A dear friend, Michael Hanlon, passed away recently. He was a great writer. Here follows some excerpts, with links, to a few of his greatest hits at the DM.
"It’s always a tabby cat. That’s the rule. Or, sometimes, a spaniel. Often there is no animal at all, just the fevered imaginations of mass hysteria. The science of phantom cats is a very strange one indeed and while it says nothing about cats it does say an awful lot about humans."....
... and...
"In Essex, van driver Rich Baker came out with the brilliant quote “It was one million per cent a lion. It was a tan colour with a big mane, it was fully grown, it was definitely a lion. It was just standing there, it seemed to be enjoying itself.” [More...]
Inside the strange world of the lunar hoaxers.
The great diesel con exposed.
Why car makers lie about fuel consumption
Sceptic:
The lion on the loose in Essex."It’s always a tabby cat. That’s the rule. Or, sometimes, a spaniel. Often there is no animal at all, just the fevered imaginations of mass hysteria. The science of phantom cats is a very strange one indeed and while it says nothing about cats it does say an awful lot about humans."....
... and...
"In Essex, van driver Rich Baker came out with the brilliant quote “It was one million per cent a lion. It was a tan colour with a big mane, it was fully grown, it was definitely a lion. It was just standing there, it seemed to be enjoying itself.” [More...]
Inside the strange world of the lunar hoaxers.
"They walk among us. From the outside they appear to be normal human beings. They speak our language, appear outwardly intelligent – well-read, even with university degrees. The way their move their limbs, the gait – they have got it all off to a tee. And yet underneath that façade of normality lurks a terrible, sinister secret. These are not People Like Us (well, not like me anyway).
No, I am not talking about the Illuminati or David Icke’s Lizard-people, nor about reclothed Roswell aliens, but about that strange subset of humanity known as the Apollo Deniers or Lunar Hoaxers. I have long ceased to be interested in what these people believe. Refuting their simple-minded claims is so embarrassingly easy it is like using dynamite to catch trout in a fish farm." [More...]
Ahead of his time
The great diesel con exposed.
At last, someone is talking sense about the Great Diesel Con. Diesel cars, I have been saying for years, are expensive, inefficient, dirty and unreliable compared to their petrol equivalents. This contradicts just about every piece of received wisdom concerning motor fuels.
People buy diesels because they think they are more fuel efficient than petrol cars. As a new Which? Report out this week confirms, while this is (marginally) true, overall the economics are mostly in favour of gasoline. This is because - believe it or not, and even in the era of the £6 gallon - slight differences in fuel efficiency really are not a big factor in the overall cost of motoring. [More...]
Why car makers lie about fuel consumption
There are lies, damn lies, statistics – and official EU car fuel consumption figures. I and others have been banging on about this for years; the figures quoted by manufacturers in their ads usually (but, interestingly not always) bears absolutely no relation whatsoever to what happens in the real world.
This scandal has been highlighted in a What Car Report which this week looked at some of the claims made for the most allegedly economical cars sold in Britain and compared them to real-world consumption figures. [More....]
