Dog

I like salsa and merengue, merengue especially but I can get the same excercise from leaping about to Little Johnny England or The Steve Gibbon Band.

Good tip - last year in Crete a friend with a taverna said that 80% of the local shops and restaurants hadn't paid rent/rates or tax for 2 years. The Cretians reckoned the Germans should pay the defecit as they hadn't paid for the WW11 invasion yet.

I must ask my brother how much it has cost him, my niece just finished at Imperial. My brother and his wife got the Royal Box for the ceremony (good job I wasn't there). My niece now tells me I must address her with the following bumf added BEng MA Msc DIC ACGI whatever that means. I told her to get a job...

Do a test first but I would recommend using linseed oil (it's cheap) mix with white spirit. The mix is up to you and how much the wood wants to absorb and the time needed to dry. I use 25% linseed and apply sparingly rubbing in well. When you want to refresh the wood just sponge/mop sparingly with 5% linseed oil in hot water.

[quote user="sweet 17"] Oh, Dog, you are a very lucky man to have done all those things. I was only an enthusiast and it would take me hours to set up one single sheet of type, but I did learn to read the "mirror image" of words and used to have fun deliberately reading notices like that so that the meanings were all garbled but were some times humorous. Imagine out amazement back then if we saw a computer that could manipulate words and images just by pressing buttons!  Makes me feel like a dinosaur just talking about this....[:D] [/quote] I am glad you enjoyed hand setting and letterpress. Sadly I had to sell my collection of metal and woodtype before escaping UK. There is a growing band of people in UK that enjoy letterpress as a hobby. A friend of mine that cannot be described as a hobbyist is a superb professional wood engraver and uses a three hundred year old press to print his fine art. It is very useful being able to read upside down and back to front especailly when meeting such as the bank manager and reading everything on his desk without him realising. Computers are not the be all and end all, there are plenty of things they cannot do and lots they don't do well. What happened to your Adana? My 1956 Heidelberg Platen is still wheezing away at the company I sold.

[quote user="Rabbie"][quote user="Dog"] Please do not tell  anyone I am a qualified compositor, letterpress & litho printer and a typographer. But to make serious money I have worked in design,  repro, proofing,  platemaking, binding, cutting & creasing and everything to do with producing books from draft to bookshop. I find if you cannot do it yourself how can you employ and tell others what to do. Stay mum.... [/quote]I wonder what Dog used to do? What qualifications does he have? Really must get my phone hacking gear targetted on him[:D][/quote]   You'd be wasting your time I have never had a mobile phone and never will.

[quote user="Gemonimo"][quote user="Dog"]  avocado tree is now six feet high! [/quote] Well, Dog, if you can tell me how you managed thatI'd be grateful....  mine is only six inches and shrinking!!! [/quote]   It would appear they do not like too much heat or direct sunlight. Otherwise probably sheer luck!

Not yet but have peach tree grown from stone (25 fruit on third year) avocado tree is now six feet high! Neighbours have lemon trees and pomegranites - luckily they hate them so I fill my boots.

[quote user="Quillan"]I always thought all printers, be they qualified or not, worked 'in the print'. How can you be a qualified printer and not work 'in the print'? My old neighbour worked 'in the print' at Bradbury and Wilkinson where they printed bank notes amongst other things, mind you he only swept the floors but he was very proud and always said when asked what he did that he worked 'in the print'.[/quote] You must be right - It may be true 'sweeper uppers' use this terminology. I have never met a printer who used this term, perhaps you will recall that I told you this many moons ago. I can only suppose your neighbour was impressed when you told him you were 'in the masons'.

[quote user="sweet 17"] Say nothing, Dog. I am a print enthusiast BTW.  Used to have an Adana machine....you know, the one where you have to set the type, ink it and then press it down carefully....[:D] [/quote]   Sweet - you must be a glutton for punishment! I know what an Adana is I nearly got expelled from school aged thirteen for printing thousands of stickers (we found on a tip) with any message wanted at two shillings a hundred on a lousy Adana. I was making serious money until the entire school was being plastered in stickers and it came to a head when a teachers VW Beetle was covered in stickers. Sadly the stickers were not very complementary about him and the glue was stronger than the paint on his VDub and when he tried to remove them they took off his paintwork - oops! The teachers worked out I was involved and I got dragged to the Head Masters office where he told me you didn't come to school to make money. I told him that I thought that was the purpose of school. Please do not tell  anyone I am a qualified compositor, letterpress & litho printer and a typographer. But to make serious money I have worked in design,  repro, proofing,  platemaking, binding, cutting & creasing and everything to do with producing books from draft to bookshop. I find if you cannot do it yourself how can you employ and tell others what to do. Stay mum....

