Bibliogryphon

Of course he is. Both he and Joanna Lumley are beings from another dimension.

Well at least you didn't say it was iminent.

I will just bring a little analysis of the 2012 list to the discussion Women made up 16% of the list and 9% of the deaths to date. British People made up 30% of the list and 27% of the deaths to date People aged 90 or above (at the start of the year) made up 52% of the list but only 45% of the deaths to date. But as with all statistices you could draw what conclusions you want from them.

An interesting potential pick. Unless anyone has some more up to date information, he was still touring a couple of years ago. Like Ken Dodd.

She has never had a good shagging of course she isn't the full shilling . In fact she hasn't even has a bad shagging . ? Are you sure ? Going by her latest twitter hashtag she seems a bit of a goer #susanalbumparty http://www.thesun.co...-bum-party.html Would you accept the invitation?

Five women who are not currently on the list Barbara Bush Doris Lessing Dinah Sheridan Judith Kerr Maureen O' Hara

There are so many things to love in this image but I think my favorite is FA Fine £24 - that's going to hurt!!!

I guess I can find it on Wikipedia, if I could be arsed, but I may just as well ask here: do the UK constitutional arrangements provide for early general elections after a government resigns? I ask, because Article 64 of the Dutch Constitution gives the government the right to dissolve the States-General, after which general elections must be called within three months. regards, Hein Until the coalition took power the exact timing of the General Election was up to the Government of the day to decide which is why when things were going swimmingly (under Tony Blair) they were held at 4 year intervals. The coalition set the date of the next election as May 2015 barring a vote of no confidence which they also made it more difficult to get. If David Cameron were to lose a vote of no confidence he would visit the Queen and ask her to dissolve parliament triggering a General Election. If the Lib Dems walked away from the coalition this is still a possibility but are unlikely to do so unless their polling status improved as they would probably be wiped out.

Great closing line of the Infinite monkey cage last night delivered by Brian Cox speaking about missions to the moon. "In the interst of balance we do feel the need to point out that despite there being significant empirical evidence for man landing on the moon, many of our listners hold deep held beliefs that are......... wrong"

Nadine Gordimer is 89 today. Happy Birthday.

I did and for some reason I have a postal vote even though I never requested one . I voted for ukip and a independent . I like ukip because they are offering something new . I believe the three main parties are very much part of the same tree. Before ukip There no party out there for a libertarian to vote for or someone who didn't want to be in Europe. They need to get rid of that awful pound sign logo though. the lib dems are the biggest joke of all really. I don't know who voted for them to have over 50 seats in parliament .Then Sold out all their voters as soon as they got a chance to be apart of the government . Nick Clegg did what he said he would do during the election campaign. He worked with the party that had the biggest mandate from the electorate. His mistake was that he probably credited the Conservatives with too much integrity and has been surprised by how much they have dumped on him and how little control DC has over the rest of the party. The Liberal Democrats are being unfairly pilloried for the actions of the Government as a whole. Nick clegg will stand down before the next election , if he is leader the lib dems will be wiped out at the next election . Seeing him during PMQ's laughing and sN-wording along with the tories is not short of a kick in the teeth to all the people he claimed to have stood up for . Doesn't matter really anyway , lib dems ,conservative and labour all puppets and political parties who certainly don't answer to the British people. When was the last time we had a referendum on anything important ? We have a referendum every five years it is a General Election. What is the point in electing leaders, when we want to micromanage every decision according to what the papers tell us is our opinion. The politicians should grasp the mandate, govern as they see fit and then present themselves to the country again five years later saying "Do you want more of the same?" I think you are right Nick Clegg will not lead the Lib Dems into the 2015 election but the Tories will try to portray any failures of the parliament as being because they did not have enough freedom to implement their agenda. The appropriate time to use referendums is for major constitutional changes such as the proposed switch to AV, Scottish independence or the abolition of the monarchy.

