Time Is Much More Valuable Than Money - Seth's Blog

A useful post here where Seth applies one area of unnecessary measures which just serve to generate more fear, waste time and fail to solve the problems they claim to address, in airport security, to the much wider picture.

Imagine a world without bullshit, it would be great, wouldn't it?!?

Jingoistic Pit Summary - BFK

Benedict Francis-Kentigern, or BFK as we know him, is an affable motoring journalist of the old school. Dropping out of some big public school somewhere in England to pursue his passion pretending to race cars, he's acquired such an array of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, arran sweaters and empty travel sweet tins, that you can't help but ignore him. Look backward to BFK's "weekly" reports on motoring, cars, and what drives the people that drive them, in his section to be found somewhere on the site.

I was amused to notice that a random comment we posted on an obsucre youtube clip (as 'whyteay') was a highest rated comment (albeit with a whopping 4 votes)...

The clip was of the old BBC start grid music which I remember well when I used to report from the pit lane for along with Tiff Needell (this was in the days when Jeremy Clarkson was a provincial hack and Richard Hammond still driving pedal cars around the back garden).

In this case it was from the Hungarian Grand Prix, still in its relative infancy but a good chuckle nonetheless, in 1989, the first year turbos had been banned and everyone was in normally aspirated 3 and a half litres (and Senna and Prost still held sway despite the bickering that ended in them only speaking to each other via pit crew members).

Good old Murray Walker keeping the flag flying by only mentioning the British drivers on the grid.

I had a chat with the (now sadly late) Michele Alboreto about his cracked ribs that Walker mentions at the end, in the exception that proves the above rule. He said he'd slipped on a patch of oil whilst eating Calzone. Yeah yeah, we believe you Michele.

For the record Mansell won the race over Senna in a real nailbiter that had the rough surface of the Hungaroring at least in part to thank...ah, I'm reaching for another travel sweet as I write these lines..

Digging At The PMC

There is no posting today - spent a good chunk of the day shifting earth from A to B in a project to dig a drainage ditch at the PMC which has left us all utterly drained, appropriately enough.

Returning tomorrow..

Seven Of Our Posts Are Missing..

There seems to be a certain amount of discrepancy on the part of blogspot as to how many posts have appeared on the PMC. According to our editing page (which you can't see, not that you'd want to!) there are 308 - we did indeed mark the passing of the 300th post the other day with a cuppa soup.

However on this homepage it cites 202 (plus this one) in the archive for 2010, and 81 for 2009. Presumably the posts which appear on the front page aren't included in this figure, but they number 8 at any one time and so that comes to 301 in total (or 302 including this one). So there's a mystery 7 posts somewhere out there..

Maybe it's simply because we don't really count Tim Flowers' offerings as proper posts (by the way he's on his summer break right but promises to have some more inciteful musings on his own genius when he returns!)

Oh well this was an easy exercise in adding one more to the post count, whatever it may be!

Green Shoots Of Recovery

According to my sources, Estonia is no less than in second place in forecast growth in GDP for the 27 EU states in 2010-2011!

The figure stands at about 3.5 per cent (only Poland is higher at 4 per cent). Not quite the figure of the heady days of the early-mid '00s (peaking at 10 per cent in 2006), which may be no bad thing, but a vast improvement of the whopping 14.1 per cent contraction last year. So the belt tightening was the right thing to do all along, hats off to Estonia and its economic restraint!

For the record, neighbours Latvia came in at less than 1 per cent growth, Lithuania much stronger at about 2.6 per cent, the UK, France, Denmark and the Netherlands hovering around the overall EU average of 1.6 per cent and poor old Greece the only one still in the red at about -1.8 per cent.

More On The Lizard Brain..

Another good post on the lizard brain (for an explanation of the phenomenon see this post) from an entrepreneurial perspective.

It also gives it it's proper medical name, the amygdala, no less. Such a tiny little blob being responsible for such a huge amount of suffering and misery:-(

Thought For The Day No. 30 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

The greatest gifts can be destroyed by idleness.

Michel de Montaigne

Death Of A Nation

What I've been watching these last few days - a thorough, maybe largely accurate and often graphic six part documentary about the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

It seems naive and crass now but I remember at the time wondering why all of these terrible things seemed to happen in places which had such idyllic, sylvanian looking scenery.

Seems that many people have forgotten about this conflict already, which I think would be a mistake.

Watch it.