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And if you were PM Adam what would you do? You can't simply issue an order to a Canadian Corporation. Think it through properly and outline what needs to be done that can be done. No political sound-bites please - just concrete proposals that the government can work on. This is a multi-party government that isn't bound by political dogma. One person coming up with an odd good idea is worth a thousand head-in-air petitions that are, quite frankly, a total waste of time!

It's OK he's just had his old VHS of Scandal out again. But soon he''ll be back to Battleship Potemkin, and all those great classics made under Uncle Joe - my particular fave being: Our Glorious Five Year Plan - #43. Compulsive viewing indeed! (Particularly so if you were a Soviet citizen and didn't want to go on an extended weight-loss holiday in the Gulag.) Don't let on but I'm planning to send him a copy of The Iron Lady for Christmas. He'll surely find it highly educational. We'll likely be treated to a full analysis of how the trade union movement was holding our Country hostage, until she stood up for fairness and the rights of the ordinary citizen.

Maybe HSBC are cleverly anticipating what customers want? They don't want their money going to pay bigger bankers bonuses, or into the mostly pointless activity of moving it around the world (and back) each time on commission, or mixed up with the funny money that's all part of fractional reserve lending. Perhaps HSBC has very wisely said to themselves: we really don't want to be in this retail banking business as it is so boring and risk-free, so we had better step-aside and leave it to someone else. Does anyone know how many tables you could get in if you took out the bank counter? There's an obvious name for this new one: The Shanghaied Shanghai!

I can! Why should people have to travel to Ashington or Blyth? If they want our money they should set up here, and provide some employment in the Bedlington! Let's have several; competition is good! We've always has choice and competition in financial services and, until that returns, we're just the town time forgot.

The idea has been floated here before, especially after the betrayals of our Town by the various national banks! At least this government is listening, and the law has been changed to make credit unions more competitive. Local money ploughed back into local projects, and an opportunity to vote with your purse and wallet against the fat-cat bankers, and their big-bonus culture. http://www.bbc.co.uk...siness-16873350 But where are the enterprising people to make this happen? Come on you silly ex-Northern Rock people; you who thought you were international bankers playing in the big league! Here is an opportunity to get back to your roots and advance real money, to real people, to do real things, in your area. EARN your royal gongs this time around! This has never been more needed than it is now. Can you rise to the occasion and learn from your mistakes, or does someone else need to show you how it should have been done?

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-16870464 Who's this Mass Market guy they are going to offer 300Mb/s to? Bet he doesn't live anywhere near you or me!

We will need a tiny break while we migrate all the files to another much faster server, with oodles of disk space, and closer to your door. So... it will be necessary to turn the board off for a short while. That's to ensure no one's masterwork gets lost in cyberspace. No fixed time set for this, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

Why does the inevitable take so long these days, and cost so much of other people's money in the process? Fascism it may be, but it's not old-style might-is-right, just-go-for-it-because-we-can, fascism. More like let the gravy train roll-on just a few hundred yards more (sorry meters!) and damn the ultimate expense - because we've got 300 million mugs out there to fund it (and their children, and their childrens children), fascism! Suppose it amounts to the same thing though. A reckless disregard of common sense; of other people's rights; for other people's point of view, and the pursuit of power whatever the consequences may be. Hey, isn't that Stalinism too? No, wrong; Uncle Joe had a cunning plan - this shower can't think it through far enough to have any "end" to justify their means!

The Groves were defo on BBC! It would have been produced live too. In those days the only option to getting up in front of an on-air camera was a telecine, and the later cost real money; so you only filmed if you could resell it. It took the Beeb a long time to work out that their output could be sold to other TV broadcasters, or indeed was worth the expense of preserving. As an aside, did you know that Tyne Tees TV had one of the very first video recorders, long before the mighty BBC? It was an american Ampex with 2 inch tape and almost filled an OB van. I was in the van when they were showing it off in London at "The Radio Show" exhibition one year. The cost then was massive - millions in today's money. The BBC wouldn't pay the money, though they played around with their own system for years before finaly abandoning it and buying commercial machines. ITV companies had to embrace recorded TV very early on, because their advertising revenue depended on it, and they didn't have all the on-site production facilities the BBC had. Nope! The above is a small modern one. The model that TTTV had is briefly shown here:- http://youtu.be/-USmM6YDa-I

Must have been quite a lot of private houses nationalised too then - the ones that were busily fitting inside bathrooms post-war! Truth is there was a steady and general improvement in conditions. But food rationing went on far far longer than it should have due the the post-war Labour government, and it wasn't until Churchill was returned to power in 1951 that the country got off its backside and we started to see real recovery. By 1958 Britain had "Never had it so good!" - including the miners! Most people around at the time realised this - except the Labour Party who were still fighting the class war, and amongst themselves. Wasn't until Harold Wilson that Labour started to come to its senses. But, he had one hell of a fight on his hands with the communists in the party, and still went on to plunge the country into another financial crisis. Sound familiar? There were some short-term benefits from nationalisation, but it soon became a gravy train, and rendered Britain's Industries uncompetitive. The pit closures (and the modernisations) would have happened regardless, but they were more painful under nationalisation because they resulted from a "command economy", and were far less staggered than they would have been had simple competition been the deciding factor. Immediately post-war many Industries did need consolidating, and nationalisation did just that. But, it brought with it a whole raft of other problems. And.. none of the above is from a book, or a second-hand opinion. I saw it with my own two eyes, and wasn't a member or supporter of any political party then.

