Kirstie Allsopp is responsible forLocation, Location, Location, Relocation, Relocation and Location Revisited on Channel 4. Tiresome shows where Kirstie helps rehome yuppies with unrealistic expectations. She is also responsible for Kirstie’s Homemade Home and Kirstie’s Handmade Britain, where she patronisingly promotes the plainly obvious concept that a lick of paint on some battered 2nd hand furniture can result in good-looking furniture. She encourages both yuppies and plebs to pick up a power drill and experience some sort of DIY epiphany, though pragmatism is usually sidelined in favour of pretentious badly-designed faux-vintage chic. In any given episode you can expect a beleaguered stay-at-home mum to use a cordless drill for the first time and burst into tears at this sudden empowerment.

Kirstie is landed gentry, so scrabbling around the local Sue Ryder for a kicked about dresser to refinish in distressed Eau de Nil is a jolly good wheez for her, rather than anything approaching a necessity.

Kevin McCloud is responsible for Grand Designs on Channel 4, aka the show in which people demonstrate they have no concept of managing finances. He also had a show where he and his yuppie yahoo mates tried to ‘get back to basics in the country’, with cringeworthy results. Self-congratulatory drivel for city boys who want to drink their purified **** in a converted barn somewhere in Devon, dressed as Worzel Gummidge, having made their mint in London. The level of smugness is palpable with these self-proclaimed noble savages. “My mate in the next valley just happens to make sustainable blown-glass hemp lampshades, I better give him a ring on my Blackberry”!

I watched one episode in which Kevin and his mates built a crude wooden shack in the woods. They appropriated an old safe to use as a log burning stove. I remarked at that point that the stove, given its advanced age, was probably coated in lead-based paint and was probably not built to withstand the heat. Sure enough, Kevin and his mates come pouring out of their primitive shack in a billow of smoke. Ha ha ha, we hadn’t thought of that.

All of these shows claim to offer practical solutions to what is, in fact, an image-driven lifestyle choice for a lucky few. Poverty safari.

Both of them would embrace sour, bird-pecked, frozen solid milk on their doorstep as it represents the humbler and simpler lifestyle that was a chore for the rest of us but a whimsical novelty for them. Without a hint of irony, both of them have built up cluttered, material-driven lives lived in a somewhat vicarious fashion and therefore strive for a bit of grubby reality once in a while. If Waitrose did a doorstep milk service, complete with a ‘meet our cows’ glossy pamphlet via the local dairy, then it would be an instant hit with those mentioned above.

This debacle reminds me of the ‘freeman on the land’ movement, whereby (usually poor and delusional) individuals imagine they can get out of a range of charges by using the correct pseudo-legalese. Cue Youtube videos of chavs shouting ‘I do not consent’ to baffled police officers, having been pulled over for speeding whilst not displaying a valid tax disk and running on bald tires.

Seems the Greeks are in a similar pickle.

Warm it gently with a hair/warm air blower.

Thanks for the advice, but I’ve already stripped the piece back. Much to my dismay, the epoxy came off in a single rubbery sheet. For reference, I am attempting to finish guitar bodies. I thought that a two-part epoxy pour would be a good substitute clear coat as it sets hard, doesn’t need spray equipment and doesn’t smell terrible or take a year to dry fully. With the Envirotex lite, I warmed both bottles prior to the pour and I went over it with a heat gun to try and remove air bubbles and other small dimples. I poured it over a sprayed acrylic colour coat (and filler primer/grey primer under that). As the epoxy came off, it lifted some of the colour out of the acrylic coat. I think I poured it too thinly and it didn’t cure properly. It was dry, but it didn’t pass the thumb nail test, and it hadn’t really bonded with the acrylic colour coats.

I need to really ‘man up’ and invest in a decent respirator and a couple of cans of 2K lacquer. With risk comes reward. 😀

The real issue here, I suppose, is the continued ‘war’ on lacquer and paint thanks to the EU outlawing chemicals. The move towards water-based products leaves manufacturers scrabbling to reformulate their clear lacquers overnight. Suddenly the clear and colour coats from a single manufacturer (Krylon and Plastikote spring to mind) don’t really bond so well. It would appear that Plastikote enamel never dries hard, thanks to some reformulation. I propped a piece next to an electric radiator for three days and it was still gummy to the touch. Useless. Likewise a piece I finished in Halfords’ clear lacquer still fails the thumb nail test two months later. I was able to buff that piece up to a fairly convincing gloss, but it isn’t the most durable.

People that claim cannabis oil cures cancer, or any number of other illnesses. They go so far as to claim there is proof of this, yet the proof either turns out to be sensationalist news reporting or endless Youtube videos of new age quackery. Even worse, this sort of belief tends to go off the deep end into the conspiracy realm whereby one is an idiot if you didn’t realise that cannabis cures every disease, but the evil Big Pharma (TM) corporations have been keeping it quiet for years, as has the government, the Bilderberg group (say what you like but I enjoy their ginger beer), the jews, the freemasons etc etc… It is amazing what rubbish smug stoners will postulate and protest when, deep down, they just want to smoke weed all day and not worry about a knock at the door.

I was once told by an individual during my undergrad studies, sincerely, that Thomas Edison had invented a long-life light bulb.The US Government, in cahoots with incandescent light bulb manufacturers, bought said bulb and smashed it to pieces (or possibly kept it under lock and key somewhere) to keep conventional bulbs flying off the shelves. The rascals! Ignoring the wonky timeline inherent in the story, I suppose this moronic story could be seen as an allegory of sorts. But, rather like Russell Brand, this individual thought he was smart enough to figure out that the government isn’t always representing your best interests and left it at that, believing his story to be true. Said individual always complained of a sore back from previously working a stint in a brick factory. Perhaps he needs cannabis oil.

Agreed: like thousands of other aircraft – scrapped and with no record of such. No great mystery, especially for such an unloved type.

I saw a programme once about the Japanese excavating entire mountains and using the material to build new harbours and such. Clearly they have no issue with going to extreme lengths to get suitable material, and in such a resource-hungry country I wager they wouldn’t have been too precious about a couple of old airframes. I’m surprised, if anything, to see the remains of the Tama Teck site given the rapid development and demand for land in Tokyo. Perhaps the biggest issue with the Marathons is that they were installed at the airport and the velodrome when they were still fairly new and just out of service. Given a decade of weathering, they would look ropey and not really be representative of either the aircraft now using the airport (and the glamour tied up in that) or enhance the scenery at the velodrome. The image in the fifth post above shows the aircraft already robbed of parts and looked a little battered in 1974; hardly the message you want to send to potential customers. This is my take on what became of those two airframes. A cursory Google search doesn’t come up with anything new.

What is the second image of, showing a partially submerged wreck of some sort?

For what it is worth, the images are a bit over-processed for my tastes.

Quite actually.

Nic

Your signature “allah akbar”: NATO’s new warcry. tells me all I need to know!