MikeJD

Tragic end to what should have been a wonderful experience. Ballooning seems to be one of those activities where it's generally extremely safe but obviously you're terribly vulnerable in the event of a crash. This one looks like a collision with power lines, which seems the typical cause of fatal incidents. I've taken a fair few hot air balloon rides, but never without a parachute rig, and I've never landed in one. I'm not sure how safe I'd feel in that gondola without a rig on.

Another vote here for Peterlee, although I only jumped there once and it was a long time ago. We turned up as visitors on a bad weather day, hung around for a while and chatted to the very friendly and informal staff before giving up and going back to the place where we were staying. A few hours later they phoned us to say that if we fancied coming back, the wind was dropping and they were planning to put a load up. I can't imagine many DZs doing that. I've jumped at many UK DZs, and the best ones are a lot more progressive than the badmouthing here would suggest but it's certainly a mixed bag. Of course the weather is always a factor in this country, but if you go to the right dropzone and they can put you up, then they will.

What about the time you had to leave one of your prosthetic legs behind in order to bail out of that crippled Spitfire?

Also the home of one of the bit-part characters in the movie 'No Country For Old Men'. He stops to help psychopathic hitman Anton Chigurh with his 'broken down' car, and presumably gets murdered for his trouble (although it's one of the few acts of extreme violence that mercifully happens off-screen!) I only mention this because I happened to re-watch the film last night. I'd never heard of Alpine before, and then it comes up twice in the space of 24 hours. Funny how that happens. :)

I guess coffee can help me out at the start of the workday, but if I'm busy enough then I just forget to drink it anyway and I can't say I really miss it. I very rarely drink more than one cup a day in any case. I'd have a much harder time giving up tea. I do love tea.

I can read it - but I don't like it. It looks ugly, and it definitely makes your eyes/ brain work harder. Ironically, your paragraph might have looked better typewritten, since without kerning the full stop/ period would have had more space either side of it. With a modern font, having such a small character wedged between two sentences means that character just gets lost. I did vaguely recall from my youth that two spaces are supposed to follow a full stop, but I don't think anyone ever taught me that formally. Mind you, when I was learning to write we used pens.

He certainly must be in a bad way after that crash. I gather he's in an a medically-induced coma at the moment, and if he does wake up it will be to the knowledge that he's killed at least 11 people. That's pretty grim. I see they've banned Hawker Hunter flights for the time being - that seems an odd thing to do considering it's a 60-year old design and this one crashed during an aerobatic manoeuvre, but I guess it's standard procedure.

Me too. I burst out laughing at that point - couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke. It's the forward roll that really makes it. The name of the road is visible in the video - Zinzan Street, in Reading. Google that and you get 'Zinzan Street Brothels', a BBC article about Britain's grimiest areas, and 'Zinzan Street fight leaves man with fractured skull'. Sounds delightful.

Condolences to Ian's family and friends. I'm always surprised by the hostility in the comments section of news articles like this. It seems a popular view that people get what they deserve for jumping off things. I don't expect non-jumpers to 'get' it - that's fair enough - but at the same time there's no need to pour scorn on those who enjoy something that you consider would be unacceptably dangerous to you. Why would you take it personally? I think a certain amount of it is jealousy, and obviously there's no concept of the preparation that goes in to this sort of thing - but a lot of it comes down to the assumption that BASE jumpers are showing off, instead of just doing their thing. That's not helped by the way the articles are written. These comments also remind us that people have very little understanding of risk - how "extreme sports" participants manage it, and how it applies to themselves when they're texting and driving, or living on junk food. People seem to want to assume that they'll be just fine so long as they don't do anything stupid - but to paraphrase a popular saying in these parts: "You can do everything right in this life and still die." 100% fatality rate so far.

After looking at the illustrations, I'd say the first step should be to avoid jumping from an aircraft wearing a daysack. Put on some kind of parachute rig, preferably with a chest strap (which you're going to need for your terminal Mr Bill), and actual leg straps (unlike the... I dunno, parathong... shown in the last picture).

Maybe they're adhering to the 45-degree rule. If they ever do collide, I guess we might have to reclassify Pluto again, as an asteroid field. I mean, look what the Death Star did to Alderaan.

