ballpoint

The perfect Christmas present, from 1951. Complete with a lump of uranium-238. Buy it for your kids and see their tiny faces light up.

An angel walks into a hardware store and says, “I’d like to buy a Christmas tree.” The cashier asks, “Are you putting it up yourself?” The angel replies, “Yes.”

My neighbour's a devout Buddhist, but he still celebrates Christmas. Every December he sits under the Christmas tree, wraps himself in paper and lives in the present.

And damn good fun it was too...

Coming soon. Everyone who voted yes gets banned from Twitter. In fact, I can't see why they haven't just left already. Leave it to the Musk Rats.

They all abstained in the past, except for the US and Ukraine. This non-binding resolution has been introduced by Russia annually since 2015, and has rightly been seen as a shameless attempt to excuse its annexation of Crimea while giving it carte blanche to invade any nation it accuses of "Nazism". "Each year, this resolution is endorsed by a large majority. It was adopted on December 16, 2021, by 130 votes for, 2 against (United States and Ukraine) and 49 abstentions. While France did vote against the text for the first time this year, it had never voted for it and had always abstained, like many other Western countries". Why France and 51 other countries voted against UN resolution condemning Nazism (lemonde.fr) Every nation that voted against the resolution has explained why it did so in pretty strong terms. For example, this is what the EU said: "We strongly condemn the abuse of the argument of the fight against Nazism, and reject the inaccurate and inappropriate use of the term 'denazification' by Russia to justify its inhumane, cruel and illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, the continued impacts of which are dire, not only for the people of Ukraine, but for people around the world. Such distortion erodes our understanding of the Holocaust, disrespects its legacy and undermines democratic principles". EU Explanation of Vote – UN General Assembly: Draft Resolution on Combating glorification of Nazism | EEAS Website (europa.eu) It's sickening that Russian shills attempt to bring this up as if it shames those who voted against it, when all the shame lies with those who introduced it.

The orchestra on the Titanic springs to mind.

In a conventional gas / oil field, the hydrocarbons have migrated from a source rock and accumulated in a large porous reservoir over millions of years. You drill your wells and it either comes out under its own pressure, or you suck it out, until you've recovered all that is possible to with today's technology, which may be some time - the largest oil field in the world (Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia) has produced 65 billion barrels since 1951 and is still going. In a shale gas / oil field, the hydrocarbons are unable to migrate from the organic source material, because shale is impermeable, so they are adsorbed to it, building up in layers that may only be one or a few molecules thick. Drilling is done along layers that have high amounts of this organic carbon, or kerogen, in shales that have sufficient "brittleness" to be artificially fractured, which is why it's not suitable for every shale deposit. The more kerogen the well intercepts, and is able to be reached by fracking, the more hydrocarbons you produce, and the longer production will last. As someone said earlier, typically around three years. Multiple wells are drilled horizontally along these layers, and spaced apart so that the fractures from one just about meet the fractures from the ones around it in order to access as much kerogen as possible from as few wells as possible. It's a bit like having a rain water tank that, once the time is taken to fill up, provides a lot of readily accessible water, compared with going onto your roof and sucking up the individual drops lying on it one by one.