19/01/2007 by Poz.

A bit of wind!  Not me personally; although, as we had a veggie visit for dinner, I did manage a bean burger - so beware. 

I have been saying that it has been getting steadily windier for a number of years - but nobody takes any notice of an old fool like me.  Perhaps they will start to listen now.

Yesterday, it was batten down the hatches and hope the roof stayed on.  Well it did; but the pig arc took a stroll across the field.  Luckily the arc is only used by the hens at the present time and they had taken shelter by the hedge (hedging their bets perhaps!). 

 I bet the wind turbine up the road was whistling merrily, but I am not sure if the neighbours are that keen on the noise.  I wonder if, with all the wind, the electricity generators could turn off a power station or two.  There again I have my suspicions that wind power may be a bit on the line of British Rail - the wrong type of wind.  It would be interesting to find out the figures.

Talking of the wrong type of things; it seems I bought the wrong type of car.  My Rover K series engine may have blown its head gasket.  It seems that this is a common fault.  As a grumpy old man my though is that if they know there is a common problem then they should fix the problem and let everybody have a free update or provide a different engine - not continue to distribute potentially faulty ones.  But I suppose their argument is that to them it is only a rare occurrence (they probably all drive BMWs).  What failure rate should this kind of response kick in at?  Even I would not expect too much tea and sympathy if there were a few failures as I would be considered unlucky.  But, browsing the web has uncovered hundreds of ‘unlucky’ people with the exact same problem - it is even mentioned in the Wikipedia entry.  This could now cost me several hundred pounds for no fault of mine (except in choosing to buy a British(ish) car).  I can feel a letter to some motoring industry executive coming on. 

“Rover K engine.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 2 Jan 2007, 03:33 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 19 Jan 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rover_K_engine&oldid=97865651>.

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16/01/2007 by Poz.

Where do I start?  Another grey day; still too warm for the time of year; glabal warming?  The only real solution is to wipe out a large percentage of the world population.  This may be a tad impracticle.  But think about it.  The planet took millions of years to lock all that CO2 into coal and oil and we are now relentlessly undoing all this i a matter of a few hundered years.  And we wonder why the planet seems not to be coping too well!

Sadly we in the west have had many years of prosperity brought about through using all the carbon deposits we can lay our hands on; forests, oil and coal.  Others now wish to emulate this and destroy the remaining forests, dig out the coal and pump out their oil.  Can we blame them?  Probably not.  

Even now we do not set good examples.  We drive when we don;t need to - why do people drive to work each day round the M25.  We fly for business meetings when there are perfectly good video conferencing systems and we travel the globe to get a tan and eat fish and chips in some foreign place.  We buy goods make in sweat shops in China which are then transported thousandes of miles.  Most of these end up in the bin a few days later.  Even food like chicken is mass produced in shitty conditions, ripe for avian flu, and shipped thousands of miles.  People in Kenya grow green beans so we can eat them in December whilst large numbers of people die of starvation close by.

Depressing isn’t it?  Perhaps I will cheer up when we get some real winter weather. 

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