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Posts
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Days Won
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Profiles
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Posts posted by XTreme
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Just now, Pedro said:
Carrying bikes in vans isn’t for everyone.
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Just now, Otto von Jizzmark said:
Oh for fucks sake: @XTreme, just zap my account and all my posts now please. Let the resident sanctimonious killjoy have the glory.
Well the Poll seems to be saying quite unanimously that you should stay Mark.
Why don't you sleep on it?
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38 minutes ago, Six30 said:
@Pedro is after his first scalp ... has he instigated a flounce before ?
I reckon the EU has put him up to it!
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Amazing report Chris......and this pic is incredible!
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35 minutes ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:
We never actually got around to discussing abiogenesis, Buckster. You're not confusing that with evolution too, are you?
As for the rest, I'm getting very mixed signals here: you think I'm moving on because I want my 'ravings' to go unanswered, whereas other people think my constant engagement with you is getting old and boring. Which is it? Maybe we need a poll...
Good idea!
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4 minutes ago, Saul said:
I find it difficult to understand how these places are just abandoned like that. On this crowded little island they would be developed into something to rape money out of the populace quick smart.
A lot of the stuff has probably been bequeathed to multiple siblings.......and they'll never agree on what to sell it for.
Time goes on and the individual shares get bequeathed to the next generation of siblings.......so there could be about 10 or 12 people who have a stake.
It gets very complicated! Particularly because the Spanish mentality is to let something rot rather than sell it.
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38 minutes ago, boboneleg said:
Anyway what do I know, I'm just a braindead gammon.
You're not a Gammon Bob!
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14 minutes ago, Buckster said:
Piss off, I went for a ride today and have video footage.
Ride Report then!
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14 minutes ago, Six30 said:
Fuck Bucksters Bible shit … you stay put .
What the annoying cunt said!
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These places don't even show up on Google Maps.......so I don't where I was exactly. I suspect most of this in Murcia!
I was out for about four hours with temps around 30C, and still managed not to go beyond my 6 mile limit. If only I had a van!
Nevertheless I wobbled off on my gay moped. It was my first run since hitting 70, and I'm pleased to report that I was riding just as badly as I was before I was 70.
I went from Granada province, into Almeria, and then into Murcia.
When I crossed into Murcia I found an abandoned restaurant!
About 15 minutes going cross country I found more ruins!
Further along the road there was more......
And then I came across a complete block of abandoned buildings!
And I was so glad I had a top box! Cos when you stop is when you really feel the heat!
This is the point most of you (especially @Skippy) would bottle it......but I just take it in my stride!
Obviously there's been somebody living here at some point!
So there we go......something for you lot to aspire to.
I'll just mention in passing that I saw Tony the Tools (who's recently moved out of the town) recruiting for his new bike gang on FB......obviously no invite for me.
Not that I'd even consider it obviously, because my idea of motorcycling is somewhat different to others.
But it just goes to show that the current generation of motorcyclists just can't hack it in the company of Old School Greasers! Tell 'em @Renegade!
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1 hour ago, Sir Fallsalot said:
Should we have poll
Yes.....on whether he should be renamed to something more suitable like "Busa Bullshitter".
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I've been out for hours and come back to find he still hasn't posted the fucking video!
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3 hours ago, Otto von Jizzmark said:
Now that’s not entirely true, is it? In the short time I’ve been here you’ve had a deeply fascinating overview of my bike history, some riveting pictures of my son making pens and fixing guitars, and even a highly risible anecdote concerning an encounter with an Irish tinker on a motorway service station. Admittedly I haven’t been here long enough to get into some of the more esoteric stuff I carry around in my head, but if you ever feel that what’s really missing from your life is a detailed knowledge of the mating habits of earwigs, I’m your man.
As for the rest? Well, I’ll give you a whistle-stop tour before I go. There are few things more tedious than endless farewell tours though, so once an appropriate time has passed for people to read this and, if they feel so inclined also to comment on it, I’d like Pete to do the decent thing and throw the switch on my account and its content once and for all. “I, Otto von Jizzmark, known in professional circles as Professor Wankstain, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare this to be my last will and testament…” etc, etc.
