What a pity. I have fond memories of that pier from about 10 years back when the wife and I were courting and we lived relatively close by in North Somerset. It was always a lovely drive out to Clevedon or Weston Super Mare for a walk along the beachfront….

I hope they rebuild it…

The difference between theory and practice.

I disagree. I would say it is more a case of funding. Funding puts theory into practice.

A fascinating look at this issue is the South African Cheetah programme.

The original Mirage III had a notch only. The first single seat Cheetah E, then had a fence and a leading edge dogtooth to replace the original notch. The 2 seater Cheetah D appears to replicate this arrangement with both the fence and dogtooth extension.

This was followed by the Cheetah C which lost the fence and had only the leading edge dogtooth extensions.

Finally, the planned Cheetah ACW, which was cancelled due to the end of the Cold War, had a fence but no dogtooth in an extended, re-profiled, drooped new leading edge……

Below is: Mirage III, III, Cheetah E, Cheetah D, D, Cheetah C, C and finally ACW

A lot of countries want to defend their borders and want to have a decent capability to take it to the opposition if the need arises , they want a cheap , Somewhat light weight A2A fighter with secondary A2G capability , for them the Gripen NG is super , advanced , top notch avionics , good cost , available , less risk , good performance . F-35 is still way too risky a program to invest in if you take away the US political pressure .

And that is the whole point neatly summed up. Not yet mentioned is the fact that the Gripen has much greater maintainability than the F-16, as well as far less cost per flight hour. These are important considerations to the majority of airforces worldwide.

Does she write and perform any of her own songs?

19/20. The whos/who’s question got to me. I panicked!

The test was pretty basic though….

She found herself sitting with a group of South African whites/Afrikkaans over here on holiday.
Now my missus is a clever sod and latched on to the fact that they were taking the mickey out of an English black girl and her child sitting behind them, not being totally up on the history of African politics, she didn’t understand the constant use of the word Kafir, she said that they were making an issue of this, well they were safe on a British train weren’t they, there were alot of them and she thought that quite frankly from their attitude, that they were a bunch of rascist bullies, a few less and she would have waded in I reckon.

Your wife speaks Afrikaans? The word is spelt Kaffir, and it is a derogatory name which originates from the Arabic Kufar, meaning non-believer. How does she know that’s what they were saying though, if she can’t speak the langauge? The pronunciation is different in Afrikaans than it appears spelled to an english speaker.

So where are all the protesters this time, or are morals applied selectively and fashionably only?(..and all this protesting at the same time Catholics were denied very basic rights in a certain part of Great Britain)……You’d think that due to Mr Mugabe’s score versus Ian Smith that the Island would be beside themselves…. And it is not like Africa didn’t provide plenty of warning signs as to what would happen. The African continent is littered with failed states.

Either way, it will take years just to get Zimbabwe back to the levels it was in the 1970’s, and that is without the endemic corruption and sporadic violence inherent to even the better African governments.