Most of those aren't bizarre. Indeed the Crooked Billet is quite a common name for a pub and it just means a bent log or branch. This probably dates to the time when pub signs were often physical objects, the crooked billet in that case just being a branch hung outside the pub.

If you want properly weird names we have a few round here. The Wappy Spring and Nont Sarah's can't be more than two or three miles apart and that's just two.

The problem with the idea of stone circles being observatories or calendars is that most of the claimed alignments are not particularly accurate.

I was reading of one circle where researchers claimed similar alignments for those of stonehenge. The claimed alignments were pretty vague. Some were out by a degree or more - a huge amount in astronomical terms. Others were very vague, due to the size of the stones you could have an "alignment" that could be one or two degrees either side depending on how you viewed them. One particularly strange one was that the researchers pointed out that there was an alignment with a feature on the lanscape, unfortunately for them the feature was man made and rather later than the stone circle itself.

It's not that I don't think that it's true that stone circles were used as celestial calendars or the like. It's that I think that modern academics attribute more accuracy to them than they actually possess.

Nice to see urbex photography without overdone HDR toning.

@Mr Awesome they only made it shat shape so those damn patent trolls at Apple wouldn't sue them. Don't forget Apple own the design of any object that is rectangular with rounded corners. Well they say they do.

@kestrel and that makes a nonesense of the whole article. It talks about indigenous turkeys and then goes on to discuss farmed varieties. The only true indigenous turkeys are surely the wild ones.

It's an old scam, but this particular story made me laugh more than most. The police reported that some of these criminals were so stupid that they were still asking for their free beer as they were being booked into custody.

@Ray why is this fraud? They offered something for free and then failed to deliver. The important word there is "free".

@tg13 whiskey is specifically a product of Ireland. I know of no such drink that comes in a plactic bottle, nor do I know of any that is not true blended whiskey. There is certainly no whiskey (ie made in Ireland) or scotch whisky (ie made in scotland) that is made in the way you suggest. Can you provide any evidence that such a drink exists? If it ain't whiskey or scotch whisky then it's just a grain spirit.

I'm sick of religion, but I'm a lot more sick of lawyers.

Shoot 'em.

@Kylie you are correct. The extent of the dispute is significant since the pilot claimed with some apparent justification that the black box recorders had been tampered with. In support of his claims the cockpit voice recording and flight data recordings went four seconds out of sync.

The pilot claimed that the major cause of the incident was that the engines did not respond the an increase in throttle.

Air France had received bulletins from Airbus stating that there were two problems with the A320, firstly that there were problems with throttle response at low altitude and secondly that there were problems with barometric altimeter. Neither of these bulletins were passed on to pilots until after the accidents.

Some people have placed significance on the fact that the investigation was carried out by the French authorities when the aircraft's owner and operator and manufacturer were French companies.

Jason the first time I heard the joke was after the London bombings on 7/7/2005 and I'm sure that wasn't the original. Not by a long way.

The point being that you did not invent an original joke. I'm not disputing that you thought of it yourself, but you weren't the first.

The only Dutch food I've ever eaten was Rode Kool Met Rolpens. Not being a Dutch speaker I had no idea what I was going to get. It turned out to be a sort of stew of beef and tripe with red cabbage. Not a group of ingredients I would have thought of putting together, but I hace to say it was very tasty.

A lot of the advice relies on the flawd application of logic to real world situations. For example, "If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range." Is deeply flawed.

The assumption is that if your assailant would shoot you running away then they would have shot you standing still. Not necessarilly. The person with the gun wants to feel that they are the one who is in control, when you hand over the wallet they feel as if they are in control. If you suddenly run without warning they will feel as if they have lost control of the situation and may shoot to regain control. The gun is their control mechanism.

A more logical way to approach this would be to assume that it is unlikely that s/he would shoot you after you handed over the wallet. If s/he was going to shoot you anyway then why ask you to hand over the wallet in the first place? Why not shoot you and take your wallet? Therefore the very fact that they asked you to hand over your wallet is evidence that they will not shoot so long as you comply with their wishes. Run after handing over your wallet and they may shoot you because they also wanted your car keys or mobile phone.

Second best advice I ever received on self defence was "never do anything to spook a man with a gun". Bear in mind that somebody pointing a gun at you will probably be in an unstable state in the first place and the last thing you want to do is destabilize them further.

The best advice was "don't get into the situation in the first place". I knew somebody who got mugged returning from a restaurant because instead of parking in the 24 hour, brightly lit car park near the restaurant he decided to save a little cash and park in a poorly lit sidestreet. Stay in the light, where you can be seen and where there are people to see you.

Tell me vbloke, does it shit you when people lift your tweets almost verbatim? Or Jason were you just flattering vbloke?

Why is it a model of Stephenson's steam engine? Stephenson used pretty standard steam engines, others invented and refined the engine. Stephenson's great contrubutions were getting the flanged wheel locomotive to work and building railways, in particular it was Stephenson who realised that railways would not work with significant inclines. Hence his being known as the father of the railways.

He certainly was not responsible for the steam engine.