Need I remind you as to whom currently holds the Ashes? (and will likely retain them too 
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Quote: " someone reduced to eating grass under the greatest regime in the world" Where are these Bourgeois social parasites? Eating grass that dear leader needs for his gout pillow, while everyone else gleans nettles, and brier ,and the occasional forbidden worm. The gift of Dear Leader to allow them strength to adore him as he airlifts Mc D’s for his 120 Lhasa Apso’s Who could complain?
You think they’ve got it bad in North Korea? Try Yorkshire
No, you don’t need to remind me, because we’ve held them for so much of the past couple of decades that it’s easy to remember the rare occasions your lot held them.
Then again, your lot is to be congratulated on regaining them last year after a fairly brief drought of 75 years at Lords from 1934 to 2009 during which we routinely thrashed your lot. 
Banter aside, here are summaries of the wartime fates of three of your team in the 1934 series, which illustrates some of the impact of the war on the best and brightest of that generation.
Hedley Verity
The great Yorkshire left-arm spinner dismissed Bradman eight times and led him to say there was no “breaking-point,” with Verity. He died as a prisoner of war in Italy, on July 31 1943. He was wounded leading his men during the British Army’s first attack on German positions at Catania, Sicily.
Ken Farnes
The young Farnes opened the bowling with 40 year-old Geary in the first Test and became only the sixth Englishman to take 10 wickets on his Test debut but was dropped after Lord’s. A bustling, muscular fast bowler with a light touch. He met a tragic end dying in 1941 on an RAF night-training exercise.
Bill Bowes
Was only selected for six out of 20 Ashes Tests between 1932-39 but took 30 wickets at 24.70 – respectable in the Bradman era. He was captured at Tobruk and spent three years as a prisoner of war. He later became a journalist and died aged 79 in 1987.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/theashes/5828384/The-Ashes-Hedley-Verity-the-hero-of-England-last-Test-win-over-Australia-at-Lords-in-1934.html
Our Keith Miller http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/fiftyaustralians/32.asp embodied all the best qualites of that generation, but his interview with Michael Parkinson also put cricket and war into their proper perspective.
MARK BANNERMAN: Keith Miller played 55 Tests and would have played a lot more had World War II not intervened.
Miller was a Mosquito fighter pilot flying over Germany.
Facing death day after day it seems that time informed much of the rest of his life.
GIDEON HAIG, CRICKET WRITER: I think when a person like that has been surrounded by mortality, imminent mortality, when he’s walked away from crash landings and decided that today his number wasn’t up, maybe tomorrow it might be different, everything thereafter, you get the sense that you have to take advantage of the time that’s been granted to you.
MARK BANNERMAN: According to cricket writer Gideon Haig, this wartime experience defined Miller both as a man and as a cricketer.
GIDEON HAIG: Miller’s interesting because where we tend to associate Sir Donald Bradman with the Great Depression, we regard him as the great solace for depression, I think we automatically identify Miller with the Second World War.
He is the embodiment of the warrior athlete who returned from war and beat his sword into a bat rather than a plough share and as a result his cricket was accompanied by a whiff of danger, a whiff of strangeness and unearthliness that accompanied his cricket throughout the rest of his career.
MARK BANNERMAN: For television interviewer and cricket lover Michael Parkinson, his understanding of life, death and sport made Miller a true great.
MICHAEL PARKINSON, TELEVISION INTERVIEWER, ON ‘ENOUGH ROPE’: I want this quote in every dressing room of every sporting event anywhere in the world - Miller’s great quote when somebody asked him about pressure.
“Pressure,” he said.
"I’ll tell you what pressure is.
Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse.
Playing cricket is not."
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1218626.htm
Bollocks, I was hoping the consumption of various MacDonald’s products, the chemicals contained and all that sun south of the equator would have affected your memory. :shock:
The fact that I have any memory at all is a tribute to the purity of Australian beer, for beers of lesser purity would have left my cranial vault empty.
Or maybe that’s happened, and I just don’t know?
Or care!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11871641
Now this is starting to worry me, if China have seriously considered abandoning the North and preferring the whole of the pennisula to be run by Seoul then this could have massive rammifications.
Most of the ruling elite in NK are the old revolutionaries, if they think they’ve been sold out by China they may just go for broke. Try to invade the south and then go back to the Chinese in an improved negotiating position. Wether that is being considered or not, this latest revelation makes the situation even more unstable than before. The NK elite, with no Chinese backing and seeing the state crumble from within may just go for that last role of the dice and bring on their own Gotterdamerung on their terms rather than wait for it to be imposed when Kim dies.
Mate, I’m down the bottom of the Great South Land, where I might more accurately be said to be north of the South Pole.
We hardly ever get a day above 40C this far down.
Whereas, here in God’s own paradise, known as the UK we have constant rain, wind and presently snow. How I laughed this weekend when the temperatures was -12 and my water bottle froze. 
Maybe.
But so far NK has been crazy like a fox, cleverly playing the West for advantage.
If NK pulls the same bullshit with China, which understands and plays the same games on the same terms, NK is in trouble if it has lost China’s support.
