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I'll confess I've never been more than an occasional casual listener of theirs - enjoyed the sound but would never single them out in a "What bands do you like?" conversation - but I got very little from it compared to the older ones. I've skipped a few out since the last one I heard though, so I was wondering if you might think it's a kind of thing you need leading into gradually as their sound changed over the years/albums? Like high BB - go straight from +20 stocks to the +70 HiFi and everyone hates it, but if you nudge it up by 10mm each year, people love it because it wasn't a shock to what they expect Slipknot to sound like. Or do I just not like it?

That "decade" to fakie noz in the flatbank... Also love the weirdness of trials riders consistently preferring to do things the other way. Pretty sure those barspins are what's considered "oppo" in the BMX, and the whips definitely are. I wonder what it is that makes such a trend to gravitate toward spinning/tricks the other way to the usual on a slightly different type of bike.

What tugs have you got currently? If it's the Gussets or something similar then I feel your pain. Been there. They're too big - might be fine for dirt-jumper dropouts but not us. Even the smaller ones like the Trialtechs are too big sometimes. I solved this on previous bikes I've had by doing exactly what you're suggesting, and a couple of times the other way around by making a bodge-fix spacer to go between the back of the dropouts and the tug plate, but I definitely wouldn't recommend that. It works in a pinch but it's insanely frustrating and not exactly what you'd call secure. Another option would be a half-link, but I'd definitely recommend playing around with tug options before resorting to that. They stretch a lot which sucks for continuity, but also often leads to being more snap happy. I've not personally had such issues with them - the stretching was enough to put me off - but I know plenty of people who have. Post a picture of the rear end of your bike so we can see the dropouts and brake mounts in the same shot, and a closeup of the dropout arrangement and we might be able to give better advice on exactly what you might be able to try

Re-bar was just an example. All the tools used to make the stone stuff. To work stone as efficiently as that, they must be stronger than stone. Things like that. And if they have access to materials like that, I find it very difficult to believe they wouldn't use it in their settlements and infrastructure. If they gathered what they could in the face of a cataclysmic event, there would still be some bits left over. Maybe they all got blown out into the ocean How would any life survive that? The advanced race might have gone underground, or left the planet altogether even because otherwise they surely would've come back out after it settled down, but what about the lemurs, and spiders, and hamsters and minnows? They didn't get nuclear bunkers. The dinosaurs died off as part of a mass extinction event, but we find their bones all over the place. There must have been entire families of species that got wiped out in whatever even drove The Civilisation away, so where are all of their bones that suddenly stop appearing around 13k years ago? I stumbled upon this the other day and thought it would float your boat. They present an extremely one-sided discussion, but there's one absolutely concrete, unavoidable issue. These temples were 100% cut from bedrock and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste material had to be removed, but there's no sign of it anywhere in the vicinity. Putting aside all other questions raised about it - what the f**k?! That's either an absolute mindf**k, or they transported many pyramids worth of waste material for many, many miles, just so it wouldn't be near their temples. Quite a lot of videos are popping up about things in India recently. One of particular likely interest to you is enormous stone temple columns that look extremely suspiciously like they were cut on a lathe. Seems strange that other things get so focused on, and others ignored. If anything, this in the video is Petra on 'roids, but Petra is way more famous in the west. (Not bashing on Petra - totally worth it's salt.) I've known about it for a long time so it doesn't have the same kapow for me right now, but Angkor, too. The Wat was only one part of it. Totally crazy stuff, though less unexplainable than some of the other places.

Another question that would raise for me is that there is no evidence of the civilization or tools they used - presumably they would have extremely durable materials for building etc... re-bar, cutters, whatever - but we do have examples of the stonework they produced. I would have thought anything that can wipe every single trace of them off the face of the planet would be more than enough to destroy some bits of granite already made weaker by having been worked, and especially any of the ones from softer stone. I actually find ancient aliens visiting, using their tech for whatever reason, and then withdrawing having never put down permanent roots leaving no trace of having been here more likely, thinking on it. Note that this isn't me jumping on the bandwagon. I'm just promoting the discussion rather than the namecalling. I've argued on your side often enough, so I hope you can see this is a question/point of thought, not a slam.

An interesting distinction I've heard made a lot of times. Who says you couldn't get skilled slaves? That's what we all are even today, after all. We just have the luxury of choosing our whipmaster. (Edit: Ok - most of us. There's a handful of crazies out there who enjoy going to work and would do it by choice.)

Oh. I think I bought mine off Rich Pearson, and at the time he said it was Ali's before his. Honestly... you think you know a booster, and then...