When Parsons does finally pass on, do you reckon he'll have instructed his eulogy to be delivered for exactly one minute without repetition, deviation, or hesitation? His funeral will be broadcast "Live from Norwich"

Leicester City 6 Ipswich Town 0 :) :)

Ummm no. Texas would not be able to sustain itself. There isn't as much oil wealth as there used to be. Most of the wealth in Texas is now from banking and industry, and all the companies that are headquartered in Texas would probably leave. People want to live and work here and companies want to be headquartered here because of the lack of an income tax for their employees and a favorable corporate tax rate. This would quickly change if Texas were to secede. It's very different to be a populist state in a larger country and a country unto oneself. Many of Texas' industries are buoyed by federal money. Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth would lose federal contracts. Sikorsky Helicopters has a large presence in Corpus Christi. There is also the annoying little issue of Fort Hood. The largest US Army base in the world is in Texas. Over 50,000 US Army soldiers smack in the middle of the state. Add to that six Air Force bases, three other Army bases, a joint reserve base and you can put a soldier on every street corner. There is still oil here, but it no longer leads the economy, and a lot of what does drive the Texas economy is multinational corporations. A separate Texas wouldn't be nearly as attractive to them as a state of Texas is. In 1869, Texas v White determined that the union "was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States." Secession talk is stupid. It's the last bastion of the idiot. There isn't a single state in the US that could support itself as a country, and it would take all of a day for the Army to move in and take over. A very comprehensive reply Surely a better Republican strategy would be to focus on 2016 and find somebody that people would want to vote for. Easier than erasing 200 years of history?

The Ticket Machine in my local Odeon. I had booked tickets for The Hobbit online and then my daughter asked me to book tickets for her and her friends to see Madagascar 3. I went along to the cinema on a busy Saturday afternoon and went to the automatic ticket dispenser and put my card in. The machine then decided to spew out all my tickets all over the floor without asking me which one I wanted to collect. I now have to keep The Hobbit tickets safe for a whole month and not forget where I put them.

This might offer a clue as to why... Seems that McAlpine and Patten have been feuding for some 40 years. Might explain why the BBC chairman turned a blind eye to these allegations being made. I hope the Daily Telegraph fully researched this before making claims like this: Lord McAlpine worked as Conservative Party treasurer when he first came across a 31-year-old Patten, who had worked his way up through Conservative Central Office to become director of the research department.

Jack Vance author of The Dragon Masters and Lyonesse was born in 1916.

Kenny Morgans - Munich air crash survivor has died

There was a fantastic link on Saturday at one o'clock which went something like this: "There will be more comedy over on Radio 4 extra at 2 o'clock when Nicolas Parsons introduced another round of Just a Minute with guests Kenneth Williams, Derek Nimmo, Clement Freud and Peter Jones." If the Grim Reaper were listening to this (and Radio 4 is his favorite station) do you think it would remind him he needs to pay Mr Parsons a visit to complete the set.

Holly Willoughby is the one on the right! And I am reliably informed that the one on the left is Lord MacAlpine.

I did and for some reason I have a postal vote even though I never requested one . I voted for ukip and a independent . I like ukip because they are offering something new . I believe the three main parties are very much part of the same tree. Before ukip There no party out there for a libertarian to vote for or someone who didn't want to be in Europe. They need to get rid of that awful pound sign logo though. the lib dems are the biggest joke of all really. I don't know who voted for them to have over 50 seats in parliament .Then Sold out all their voters as soon as they got a chance to be apart of the government . Nick Clegg did what he said he would do during the election campaign. He worked with the party that had the biggest mandate from the electorate. His mistake was that he probably credited the Conservatives with too much integrity and has been surprised by how much they have dumped on him and how little control DC has over the rest of the party. The Liberal Democrats are being unfairly pilloried for the actions of the Government as a whole.