I take the skin off chicken.

Return home? What, he couldn't call them on his iPhone? Sheesh. They don't make stuff like they used to.

I think some of that is down to the spinny things on the front. I have work colleagues who sometimes have to fly to small/ remote airports on business, and I overhear them saying how they were nervous they were getting on an aircraft driven by propellers.

Really nice, interesting technology - but I find it a bit dispiriting that people don't seem to be able to experience anything now without the validation of filming it or being filmed doing it. I went to a jazz gig recently where some audience members were watching most of the performance through their phones while recording, and even reviewing the playback and uploading it to Facebook before each number had even finished!

Somewhat off-topic, but it always surprises me that journalists never seem to know how to write 'skydiving'. Aside from the fact that a simple web search would solve the issue for them, more surprising to me is that they almost invariably seem to write it different ways within the same article - 'skydiving', 'sky diving', 'sky-diving' - as though taking comfort in the thought that at least they'll be right some of the time!

I've read a book or two on the subject as well, but didn't pick up any vibe of conflict between the people building the computer and their managers. Was the "Hollywooded" up a bit? I suspect so. The grandchildren of Alastair Denniston, played by Charles Dance, have complained about his portrayal. The film makers subsequently tried to backpedal, calling him one of the great heroes of Bletchley Park, but I think that's disingenuous - they certainly didn't write his character that way for the movie.

You re-heated tea? Bleugh. You re-heated it again? Double bleugh.

If you enjoyed "Lucy" I'm sorry for what I'm about to say, but I thought it was the stupidest science fiction film I'd seen in a very, very long time. When I looked at the trailer and saw who was in it, I thought it had some promise. However, five minutes in it became clear it would be a crap fest. +1. Except the bit about the trailer - to me it looked like a crap fest from the start. I watched it anyway - sometimes crap fests have entertainment value because they are so bad... But no... Lucy was just crap. IMO.Suckin up to Quade are you? I'm not sucking up to anyone, and I thought Lucy was a big disappointment too. From the trailer I'd hoped it might turn out to be a guilty pleasure at worst, but it wasn't even that for me. I did kind of like its ambition, but I think it would need to have been a much smarter movie to live up to it. Scarlett Johansson has been gaining a lot of kudos with some of the parts she's been choosing lately, but I'd say this was a misstep for her - and I wish people would stop hiring Morgan 'Gravitas' Freeman just to try and lend credibility to Hollywood fluff!

Voted too. I've jumped at Tecumseh a couple of times, and I loved it - the place and the people. Really hope you guys get to stay put.

I watched The Imitation Game a couple of weeks ago and was left a bit underwhelmed. Some aspects were good - the performances were fine, and I liked the fact that they made Turing's character so unlikeable - but I thought the script was a real clunker. Some of the dialogue was bad to the point of parody: "Love just lost the Germans the whole bloody war!" Still, it wasn't a bad way to spend a couple of hours and my female companion enjoyed it - although it's hard to say how much of that was down to the Cumberbatch effect.

I'll happily drive with or without music. If it's a long distance and it's late and I need to keep myself awake, I'll probably have talk radio on because that's a stimulus. I don't like having loud music on in the car - I feel uneasy if I can't hear my own engine or any warnings from other motorists - and I don't much like having an incessant chatterbox in the passenger seat because I find that distracting, especially if the driving conditions are bad or it's an unfamiliar journey. I also think that having banging tunes on in the car seems to make some people drive aggressively - or maybe that's a chicken/ egg thing.

Whichever the case, I think we've discovered the new viral internet sensation: are we looking up Nataly's stairs, or down them?

Yeah, what everyone else said. They're trying to sell this as the new 'gold dress' picture, but it's not even close. The stair construction is a dead giveaway.

Ah, but it does according to the laws of Hollywood physics (see also Drop Zone and Cutaway). And I guess it's one of those things that provides more drama and yes, even seems more realistic to non-jumpers. I've accepted now that a filmmaker's job is to entertain the audience and 'sell' a scene, not to provide authenticity. They've no compunction to pander to the fewer than 1% of their audience who actually jump from aeroplanes.