On Thu, 8 May 2008, Paul Corfield wrote:

On Thu, 8 May 2008 18:11:48 +0100, Tom Anderson
wrote:

On Thu, 8 May 2008, Paul Corfield wrote:

On Thu, 8 May 2008 16:52:43 +0100, Ian Jelf
wrote:

Further to recent discussions about people taking an interest in buses,
trains, etc. getting "hassle" from the authorities, yesterday evening I
had an interesting, non-transport-related variant which I hope will
nonetheless be of interest to people on utl and ur.

Alternatively next time this happens - as it surely will - you can pull
the cap off the brolley and fatally stab them with the poison tip and
then make good your escape ;-)

Paul, it's absurd, insulting, and unhelpful to suggest that Ian has a
poison-tipped or otherwise lethal umbrella.

We all know it's an exploding blue badge he's got.

I do apologise for making such a fundamental error. Despite meeting him
twice I have yet to see the exploding blue badge - perhaps I am blessed?

You evidently haven't annoyed him.

Yet.

tom

--
For the first few years I ate lunch with he mathematicians. I soon found
that they were more interested in fun and games than in serious work,
so I shifted to eating with the physics table. There I stayed for a
number of years until the Nobel Prize, promotions, and offers from
other companies, removed most of the interesting people. So I shifted
to the corresponding chemistry table where I had a friend. At first I
asked what were the important problems in chemistry, then what important
problems they were working on, or problems that might lead to important
results. One day I asked, "if what they were working on was not important,
and was not likely to lead to important things, they why were they working
on them?" After that I had to eat with the engineers! -- R. W. Hamming