2015 Subaru WRX STI on TT course

Posted on

Here’s a quick (in more ways than one) video of Subaru driver Mark Higgins driving that company’s latest WRX STI vehicle around the Isle of Man TT course, rather nippily.

Of particular interest is the footage about a minute in of the previous record that he set in 2011 and his comment that they “had a big moment; basically the car just got a little bit of of shape…”.

This “moment” stuff is motorsport parlance, of course. There are two types of moment in this context. You can either have “a bit of a moment”, or you can have “a big moment”. For most of us mere mortals, “a bit of a moment” would be more than enough for us to require, at least, a change of underwear and several months of industrial-strength counselling. This, I’ll remind you, was “a big moment”.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, looking at that bit of the video, it’s evident that Mark’s version of:

a little bit out of shape…

and mine also differ significantly. Superb driving control though. What a save.

Anyway, well worth 7 minutes of your valuable time, if just for the camerawork, the details of the car and the driver and the occasional Manx countryside.

Fiercely Independent

Posted on

This was shared by @JonJonFaull last night, and deserves a blog post all of its own:

Bq6eOndIYAAq4yP

Yes, as Davy C should really know, while Scotland is still a part of the UK, the Isle of Man certainly isn’t, and never has been. And that means that it’s not part of the EU either.

This self-governing crown dependency makes its own decisions, like imposing its own sanctions against Russia over the annexation of Crimea. Yeah. What are you gonna do about it, Vlad?

There are, however, some similarities between Cameron’s place and the Isle of Man when it comes to sport, namely that the Manx cricket team isn’t great (Manx lose to Norway in Euros) and the national football team isn’t great in penalty shootouts (Ellan Vannin heroes lose final on spot kicks).

But that little green dot twixt England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales above is well used to punching above its belt and rightly, it has no problem with telling No.10 where to go.

UPDATE: Downing Street apologises!

The Three Second Rule

Posted on

Not to be confused with the Five Second Rule, this quote doesn’t relate to microbial contamination of fallen foodstuffs, but to pedestrians crossing roads.
But I guess that you could apply it to any task – or indeed any time period.

…it’s amazing how far you can travel in three seconds, if you know that three seconds is all that you have, but that you definitely do have three seconds.

That from Brian Micklethwait at Brian Micklethwait dot com, tangenting from the news that London buses will now tell you whether there are free seats upstairs when you get on them, useful to save your legs up the stairs, sure, but moreover:

The technology “saves that ever-so-English embarrassment of going upstairs, popping your head up like a meerkat at the top of the stairs for a look around, only to come back down again”

Yes.

Now all they need to do is find technological solutions to these other problems too.

World Cup goal quota photo

Posted on

With England already out, you might think that there’s no reason for me to continue to show interest in the World Cup. But I wasn’t really expecting much of England and I’m actually not a huge fan of the national football team. In fact, I was more bothered about losing SuperBru points in the Uruguay game (I had 1-1) than the fact that Rooney et al. were heading home.

Treachery!

Anyway, you’d be wrong about the lack of interest thing, because it’s football; it’s the beautiful game and I will watch every minute that I can simply because of that.

wcup-23-goal_2951315k

And proving that you can do beautiful photography of the beautiful game, here’s a fantastic photo by Siphiwe Sibeko of Clint Dempsey scoring for the USA against Portugal. It’s one of the many on the ever-growing Telegraph World Cup Photo Album.

Not the first time we’ve connected the name “Siphiwe” with a bulging World Cup net either, is it?

UK animal theft stats released

Posted on

Animal theft stats have been released for the United Kingdom and GetSurrey.co.uk’s synopsis of them may contain one of the best lines ever when it comes to describing the range and scale of animal theft in the UK. But first, let me take… you through the Surrey stats:

More than 110 animals, including fish, horses, birds and dogs, were stolen in Surrey last year. According to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act, there were 118 reports of stolen animals to Surrey Police.
In Surrey, the reported thefts included one sheep, nine fish, 23 birds, 16 horses and 32 dogs.

If you’re struggling to visualise that information, worry not, because getsurrey.co.uk have provided a helpful graph to assist you. And looking at that sort of service, I think that we can all agree that here, we are soaring amongst the majestic eagles of local journalism.
118 animal thefts adds up to around one every three days (I hope this is clear as I haven’t provided a graph), but as getsurrey.co.uk then go on to point out, the figures nationwide vary dramatically, with Surrey somewhere in the middle:

The figures for Surrey are much higher than some areas – such as the City of London with only one reported dog theft – and considerably lower than other forces in the UK, with 30,593 animal thefts in Edinburgh…

So that’s an average of… wait… what? Thirty thousand, five hundred and ninety-three?!?!?

 …although 30,000 of those were bees.

Right. Even if that seems a remarkably round number in terms of apian thievery. Does this result from one single theft of 30,000 bees, or (for example) thirty separate instances of 1,000? It could, I suppose, even be 30,000 individual bee burglaries, although this does seem somewhat unlikely. Maybe the police should mount a sting operation. Maybe I should be on stage.

Maybe not.

Anyway, with the bees taken out of the equation, it seems that Edinburgh is only about four times worse to live in than Surrey, rather than the two hundred and fifty-nine times that we’d all previously calculated. Unless you’re a bee of course. Then it’s pretty much kidnap central and should be avoided at all costs.

I’d like to report 30,000 very small cases of theft, please Officer.

Now, I’m not belittling the theft of bees, but if we’re going down the route of including bees in animal theft stats, then what of ants and worms and other small things you thought wouldn’t usually be (no pun intended) considered as “animals” when it came to “animal theft”.

Hive (pun intended) really no idea who thought that this was a good idea. Surely now we’re not far from taking bacteria into account as well? And that certainly won’t make it any better for the Ancient Capital of Scotland, because in microbiological circles, Edinburgh is already notoriously recognised as a hot bed of Petri dish pilferage as well.