Rob

It would still be better to let her get her own policy. I hear of so many women, my wife included, who live their lives as named drivers on Dad's policy, boyfriends policy, husbands policy and never get their own NCD. Tell her its 2011 and Emmaline Pantry didn't set fire to the King's horse's bra for nothing.

Do you know of any other buildings made with explosives in, to blow up on demand? Given that airbags in cars have a 12 year lifespan before they cannot be relied upon to detonate anymore, what is the lifespan of steelcutting explosives? Does it seem even remotely like a good idea to have a building that can instantly detonate if needed, given the way systems go wrong, short out, malfunction or people making ? Maybe, just maybe, in the depths of an Air Force base where its safe from the public, doing top secret weapons development that could be used against the US if it fell into enemy hands with employees who have signed up to this concept and know the risks, but some secret files in downtown Manhattan, in a building with other tenants in it? Sorry, nice idea for a film but really just fantasy.

That's just reminded me of the bit in Fast Five where Mia jumps down about 3 storeys through a tin roof, then tells Brian and Dom she's pregnant. Don't think you will be anymore after that, love.

I think you are too far north to have felt that very minor shake we had in England a few years back. Obviouly it was tiny compared to proper earthquakes, but for me, in my house, when things start moving that have never moved before, its really, really unnerving. I mean, one's house simply doesn't start shaking. It was very scary and it only lasted about 10 seconds, if that. That pedestrian in the video was clearly experienced however, the way he hunched low for stability on his feet was impressive.

Er, yes. paypal me the £50 and I'll email the telly over to you.

I feel it necessary to state, at this point, that when I did that awful joke about the plasma telly with the broken volume button "at this price you can't turn it down," two members did actually pm me to buy it.

He frightens me, I often imagine he has been carved from mahogany and has come to life under an evil curse. Like Joan Collins did, in that film.

I'm unemployed. Its that or watch Homes Under the Hammer.

Tch, my wife was brushing her hair vigourously and the build up of static electricty caused our Wide Area Network router to momentarily hiccup. (Presumably. I know nothing about IT networking, so this may fall on its ass)

There are several ideas floating about, but most are so tortuous and contrived they no longer seem funny.

Really hacked off this morning, vandals have thrown a CD copy of the excellant album by INXS and its lodged in the wooden panel of the back door at my mum's house.

Really hacked off this morning, I opened the van to find several comorant sized sea birds, all eating bits of rough shredded tobacco while performing a 50's style US beach dance routine. Gutted!

Well maybe, the footage of the second plane hitting the WTC shows it just disappearing into the building. But suffice to say, there are pictures of the area strewn with airplane-identifiable wreckage.

I'm not sure my description of the pentagon damage in my post above is accurate at all. I might be referring to footage post-collapse. Its difficult to find info on the web that isn't biased towards a conspiracy theory. I do not know enough about the Pentagon or its structure to comment, to be honest.

ITV player is down at the moment, as I was going to link to the TV prog "9/11, the day that changed the world" aired last week. There was clear footage of the massive void caused by the jet hitting, billowing smoke, and then later the roof collapses in. The hole goes all the way through the outer "ring" into the first inner courtyard. And by "huge" I mean the whole wall full height and more than that distance wide.

Probably the most guarded building on the planet: FACT Well, maybe, but lots of sentries can't stop a plane flying in, and we've already seen plenty of testimony as to why it was so difficult to get fighters airborne and directed to identified targets. No CCTV footage of the plane apparently exists :FACT - Show me some if Im wrong I don't doubt lots of CCTV exists, but the FBI have chosen not to reveal it. Maybe thats because its a plane hitting a top secret building. The one bit that is released is only two frames and shows nothing of value, but there is plenty of testimony from witnesses on the ground and in the air who saw the plane hit. Airline and Military pilots have stated the manouvure was impossible: FACT Fact that its impossible or that some pilots say its impossible. There are lots of people pn the ground who say they saw the plane, policemen and there is the C130 pilot who described in detail the manouvere he witnessed dead ahead of his cockpit. No scarring on the lawn upto the hit zone : FACT Not a fact at all. I've seen lots of film and photos of the damage caused on the run-in. The Building was complete until it collasped some time after the impact of the "object" :FACT As above, nonsense. There was a huge gaping hole in the front facade, littered with debris from the building and the plane.

