Bob The Badger

1 hour ago, Pearl Ram said:

That was my thought in a nutshell. Where was his principles when he was of the opinion Johnson wasn’t fit to hold office ? Too busy milking the gravy train that’s where.

I have a strong dislike for Cummings and I'm sure he is vindictive, but people in government rarely take out against government whilst they're in government, no matter what they thought/think at the time.

We can remember people like Michael Heseltine and John Nott (if you're old enough) because grand gestures and resignations like that are so rare.

Even opponents of Trump like Mattis, Tillerson and Cohen waited until they were on the outside before speaking up.

Once you do speak out you lose your influence, so 99% of people in politics prefer to stay quiet and try to make changes from the inside.

Even Obama spoke of the need to sometimes just keep your mouth shut.

1 hour ago, Gaspode said:

The press don't see the irony in spending months telling us that Cummings was a lying toad and now quoting every comment he makes as gospel.....

That sounds like it should be true, but from the news reports I have read, it isn't.

I've only followed the BBC and The Guardian and they have just been reporting what Cummings has been saying.

In fact, that is pretty much what the BBC always do to the chagrin of right and left.

I never heard them say Cummings was lying then, and I have never heard them say he is being truthful now - they're just reporting.

They reported what he said then and they are reporting what he says now.

Lots of people took what was reported at the time and thought Cummings was clearly lying - me included - but I don't remember the media spending months telling us Cummings was lying then any more than they are telling us what he is saying is gospel now.

It just feels that way because of what other people say about the media.

6 hours ago, Coneheadjohn said:

I remember an armed robbery at work when there were robbers at the front with shotguns,I was as trying to direct people out of the back fire doors and a bloke said to me he wasn’t leaving without his cooked chicken...legend!

I was staying away on business (can't remember if it was Glasgow or Edinburgh now, it was close to 30 years ago, but a Hilton I think when the fire alarm started around 1 am waking me up.

I rushed downstairs and just as I got to the lobby realised I had left a bag of herbs on my dressing table (purely for cooking soups and stews you understand) and the staff were going room to room to make sure everybody was out.

I turned and ran back upstairs going past people coming down. A staff member said it wasn't a drill and i needed to go down.

I did a quick calculation of the odds that the alarm was set off by a drunken colleague as opposed to being a real fire, versus losing my job and pushed my way past him and sprinted for my room.

I can't claim to have been unflustered though. I was on fluster overdrive.

22 minutes ago, Stive Pesley said:

Wow - Cummings has literally just said that there is something badly wrong with the system that allowed him to hold such a position of power. And then added Boris Johnson to that same rationale - he's basically saying what we all know. The system is f**ked and none of them have a clue what they are doing

Who was the woman who he said came into the room and said 'We have no plan, I think we are absolutely ducked”.

31 minutes ago, ariotofmyown said:

He is sort of implicating himself, but with a few get outs. Like "I should have acted sooner, but if they had listened to me, we would have got other people involved earlier who would have made us act earlier".

There is a nice irony that the cabinet MPs who could just say Cummings is lying like with his Rose Garden statement, can't say that as they were all forced to back him up then. 

Looking forward to when them come clean and admit that happened.

Cummings doesn't seem to be lying this time though, and imagine there are plenty of others who will back up what he is saying/documents exist saying the same.

Cummings is an utter tool, but he's coming across as incredibly plausible and this is devastating for Johnson.

And other than his conversations he has agreed to back everything up with documentation. 

Up until the vaccine I though BJ had done a horrible job.

It was much worse than that.

On 13/05/2021 at 22:55, Kinder said:

It’ll be this if the US takeover rumours are true.

 

Greg the Leg prior to him joining the Cowboys. 

He got the ball over the bar so often that he'd have fitted in well for Derby.

oops, were you being serious @Eddie regarding subtitles?

I thought you were joking because we'd been talking about some foreign films and @ketteringram hadfallen for your joke.

Now I'm thinking you may be hard of hearing and I look like a bit of a tool for laughing.

Sorry if that is the case.

@ketteringram we watched seasons 1 to 3 with no adverts on All4 at the last place we rented.

Then when we moved into our new place and decided to pick it up again at the start of the 4th series there were suddenly adverts.