Now that's a topic I'm more familiar with. I don't see Belgium falling apart anytime soon, for reasons I'll explain later, but I think it'll happen eventually. I speak with Flemmings regularly and this is a subject that comes up sooner or later. It's interesting to see that in the last few decades Flemish separatist sentiments have spread considerably through the political spectrum. Until the 1990s separatism was pretty much confined to very right-wing circles. As Flemish nationalism was strongly associated with Nazi collaboration during WWII, any party or ideology that kept their distance from the Nazis wouldn't touch separatism with a 10' pole. Vlaams Blok, itself quite right-wing, managed to change that. The moves toward stronger federalism that've been running through Belgian politics since the 1970s are a reflection of that. The reasons the strings aren't cut yet are, as I see it, the following: Wallonia needs Flanders in Belgium for financial reasons. Mining and manufacture, once the engines of Belgian economy, were mostly located in Wallonia, but have largely collapsed since the 1970s. Today Flanders is the rich part. Consequently, the Walloon part of the electorate will resist separation to the end. Flemish separatism is still much a right-wing thing. Socialists and, to a lesser extent, liberals aren't very keen on the thing. Even if splitting Belgium in two could be negotiated, there's the problem that both sides want Brussels. No political settlement is possible in which either Wallonia or Flanders get Brussels. What's the perspective for the resulting parts after a split? Separate states? An independent Flanders I can just imagine, but nothing like it for Wallonia or Brussels. I ignore the German speaking minority in this discussion. I don't think Wallonia is keen on joining France and integration of Flanders in the Netherlands is something neither the Flemish nor the Dutch fancy much. The Flemish haven't forgotten 1830 and will not become subjects of an Orange. That said: Belgium doesn't work very well and the Belgians know that. The fact that it took a year and a half to form a new federal govenment after the 2010 general elections is revealing evidence for that. I think it's inevitable that somewhere in the next twenty years the knot will be cut, possibly along the lines of: Wallonia in some way connecting to France, Flanders as an independent state and Brussels as a European Capital Territory. I can be wrong. regards, Hein What would become of the King of the Begians?

I am still promoting Rodney Bewes since the last time I saw him on telly he looked like someone had just dug him up.

I agree that the people on the list should be sufficiently famous that most people would know who they are but I disagree that Herbert Lom and Tony Martin do not meet that criteria. A lot of the "fun" in the Deathlist is rembering those who have faded from public life but have left a body of work.

Probably! Thanks Syd. My last comment on the matter is that some Aussie States have considered seceding from time to time. Western Australia sometimes becomes bitchy towards the eastern part of the country and wants out but their moves have never gone too far. Tasmania is also an interesting case: it is one of the poorest parts of the nation with all kinds of economic problems and lack of infrastructure. Some mainlanders compare it to the southern USA but this is really unfair. Nevertheless it does have a lot of problems. However, in the 19th century, before Federation turned all of the independent British colonies into a single nation, it was extremely prosperous. Back in the 1990s, some economists were asked to produce a hypothetical model of how Tasmania's economy would perform if it became an independent nation. According to their models, it would thrive. I wonder if anyone has done similar modeling for Texas and Louisiana. Maybe if they had to fend for themselves, their economies would kick-start and the outcomes would indeed be better. I am sure, over time, if they were independent their grudge towards "the north" would lessen and their Bible belt fundamentalism would become much more moderate. Of course, there is no way Washington will let their oil producing states go, and as Angry notes, there is hardly a groundswell of support for this movement but it is interesting to speculate about while we wait for Oscar Niemeyer to kick the bucket. Can I at this point say SCOTLAND? I think you can, but what point you are trying to make is unclear to me. It is undoubted that much of the Scottish population is concentrated in the central industrialised belt, as such it bears little resemblance to either Tasmania or the southern states of the US. There are many dispersed communities in Scotland but they are not the norm as in the southern US, further the UK as a whole has fare more uniform standards of living and welfare support than the Southern US. While being part of the UK enables it to enjoy many services that would be denied it if it had to pay for them on a per capita basis. It finds itself in the position of contributing income from its resources to the United kingdom economy however the development of those resources came about at relatively favourable terms as a result of the union (just ask Nigeria what happens if you invite BP in and don't have a big stick to threaten them with!) and many services are available to Scotland at a much reduced cost compared to similar sized populations in Europe (like TV services). Over all I think comparing the southern US or Tasmania with Scotland is like comparing chalk and a medium sized halibut but maybe you can bring clarity to the situation. Best regards Syd I was not trying to draw a direct parallel between the exact situations. However, there is talk of how these states would fare outside of their current national framework which is entirely theorectical but in Scotland there is a very real process, where these types of argument are going to be discussed at length over the next two years and the population of Scotland will have to make a choice. Each side will make the choice seem as black and white as possible but in reality they will be weighing up what is most important. Alternatively I could responde in Monty Python fashion - "BURMA" "What did you say Burma for?" "I panicked"