Fake Steve Jobs claims a good friend of mine got beaten off by the BBC due to him being “a freetard”. We already knew aunty was a whore, and the practise of twisting names into insults (Republican → Repugnican, Democrat → Demoncrat) dates back to the second oldest profession*, but the practice of bashing the concept of freedom in general is new to me. Even ancient tyrants performed their bloodbathing in the name of freedom. Isn’t freedom supposed to be an unqualified Good Thing? The word freetard is a calculated insult designed to mock freedom and those who advocate it.

Haw haw, you like freedom! If you like freedom so much why don’t you marry it?

I went to Harrogate last weekend to see an ex-uni friend and her fiancée who work in an animal testing bunker. No shit. But on the way we stopped off at both Silverstone and Donington.

It wasn’t a race day so the stands were deserted like some kind of post-carpocalyptic movie, but there were interesting looking cars going round. I think these ones were Formula Ford:

The shutter speed was 1/2000 on that one so I could probably try to measure the blur length relative to the track side and work out how fast the car was going, but I don’t know the dimensions of the red and white bits, I don’t have the will to power at the moment, and I know first hand that they were going very, very fast indeed.

This is rather elite.

Meanwhile, further north at Donington Park, there is a Grand Prix museum full of grand prix history and miscellany. It’s got a surprisingly large amount of authentic hardware on display for a circuit that’s only hosted one grand prix in the last 70 years. This is the McLaren room, as new fans of the sport might not be able to tell, thanks to the ban on iconic tobacco advertising.

I don’t know how much official Schumi-signed artifacts go for, but this one was allegedly from 1998, before his total dominance. That’s got to be worth something.

And this is a corner of a field that is forever England!