I have to say (and I have said it elsewhere) that I quite like this store. Apart from the fun of working out the contents of things from the endless euro-names, LIDLs has big central bins of "stuff" that change on a frequent basis. It's where my laser-level (£8.99) and thread-cutting tools (£4.99) came from, for example ( Read more... )

Oil is ~$120 per barrel, and possibly rising to $200 by the end of the year. So it's just about doubled in price in one year, and likely to do the same the next ( Read more... )

Having borrowed it from the library, I've just finished Robert Zubrin's 1996 book: The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.

It's an interesting read.

Zubrin, rightly appalled by the likely 450G$ pricetag of any Mars' mission which followed NASA's 1989 90-day study, realised that there had to be a cheaper way to get ( Read more... )

Quote from today's Guardian, on the back of Paris and London's anti-Chinese demonstrations:

"May the Olympic flame never expire." Adolf Hitler

(The procession of the torch was introduced during the Berlin Olympics of '36.)