Here are my replies to recent comments on my blog, all in one place, to make it easy:

Ontario Emperor wrote:
MEN EMPLOYED by FARMERS must not cross the main lines to fetch milk cans. Words to live by.

Absolutely!

Freddie wrote:
Watch your watch. Time will go away. Sleep.

Imagine if you could squeeze Time into just one watch, so that it no longer existed anywhere else!

Ontario Emperor wrote:
Personally, I would not avoid London for this reason. These things get a lot of headlines, but, as someone pointed out on this side of the pond, more people die in the U.S. from food poisoning each year than from terrorist attacks. The chance of something happening to either of us is very very small.I speak from experience. As you know, I live in Southern California, where Disneyland is located; I have probably been to Disneyland dozens of times since September 2001, despite the fact that Disneyland is one of the top terrorist targets in the world. And should I mention that I spent part of my vacation in Washington DC, walking by the White House? My advice is to go on living and doing what you want to do. My two cents.

That's a good point actually. But I might want to leave it s short while, until they have cleared things up. I'd like to travel on the tube. Once, when I was a kid, my dad took me on a trip to London, where we got day passes to the underground railway, and spent the whole day zooming around different parts of London to visit parks.

It's funny how I don't go to London very often. It feels far away, whereas it's only about 120 miles away, which in American terms would probably be considered local. The thing here is though, everything is so compact, it's not like there just where I live, then 120 miles of nothing, and then London. There's so much imbetween, and so much in other directions and nearer. Bristol is only 20 miles away from me, and that's almost like a miniature London, only far more hilly, and without an underground rail network. Bath is only slightly further away than Bristol. Then there's Cheltenham in the other direction, which is a really posh town which looks a bit like the posh areas of London (Kensington & Chelsea). Not to mention that I live in the world-famous Cotswold Hills, where there are hidden pockets of pleasantness round almost every corner.

An amusing thought to me, is that a lot of tourists probably come to the UK and not venture outside London. Trust me, you could visit the UK, and never even go to London, and you'd definately find more than enough to distract you.

But I probably will go to London soon though. That's if I don't get distracted by Oxford. That's only half the distance away from me that London is, yet I've never been there. Horrible to drive through or park, so I've heard.

Ontario Emperor said:
One more comment on the statement "although the body count is far lower":Though I know that you would never do such a thing, there are some people that say that the attack on London wasn't that serious because a relatively smaller amount of people got killed. That kind of thinking is hogwash. Even if only one person had died in England, or in the U.S., or in Spain, etc., the very fact that a terrorist attack killed someone is disgusting.

Even somebody getting stabbed in the street (the kind of thing that's a frequent occurrence in UK towns & cities), is pure evil, and something that just shouldn't happen. The ley thing in incidents like the London bombing, is that innocent people get killed/maimed/traumatised. Many of these people were opposed to the war in Iraq, and some of them probably don't even think about politics, but the important thing is, they were absolutely nothing to do with whatever issues the bombers have with the UK/US.

It was overdue though. Straight away after the WTC attacks, I was concerned about London being the next target. When it was 11th September 2002, I was half-expecting an anniversary attack on London, like they would go round the major western cities one by one.

Side note: does anyone every wonder about the spooky resemblance between the term "9/11" and the code used to dial emergency services in the US (911)? Funny though, because by the UK dating system, we would have called it 11/9. To us, 9/11 means the 9th of November. It is therefore strange that, with the London attacks happening on the 7th of July, eastern terrorists seam to have got it into their head that we dial 77 to call an ambulance. It's 999 in case you didn't know - which is why, whenever I'm in an office with an internal phone system, and I'm told that I have to dial 9 to get an outside line, I always ask, "What if there's an emergency, do I need to dial 9999?" It's important information. Somebody could be bleeding from a paper cut, and the person next to them might have not dialled enough nines.

Incidentally, if I ever hijack an American plane, I'll be attempting to fly it into another dimension. This is information is of absolutely no use to anyone, but I don't care.