What’s in it for China?
Support NK and lose all the benefits to the Party, Army and related officials derived from the industriousness and commerce of the new capitalists fuelling the PRC economy?
Or ditch NK and keep and expand upon all those benefits?
The major risk in this situation is that the Communist old guard in China gains the uppper hand and supports NK, but that assumes that there is a Communist old guard which could gain power and wants to go back to the past where the Great Leap Forward and other brilliantly conceived propaganda programs sent China backwards under Party control when it is now advancing dramatically in all economic and many social terms through the efforts of China’s free enterprise industrialists and merchants.
It’s a no brainer for anyone except a doctrinaire Communist of the local variety.
Surely there is a bright spot?
Although it’s probably not in Wales. Or Scotland. (I omitted Ireland, for reasons which should not need to be stated.)
Ah, the admirable British Tommy with his stiff upper lip, rakishly tilted helmet, cheeky smile, and cuppa char.
Oh, sorry. No cuppa char with frozen water bottles.
Have you thought of iced tea? :mrgreen:
Never underestimate the British tom’s (tommy is SOO last century) ability to make a brew or find a kebab van
Was that Andy Rooney? 
Some interesting speculations are coming out of the Wikileaks documents:
Leaked cables show guessing about N. Korea
Documents help explain why some suspect North’s recent outbursts may be last snarls of dying dictatorship
WASHINGTON — With North Korea reeling from economic and succession crises, American and South Korean officials early this year secretly began gaming out what would happen if the North, led by one of the world’s most brutal family dynasties, collapsed.
Over an official lunch in late February, a top South Korean official confidently told the American ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that the fall would come “two to three years” after the death of Kim Jong-il, the country’s ailing leader, Ms. Stephens later cabled Washington. A new, younger generation of Chinese leaders “would be comfortable with a reunited Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a benign alliance,” the diplomat, Chun Yung-woo, predicted.
But if Seoul was destined to control the entire Korean Peninsula for the first time since the end of World War II, China — the powerful ally that keeps the North alive with food and fuel — would have to be placated. So South Korea was already planning to assure Chinese companies that they would have ample commercial opportunities in the mineral-rich northern part of the peninsula.
U.S. military presence unwelcome
As for the United States, the cable said, “China would clearly ‘not welcome’ any U.S. military presence north of the DMZ,” the heavily mined demarcation line that now divides the two Koreas.
This trove of cables ends in February, just before North Korea began a series of military actions that has thrown some of Asia’s most prosperous countries into crisis. A month after the lunch, the North is believed to have launched a torpedo attack on the Cheonan, a South Korean warship, that killed 46 sailors.
Three weeks ago it revealed the existence of a uranium enrichment plant, potentially giving it a new pathway to make nuclear bomb material. And last week it shelled a South Korean island, killing two civilians and two marines and injuring many more.
None of that was predicted in the dozens of State Department cables about North Korea obtained by the organization WikiLeaks, and in fact even China, the North’s closest ally, has often been startlingly wrong, the cables show. But the documents help explain why some South Korean and American officials suspect that the military outbursts may be the last snarls of a dying dictatorship.
They also show that talk of the North’s collapse may be rooted more in hope than in any real strategy: similar predictions were made in 1994 when the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung, suddenly died, leaving his son to run the most isolated country in Asia. And a Chinese expert warned, according to an American diplomat, that Washington was deceiving itself once again if it believed that “North Korea would implode after Kim Jong-il’s death.”
The cables about North Korea — some emanating from Seoul, some from Beijing, many based on interviews with government officials, and others with scholars, defectors and other experts — are long on educated guesses and short on facts, illustrating why their subject is known as the Black Hole of Asia. Because they are State Department documents, not intelligence reports, they do not include the most secret American assessments, or the American military’s plans in case North Korea disintegrates or lashes out.
They contain loose talk and confident predictions of the end of the family dynasty that has ruled North Korea for 65 years. Those discussions were fueled by a rash of previously undisclosed defections of ranking North Korean diplomats, who secretly sought refuge in the South.
NBC reports on reaction to leaks abroad
But they were also influenced by a remarkable period of turmoil inside North Korea, including an economic crisis set off by the government’s failed effort to revalue its currency and sketchy intelligence suggesting that the North Korean military might not abide the rise of Mr. Kim’s inexperienced young son, Kim Jong-un, who was recently made a four-star general despite having no military experience.
Laughing about North Korean paranoia
The cables reveal that in private, the Chinese, long seen as North Korea’s last protectors against the West, occasionally provide the Obama administration with colorful assessments of the state of play in North Korea. Chinese officials themselves sometimes even laugh about the frustrations of dealing with North Korean paranoia.
When James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, sat down in September 2009 with one of China’s most powerful officials, Dai Bingguo, state councilor for foreign affairs, Mr. Dai joked that in a recent visit to North Korea he “did not dare” to be too candid with the ailing and mercurial North Korean leader. But the Chinese official reported that although Kim Jong-il had apparently suffered a stroke and had obviously lost weight, he still had a “sharp mind” and retained his reputation among Chinese officials as “quite a good drinker.” (Mr. Kim apparently assured Mr. Dai during a two-hour conversation in Pyongyang, the capital, that his infirmities had not forced him to give up alcohol.)