No way am I sitting through 20+ minutes of ads for a 1-hour program with no way of scrolling through, so we called it a day.

@BucksRam - seasons 3 - 5 are still very good, it's just that I found Escobar really chilling in compelling in seasons 1 and 2. And yeh I loved the way they weaved real footage in too.  The acting in all of the seaosns is really top notch.

I also love the way they when they get into the Mexican cartel they start to weave the Cali cartel back into the story line because a lot of this was going on concurrently and the Mexicans were buying from the Colombians.

@Wolfie

American TV did a remake of that and rather surprisingly for foreign remakes it was excellent. Very noirish and great acting from the lead woman and the dude who was in Robocop and Altered Carbon.

For anybody who prefers not to bother with subtitles, then I'd go for this and it's on Netflix (I think).

14 hours ago, Chester40 said:

 

Seen about 20 of them.. 

Gomorrah, Sopranos, Dexter and 24 are glaring omissions for me ? 

Whisper it quietly, but Gomorrah may even be better than Breaking Bad and Peaky Blinders.

I'd also have Narcos up there, especially the first two seasons about Escobar, utterly outstanding.

Good time to binge Gomorrah @BucksRam as they just wrapped up filiming for season 5 coming this autumn. 

https://www.skygroup.sky/article/first-look-at-gomorrahs-fifth-and-final-season

29 minutes ago, Mr. P said:

I’ve just finished the 1st season after completely forgetting about it when it first came out. It’s also on Disney+ of all places lol. 

Yeh I can see why Disney would be showing it!

Just say yes kids!

4 seasons behind, but just getting into Snowfall.

On iPlayer, it's a look at the US coke scene in 1983 that is going to turn into the US crack scene rather shortly it would seem.

It's also looking at the US funding (with money from drug sales) of the Nicaraguan contras - or at least that's what I presume it is because they h mentioned them, or the country, by name yet.

I know there was a woman who was a serious player in LA back then and I'm wondering (4 episodes in) if the character they have is based on her because it's unusual to have a woman 'boss' like that.

Really well acted with some lovely dark humour, and I like the 40 minute or so long episodes. 

Expecting big things.

I just saw there is a new season of The Kominsky Method.

It took me a while to get into this, but when I did I loved it. Very funny.

14 minutes ago, Mucker1884 said:

Just looked into this, albeit very briefly.  (I'm over 50, not vulnerable, and 2nd jab booked for 10th June).

The actual wording on the booking site is highlighted in yellow, and reads as follows, so I didn't pursue beyond that:

Important
We'll be contacting some people directly to bring forward their appointment for the 2nd dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
This is so people at greater risk of getting seriously ill due to coronavirus can get maximum protection earlier.
Please wait to be contacted if you think you're in this group.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/coronavirus-vaccination/book-coronavirus-vaccination/

On the advice of my sister who works at a vaccination center and said I'd get in, I canceled my 2nd jab for Bank Holiday Monday because we have friends coming to stay 2 days later and I didn't want to risk feeling crap.

I then went online to rebook and basically it was 'when can you come?'

That was Sunday and there were openings literally every morning and afternoon from Monday onwards.

So I went and had it this morning and was in and out in 10 minutes tops.

I'm in Cornwall, but my sister is in Derby and she says it's the same there.

What I meant to say was this.

I'm taking a screenshot of my Messenger conversation purely because it's quicker than typing as I already just told a friend this and don't want to keep explaining myself to laypeople. 

It's me on the left and my thick mate on the right.

10 minutes ago, RoyMac5 said:

How long do they stay neutropenic?

Sorry, somebody hacked my account above.

How long you say?

Well, obviously it's only usually about 10 days and we give them growth hormone to stimulate white cell production. We recommend that they have the vaccine before a chemo cycle.

None of the above was copy and pasted from Facebook Messenger, it's just what I knew.  

6 minutes ago, RoyMac5 said:

How long do they stay neutropenic?

You're presuming I know what I'm talking about and not just regurgitating something my wife told me.

I just messaged her said 'Help I'm in a conversation and out of my depth, can you bail me out and make me look smart?'

