Do you want to know anything?

On the Beastie Boys album "Licensed To Ill", there's a line that goes "You're jealous of me 'cos your girlfriend is [missing word]".

What is that missing word and what the hell does it mean?

I've only heard the word once before (and I assume it is derogatory in some way), when it was uttered by the token Canadian kid at our school when I was only seven years old.

This has been a source of befuddlement for me ever since. Please help!

I'm on the case with the others.

According to here (not sure if this link is permanent, 'catting' means being on the look out for other guys; tarting around.

Graham White, the Lancashire businessman who owned and managed Colne Dynamoes, had expressed his dream to bring his HFS Loans league club to Nationwide (or whatever it was then) league glory. Expectations were raised such that when Colne failed to make the Vauxhall Conference (they won the HFS Loans championship but were denied entry to the conference after failing ground safety standards and failing to sort out a ground-sharing arrangement with a neighbouring club such as Burnley) some turned supporters turned nasty and White's family began to receive threatening phone calls and letters.

I think the answer to your question is 'no', but it would obviously be NOT GOOD: September 17, 2001
Associated Press
Global atomic agency confesses little can be done to safeguard nuclear plants

Haunted by last week's terrorism, delegates from 132 nations opened an annual atomic energy conference Monday with calls for tighter security - and admissions that little can be done to shield a nuclear power plant from an airborne assault.
Governments, fearing a similar suicide jetliner crash at a nuclear plant, have tightened security outside nuclear power and radioactive waste facilities worldwide in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But Japan, which is heavily dependent on nuclear energy and has 52 nuclear plants, warned Monday that nothing can shield the plants from a direct hit from a missile or an aircraft. At the same time, the world must also "ensure that nuclear materials are never used as weapons of terrors," U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told the International Atomic Energy Agency gathering in Vienna.
"We cannot assume that tomorrow's terrorist acts will mirror those we've just experienced," he said.
In a message to delegates, President Bush also urged the Vienna-based agency to keep pace with "the real and growing threat of nuclear proliferation." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the effort "more important than ever in the aftermath of last week's appalling terrorist attack in the United States."
The architects of the world's nuclear plants designed them more with ground vehicle - not airborne - attacks in mind, IAEA spokesman David Kyd said. Most nuclear plans were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, were designed to withstand only accidental, glancing impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time, he said.
"If you postulate the risk of a jumbo jet full of fuel, it is clear that their design was not conceived to withstand such an impact," Kyd said.
In Japan, Takeo Hiranuma, minister for economy, trade and industry, noted that his country's nuclear plants were built to withstand earthquakes - not "hits from above by missiles or aircraft."
A direct hit of a nuclear plant by a modern jumbo jet traveling at high speed "could create a Chernobyl situation," said a U.S. official who declined to be identified. The 1986 nuclear explosion in Chernobyl, Ukraine, killed more than 4,000 people. Tens of thousands more were disabled in the cleanup afterward. However, the buildings that house nuclear reactors themselves are far smaller targets than the Pentagon posed, and it would be extremely difficult for a terrorist to mount a direct hit at an angle that could unleash a catastrophic chain of events, Kyd said.
If a nuclear power plant were hit by an airliner, the reactor would not explode, but such a strike could destroy the plant's cooling systems. That could cause the nuclear fuel rods to overheat and produce a steam explosion that could release lethal radioactivity into the atmosphere.
In the United States, one solution could be installation of anti-aircraft weaponry manned by military personnel who would be stationed outside the nation's 104 commercial reactors, said Paul Leventhal, president of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute, a nonproliferation advocacy group.
Last week, military fighter jets were alerted to civilian airlines veering off course - but failed to get there in time.
"We're in a new era, and we must protect these plants in extraordinary ways," Leventhal said.

1) everyone is watching Countdown
2)have you looked into boiler rooms?