Video: King: WikiLeaks is ‘terrorist organization’
But reliable intelligence about Mr. Kim’s drinking habits, it turns out, does not extend to his nuclear program, about which even the Chinese seem to be in the dark.
On May 13, 2009, as American satellites showed unusual activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site, officials in Beijing said they were “unsure” that North Korean “threats of another nuclear test were serious.” As it turns out, the North Koreans detonated a test bomb just days later.
Soon after, Chinese officials predicted that negotiations intended to pressure the North to disarm would be “shelved for a few months.” They have never resumed.
The cables also show that almost as soon as the Obama administration came to office, it started raising alarms that the North was buying up components to enrich uranium, opening a second route for it to build nuclear weapons. (Until now, the North’s arsenal has been based on its production of plutonium, but its production capacity has been halted.)
In June 2009, at a lunch in Beijing shortly after the North Korean nuclear test, two senior Chinese Foreign Ministry officials reported that China’s experts believed “the enrichment was only in its initial phases.” In fact, based on what the North Koreans revealed this month, an industrial-scale enrichment plant was already under construction. It was apparently missed by both American and Chinese intelligence services.
‘Increasingly chaotic’ situation in the North
The cables make it clear that the South Koreans believe that internal tensions in the North have reached a boiling point. In January of this year, South Korea’s foreign minister, who later resigned, reported to a visiting American official that the South Koreans saw an “increasingly chaotic” situation in the North.
In confidence, he told the American official, Robert R. King, the administration’s special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, that a number of “high-ranking North Korean officials working overseas” had recently defected to the South. Those defections were being kept secret, presumably to give American and South Korean intelligence agencies time to harvest the defectors’ knowledge.
Story: Signs of disarray in S. Korea in wake of attack
But the cables also reveal that the South Koreans see their strategic interests in direct conflict with China’s, creating potentially huge diplomatic tensions over the future of the Korean Peninsula.
The South Koreans complain bitterly that China is content with the status quo of a nuclear North Korea, because they fear that a collapse would unleash a flood of North Korean refugees over the Chinese border and lead to the loss of a “buffer zone” between China and the American forces in South Korea.
At one point, Ambassador Stephens reported to Washington, a senior South Korean official told her that “unless China pushed North Korea to the ‘brink of collapse,’ ” the North would refuse to take meaningful steps to give up its nuclear program.
Mr. Chun, now the South Korean national security adviser, complained to Ambassador Stephens during their lunch that China had little commitment to the multination talks intended to force North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. The Chinese, he said, had chosen Wu Dawei to represent Beijing at the talks. According to the cable, Mr. Chun called Mr. Wu the country’s “ ‘most incompetent official,’ an arrogant, Marx-spouting former Red Guard who ‘knows nothing about North Korea, nothing about non-proliferation.’ ”
But the cables show that when it comes to the critical issue of succession, even the Chinese know little of the man who would be North Korea’s next ruler: Kim Jong-un.
…
Cont’d
‘Too much of a playboy’
As recently as February 2009, the American Consulate in Shanghai — a significant collection point for intelligence about North Korea — sent cables reporting that the Chinese who knew North Korea best disbelieved the rumors that Kim Jong-un was being groomed to run the country. Several Chinese scholars with good contacts in the North said they thought it was likely that “a group of high-level military officials” would take over, and that “at least for the moment none of KJI’s three sons is likely to be tapped to succeed him.” The oldest son was dismissed as “too much of a playboy,” the middle son as “more interested in video games” than governing. Kim Jong-un, they said, was too young and inexperienced.
But within months, a senior Chinese diplomat, Wu Jianghao, was telling his American counterparts that Kim Jong-il was using nuclear tests and missile launching as part of an effort to put his third son in place to succeed him, despite his youth.
“Wu opined that the rapid pace of provocative actions in North Korea was due to Kim Jong-il’s declining health and might be part of a gambit under which Kim Jong-il would escalate tensions with the United States so that his successor, presumably Kim Jong-un, could then step in and ease those tensions,” the embassy reported back to Washington in June 2009.
But carrying out plans for an easy ascension may be more difficult than expected, some are quoted as saying. In February of this year the American Consulate in Shenyang reported rumors that Kim Jong-un “had a hand” in the decision to revalue the North’s currency, which wiped out the scarce savings of most North Koreans and created such an outcry that one official was executed for his role in the sudden financial shift. The cables also describe secondhand reports of palace intrigue in the North, with other members of the Kim family preparing to serve as regents to Kim Jong-un — or to unseat him after Kim Jong-il’s death.
Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.
This article, " Leaked Cables Depict a World Guessing About North Korea," first appeared in the New York Times.
So basically, no-one actually knows anything concrete…wonderful.
It was Dana Carvey, but I can see Rooney’s influence if not his eyebrows… The Grumpy old man character was popular as he placed the newer generations complaining nature in its place, and with hilarity. But, you be the judge…