Sadly and selfishly I can only presume she's dealing with oncology patients so hasn't responded yet.

I'll get back to you.

1 hour ago, DarkFruitsRam7 said:

I think those two sentences are key.

The scientists are by far the most qualified people to be tackling the virus, but you wonder whether they're factoring other things like the economy, mental health, jobs, etc, into their calculations? I'd hope so.

To take an extreme example, allowing people to do normal things like drive cars inevitably kills people because it leads to car crashes. But the view is taken that the benefits of cars massively outweigh those deaths (as brutal as that sounds), which means driving is allowed.

Those kinds of calculations will be made every day with government policy, hospital funding, etc. The fact that people's lives are reduced to numbers sounds horrific, but it's essential to making the right decisions.

I'd be interested to know if the scientists have assigned a value to things like the economy and mental health (both of also which cause deaths when going badly) and weighed that up against the deaths that reopening would inevitably cause. I presume they have.

 meant for the scientists to figure out the advice they offer the Government.

I don't expect, not would I want them to, set policy.

Extreme examples like that serve little purpose other than for poorly informed people (not you btw) to say 'Ha! What about that then. You never thought of that did you?'

Neutropenic patients WILL die if given the vaccine, nobody is likely to die getting into a car under normal circumstances and when viewed statistically.

16 hours ago, DarkFruitsRam7 said:

Genuine question, without agenda:

What's the reasoning for continuing restrictions once the vulnerable have been double vaccinated?

As @angieram said, there are people who cannot have the vaccine for medical reasons.

It would literally kill some people.

But also, what keeps getting missed/ignored is that the vaccines (like any other vaccine) are not 100% effective.

Bill Marr the US comedian and talk show host caught Covid after having both jabs and had to cancel his show last week.

He's a fit guy for his age and he didn't get sick, but some have.

And then you have the concern that with every mutation there is the risk that the vaccines will cease to work as effectively or even at all.

That's not been the case as of now (and maybe it won't ever) but as the virus continues to mutate they can't be sure.

That's the reasoning.

Whether it's the right thing to do is another matter however and I honestly don't know.

I'd rather leave the scientists to figure it out.

2 hours ago, Anag Ram said:

You clearly didn’t watch these dudes! ?

I think I've turned.

17 hours ago, Chester40 said:

Started 'Mare of Easttown'. 

US detective drama with Kate Winslet as the grizzled, irritable lead. Much better than expected so far. 

She's brilliant in it

By all accounts HBO wanted her glammed up but she refused saying that's not how hardened cops are, which of course is true.

On 17/05/2021 at 11:38, BaaLocks said:

It is an absolute masterpiece, deserves far wider recognition. 

I agree it's a masterpiece, but I'm not sure it could have much wider recognition when half the professional footballers in the country adopted ludicrous PB haircuts.

It's even started to gain traction in the US when they historically struggle with anything British that doesn't involve outrageously posh accounts or Benny Hill chasing scantily clad ladies and a small bald man round and round in circles.

4 hours ago, G STAR RAM said:

The sad thing is these stories lead to mass hysteria, which in turn leads to more pressure being applied on the Government to delay re-opening.

Where is this mass hysteria you talk of?

I'm seeing mass eye-rolling more than mass hysteria tbh.

7 minutes ago, angieram said:

Leave the politics out, please.

I'm being serious btw, I was in this thread in days of yore and it was all politics.

7 minutes ago, angieram said:

Leave the politics out, please.

Oops, when did that happen?

On 15/05/2021 at 13:44, Scott129 said:

Had my jab at the arena today.

Say what you want about how we've handled the pandemic overall, but our vaccination program has been superbly organised.

Couldn't walk 5 steps without a marshall pointing me in the right direction and I was in and out in a flash.

How drunk were you that you were going in the wrong direction inside 5 steps every time?

16 hours ago, bimmerman said:

Nah,nobody wanted Chelsea to win anyway 

I did.

I'm a seething cauldron of jealousy over Leicester doing so well.

Sheer unadulterated envy is coursing through my body like molten larvor spilling from Krakatoa.

I literally vomited myself to sleep last night whilst punching a fox I caught in our garden to death.

We should be Leicester and until we are I'm denying reality.