Typhoon?! It will never replace the Hurricane! Maybe they meant a Eurofighter Typhoon? In which case it has probably just lost its AAA rating!

What happens when you live in/near a military playground. Going way back I have two or three recollections. Fortunately they were "near misses"; else you wouldn't be reading this, and the taxpayer would be out a few more tens of millions!

Hopelessly Slanted Bonus Culture Higher Salaries Before Customers Hasta-la-vista Suckers! Bedlington's Closing! But... let's be realistic here; how is someone on a mere £1.25M p/a going to survive these hard times without their £5M bonus?

So is Zeppelin the Wright answer to the wrong question? I'm not aware of any heavier than air stuff in Germany apart from Lilenthal (sp?) in or before 1900, and he was killed before 1900 in a stall. There was an Austrian guy though, who's name I can't recall, messing around with attempted flights off a lake.

Sorry to come late to the show, but I've never seen a "frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form but fresh" avocado, and I just ate one today! 1 and 4 are obvious! ...and isn't a tilde (~) a common punctuation mark? Plastered all over dictionaries to signify alternative word endings, and us coders use it all the time not! [Programmers joke] ...surely ... is ellipsis, and not ellipses - oh, OK, so maybe that's the plural! And the Wright brothers are going to be turning in their graves over the above! BTW an airship is not an aeroplane, it's a dirigible. Aero plane = the wingie things, gerrit! Lighter than air does not fly; it floats - as Count Zeppelin would have told you!

Can only but agree. Great chap; at his house at Hotspur Avenue many times in the late 70's, and he was always hospitable. For the record he was responsible for building what is now the Music Shop on Front Street East, and I think had a bingo place at Newbiggin too. Seem to remember that it was near impossible to get them to say their house number, because it was in fact number ...!

Hungary the next candidate for meltdown it would appear, and they are "as mad as hell, and not going to take it!" - at least from the IMF. Back to Chairman Dave: Count the fairs - it's almost as if it were catching from Cleggie. Pity the "...." is Scotland and not the UK! Pity he's talking about a Scottish referendum in relation to independence, and not about a UK one in relation to independence from the EU. Double standards? Nnaaa.. politicians are always totally consistent - when it suits them!

Magic! This has to be the Glebe Road as I don't recognise the shop front at all. I should be able to guess at who some of the "youngsters" are, but the only one that I could be anywhere near is the lady with the dark blouse and white necklace under the 'O' in CARRY ON. If I had to guess I'd say it could be Sylvia Curley. There has to be a "Kit" - who was a real whiz with cycles - in there on the left. Date? Mid 1930's is the best I can hazard. Many thanks for posting a real bit of Bedlington history.

So, Dave does the right thing at the EU summit and refuses to sign the Let's all be German treaty. The other quisling "leaders" meekly go along with it and have the audacity to call us wreckers! The wrecking was done by politicos over a decade ago in adopting an unworkable and solely politically motivated arrangement. But should he get any credit for the stance? Well, no. That's because he is still ducking the referendum issue. Just because the slimy politicos are calling it an accord and not a treaty doesn't mean there hasn't been another fundamental change sneaked through. The Europe we are still part of is going the federal route at a rate of knots, and all the worst warnings of the skeptics are coming to pass. It's time to put the question to the British people. That question can only be do we want the EU to remain the free trade area we agreed to join (despite the hidden agenda of the Ted Heaths of this world), OR are we to become an outpost of the Fourth Reich? Our parents and their parents had a firm answer to this, and we'd do well to listen.

A gem! ...Mr Cameron said the UK would not agree to the transfer of any sovereignty from Westminster to Brussels as part of any future reforms to EU institutions aimed at protecting the single currency area from economic instability. ... Such a treaty was "not likely to happen" in the foreseeable future, Mr Cameron acknowledged. But... if it were to... (must be by March says Sarky, facing HIS voters), he will move the goalposts yet again to ensure that the British public doesn't get any say! What ever happened to the commitment that a treaty change would need a referendum, and - by all three leaders - that we'd have one "in the next parliament"? "The prime minister says he will seek to return powers to the UK at the right time..." We all know when the right time means in politico-speak - it means: sometime never, not on my watch, and isn't it great that the electorate has a short memory!

http://youtu.be/xBPmATZyEg8 http://crave.cnet.co...craft-50006299/

But it's not working any longer! http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/apple-beaten-in-us-court-over-samsung-ban-bid-50006330/ Guess the judge might be one of the burgeoning number of "droid" owners.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...litics-16029474 "Many MPs say this would alter relations with the EU and a referendum is needed. But Downing Street said it did not meet the test for a vote" QED!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067723/Middle-class-boy-set-robot-program-financial-advice-investors-pocketed-1-5m.html ...with a huge future starting as PPS to Ed Balls!

It would be an even sadder day if Bedlington didn't acknowledge the death of its friend, film director Ken Russell. Over the years quite a bit has appeared on this board about the making of Women in Love at Bedlington Station. His return in recent years to film a documentary about the cultural change in the area only cemented his bond with the Town. I believe this association started in the early days of TV with an assignment to produce a black and white documentary on the 1960 Miners' Picnic. There's plenty on the web to celebrate his life and career without repeating it here. But, the Town would like to say goodbye Ken, it was a great friendship - you brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of local people - you will be missed! http://www.bbc.co.uk...t-arts-10701521