[quote user="Quillan"] [quote user="DerekJ"][quote user="Rabbie"][quote user="Dog"]Let's face it if you are silly enough to use a mobile phone (an insecure one at that) why shouldn't people acess it? If the journo had found the killer he would now be a hero.[/quote]That is no excuse for deleting the Voicemail messages on Milly Dowler's phone and giving her family false hope at a time of great stress and worry for them[/quote] So Dog... you don't condemn these phone hacks. Is that correct? You think it's all perfectly acceptable?  If that's the case I presume you feel the same about the breaking news of the 7/7 bombing hacking? Or is this just a bit of trolling on your part? [/quote] Possibly because he was one of them working in 'the print' as he has mentioned more than once. [;-)] [/quote] I wouldn't expect any other comment from Q. I find it tedious but not unexpected that Q repeats this slur. I have never used the phrase 'in the print' to describe my work. I am a qualified printer. I have never worked at a newspaper.

[quote user="DerekJ"][quote user="Rabbie"][quote user="Dog"]Let's face it if you are silly enough to use a mobile phone (an insecure one at that) why shouldn't people acess it? If the journo had found the killer he would now be a hero.[/quote]That is no excuse for deleting the Voicemail messages on Milly Dowler's phone and giving her family false hope at a time of great stress and worry for them[/quote] So Dog... you don't condemn these phone hacks. Is that correct? You think it's all perfectly acceptable?  If that's the case I presume you feel the same about the breaking news of the 7/7 bombing hacking? Or is this just a bit of trolling on your part? [/quote] I would prefer a journo to have accessed the phone and it being in the 'free world' than the UK government and CIA that have accesss to all emails and phone messages. Wake up if you use insecure methods to message you will be listened to our read.

You are lucky to have an ethnic market - in UK I could go to Leicester to buy mangoes at £4 a case and they were fresh airfreight best Indian quality. Here you get useless tasteless South American mangoes - the African ones are a little better. We had a local ethnic shop that sold lose spices and interesting things like beer from Dakar - sadly closed. We have acres of apples trees nearby so are never short of scrumped apples - wild and free always tastes better and has more pranic energy. The local Bio farmer lets lots of his fruit go to rot on the trees - so we do not feel too guilty.

A mango or apple mmmmmmmmmmmm yum.

This overpricing also happns with Olives, the upmarket ones with herbs and spices in stoneware pots. They give free samples and I am sure the olives taste good but they are priced per 100gm or 250 gms. At around 6 euros for these wieghts you are paying a small portion for olives.

Salamanca is very interesting and largely forgotten and has a lovely reasonably priced luxurious mini hotel opposite the Art Deco Museum.

This has been going on for some years - they employ good looking young gurls that speak English. They solicit holiday makers with samples and sell dubious old cheese at very high prices. In Perigueux I have seen locals warning the toursits that they are being ripped off.

I had same problem in UK and Homebase sold an expensive paint that covers water damaged ceilings - it worked - what a bargain! Sold house on first viewing...

Let's face it if you are silly enough to use a mobile phone (an insecure one at that) why shouldn't people acess it? If the journo had found the killer he would now be a hero.

It depends if you gamble much on things like poker or have expensive habits - know what I mean... In France 20k per annum buys a reasonable life for two, 30k would be nice, 40k enjoyable, 50K reasonably luxurious, 100k would nearly buy some happiness, 250k getting interesting, 500k you might be better moving to Monaco or Switzerland. I reckon I could live happily with a tent on 5k a year. You pays yer money and takes yey choice. I reckon if you spend to much time thinking you will never do anything! It is better to have lived and lost than never to have lived at all.

Good luck and get well soon.

[quote user="Mr Coeur de Lion"]If anyone could name one form of government / leadership that has worked in the history of humanity, I would be very interested to hear. Republicanism doesn't work, communism doesn't work, monarchy doesn't work, socialism doesn't work, real democracy doesn't even exist, it's just a case of picking one that works the best. And none of them do really, so it's just a case of getting on with it. And as I said before, whatever the system, we all get screwed by it, so why worry? I can't do a thing change any of it, so I just live my life as best I can and worry about what I can change.[/quote] So why not get rid of all government for 5 years to show that there would be little or no change.

[quote user="woolybanana"]Dog, please name one person from UK who has been fit to be head of state, in the last fifty years[/quote] The only one you would know would be Stanley Unwin, the other 250,000 plus are average Joes. Fact is I don't wan't a President either they are not necessary.

My brother has two children at Imperial - I wonder if they will ever work. One just bought an old motorcycle and realised the rectifier was broken, and a new one cost 70 quid so he was going to make one. So I guess he learned something...

I bet Penn & Teller could tell what tricks she uses... Duty my nose, my granny did more for UK and she didn't have family that thought fascism was the answer. I just cannot believe people buy into the 'Royal Myth' - well I can - as they pay over the odds to all the people that work for them... .. and the other half believe in fairy stories and have such sad existances that they live their lives through these less than savoury characters.