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And there are moves to legalize contra one way riding on a one way street.
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Didn't his driver see who took it ;-)
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Ere!!! its on eBay - his bike ! its got 8 days still to go, I might go 4 it and keep it til he
ascends to high orifice then present it to him and get a night hood ... Sir Dog !
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'spect he'd think you were "barking" and have you "hounded" out of the building for "pedalling" such a tale !
I'll be off now shall I ? ............
;-)
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les bicycles de belsize park, arise sir dog I hear you bark,
under milkwood and o'er the lee, tis down I go on bended knee,
the queen looked upon the scroll and exclaimed "a knight for a bike ?
off with his head ! we are not amused - get on ya bike and take a hike.
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Ere!!! its on eBay -
tinyurl.com/58pa9h
It is BIG and BLUE and despite looking quite well-balanced (spelling corrected) it leans oddly to the right.
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>> Ere!!! its on eBay - >> >> tinyurl.com/58pa9h
>>
The same phantom item by the same seller attracted some silly fun bids, but was pulled yesterday by eBay. see
tinyurl.com/5nz7lw
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Helmet wearing is not compulsory:) Probably not even useful.
Of course not, why would a protective helmet be useful?
Unless of course you get knocked off bike and land on your head on the kerb edge (like my lad did - helmet broken into three pieces but son's head OK apart from minor concussion). Helmets should be compulsory to protect the dim-witted from their own stupidity (bit like seatbelts and motorcycle helmets).
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Played very well in the press.
Cameron being a geezer who got his bike nicked by chavs as he went shopping at Tescos whilst increasingly weird Gordon is always surrounded by security or handpicked Nulab clones.
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>> Helmet wearing is not compulsory:) Probably not even useful. >>
In the case of somebody who locks their bike to a short post, what's the helmet going to protect?
The road?
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Of course not why would a protective helmet be useful? Unless of course you get knocked off bike and land on your head on the kerb edge (like my lad did - helmet broken into three pieces but son's head OK apart from minor concussion). Helmets should be compulsory to protect the dim-witted from their own stupidity (bit like seatbelts and motorcycle helmets).
There is no evidence to support the usefulness of cycle helmets. In countries where they are compulsory deaths and serious head injuries have remained unaltered compared to pre-compulsion. The same applies in professional cycle racing, where riders regularly crash at higher speeds than the rest of us.
Helmets will disintegrate at low speed impacts, that is what they are designed to do. Whether your lad's head would actually have touched the ground without the additional bulk of a helmet is also debatable.
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There is evidence to support an argument that cycle helmets are actually more dangerous to the wearer as they can increase the rotational forces on the skull under certain impacts.
I'll see if I can dig out that particular study.
BTW I wear a helmet on the race and the TT bike...
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There's also evidence that drivers will give a cyclist wearing a helmet less consideration than one that isn't. I choose to wear a helmet most times when I ride - I'd not like to see it made compulsory. In some places cpompulsory helmet wearing has actually reduced the amount of cycling, kind of counter-productive.
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I can see the arguments for and against wearing cycle helmets. But what's the use of hanging it from your handlebars?
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But what's the use of hanging it from your handlebars?
For lobbing at bike thieves maybe ?
Edited by Humph Backbridge on 26/07/2008 at 21:23
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There is evidence to support an argument that cycle helmets are actually more dangerous to the wearer as they can increase the rotational forces on the skull under certain impacts.
I wonder what sort of impacts those are? The mass of a bike helmet (the ones that my kids wear) is small. I am not sure what you mean by 'rotational forces on the skull'. I can imagine the neck being damaged by rotational forces, but not the skull?
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Helmets will disintegrate at low speed impacts that is what they are designed to do. Whether your lad's head would actually have touched the ground without the additional bulk of a helmet is also debatable.
No, nothing to debate at all.
A car turned across the front of him, squeezing his bike into the kerb. He went over the handlebars, over the front corner of the car, and landed head-first on the kerb. His head, via the helmet, took virtually his entire body weight. We met the paramedics at the hospital and initially feared the worst, but in the words of the paramedic, 'bike helmets are life-savers'. I would not get on a bike without a helmet - 100% proven as far as I am concerned and should be mandatory.
Edited by qxman {p} on 26/07/2008 at 21:49
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You can never comment on individual cases, but as I said before statistics do not bear out the fact that helmets make any difference. Head injuries account for a far greated total of car deaths than cycle ones, and nobody is suggesting compulsory helmet use for drivers.
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Cycle helmets are mandatory in Australia. Child head injurys have reduced dramatically since the law was introduced.
Edited by Old Navy on 26/07/2008 at 22:34
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Cycling head injuries in Austraila have reduced strictly in line with diminished cycle use since helmets were made compulsory over there.
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Cycling head injuries in Austraila have reduced strictly in line with diminished cycle use since helmets were made compulsory over there.
Kids still use bikes, even if adult use has reduced.
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"In the case of somebody who locks their bike to a short post, what's the helmet going to protect?"