'Conkeroo' is just a slurring of 'Conqueror Root', as in John the Conqueror Root, a root endowed with voodoo properties and worn as a good luck amulet by many bluesmen.

Is Nick just using Google to answer these questions?

Thank you for your root offer, Sam. IT'S MORE THANKS THAN ANYONE ELSE HAS GIVEN ME.

Bonus question: is the critical consensus that there are in fact allusions to Dante's Inferno in the Robert Frost poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"?

This is all a bit shady. Stella Rimington recently wrote that she had asked the official archivist this question herself and was told it was classified information! But it would seem that in the old days there were loads of Military Intelligence units.

MI1(b) seems to have been a crypto unit for the Royal Flying Corps in WW1, as part of the War Office.
MI1(c) was part of the Secret Service Bureau set up in 1909. The SSB had a 'Foreign Section' which in 1916 was named MI1(c) and run out of the War Office. By the end of the war it was run by the Foreign Office. The SSB Foreign Section [MI1(c)] later turned into the SIS (secret service). MI1(c) seems effectively to have been an early version of MI6. SIS was called MI6 when it covered Military Intelligence gathering activities, separate from political espionage activities. During WW2 it was run out of the War office, and generally called 'MI'.

MI2 was responsible for Russia, Scandinavia and Eastern countries. Subsumed into MI3 in 1941.

MI3 was the European country section with MI3(b) being the German subsection. MI3(b) became MI14 in May 1940.

MI4 was involved in tactical photographic interpretation end 1941/42, = but may have been a general interpretation unit

MI7 - press control & propaganda?

MI8 was German army/air force signals traffic analysis

MI9 carried out clandestine operations

MI10 was a weapons analysis/technical unit

MI15 covered German anti-aircraft defences

MI17 was a secretariat organization for the Director of MI

MI19 debriefed enemy POW (taken over from MI9(a) end of1941).

MI1(a) seems lost in the mists of time.

Having met you, I doubt you were around in 1958 to have this discussion with your pa. So I assume you are talking about the 80s remake. In which case, yes. The film was based on a George Langelaan short story 'The Fly' that first appeared in the June 1957 issue of Playboy. It was collected in the 2nd Pan Book of Horror Stories (1960) - perhaps that's where your dad read it..

Yeah thanks Nick, you're a star, although to be honest I ought to have guessed the answer myself. "Cattin'" girlfriends are the story of my life.

Well there is, that's why I've got a job.

The thing is, I find out things for a living, but they tend to be immigration or criminal law type things.

One thing's for certain, an anything thing finder is a precious thing indeed.

Sweetcorn and gravy though, uh, wouldja? Answer THAT one Nightmare Nick.

You started off with two open italics tags, so had to close two to cancel them out.

Sam -

This is an interesting one. As far as I can make out, the 1987 version is quite widely available on NTSC format (at cduniverse for example). I think it's out of print in the UK (although it was rated by the BBFC in 1990, under the distribution of Intervision Video Ltd).

You can order a second hand copy via gemm.com, although the vendor concerned is given a low approval rating. If you're into the soundtrack, another gemm partner has a copy of that on vinyl for sale.

What confuses me is that imdb listed the film as being from 1992. This isn't a remake though, despite the erroneous (I think) listing of Robert Urich on the sparse cast list (see below). A video with the same cover art is described by an Amazon user and another website as having Robert Clegg on the soundtrack. But there was a remake - the problem is that imdb compilers have conflated the two versions. It was called Jock - A True Tale Of Friendship, and released earlier this year. Here's a video pack shot. It stars Robert Urich, who imdb claimed was in the South African version.

Anyway, it looks rubbish. Why not buy a Jock of the Bushveld plate instead.

How many brothers & sisters does Osama Bin Laden have? How many wives did his father have? How many wives & children does bin Laden have?

(factoid from rubbish digital TV show)

Oh, and since Nick didn't answer Ned's question (I don't think), he works for the Guardian newspaper as a library researcher.

