes come from, but have a guess about the authors without Googling these to see if you can recognise the style of the writing.   Some of them may surprize you.   The answers are further down the page.   1)        1)  I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what is particularly dead about a door nail.   I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest bit of ironmongery in the trade.   But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done.   2)        2)   There has been some talk latel...

 Yeah, OK.  That title might be very optimistic, given the diminutive size of the publisher concerned, and the fact that I make up a mere one thirty ninth of the content, but I now have a fiction story in print. Legiron books ( Home - Leg Iron Books ), have seen fit to publish a short story that I submitted to them in their latest compilation of Halloween based stories.  It is out now on Amazon in both paper and Kindle format ( Monster: Underdog Anthology 24 eBook : Hillman, H.K., Doo, Roo B., Ellott, Mark , Royer, Daniel, Duffy, S. W. , Stones, Adam D., Caswell, Ian, Bidgood, Lee, Walker, David D., Lombardi, Nicola: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store ) I have to admit that zombies and all that supernatural stuff is really not my style, but since this is a Halloween based compilation, I had to go with the flow.  As a result of my aversion to supernatural based stories, I can't even tell you that I enjoyed all the stories in the book.  Some are distinctly better than oth...

There are a number of reasons not to buy an electric car over their petrol powered cousins.  Below are just a few.  I have used the cheapest options where possible. 1) Cost. In the UK, the cheapest available electric car is currently the Dacia Spring, costing from £14,995 upwards, depending on specification.  It has a claimed range of only 140 miles (Electrifing.com estimate a real world range of 100 miles, with a worst case estimate of only 70 miles in cold weather), and it takes around 5 hours to charge at a charging station.  As such, it is described as a city car.  Given those figures, you certainly aren't going to go continental touring in it!  A 5 hour wait every 100 miles would prove somewhat tiresome. The similarly sized, petrol powered,  Dacia Sandero is available from £13,795.  That is £1200 cheaper, and you won't need to install a charging station at home to be able to use the Sandero.  The carwow site estimates around £2000 for th...

 Sorry, I seem to be posting a lot about this conflict, but this is worth viewing, and if you are not in the UK, you may not have seen this issue.  Good journalism on the part of Paraic O'Brien.  Scary stuff! Hardline Israeli settlers gather to plan future homes in Gaza strip – Channel 4 News

 See also:  Rogue State? (oldandireland.blogspot.com) And:  Two Wrongs……. (oldandireland.blogspot.com) So we have reached the one year mark in Israel’s conflict in Gaza.   Time for a little reflection. 1)     After the original and totally horrific Hamas attack, questions were asked about how the Israeli security agency had apparently managed to completely miss all the preparations that must have been necessary for the attack.   I must point out here that I am making no excuses for the Hamas attack.   It was brutal, appalling, inhuman (continue to insert your own descriptives here, none of them will fully describe just how wrong the Hamas attack was).   Any questions raised about the Israeli security agency seem to somehow to have been lost in the brutality and genocide that have happened since the original attack. I was wondering about this though.   The agency that managed to miss a Hamas breakout of that size, does not sound ...

  HED Map Viewer 2024 (arcgis.com) The map showing archaeological sites here in Northern Ireland that I used in my last piece is well worth a mention in its own right (see the link at the top of this page).  It is a government site, but is open to the public, so there are no issues in using it.  There are many layers, from ones showing shipwrecks and aircraft crashes, to historic maps, battle sites, and even lidar surveys in some areas.   Pick on  a link that interests you, and click in.  There are often further links to other sites and even back to the original archaeological reports on many of them.  To those who don't live in Northern Ireland, sorry, you will have to find something similar for your own locality.  But here, there is a real warren of interesting information and links that will keep anyone with an interest occupied for hours. Many of the sites local to me I knew about, but there are a few that are new to me, including an intr...