I’ll start with being a musician, not that there’s a great deal of any interest to say about that. After starting out on the piano at about age five I have ended up playing bass guitar (badly) and trumpet (worse), and spent years playing in numerous orchestras, big bands, jazz bands, pit bands for shows, rock covers bands – you name it. Nothing too remarkable there. The only vaguely unusual part I suppose was when I was 16, when I was briefly the bass player with a thrash punk band called The Nun Fuckers. They were something of an underground hit in my home town for a while, with one of their most popular numbers being the sensitive and tender romantic ballad ‘Anal Intruder’. The only lyric of that one which I can recall is “I’ll put roses on your piano if you’ll put tulips on my organ.” I was the youngest of them by a good four years, and only got the gig after the band I was in at the time shared the bill with them at a particularly dodgy nightclub where one of the headbangers in the audience invaded the stage and hospitalised their bass player. We only ever played the shittiest venues (another enduring mystery of our time) and every gig was utter carnage. Our final gig was at a condemned nightclub that had been closed by the council two years earlier, but which after ‘unofficially re-opening’ had rapidly become the local drug-dealing hotspot. The police raided that one and gassed the place. The band all legged it and hid in the bus depot until about 6 am when it was finally safe to go back and reclaim our gear. At one point we held the distinction of being one of only two bands to be permanently banned from playing an especially seedy local boozer, the other being The Macc Lads. I don’t know if you are familiar with their work, but if not, I’d leave it that way if I were you.
The drummer and the guitarist are both long gone – one in an accident, the other of a heroin overdose – and I have no idea what happened to our lead singer. He’s probably a record company executive somewhere…
Anyway, I’m happy to say that that wasn’t the summit of my musical achievements, and I did go on to (blush) play in the Royal Albert Hall a few times and also on the telly. These days I’m a degenerate jazzer – far less rock’n’roll, but also far less energetic.
My professional life isn’t something I go into much detail about, and with good reason, but it’s not as exciting as you make it sound. Most science isn’t. It’s not thrilling or glamorous, it is - by and large - a long, hard, repetitive, tedious and pedantic slog. And it needs to be if it is to stand up to the mauling it gets from its peers, because most scientists love nothing more than to rip each other’s work to shreds. That’s not to say that bad science never slips through the net – it does – but good science is what exposes it and roots it out. Having a paper withdrawn after publication is the kiss of death to any scientific career, which is one of the reasons that a mauling at peer-review should be seen as a service rather than a trial. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves when we’re gleefully eviscerating some poor bastards work…
I fully took your point Pedro about goading Buckster for my own entertainment perhaps getting a bit boring for other people, and perhaps this is the explanation for it. But then if you are going to take on something as audacious as discrediting everything science has learned since the Enlightenment you’ll certainly get my attention, and if you’re daft enough to do so with such a woefully deficient grasp of the subjects then you deserve what you get. And with apologies to those who found it boring, this sort of nonsense needs to be ridiculed wherever it rears its head, not least because it is deeply insulting to those of us who have dedicated our lives to the acquisition of genuine knowledge.
That leads me on to my final point (which is in no way a dig at you, Pedro, because most people do it) which was your admonition to be mindful of the feelings of people on here with existential doubts. I dismissed that one so instinctively that I later realised that it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time to explain why.
Whilst we should all fully respect anyone’s right to hold religious views, we are under no obligation to have any respect for the views themselves, especially when so many of them are such an outrage to logic, reason and morality. In a free society, no ideas should be immune to scrutiny and, if necessary, to ridicule and contempt, whether they be political, scientific or religious. To think that any one set of opinions deserves special privileges and protections is a very dangerous road to go down.
If people are having existential doubts, then what they need above all else is honest and accurate information from both sides on which to make their decisions, not a ring-fencing of one set of views that puts them beyond criticism or attack merely because they are religious views. Where were you when Buckster was telling people that evolutionary biology is junk science, or that evolution has been disproved, or that there are no transitional fossils, or that radiometric dating is bogus and the earth is really only a few thousand years old? Where were you when I was being denounced as a deluded pseudoscientist, or being told that I was an insignificant grain of sand who lacks the intellectual or moral sophistication to be able to fathom the plans of The Almighty? Now in one sense of course it doesn’t matter, because I am quite capable of looking after myself, but nobody ever steps into these arguments on behalf of the atheist or the natural scientist who might be deeply offended by religious dogma or by their tawdry bastardisation of science. People will often say “I am offended” as though those three words constitute any sort of argument. I am offended by religion on a daily basis, not least when I turn on the news only to be confronted with the latest sub-human atrocity the parties of God are inflicting on their fellow humans, but merely being offended does not constitute an argument, nor a moral position.
