Youâre meant to be studying for 3 days, not 3 minutes. Your missus had barely left for Limerick and there you were rounding up a gang to go drinking with.
Iâm a firm believer in lots of rest periods when studying-the mind can only concentrate for so long, bro. Although Iâm finding it hard to get into it today.
And fuck herâŚthe bitch.
The obituary of the man who inspired The Great Escape
[SIZE=4]William Ash[/SIZE]
[SIZE=6]William Ash, a Spitfire pilot, POW and later Communist, died on April 26th, aged 96
[/SIZE]
ESCAPE from a German prisoner-of-war camp was not just a bid for freedom. It was a way of humiliating the Nazis, and distracting them from the war effort. But for William Ash it was more than all that: it was an addiction. He made nearly a dozen escape attempts, ranging from the elaborate (tunnelling out from latrines) to the simple but audacious (bolting when a guardâs back was turned).
Most ended in the âcoolerâ, the punishment cells. He did not mind the isolation: his mind was free even if his body was not. He recalled swathes of poetry from his school days in Texas, and wrote a novel (torn to shreds by a vengeful guard). Mostly he let his thoughts roam over fanciful escape plans. âI catapulted myself over the wire on a giant rubber band, I burrowed out through the walls like one of the mites in the German cheese, I soared on home-made glider wings,â he recalled.
It was during one such spell, in the infamous Stalag Luft III, that he heard the sirens blare, marking the discovery of the ill-fated mass breakout known as the âGreat Escapeâ . But he decried suggestions that he was the model for Virgil Hilts, the American pilot played by Steve McQueen in the Hollywood film of the exploit; he was no good at riding a motorbike, he said.
He did not condemn those who cracked under the strain of camp life. But he disliked grumblers at its rigours. Though camp food was indubitably poor, the prices were more than reasonable, he said reprovingly. And laughter and shouting were the best answers to the vagaries of the universe. His posh counterparts thought their years at Britainâs best boarding schools were good preparation in evading authority amid privation. But his own resilience, and skills in finding blind spots and ruses, came from life as a hobo, riding freight trains during the great depression, dodging the âbullsâ (railroad police) and scrounging food. Fastidious inmates shunned the gritty âKlippfischâ (dried cod); he gobbled it. Heâd known real hunger.
He was achingly close to success when, having found a boat on the Lithuanian coast, he was too weak to haul it into the water. He chanced his luck with some nearby farm workers. They looked at him with sympathy, but then one replied dryly: âWe would love to help you but we are soldiers of the German army and you are standing on our cabbages.â
Only his last bid, in 1945, was successful: half-starved, trembling from jaundice, after weeks of marching hither and thither in the ruins of the Reich, he fled the filthy camp hospital where some diehard Germans were making a last stand, and staggered into the arms of the advancing allies. Hearing a cry, âDonât shootâheâs British,â he replied, âActually Iâm American, and Canadian, and Britishâitâs a long story.â
It was. Young Bill enjoyed running away, concocting an excuse to get a lift from sympathetic strangers, spending a day sightseeing in a strange town, and then asking the police to bring him home. He showed entrepreneurial zeal, publishing a vanity high-school âWhoâs Whoâ (sole criterion for entry: a $5 fee) to support his hard-up (frayed-collar, not white-collar, he recalled) family. But he detested spivs, after a bum tip cost him his savings in the crash of 1929. Bullies always aroused blind fury, whether it was schoolyard toughs who made smaller boys fight, and bet on the outcome, or the Nazis he once glimpsed through his cell window, frogmarching unknown women to an unknown fate.
He came early to the war. In 1940, while the United States was still neutral, he borrowed $20 and ate solidly for two weeks to overcome a Canadian recruiting sergeantâs scepticism that he was too scrawny to fight. Taking the kingâs shilling instantly cost him his American citizenship, but it was a good bargain: he proved to be a natural pilot. âFlying was a form of music and the song was one I had been born to sing,â he wrote later. He adored his Spitfire: the Platonic ideal of a perfect aircraft, he reckoned, smelling of metal and leather, of raw horsepower and excitement. Never mind that you had a mere 15 seconds-worth of ammunition once the fighting started.
When he was first captured, after being shot down over France in 1942, he refused to betray those who had sheltered him. Pressed under torture to give âjust one nameâ of a French helper, he mockingly provided the name of his French schoolteacher in Austin, Texas.
Blind spot
After the war he went to Oxford, and rose up the BBC, becoming its man in India. When his increasingly left-wing politics (including brawls with the fascists in Londonâs East End) ended that career, he became a notable expert on radio drama and a mentor for young writers.
Unable to join the mainstream Communist Party because of his idiosyncratic views, he ended up in the Pythonesque world of British far-left politics, as a founder of the tiny Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). As well as novels and a bestselling memoir, he wrote books on Marxism, and, in 1974, âPickaxe and Rifleâ, in praise of Enver Hoxhaâs benighted and isolated Albania. The regime there was so hardline that it termed Soviet Communism a revisionist fraud. Strangely, he seemed not to see that the workersâ paradise he lauded so quixotically was another prison camp run by bullies.
How the tournament would play out if 32 countries were competing in things other than soccer.
http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/WORLDCUPTOEE/#/?lang=en&metrics=Population
[QUOTE=âchewy louie, post: 960018, member: 1137â]How the tournament would play out if 32 countries were competing in things other than soccer.
http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/WORLDCUPTOEE/#/?lang=en&metrics=Population[/QUOTE]
Ghana 
- Dirty Orange bastardsâŚ
Fella flies a drone into one of the Poolbeg chimney stacks.
Map of all the devices in the World connected to the interweb.
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No Clare FM?
This is a fantastic find.
delitradio.it is playing great tunes tonight.
A similar, brilliant idea.
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That sounds like the most elaborate practical joke in the history of the World 
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Reading the Gaelic Football thread on here has the opposite effect.
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