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Skye toll abolished
The Skye Bridge toll was abolished today. An excited Jack McConnell, First Minister for Scotland, explained on Today how it would provide new opportunities for commuting to and fro. Good idea. There's all that empty space on the roads up there just crying out for Ford Mondeos.
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give Branson a go
At the National Rail Museum at York, you can read about how a successful if underfunded railway network was broken up and sold off to profiteers in the 80s. You can't help feeling bitter surrounded by some of the greatest trains ever built. So we welcome without reservation Branson's bid to operate the East Coast mainline (which presumably means we won't get a seat). It would mean Virgin pretty much re-creating the old InterCity network, and we believe him when he says there's no money to be made: he'd be doing it as a public service. Perhaps he even plans to cross-subsidise with the space tourism project.
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to MaccyD's for breakfast

Free bagel, porridge and Latte vouchers in the Metro so that's what we had.

There've been some subtle changes at Maccy Ds. Among the surprises on the backlit menus, which could be ingeniously twirled round by the manager, were Quorn fillets and hash browns. A cheeseburger cost 79p: same as 10 years ago? The Independent and Mail were available. For a pound we could use the computers set into the side tables for 30 minutes. Once past their portal, the combination of grease smeared touch screen and metal keys flush with the table worked surprisingly well, the keys having a firm click action which belied the reconstituted potato that must get forced into the cracks...
louis on 15.12.04 @ 10:20 AM CST [more..]

Cary R Bagg
The new self-checkout system at Snaisburys requires you to put your items into a carrier bag as you check them through. We think there's a weight sensitive panel under the bag which senses you've put an item in the bag, readying the scanner for the next item. The deviant who brings his own bag thus has to reload at the end. Nothing less than you deserve for subsidising everybody else.
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nothing happened on November 9
Can everyone please stop talking about 9/11? It's not how the British do dates and it's a logically inferior way to do dates. It's just another indication of how far the US cultural dominance has gone.
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"For all those who care about our environment there is an over-riding obligation to review our travel requirements"
...the words, remarkably, of Noel Edmonds on the Transport 2000 website. At the time, we were all for the Radio 1 revolution. The Zeitgeist dictated that Simon Bates and Mayo had to go. However, what replaced them is mostly worse, with morally reprehensible morons talking about "Bigging it up". Perhaps we were too hasty. Revisionists may well look back on the Golden Hour as just that.
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