soubriquet

I have worked with sheep in the UK, and the domestic breeds (not merino) were still prone to strike, despite not having the skin folds. We used to dip, and that would control it, but the pesticide we used was dealdrin, and is now banned. Fly strike is horrible. The flies lay their eggs in the daggy wool around the anus. The maggots hatch and bore into the flesh, and eventually kill the sheep if not treated. I can't see why selective breeding can't be used. Sheep are not uniformly woolly, and although its a long time since I've looked at a sheep's arse, neither are they.

Yes yes yes. Hope that's not over-complicating things...

Snowcats will be diesel.

Sri Lanka: Tamil Tigers.

Brendan. My experience is limited to Yamagata, and it may not apply to other parts of Japan. Here, it starts snowing in December, and stops in March/April. Most days you can ski fresh snow, but I'd hesitate to call it powder because it is fairly heavy and wet. Further north is colder, and presumably drier. You won't have any problem finding fresh snow in Japan.

Congratulations gamera, well done for getting off your backside and making it happen.

Thanks gamera. Maybe I was being a little opaque. How was it? I'd guess that September will be cool and settled, but that's my UK experience, and I'm not sure how it applies to Hokkaido.

I'll be watching, if I can stay awake. Best season in years, thanks to the one tyre rule. Qualifying is problematic. The one car, one lap shoot-out is supposed to be good TV, but it punishes any mistake, and the real problem is the start position carry over from the previous race. Perhaps they should use free-practice times instead, with no refueling. Then we could reatian the nice mix of short fueled sprinters, vs marathon men.

Girlfriend has suggested we take a trip to Shiretoko in September. Anyone been? How about September weather?

In my case my skiing improved till I was in my mid thirties (started skiing at 23). Now I avoid monster moguls and heavy soft snow.

DOS was a terrible operating system, hopelessly unstable. Everything up to Windows 98 was horrible. MS fixed the problem by ditching everything, and bringing out NT as Windows 2000. At least now if an application goes down it doesn't invariably crash the system: the Blue Screen of Death

It seems rational to stop when requested to do so by an armed policeman, but that's the point. Panic is an irrational response, and all of us are prone to that. We still don't have the full story.

Panic.

Speed will be limited by the rubber tracks, suspension and terrain, not by power. 40 is probably plenty in the moguls, it doesn't seem to have much in the way of springing, front or rear. Canucks step forward, what speed to the snow mobile racers get?

With a supercharged nitrous breathing V8, I'd guess it's well past frightening, and probably close to self destruct. Aka "adequate".

There's only one seat, but it's a T-Bucket, so it could take two. With a hot rod, you can build it to do whatever you want.

While I am mostly in qualified agreement with you Ocean11, I'm 100% here: "And inasmuch as this terrorism might just prove an incentive and an opportunity to rethink some of the fundamentals of community relations, foreign policy and so on, it would be dishonest and counterproductive to pretend you didn't have some specific hopes for after all the blood has been mopped up." It seems a little hypocritical to ask for Islam to reform itself while While western society is run by criminals.

Well, thank'ee very much. I thought my brain-dump had killed it. I am a geologist (sedimentologist) and I used to get payed by the CSIRO to describe landscapes and their processes, and to project the models back in time. So apart from the fact I'm interested in space in the same way as mountains and machines, remote sensing can generate stunning data sets. The Landsat data are a wonderful archive, so yes, I am interested. Hyperspectral data give 128 channels and a 3m pixel size! Now where did I put my orgasmatron.......?

Forgot to add O11, I was effing grateful for the self-lifting toilet seat when I stuffed my back again this spring. I couldn't put on my own socks or underpants, but at least I could take a piss unaided.

Inland Yamagata in nice because the central valley is a classic graben, with all the volcanos lined up nicely along the lines of faulting (Zao one side, Gassan the other). Because it is going down (normal faulting), we don't get much serious activity. Lightweight construction is ideal because in theory a light flexible structure can bounce around, or even come off its foundations without collapsing. The steel frame really helps tie things down and together. The problem is that in Oishida, we are in high snow area. 14 metres last winter, on a daily accumulation basis. Anything like

Because they are blind, and it's something they can do. Yes, and it's good.

The built environment in the parts of Japan I know is pretty horrible, a shame considering that the parts without buildings and power lines are so beautiful. I asked my goil about this. She said it's because when you build in paper and wood, there is a cultural expectation that buildings are transient things. A lot of the rubbish around me is 50's-60's stuff, built when there was little money around and really low quality. It is being replaced at an amazing pace, and the new stuff is fine. My house is new, steel framed, insulated, aircon and central heating. We've a LAN as well as

It gets to 42 every summer in Perth, and it twice got to 47 when I lived there. That's in the shade of course. It's a fair bit hotter when you are out in the sun doing fieldwork. 10 litres water a day was normal

slow is right. Find something you are interested in, go to the city office and find the owner and approach them directly. Gaijin or not, money is money and people do deals.

Well then Sanno, why don't you vote? Three of us have 'fessed up.