LOL, Best laugh today.........;)
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I think that the research that RR relates to is a European country where the introduction of compulsary helmets did not affect deaths/injuries?
A helmet will almost always help, but looking at the things, compared with a Motorcycle helmet, I can't see it making a lot of difference - it would be like those early car racers that wore a leather helmet, better than nothing, but not much better....
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I think that the research that RR relates to is a European country where the introduction of compulsary helmets did not affect deaths/injuries?
No, the research I referred to was carried out in Australia where the pro helmet lobby were crowing about cycling head injuries being reduced by 30% after the law making helmet use compulsory was introduced. The figure looked a little different after further research found that cycle use had declined by................30%.
As far as I know, no European country requires the use of helmets. In cycle friendly countries like holland hardly anyone wears a helmet.
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A man got shot in WWII and a chocolate tin in his pocket took the bullet and saved his life, QED they should make tins in breast pockets compulsory.
Seriously, I don't wear a helmet, and I wouldn't on a motorcycle if it was not compulsory. I think peripheral vision, peripheral directional hearing, the ability to move the head about quickly and a cool head are outweigh the benefits. A helmet is restrictive and adds an unnatural increase in head inertia.
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Now that I don't agree with - I used to race cars and I have a full bike licence and know that a decent helmet will save your life, whether on a motorbike or a race car, the benefits far outweigh the cons...
Edited by b308 on 26/07/2008 at 22:44
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Apparently the Cameron velocipede has been recovered minus its front wheel. So perhaps after all he didn't shackle it to a bollard, but just shackled the front wheel to something tall.
I saw two pushbike plod yesterday evening up the road looking eagle-eyed and muttering to each other. One was on the radio. I wondered at the time whether they were on the track of the opposition leader's missing transport. There are a lot of pushbike thieves round here (anyway people who look as if that's what they are) and more pushbike plod seem a good idea.
I must say schadenfreude is all very well but it seems to me a bit silly to suggest Cameron would be stupid in any obvious way. And if there was a Lexus full of heavies following his every move the bike wouldn't have been touched, would it?
All the same, tee hee. But with a twinge of sympathy. Perhaps no one here has ever been robbed?
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surely something on your head that has some form of safety design is going to be better than nothing, if you involuntarily bang your swede hard on the floor?
I'd accept a proper helmet would be better, but who's going to wear one of them...apart from The Stig?
Same with riding horses isn't it..the Old Guard refuse, whereas the more modern thinking is to wear a riding helmet, although personally, if it hasn't got brakes i'm having nothing to do with it.
Edited by Westpig on 27/07/2008 at 07:22
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Seriously I don't wear a helmet and I wouldn't on a motorcycle if it was not compulsory.
Anyone who rides something as unstable as a bike, motorised or not, without a helmet will probably end up having their head examined anyway.
Edited by Old Navy on 27/07/2008 at 10:52
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As an occasional cyclists I would be seriously peaved if helmets became compulsory, it is not an extreme sport. As stated above, forcing car drivers and passengers to wear them would reduce casualties, but is obviously a ridiculous idea.
The majority of cycling deaths, in London at least, are caused by cyclists getting crushed under the wheels of HGV's.
Do you want to live in a world where anything that could be considered dangerous will be legislated out of existence.
The comparison with horse riding isn't fair, as horses are unpredictable creatures and the rider is higher up so they have further to fall, yet helmets still aren't compulsory.
Edited by krs one on 27/07/2008 at 11:26
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Cameron is a Waitrose or M&S man. The Tesco Metro he used is in a pretty high crime area of Portobello Road. He would have known the risks living up the road in Notting Hill. I can't believe he is that stupid to leave the bike the way he did. Good spin. Shows he's like the rest of us doesn't it. Crime effects him also! Knows this will put another feather in his cap with an election on the horizon. Remember, he was a big player in the Tory PR machine of the 90's. So he's not short of a few tricks.
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Bike found, still with helmet and lock, but minus front wheel:) news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7527403.stm
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Day or two after his bike being pinched, Cameron dropped into the Royal Welsh Show at Builth Wells by helicopter and was quoted as saying "I hope to take home something tasty from the Food Hall for supper" - a bit of an extreme solution to losing the push-bike?
Meanwhile, the country sleepwalks a day nearer to voting for him because we "need a change" - last time we went down this road we got Thatcher!!!!!!!!!
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Same thing happening in America, expect McCain to have his horse nicked in the next few weeks.
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we "need a change" - last time we went down this road we got Thatcher!!!!!!!!!
Er, didn't we get Tony Blair? Mrs Thatcher was the time before.
Looking across the pond to where these things have a bit more fundamental importance, if I were McCain I would arrange to have my false teeth stolen. I ask you, in the thrusting, dangerous, whippersnapper-led world of today, would you vote for a worthy but inspiration-free dodderer with teeth that whistle when he utters sibilants?
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In what way was Blair a change from Thatcher, other than not actually being the antichrist?