Yes. I presented a reasonable description of why the main towers fell, and also refuted your assumption that the structural engineer guy who claimed WTC7 was a controlled demolition was assasinated. So far, no one has countered those but isntead changed subjects to the Pentagon and the actual collapse of WTC7. That's a classic technique of conspiracists ( i just made that word up, I think) to avoid having to face facts.

Would you like to respond to my previous points, first?

Not really, there was a dirty great hole in the front of it, removing vital structure. See the tl;dr above.

You're not dead. The Loose Change guy is not dead. That shock jock guy is not dead, the lead architect of the Architects and Engineers for Truth, or whatever they're called, he's not dead. This poor chap was a one car accident, so how could it be an arranged hit....unless...unless...no! Not Princess Diana too? Was she murdered? There's a few one car accidents on here over the last 10 years. Maybe they are suspicious too if lone accidents are so unusual.

Ok, I give this one more go, as I wanted to stay away from wasting time on conspiracy theories but you are asking genuine questions about structure. First thing is, forget about foundations, the foundations are underground and they transfer the entire mass of the building onto the Manhatten granite bedrock. The planes hit high up on the building, having no effect on the foundations. For all I know, they may still be there and the new freedom tower might be built off them. Now, the plane goes in and explodes, hugely, as we all saw on the telly. This causes significant damage to the steel structure as is described in the video above. Fires burn at high heat and start to soften the steel in the area of the crash and a few floors around it. What you have to understand about buildings is that most (not all) the steel frame is fire protected. this can be done in various methods, you can totally encase the steel in concrete, but that is too expensive and heavy on a high rise, you can clad in various types of board or you can spray on a sort of lightweight cementitious glob. All of those methods are too protect the steel for enough time to evacuate the building of humans. You do not fire proof to save the building from collapsing, merely to give you time to get the hell out. Modern fire regs demand that the frame be allowed to progressively collapse, to protect firefighters and surrounding properties. Fires in buildings start because people are careless, or wiring is faulty, or maybe even an employee goes mental, so they burn up from a small ignition point. Again one does not design to prevent a fully fueled plane hitting at 500mph, because you cannot build against that threat, economically. (maybe a nuclear reactor, or a military bunker, but not a lettable office space) When the planes hit and exploded, that explosion blew away all the fire protection, so all the frame was now vulnerable. The hour or 2 hours protection was gone in an instant. So the floors heat up and they start to droop. You do not need much temperature to do this, so ignore all the bumpf about temp of jet fuel and melting point of steel. The floor beams start to drop out, one by one as the drooping effect makes them too short to span between the columns. Eventually a void starts to open up in the building. Now, the thing you need to know about any structure is that its not as simple as beam carries load horizontally and column carries load vertically. In a complex structure they do both, they support each other. Take the floor and ceiling out of your house and you have a ver y unstable brick wall shell, a good wind will crumble it in on itself. The floors of a multi story building brace the columns so that they can carry more load than they could carry on their own. Imagine glueing 6 bits of spaghetti to the side and corners of a sheet of lasagne, then glue another piece of lasagne on the top. It won't carry barely its own weight before the spaghetti bends and snaps. But glue in more sheets, all the way up every inch. Now it can carry a substantial mass, but its still only 6 bits of spaghetti. So back to WTC, when the floors started to drop out, the load bearing columns in the area of that void, the crash site are structurally compromised, they are being asked to hold up the huge mass of the floors above. Now they could do that for the last 30 years fine, but now the floors are going, one by one, the structural bracing is falling out, until it can't take it anymore. It all folds in and the massive amount of building above, starts to fall, more or less in a straight line, but its just a big collapsing mass, going right down and no structure below it can stop it moving. Its wnough to destroy the entire structure below. If you look at the footage of both collapses, you can see they don't fall cleanly vertical, they start to twist and roll. In the immediate aftermath, there are still bits of the core structure standing up 40/50 storeys high, that eventually crumble. There have been no other collapses like those, because all the other building to have subsequently caught fire have not done so through a plane hitting at high level. The Madrid hotel ends up a twisted mass of steel, without collapsing, because the whoel thing went up in flames.

Oh its David Shayler. Entirely trustworthy then. Apparently Morgan Freeman really likes penguins too.

I think I have a pair. I'll check on Saturday and let you know.

Like marriage?