For more information about tickets and the venue please visit the site here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/111480, or visit the movies home site here: http://www.bloodintowine.com/.

The first email i got form the genius Drew.

This is Drew from Envato support. I’m writing regarding your behavior on
the marketplaces. Please be aware it is against policy to publicly call
out or act disrespectfully towards users and/or their items through any
medium, including collections. Your collection slanting users items has
been removed. An example of this behavior can be found on this thread:

http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/honestly-whats-going-on/25200?page=1

Please consider this a first and final warning regarding this matter. If
this behavior or pattern of public disrespect towards other users, staff,
or their items continues then we will have no choice but to place a
permanent ban on your account. We are more than happy and interested in
having you as part of the marketplaces, but the rules need to be followed
and we all need to remain respectful of one another.

We require that you reply to this ticket within 10 days stating you
understand the above warning. If we don’t hear back from you within 10
days, we will be forced to disable the account. Thanks much Eric!

Kind Regards,
Drew
Envato Support Team

And my very equal response back, gee i hope they don’t find it offense because its pretty much the same letter they sent me.

I kinda don’t understand it. what if I find it disrespectful that you would
delete my collection based on what users might or might not think. do you
give a damn? Being offended goes both ways. I have purchased 35 items and
your going to just delete my things because someone might get offended
without even caring if I get offended? Now I offended is there anything I
can do about it? should I get offended if there isn’t anything I can do? I
really don’t think my collection was worth deleted and starting this… do
you?

I require that you reply to this ticket within 10 days stating you
understand the above warning. If I don’t hear back from you within 10 days,
I will be forced to start buying from another marketplace. Thanks much Drew!

Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch, and slipped quietly into the garage. I hooked up the boat up to the van, and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour. The wind was blowing 50 mph, so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad all day.
I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed. I cuddled up to my wife's back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, "The weather out there is terrible."
My loving wife of 5 years replied, "Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?"
And that's how the fight started...

I rear-ended a car this morning. So, there we were alongside the road and slowly the other driver got out of his car.. You know how sometimes you just get soooo stressed and little things just seem funny? Yeah, well I couldn't believe it.... He was a DWARF!!! He stormed over to my car, looked up at me, and shouted, "I AM NOT HAPPY!!!"
So, I looked down at him and said, "Well, then which one are you?"
And then the fight started.....

After retiring, I went to the Social Security office to apply for Social Security. The woman behind the counter asked me for my driver's License to verify my age. I looked in my pockets and realized I had left my wallet at home. I told the woman that I was very sorry, but I would have to go home and come back later.
The woman said, 'Unbutton your shirt'. So I opened my shirt revealing my curly silver hair. She said, 'That silver hair on your chest is proof enough for me' and she processed my Social Security application.
When I got home, I excitedly told my wife about my experience at the Social Security office.
She said, 'You should have dropped your pants. You might have gotten disability, too.'
And then the fight started...

My wife and I were sitting at a table at my school reunion, and I kept staring at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at a nearby table.
My wife asked, 'Do you know her?'
'Yes,' I sighed, 'She's my old girlfriend. I understand she took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear she hasn't been sober since.'
'My God!' says my wife, 'who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?'
And then the fight started....

I took my wife to a restaurant. The waiter, for some reason took my order first. "I'll have the steak, medium rare, please."
He said, "Aren't you worried about the mad cow?""
Nah, she can order for herself."
And then the fight started...

A woman was standing nude, looking in the bedroom mirror. She was not happy with what she saw and said to her husband, "I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly. I really need you to pay me a compliment.'
The husband replied, 'Your eyesight's darn near perfect.'
And then the fight started.....

Dr Pepper in a 16oz can

I was in Atlanta the other day, and for those who have been to Atlanta you know that every time you go your going to see something your never seen before. This trip was no different, but in the best of ways. I have always complained that the 12oz cans that every soda company makes just isn’t big enough. Well it seems that Buffalo Rock in Atlanta agreed and starting bottling a very nice 16oz can. No is only the Buffalo Rock branch in Montgomery would follow.

Here is another little fact most of you may not know. There is only one place in the world to get a Dr Pepper made with its original formula, and its in Dublin, Texas. You can order them online by the cases if you wish. The bottling company in Texas still makes their Dr Pepper from real cane sugar and not the high fructose corn syrup that every soda manufacture changed to in the early to mid 80′s because of high sugar prices. http://www.dublindrpepper.com/.

But sometimes I do wish I had his regimented, organized mind because that would make my life as a columnist so much easier. Take Richard Little John for example. Present him with a news story and you know exactly what he’s going to make of it. And it was the same story with the late Auberon Waugh. When you read in his autobiography that he was three when he learned to hate the working classes, you know what his take’s going to be on everything from the French riots to Big Brother.

James is the same. James likes his beer to be brown and his house to be beige. I therefore know what James will think of a new car long before he actually drives it. Poncy, usually. And I know he’ll continue to call it poncy until the day he dies.

Not what I would choose to do in a 1.2 million dollar car

I’m rubbish at this. I change my mind six or seven times before I get out of bed. One minute, I think the only way to deal with disaffected Muslim youths is to drop a bomb on them. The next I think the solution is to drop a bomb on America.