I have never allowed myself any delusions (at least, not since I was 15) and I am not inclined to indulge them in anyone else. Nor am I in the least bit concerned about riding roughshod through the intellectual ‘safe spaces’ of the existentially baffled. They are adults, and they need to approach the problem as such.
In a nutshell, the root of their dilemma is trying to square what we once believed with what we now know. One way to do that is to do what Buckster does, and retreat into an alternate reality where everything we have learned since the Enlightenment is wrong, and where the only people who really understand what’s going on are charlatan hacks on the payroll of dodgy creationist organisations - essentially, to perform an intellectual self-lobotomy. That’s fine if you are happy with facile answers to important questions, but not all of us are so incurious. Another option is to make use of the innumerable high-quality, reputable educational resources at our fingertips in the 21st Century and get to grips with real science - and with more intelligent theology - and take it from there. Which of those they choose is entirely down to the individual, but the one thing they have no right to expect is that the rest of us modify or temper our views to accommodate their dithering.
At this point we haven't even set foot outside the realm of the natural sciences; the moral discussions take things to another level altogether. What elicited your rebuke in the end was my suggestion that much of what is to be found in the bible is exactly the sort of inane and morally reprehensible drivel that you might expect from a bunch of semi-literate Middle Eastern goat herders. And so it is. Take the story of Onan, for example, who was commanded to have sex with his dead brothers grieving wife by his father. Finding the ethics of the whole enterprise a bit dubious, he pulled out at the last second and ejaculated on the floor. This angered God, who promptly killed him. What profound moral or philosophical lessons are we supposed to take from this? Pretty much the only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that with an aim like that he had no future in the porn industry.
Of all the characters in the bible, perhaps unsurprisingly I feel a particular sympathy with Isaac, the naïve and trusting son of Abraham. God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac to prove that he feared Him, and Abraham dutifully took the unwitting lad off to be slaughtered, only to be stopped at the last moment by a messenger of God who congratulated him on ‘passing the test’. What benevolence is this, that would conceive of such a monstrous test? Any man alive today who needs his wife to fear him would rightly be denounced as a coward and a thug, but if God can terrify a parent into murdering their own child we are supposed to be in awe of Him? What is this? Personally, I have no time for it, nor for those who fall over themselves defending it or apologising for it.
And perhaps this should be the test for any readers who are experiencing existential doubts: if God appeared in the heavens and commanded you to kill your child – or any child, for that matter - would you do it? If the answer is yes, you need to be institutionalised without delay; if the answer is no, you have already taken the first step towards self-enlightenment. Keep going.
And now, with nothing further to say before my self-imposed sentence of death is passed, I shall bid you all a fond farewell. You are a pretty cool bunch, and I like you all a lot. And yes, that includes you, Bucky.
But the bike was trailered away yesterday morning, and I’m making a clean break; no sense hanging on to things that will only remind me what I’m missing out on.
So @XTreme, as bad as I feel about abandoning you to the braindead gammons (again), once a suitable interval has passed for people to read this undoubted masterpiece, please go ahead and zap the lot. It’ll be like I never existed – a wise one who came, who spread his word and then vanished into the ether, leaving no physical trace, never to be heard from again… Wooo….
Will do Mark......I'll be sorry to see you go!
And once again you've left me lumbered with @Six30.......he's like a turd I can't flush!
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They love their Brit bikes there Saul!
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I'm off out! Covering 3 provinces.......all within a 6 mile radius of course!
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20 minutes ago, Six30 said:
Being Welsh ?
That is a privilege only accorded to a select few!
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17 minutes ago, Specs said:
How awful.
We keep that skeleton in the cupboard whenever possible Alan.
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46 minutes ago, Six30 said:
Walk report … @XTreme you seen this .. no bike or a fucking van !
No van? That man is living on the edge!
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11 minutes ago, Buckster said:
I’ll be riding tomorrow, that much is true.
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4 minutes ago, Buckster said:
That’s the new battery on, it has some serious cranking power. I have the NOCO charger on my old battery now to see it it can recover it, although I doubt it.
Ride Report tomorrow then?
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Your Day Today!
in GENERAL CHAT
Posted
9 votes to stay.....and zero to leave at the moment!
The will of the people and all that!