How many wives did his father have? - the figure of four that has been in the press the last few days seems wrong (four women producing 50+ kids - phew!). One thing I read said 30, but I think it's actually 10.

How many wives & children does bin Laden have? He now has four wives and around 13 children.

The Red House Painters were sort of from Iowa. Define 'successful'! Define 'from'!

Nicole

- I have half your answer but I guess that's not good enough.

[IN BOTH SENSES [of the sense] PLEASE.]

I fear we might have to do a little research to discover why the Merge and Setanta versions of Get Lost are anagrams of each other, and this will only lead to certain New Yorkers of our acquaintance sighly deeply as they struggle to recall Minor Indie- Label Administrative Calamities of the mid-90s.

Because I want to know where Our Price Records head offices were located in London in the late 80s/early 90s.

I went for an interview there once (Farringdon?) and remember being impressed with a preserved stone gate nearby. I want to track it down.

Alternative idea - ring or email Robert Elms's BBC Radio London show - he loves questions like that.

Spencer - they can't. That's quite impossible, as any fool knows.

Belated information on this topic:

Death rays: Far out
Mark Pilkington
The Guardian
Thursday , August 12, 2004

"A flaming death . . . an invisible, inevitable sword of heat." So HG Wells described the Martians' heat ray in his 1898 classic The War of the Worlds, one of the first novels to introduce the death ray into popular consciousness.

The first historical accounts of this archetypal weapon of mass destruction date to the Second Punic War, 218-202 BC. Defending the city of Syracuse against a Roman assault, the Greek sage Archimedes is said to have used a series of hexagonal mirrors (or bronze shields) to focus sunlight into a searing beam that set the Romans' ships alight. The incident was successfully reconstructed in 1973 by Dr Ioannis Sakkas, who used 50 bronze-coated mirrors.

When it comes to 20th century death rays, two names feature prominently: the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla and an Englishman, Harry Grindell Matthews.

"It will be possible to destroy anything approaching within 200 miles. My invention will provide a wall of power," the 81-year-old Tesla told Liberty magazine in 1937. He spoke of several directional lightning and beam weapons in his lifetime, none of which were demonstrated. In his final years he claimed to have built "teleforce", a highly charged particle wall that would surround nations and destroy anything that approached it. Tesla's claim can probably be taken with a pinch of salt, though plans for it may have been among those acquired by US Intelligence after his death.

In 1921, Harry Grindell Matthews produced one of the first talking films, of Shackleton's speech before setting off for Antarctica, but he remains best known for his "death ray". In 1923 he astounded journalists by stopping a motorcycle engine at 50ft using a projected beam. The finished version, he claimed, would knock aeroplanes out of the sky. But Matthews refused to explain how the device worked, and a military demonstration only caused a light bulb to glow and a small motor to stop.

When the British government refused to fund his project, Matthews threatened to take it to the French, and the Americans. Neither produced working death rays in the second world war. A 1924 Pathe film features Matthews himself operating an impressive, but unfortunately entirely fictional, ray device. This, we can assume, was as close as he got to the real thing.

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What I like about mark s's question is the 'into fiction' bit, suggesting he hasn't discounted the possibility that it was introduced into reality first.

It was (um, at least in part) about the concept of 'Arturity' in Tennyson's Idylls, esp. Balin and Balan... I've tried a google search for 'arthurity' but it only returns malory stuff. Also I am in deadline panic and have lost all pride :(

Yeah, I think it's just distribution of weight.

(the first "arturity" is a typo obv, the second is right)

as explained in Pitch Black his character's eyes have heightened sensitivity to bright light, but give him a natural and extremely useful 'night-vision'

I think it's possible that the article you want is 'The Epic Plight of Troth in Idylls of the King' by Herbert F. Tucker. It's from ELH, Vol. 58, No. 3 Autumn 1991.

Full text available through JStor if you have access.

Can I come to your graduation and glow with pride and everything?