Early Risers.

[jamie92208]

My father smoked cigs and a pipe. He got hardeni g of thecarteries and needed a bypass in his leg at 72 and gave up overnight. He had 10 relatively  good years till the graft failed then a further 8 years with a more and more restricted lifestyle so smoking certainly denied him an active later life.  I detest the smell of cigs but funnily enough quite like the smell of pipe tobacco. I have no idea why. 

 

Anyway it's goodnight from me.

 

Jamie

[BoD]

Some strange skies and weather here tonight.  This one from the local hospital.

 

 

Rather poignant I thought.

[Gwiwer]

I have never been a smoker.  

 

That is not to say I have never smoked; I have.  I had a very few in my school days as most of us did out of some sense of bravado, false adulthood and against the risk of getting caught.  I had a small number more when with my late partner mentioned above.  I once sampled a cigar and the immediate resulting urge to relieve my stomach of its contents into my lap ensured that was the only such time.  Dad's pipe rack stank of stale tobacco though I never noticed that he did; I never joined him in his enjoyment of the weed.

 

But I would never class myself as a smoker for any reason - including medical or insurance purposes.  It's like many things in life.  We try, we might be curious and learn from experience but we are not bound to continue.  

 

It's bed-time already.  A virtual day out in Taunton has been enjoyed and yet again I won nothing in the draw.  As always I enjoyed being a part of the family which is RMweb in its wider sense.  And  the Orange Army seem to have done all the noisy things they needed to do to our level crossing and are quietly going about the final stages of the job meaning there is a good chance of a better sleep tonight.  

 

The House of Fun awaits .....  

 

Until then sleep well - stay well. 

[brianusa]

3 hours ago, Gwiwer said:

Booked a friend's holiday cottage on her Cornish farm.  Booked the hire car.  

 

I don't care if it's tempting fate.  It's for October.  We need some light in this tunnel and it's our re-arranged silver wedding anniversary event.  We were to have been going to northern Italy ...... 

 

You'll probably get as far as the Tamar Bridge and get turned back!

     Brian.

[Gwiwer]

2 minutes ago, brianusa said:

 

You'll probably get as far as the Tamar Bridge and get turned back!

     Brian.

 

We'll see when the time is closer.  We would go down by train anyway.  There is a  justifiable strong anti-visitor feeling currently but that may dissipate if movement is relaxed.  

[tigerburnie]

G'night all

[Kingzance]

16 minutes ago, Gwiwer said:

A virtual day out in Taunton has been enjoyed and yet again I won nothing in the draw.  

I believe our most senior virtualist indicated that his draw would not close until after midnight Rick. If that is so, you may still find you have been lucky!

[grandadbob]

I was quite a heavy smoker, 35-40 a day for years but gave up on June 30th 2007, the day before the smoking ban in pubs. ISTR they were about £5 for 20 then.

I did a rough calculation a couple of years ago that I'd saved not spent in excess of 45K on cigarettes.  Judging by current prices it's a lot more than that now. It has enabled me to spend silly amounts of money on this wonderful hobby of ours and all sorts of other things that I couldn't have afforded otherwise. It's also helped my health somewhat.

Edited April 26, 2020 by grandadbob

[Simon G]

It is not often that I can honestly say this, but we had some rain today and I was pleased to see it.  Hopefully there was enough to give the garden a good soaking.  It did give me a good excuse not to finish cutting the grass at the back of the house.

 

Goodnight all.

[Coombe Barton]

Active planning

 

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/back-lawn-now-massacred/

[Barry O]

Rameu....a favourite composer. You can imagine him conducting the orchestra. At that time they used a pointed staff to keep time. One of the composers was doing this and speared his foot. He died of gangrene. ..which lead to the use of a baton for conducting the orchestra. 

 

Baz

[Barry O]

Goodnight all!

Baz

[Tony_S]

Our lawns were cut but not by me. The cable survived this time too. We sat in the back garden. Quite a few bird visitors. I think sparrows are building a nest where the blackbirds do usually. The blackbird pair turfed a couple of nest building pigeons out of the ivy bush a few weeks ago. I wonder if with more people at home they are keeping their cats in, there are no feline visitors now. 
Tony

Edited April 26, 2020 by Tony_S

[Coombe Barton]

11 minutes ago, Barry O said:

One of the composers was doing this and speared his foot. He died of gangrene. ..which lead to the use of a baton for conducting the orchestra. 

Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1687. And a film featuring such a staff in action is Tous les Matins du Monde, of the career of Lully's pupil Marin Marais.

Edited April 26, 2020 by Coombe Barton

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone

 

Despite the fact that my father, mother, maternal grandparents, all my mother’s brothers and my father’s brother were all smokers, I’ve never been a smoker, nor have I ever smoked a cigarette, cigar or pipe. Although I do recall when I was about 7 or 8, that one of my uncles, much to the dismay of my mum and dads, gave me a puff of his cigarette, I coughed so much that I was almost reacquainted with my tea. I’ve never tried or even been tempted since, despite the fact that nearly all my friends and work colleagues were smokers!

 

Today I’ve managed to get 2 coats of primer/undercoat on the old towel rail. I also managed 2 very short sessions in the workshop, but progress has been made on the drive system for the turntable. The motor I’m using came with a mounting plate fixed to the motor, but it was flat and as such wasn’t much use, as it meant that it would need to go directly below the turntable. As the motor and gearbox is approximately 4” long and with the indexing mechanisms going between the two, it would require around 8” and 10” clearance beneath it, thus reducing the storage area below. So I’ve decided to mount the drive motor at 90 degrees to the turntable, which will reduce the clearance to about 5”. Well over 30 years ago when I was working in the steel industry, I was a regular visitor to the scrap area, as there was always one or two gems to find amongst that lot. During one particular visit, I came across a redundant control panel, in which were a couple of mechanical hours run meters. These meters both had very good looking gearboxes, which I removed. Anyway, today I stripped down these and I’ve retrieved a couple of sets of bevel gears, universal joints and drive sprockets, some of which will be used for the turntable drive system, I always knew that they’d come in handy one day!

 

Goodnight all 

[laurenceb]

Night awl

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. I hope the Virtual Members day goes on for a bit longer as today seems to have disappeared while I wasn't looking.

[The Stationmaster]

2 hours ago, brianusa said:

 

You'll probably get as far as the Tamar Bridge and get turned back!

     Brian.

Have you heard about the couple who the forces of law and order collared in Falmouth.  Found sleeping overnight in a car and it turns put they had driven 300 miles to get so on the spot fines for failure to observe the lock down travel restrictions.  But of course the rozzers once roused really go to town and found the vehicle was not insured and the driver didn't have a driving licence, so they confiscated the vehicle as well.

2 hours ago, grandadbob said:

I was quite a heavy smoker, 35-40 a day for years but gave up on June 30th 2007, the day before the smoking ban in pubs. ISTR they were about £5 for 20 then.

I did a rough calculation a couple of years ago that I'd saved not spent in excess of 45K on cigarettes.  Judging by current prices it's a lot more than that now. It has enabled me to spend silly amounts of money on this wonderful hobby of ours and all sorts of other things that I couldn't have afforded otherwise. It's also helped my health somewhat.

After I packed up smoking i used to tot up how much I'd saved each week and although I always used to buy a stock of fags whenever I was in France or Belgium (where they were cheaper and i visited one or the other fairly frequently) the savings quickly mounted up.  It was a good incentive not to go back to smoking.

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[The Stationmaster]

G'night all

[J. S. Bach]

Good night owl from the Piedmont.

[BR60103]

22 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Google suggests this.

 

 

LNER Coronation coach set - window stripe?

 

Bottom half in Garter blue?

 

You guessed it.

My local dealer doesn't list Precision paints on his site. I'm still trying to figure out the bogies.

 

This weekend we spent not having the Great British Train Show.

 

I tried smoking a pipe.  I found that I usually didn't have all the paraphernalia with me.

 

 

Edited April 27, 2020 by BR60103

[AndyID]

Looks like I've completed my "universal chairs for holding conductive unmentionables" models for now. If they function properly I might add more detail but then again I might not

 

I launched this print and left it while we were having dinner. It's supposed to go at the junction to the terminus from the main line and as such it's a very gentle radius. It's a C switch with a 8.25 crossing and it's about 13 inches long in OO. As you might be able to tell from the monitor the straight road isn't exactly straight.

