Tuesday 15 June 2021

Ian Botham - Who'd Have Thought?

Here's something that surprised me greatly: the Thoughts of Ian Botham in the DTel (paywall) on those persons deserving plaudits for having the "biggest impact on climate change".  The runner-up in his caustic awards is Chris Packham, "Travel Hero", for his paid promotion of costly & exotic holidays in faraway places - holidays with large carbon footprints, naturally.  Turns out Botham has a longstanding feud (or 'beef', we might say ...) going with Packham - I didn't know about that, either.

But Botham's top award goes to Drax, as well it may, for its extraordinary and deeply counterproductive consumption of trees in its furnaces - subsidised royally by ourselves at around a billion £££ a year.  He even quotes - near enough - from a C@W of 4 years ago ...

This is a man after my own heart.  Top bloke, Botham!

ND

16 comments:

Don Cox said...

He's certainly right about Drax.

Maybe when Hinckley Point C is in operation, Drax can be closed down.

Don Cox

lilith said...

Fantastic. The amazing thing about Drax is that nobody said "Er, Guys, how green is it to chop down forests in USA and ship the wood to the centre of the UK...?."

OT/ but if anyone is feeling hopeless and everything has gone to sh*t may I offer up this soothing video? (It may only work for half the population) Perhaps one day the young will make nostalgic pop videos with a 2021 flavour...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d4yW6Lz_1o

Check out those Italian wool threads....

Anonymous said...

OT, but in todays Guardian comments section on the business page, no one seems to have noticed that while CPI is at 2.1%, the more accurate RPI is at 3.3%.

Jan said...

But...but Greta visited it in her documentary and likes it cos it's going to do CCS so it must be OK.

The share price is down a bit today so maybe beefy has managed to shift it as Ronaldo did yeaterday with Coca Cola by all accounts.

E-K said...

I wear a lanyard. Nobody questions it, Lilith. Thanks for the link.

E-K said...

Ronaldo did well too. Obesity is largely to do with sugary drinks going by the fat chavs up in the flats the road from me (I'm always clearing their bottles out of the road.)

So that should end the debate about fat being down to poverty. The healthiest thing you can drink is also the cheapest.

On Drax, on everything, you can guarantee a Lefty to be 100% wrong.

lilith said...

My masks are all gone next Friday. I wear a lanyard sometimes but after the 21st, nah. If anyone wants to know why I am ready to explain about my violent psychosis, initially triggered by Matt Hancock's face as he talks to camera but now just 5 mins in a post office queue will do it. I already assume anyone outside in a mask is sick and swerve them.

The BBC told kids that they should have the Pfizer vaccine because it is 100% safe and it will stop them infecting their parents. On Newsround. Is it any wonder that I avoid the BBC to stay chilled?

iOpener said...

Most paywalls are childishly easy to defeat.

When the DTel "You must subscribe pop-up" appears key in ctrl-U and ctrtl-F then enter "article-body-text" into the find box.

Select the article-body-text when you find it, paste it into a word processor. A good one will format the snippet and you can read away.

Every one I have tried so far has some version of "article-body-text" somewhere in their great spongy mass of HTML.

Is it legal? Is it moral? I dunno.

Anonymous said...

iOpener - which word processor do you use to format the text?

Anonymous said...

I don't wear a mask or a lanyard in Tescos which is where I go most. I will also start this same regime in a few other places now. I've never bought sanitiser/gloves/masks since all this c*** started and I'm not vaccinated.

I took a few mins with a strip of material, 2 safety pins and 2 hair thingy elastic bands to fashion a mask when it first started but I certainly haven't wasted any cash. I take it with me when I go out and if anyone asks why I'm maskless I will just say I forgot to put it on. I don't intend to get into an argument over such a triviality.

I do keep away from other people and give them as wide a berth as possible plus I've always washed my hands when I get in to the house and before eating.

Matt said...

@ Anonymous

Probably pointless from a CV-19 perspective to wash your hands as it's not transmitted by surface touching - it's airbourne.

Matt said...

Washing hands is yet another pointless imposition on people by the experts. Yet the sheeple will all use the hand sanitiser provided.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30678-2/fulltext

lilith said...

I'm sorry your lovely post hasn't got us all chatting about cricket, global warming or Sir Ian, Nick. I suspect if we did, we'd be moaning about T20 taking up a perfectly good Test summer, then cramming in 5 tests with India before the light fades and on to Australia for a pasting...

Nick Drew said...

too kind, Lil - but alas it was, ahem, a potboiler! (obviously enough)

Anonymous said...

If you use chrome, edge or Firefox and want to avoid paywalls, there's a great browser plug-in available here:
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

I've installed in from the firefox add-ons store and confirm it works. I've also checked the source code and whilst I'm no where near an expert in javascript, there doesn't appear to be anything dodgy in there.

News sites could easily stop these workarounds that allow you to access the full articles, so that you could only access them with a subscription.
They don't because they want google/search engine/news aggregators to be able to scrape the whole article so it can be be included in notifications, which only works if these scrappers can access the full articles without having to log-in.
It's advertising for them as they hope someone who gets to the article via the aggregator and reads the first few lines will then subscribe to read the rest.

When you read a paywalled article you've actually been sent and have downloaded the whole article, what you do with this on your pc once you've received this data is up to you - certainly wouldn't be illegal to bypass the code that is blocking you from viewing the remainder of the article.

Scrobs. said...

Anyway, it wasn't Botham's Ashes, it was Bob Willis's...