Craig Sawyers

KEF - Kent Engineering Foundry. Used to make crop sprayers and agricultural machinery. It was bought by Raymond Cook in 1961, ex BBC and Wharfedale, and hence renamed KEF Electronics with a completely different focus - away went the agricultural stuff, and in came the loudspeaker designs. KEF went bust in 1992 and was bought by the Chinese. So it only existed for 31 years as an independent business. Design is done on HK and manufacture in China.

At various points in my life I've been all over that diagram

Could be Lemo's competitor, Fischer. The are tantalizingly close in appearance and incompatible.

Yum yum (not)

Happy birthday!

I was on the Isle of Wight last week. Just off the South coast of England. I took this photo (among others). This was the site of the 1970 rock festival - the largest ever with 700,000 audience. Hendrix headlined, which attracted a who's who of rock legends (Baez, Dylan, Cohen, The Who, Miles Davis, ELP, Free, etc etc) The second photo is what it looked like from the same place in 1970

A massively belated happy birthday! Hope it was great....

Woah - how did I miss this? Very happy and belated birthday Dusty!

And here is Dusty talking about Dr Who. That, lkong, looks like a time vortex disrupter to me...

And Indian restaurants. You are never more than a few miles from one. Now classes as standard British cuisine - there are 17,000 in the UK. If they were uniformly distributed over the entire land area of the UK they would be spaced by less than 2.5 miles. But since they are in cities and towns it is not a case of "do you fancy an Indian meal tonight?" it is "Which Indian restaurant to you fancy tonight?". Our little town of Abingdon (pop 30k) has at least seven. A big city like Birmingham has hundreds.

First cut the blue wire....

I had no idea she had got so old. You lose track when you listen to her old, but perfect recordings in her heyday that it was many decades ago. RIP Montserrat, a great vocal artist.

A truly great man. I didn't realise that he had coined the term "God Particle" for the Higgs Boson. Also proved the existence of two types of neutrino (there is now known to be three) way back, and confirmed that the weak nuclear force was parity-breaking back in '57. Not mentioned is that Richard Feynman was also in the speculation loop about parity breaking. When the news came out that experimental results showed that was the case, he was at CERN, and apparently jumped on the desk and did a dance of joy. IOW typical Feynman. RIP Leon. Not many of the original godfathers of particle physics left now.

Stone countertops - that sounds like the baker in you writing the specs. Puff pastry, tempered chocolate - all need those cold stone counters

I smell baking bread! Hey - I really needed that video Knucks

Thanks everyone. At times like this the support of the group means so much - you really are a great bunch. Carole's on her way to Copenhagen right now, to support Steve for the next couple of days. I'd be there too, but I've got contractors crawling all over installing a new en-suite bathroom, so I'm kind of stuck here. Damn. Sue was at home with Steve until Sunday, when a bleed (from the lung cancer secondaries) meant she was readmitted. And then it was just a matter of keeping her comfortable and sedated. She has known it was terminal for about four months when they found the extent of the secondaries (lung, bowel and adrenal), and was living with a breathing tube as a result of the tracheotomy and a feeding tube too. But she was a tough cookie, just didn't just give up, and kept her pithy sense of humour right to the last. And yes - as so many here have said - rest in peace Sue. I'll miss you, girl.

I mentioned most of this in Random Shit, but it is more appropriate here. RIP my sister in law Sue, my wife Carole's sister. After a long battle over the last year, first with cirrhosis and partial kidney failure, and then with rapidly developing cancer. She died peacefully under sedation in Denmark holding hands with her husband Steve two hours ago. I've known Sue since she was 16, and she made age 60. Carole is flying out to Denmark early tomorrow to support Steve, who is in pieces.

I used to have this thing for going for a run when there was a thunderstorm - I liked the drenching downpour (yeah OK - weird). I stopped then there was a simultaneous blinding flash and a BANG, and a smell of ozone. It must have struck very very close to me. I got home in a hurry. That was the end of my going running in thunder storms ⚡ ? ?

That really is a thing of beauty, Justin!

Happy belated too! Hope that was a great ribeye.

Happy birthday!!

Happy birthday! Have a great one!!

Jeeze - really? Ready made scrambled eggs? What is next - mircowave ready made toast? Pre-packed water? Hey hold on that one already exists

Yes you are right. But working men in the North East of England at that time did exactly that - work their socks off. So the idea of becoming a professional bike rider would have been laughable. Stan was a painter and decorator. A contemporary of Stan's in North Yorkshire, Brian Trippett said in an interview "I didn’t race in the Tour de France for the same reason. I was asked to twice, in 1959 and 1960. But it would have meant using up all my annual holiday." You get the drift. But now the world is different, and many of the excellent British riders who rode superbly back in the day would have a host of different opportunities now, particularly with the dominance of British riders in track cycling and grand tours. Opportunities have dropped temporarily since the UCI reduced the team size from 9 to 8 in an attempt to reduce the number of crashes. It has actually had no effect in that regard, so lets hope they increase the team size back to 9 and get more pro riders on the grand tours.

Just seen Carole's uncle Stan on the BBC 10pm main news. He's now 87 and is being treated for wet macular degeneration - which is what the news segment was about, and different drug treatments. But back in the day he used to cycle for England, 60-odd years ago. A fiendish climber, he is the typical light weight small built bloke. This was well before professional cycling, but he would have been a dead cert had he been in his early 20's now. He used to do 24 hour endurance races at a weekend while working. When he had kids and got to a normal work life, he didn't cycle again until he retired at just over 60, having not been on a bike for nearly 35 years. Then he got back to 300 miles a week, and in his mid 60's got his hour distance back to greater than 25 miles. His miles have dropped off a lot because of age, and eyesight - but he still gets on his competition bike most days.