 

Unfortunately I'm printing the base with a glossy black plastic and the printer's bed is glass over a black bed-heater which makes it a bit hard to see what's going on. The print is split into two parts to fit on the bed. The printer has almost finished printing the first layer of the first half of the print.

 

 

The print took just over one hour and it came out OK. It should look a lot better after I add the rails and apply some paint.

 

[TheQ]

Morning Awl,  inner Temple Hare. 

4 hours sleep so far  I need more. 

 

I hope the exhibition hasn't disappeared,  I hadn't got all the way round.. 

 

Dad smoked for many years and now suffers badly from copd,  I've always hated the smell of cigarettes and never could get my head around paying to burn money on something that smelt so bad.. 

 

Snooze button for now.. 

[iL Dottore]

7 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

The essence to me is critical thinking. Societies that do not value critical thinking do not thrive.

 

The desire to have a simple/lazy explanation rather than confront your worldview with critical thinking is also a factor.

 

Human ability to embrace cognitive dissonance is a form of a mental survival instinct, but it is the enabler of conspiracy theories.

 

Too true. Unfortunately, it seems that many universities are “dialling back” on teaching their students critical thinking. One can (churlishly) assume that it’s done so that the students’ cozy world view is not shattered by reality. Although I did learn a lot of “facts” at Uni, the most important thing I learnt there (and something then championed by the good profs) was - more or less: how to ask questions, how to find the answers and how to understand the answers. I firmly believe that due to a decrease of emphasis on critical thinking, many (most?} of today’s university output are “trained but not educated”. If I may digress, I feel that I have pretty much forgotten most of what I have learned at Uni, but then I find myself watching University Challenge or Mastermind and being able to answer - correctly - a majority of the questions (except those regarding sport or post-2000 popular culture). So it would seem that what I learnt has been noted, categorised and filed in my - what passes for a - brain.

 

Smoking: what an interesting topic and something of professional interest for me: I spent a decade or so working on oncology drugs for lung cancer. During this time I learnt many things some of which that might be of interest to ERs. Firstly, whilst smoking is a contributing factor to Non Small Cell Cancer (NSLC - one of the nastiest cancers around), a significant percentage of patients with NSLC have never smoked. In fact in one of the large studies I was responsible for, we found a particularly aggressive form in non-smoking young Asian females (data from Hong Kong, Malaysia etc). Smoking increases the risk of developing lung, throat and oral cancer as we know, but there is also a hierarchy of risk. At the top, riskiest of all is cigarette smoking (heavily processed tobacco, always inhaled into lungs) followed by pipe smoking (sometimes processed tobacco, sometimes inhaled into lungs) then cigar smoking (unprocessed tobacco, rarely inhaled into lungs). Some data suggest that cigar smoking only marginally increases your risk over that of a non-smoker. For the record, I am a cigar smoker (about 1 - 4 per month) and used to smoke a pipe (interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, the most pleasant pipe tobacco to smoke was the untreated stuff that could smell like burning nappies, the aromatic smelling tobacco was utterly foul to smoke). According to the actuarial tables some insurance companies use, being an occasional cigar smoker would classify me as a “non-smoker” 

 

Cancer is very much an interesting beast, more so nowadays as we have made sufficient progress in hygiene, nutrition and medicine that more people are living long enough to develop cancer. Returning to critical thinking: whilst I certainly do appreciate Cancer UK’s efforts, their slogan “together we will beat cancer”, is both optimistic and misleading given that - to put it simply - cancer is due to defects in the cell’s self regulating mechanisms (for example, cancer cells manage to avoid apoptosis - something that doesn’t happen in healthy cells [and yes, I’m simplifying]). So, if you think about it critically, we can eliminate risk factors/contributing factors from the personal and public environment and we can develop extremely effective treatments for it but we’ll never “beat cancer”. Ultimately, as in nearly everything about the human body, it’s all down to how lucky you have been in the genetic lottery (hence the stories of 60/day heavy smokers who drink a bottle a day who live to 90 and diet, health and fitness obsessed individuals who peg out at 40).

 

Finally, muddling news: progress is being made on my GWR outside framed monster, but the Coopercraft/Mailcoach instructions are minimal to the point of almost being completely useless. All I can do is thank the gods for the accumulated wisdom of RMWeb.

 

And on that note, boys and girls, I wish you a splendid start to the week!

 

iD