I know... Had naughty thought about mine, but then I don't think it'd get much as either Ali or Rich had drilled it out to 4bolt at some point in its life. Doubt people would want that

Is this always the case? I thought clearance was an issue with the vee lugs being further down the seatstay than the bottom 4bolt mount. Curious now!

Well that I was not aware of! The '05 I had was 375mm with 1055mm, so I dearly hope they weren't longer than that one

They were made as a Python replica

Based on the dropouts, and especially the spec it's built into, I'd hazard my guess at a Zona Zip.

I've been wanting a short, steep and cheap get-around with a bit of fun bike that I can lock up in town without fear of being nicked for quite a while. Done loads of searching through DJ etc to not much joy, but totally forgot these existed! If that geo is close, it could well be the one. Edit: Although good luck finding one, apparently.

Holy moly that's a nice build. Love the proportions, even in spite of the too-low toptube. What's the geo?

What rear pads are they? Very quiet, even for a vee.

I went to Womad last week and saw a guy with a pair of Rubber Queen 2.2s on. Presumably just for mud, and would have more conventional tyres elsewhere, but it looked so f**king cool. So I'd say that.

Damn you for snaking my pre-edit post! For everyone else - I added that extra bit about history books before his reply was there

The NLP attempts in those videos is so blatant it seems impossible it could ever take root. Then again, there's empirical evidence that placebos still work even if the taker knows they're taking a placebo. It bothers me that they repeatedly state that these things were done "effortlessly". Even if they had the insane tech these videos imply, it still wouldn't be "effortless", else the feats wouldn't have been held in such esteem. If it was effortless - they would be literally everywhere, not major monuments. They did it somehow, and of course it could be with less effort than the history books say, but it was obviously still a big deal. (That's a major aside from the point, but a little gripe I have.)

One thing to bear in mind is that for smaller, more mundane structures like houses etc. it was just so much easier and more efficient to make wooden buildings - wattle and daub being a go-to. Or mud-bricks. There's a strong argument for only doing the really big stuff in stone because then it's worth the effort. Smaller stones will have been taken and recycled into other stuff too which we see all the time at sites like Avebury - some of the original standing stones having been found as filler (!) between two layers of wall in the church. There was likely a lot more small stone structures that have been dismantled and reused. In Scandinavia with traditional wooden churches (medieval era) it wasn't uncommon for the entire thing to be dismantled just so that it could be rebuilt somewhere else. Bonkers effort. I personally find it particularly interesting that the tipping point of going from small to large scale civilisation didn't coincide with the development of writing (~3500BC for a genuine writing system, with many places later). If anything was going to give a sudden boost in progression, that should have been it by my guess.

It's in the hands of the reader almost as much as the writer. A good writer reduces ambiguity, but it's never going to be completely their fault. There will always be better, but you're by no means bad at writing. You seem to understand the uses and placement of apostrophes so you're better than 75% of other English writers by default

Ah - that's very different from what I thought you meant. Haha.

Love this whole setup, and how on-f**king-point Clarke's First Law is. ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Show someone from the medieval ages a smartphone... In fact, ask the average person of today how one works ). It's getting pretty meta now, given that no human on the planet fully understands or knows the physical layout of transistors in of bleeding edge CPU chips. They're all computer-designed, so we made the things that made them, but we have and use this technology that we don't fully understand. (Ok, it's not nearly the same thing as this topic, but an interesting modernisation of the concept of not-necessarily-lost-but-perhaps-"missing"-technology, and I appreciate that we don't necessarily NEED to understand what goes where and why so long as we do know exactly and predictably the output of a given input when using it, but still - I'm a fan of the arcane.) That would be fun, but I'm pretty sure it would boil down to coincidence. Stone was just the material of choice because of its endurance. I'd love the Steinlords to roll in and smite us with their granite-wrath, but I think they're unrelated. It's hard to keep the span of time in check in our measly mortal minds - there was around three THOUSAND years between Stonehenge being in active use and the Romans invading Britain. That's 1.5x longer gap than the gap between the Romans invading Britain and today, and a huge chunk of it can't really be accounted for because those bloody Celts couldn't be arsed writing anything down I'm not saying it's impossible, but if you put "something dodgy is going on with current world politics" as a 1 and "the Queen's a lizard" as a 10 on the conspiracy scale, I personally would put a single organisation not only enduring but remaining in global power for five millennia at about an 8.6. (That's putting aside the 10-20,000+ year old masonry claims just for now.)

I say it every time so sorry if it's boring now, but that style... Damn. Not to mention the size of things!

But... But... But... Mustard yellow?