Edited by Pugugly on 27/07/2008 at 18:20
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One of the problems of democracy is the tendency of the media to present leadership candidates as the Second Coming or the antichrist, and of voters to believe or half-believe it. Of course 'New Labour' did represent a change from the Major government, but that isn't really the point. The voters may vote for the other party because they want a change, but there's no guarantee that they will get one. Indeed the chances of very significant change are quite small.
Edited by Lud on 27/07/2008 at 18:19
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the chances of very significant change are quite small.
Let me quote, on the subject of this country's political system, my late Hungarian friend Miklos, a most brilliant man raised under communism there (once he had survived the war by pretending to be a Catholic rather than a Jew):
'The two-party system is the perfect one-party system.' Pretty well unanswerable, if you really understand what he meant.
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Mrs Thatch, then Tony Blair, elected by sleepwalking voters - maybe proves my point!
Would the last man emigrating please turn out the lights?
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Before the mods remind us this is a motoring forum, may I add "Thank Goodness we got Thatcher".
Or are many of you too young to remember the seventies, when the state of the country was summed up by BL?
Edited by Webmaster on 29/07/2008 at 11:24
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Yeah, I remember the 1970s and I also remember the 1980s, which in the places where I was living at the time were much, much worse, because in the 1970s people at least had a job. What a waste of potential that decade represents; mismanagement from top to bottom and we're still paying for it. On the subject of the 2 foot post, in around 1989 a friend of mine returned to his (very expensive) bicycle to find thieves had attempted to lift it off the top of a lamp post--maybe 35 feet or so. It stuck on the light itself and was suspended there for several weeks until the council recovered it. The thieves did this in broad daylight in a busy shopping precinct and nobody reported it.
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Have to say I have never been so well off as I was in the '80s. Which is a paradox as some of the values of that decade were not particularly mine. We are all Thatchers' children like it or not, as was succinctly illustrated recently in a series of documentaries hosted by Andrew Marr.
The level of disposable income I enjoyed, led amongst other things, to the purchase of an obscenely expensive mountain bike which I still have. It has never been stolen.
;-)
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We are all Thatchers' children like it or not
Not me comrade, or anyone of my age. Churchill's perhaps, or Attlee's, unless one is going to be literal-minded and name poor old Neville Chamberlain, although frankly one can hardly rejoice in having any of these figures as a virtual parent.
Almost anything is possible these days - who bubbled Max Mosley? - but I don't really buy the idea that David Cameron bribed a local hooligan to nick his bike. If you get rumbled doing something like that it's even more embarrassing than what seems to have actually happened, I should imagine. And there are a lot of smart, nasty people who would want to catch you out.
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Neville Chamberlain has been greatly misrepresented and misjudged by History.
I wonder how many PMs/Party Leaders had bicycles - can't imagine many really.
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Neville Chamberlain and Gordon Brown will share one characteristic
Neither will have won an election as Prime Minister.
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Exactly. Much of the impetus for offensive defence, and the time to achieve it (Spitfire etc.) came from the maligned Chamberlain.
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>but I don't really buy the idea that David Cameron bribed a local hooligan to nick his bike.
There is speculation on some political blogs that it was very convenient that a certain newspaper managed to reunite Cameron with his bike.
Kevin...
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Politics tends to go full-circle every 10 to 15 years. The depressing matter is how quickly we have got to this point again.
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>>Politics tends to go full-circle every 10 to 15 years.
Well it has been 11 years, so within your time frame.
The depressing matter is how quickly we have got to this point again
For me the depressing thing is it didn't happen much sooner. It would have been even better if the NuLab spinners had never got in.
Thatcher went too early, there were some powerful unions left untouched who could have done with some of the Thatcher medicine. Unfortunately, these barons still rule as was witnessed last week at Labour?s National Policy Forum, at Warwick University.
motoring link:
Thatchers plans for 10 new nuclear power stations were shelved by Major and Blair. We could have done with some of that now to take pressure off motorists from fossil fuel use and the calls to reduce CO2 emissions.
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<< Thatchers plans for 10 new nuclear power stations were shelved by Major and Blair. >>
Nope, neither Major nor Blair was the assassin; new nuclear plants were killed stone dead by the City of London. The investment houses wouldn't touch the electricity generating companies with a bargepole if they had nuclear power included, so the nuclear was kept in state ownership when the other power stations were privatised.
It was only later when the govt figured out how to guarantee massive backdoor subsidies that the nuclear stations were privatised, and it's only further rigging of the market that has brought the prospect of building new nuclear stations. Depending on your POV, the nuclear subsidy is either an investment in the future or a handout to a dangerous technology, but either way it's quite a contrast with the lack of public investment in clean power for automotive purposes.
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so the nuclear was kept in state ownership when the other power stations were privatised
Exactly. You have proved my point. Thatcher wanted to build more nuclear stations under state ownership, but she was ousted before she could do so. Walter Marshall was the man who was going to do so, but without Thatcher at the helm, he was unable to get the necessary funds from the treasury.
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Walter Marshall was the man who was going to do so
Lord Marshall of Goring, no less. That was an inspired choice of title, wasn't it?
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