“I try on opinions like I try on clothes, standing in front of a mirror and wondering if they suit me. Sometimes, I take them home and realise I made a bad choice, so I throw them away and get new ones.”

This gets me into all sorts of trouble because I can have a definite, firmly held view on, say, a new Peugeot and then, when I drive it again, I can’t remember what on earth that view might have been. People sometimes stop me in the street and are alarmed to find I sing the praises of something I destroyed in print just two weeks earlier.

Take the McLaren F1. When it came out, I said it was a stupid car because it had a stupid price tag. You’d have needed to win the premium bond jackpot twice to have bought such a thing, and then there’d have been nothing left over for shoes, or supper. “Why dream”, I asked, “about something there’s no point dreaming about?”

On this basis, I’d be similarly dismissive of the Bugatti Veyron. I mean it’s on sale now at £840,000. And, for that money, you could buy a house.

If there were any consistency in my life, if I had even a shred of Jamesishness, I would have refused a test drive. Why bother? It’s too expensive. I’m not going to dangle such a thing under the noses of the readers knowing full well their chances of having enough money to buy one are about the same as being gnawed to death by a platoon of woodlice.

I didn’t though. I packed my little suitcase and went to Italy where I was presented with quite the most stunning piece of automotive engineering ever created. (This opinion may change at some future date but I’m sticking with it for now).

I mean take the flappy-paddle, seven-speed gearbox. I spoke to the man who headed up the project at Ricardo and he said he’d never done anything so difficult. Quite an admission from someone whose products are used by F1 teams.

The might of the Bugatti Veyron

“It’s not that it can do 252mph, it’s the way it manages to do 252 so effortlessly that impresses me most”
“Oh, F1 is nothing,” he said. “They don’t have anything like the power of a Bugatti and only have to last two hours. The one in the Veyron has to work for 10 or 20 years.” Small wonder it took 50 people five years to make the damn thing work.

It wasn’t just the gearbox, either. It was the engine too, that massive quad turbo W16, and the aerodynamics as well. The team had been given the shape of the body and told there could be no alterations. They’d been told too that it must do 400kph and must produce 1,000bhp.

They weren’t fighting to beat Mercedes or BMW. These guys were fighting to beat heat, and friction and lift. They were fighting nature. And how did motoring commentators react? Instead of cheering them on and offering support, we laughed at the many and very public setbacks.

Well, the laugh’s on us now because they’ve made it work. When that massive rear spoiler begins to rise on specially cooled hydraulic rams, you can feel the back of the car being pressed into the road.

It’s not that it can do 252mph, it’s the way it manages to do 252 so effortlessly that impresses me most. At high speed, a McLaren F1 feels like the Bell X-1, a mass of vibrations and terror. At high speed, the Bugatti feels like an Airbus – solid, planted, safe.

You may not like the look of the thing, or the gaudiness of the interior. You may think Ferdinand Piech a mentalist for ordering such a car be made, and to hell with the shareholders. But you have to love the engineering. You just have to.

It isn’t even a straight-line rocket ship, either. On that twisting dual carriageway that comes back down to the ionosphere from the Mont Blanc tunnel, I had it in handling mode, and it’s hard to put into words how much grip there is.

Foot down and with 800bhp hitting the front wheels, you get a dollop of power understeer, but it’s not like any power understeer I’ve ever felt because there’s still 200bhp going to the back wheels… and that’s a number that’s growing by the moment. It feels odd at first, but then it feels spectacular.

Nearly as spectacular as the hammer-blow power delivery when the corner’s over, or the chuckability when you get to the next. I could describe this car as the Lotus Elise’s big brother. So I will. It’s that good.

The cast of Top Gear

And now I’ve changed my mind. It’s not ‘that good’ at all. It’s better, because I drove this car for 12 hours and emerged in London with no aches. You can’t do that in an Elise, and not only because after 12 hours, you’d still have 12 to go.

At a stroke then, the Veyron has rendered everything I’ve ever said about any other car obsolete. It’s rewritten the rule book, moved the goalposts and in the process, given Mother Nature a bloody nose.

Of course, I don’t mind changing my opinions about Ferrari and so on. I’m used to it. I spend half my life apologising, and I don’t mind finishing up here with another. I’m sorry I laughed at the Bugatti Veyron’s gestation. I didn’t realise quite what a project it was.

James too is bowled over by the scale of what’s been achieved – I knew he would be – but sadly, the praise is not universal. I’ve have read a couple of reports where commentators are still sneering about the problems of making it, and the supposed soulless nature of the finished product. Come on chaps admit it. You were wrong and the Veyron makes you look like a twat.

I know how you feel. The McLaren F1 did much the same thing to me.

Very nice details on the back side of the LF-A

The new 375k supercar from Lexus/Toyota

While most CF components are created using pre-weaved sheets of carbon fibre, Toyota owns one of just two rotary weavers in existence, a device capable of literally knitting incredibly complex shapes out of the black stuff

Ok just testing my net out here. Can you beat it? test your speed and post the output at http://speedtest.net