Post-40 Bloggers Round-up: If you read only one post?

post40 bloggers 610I recently listened to two women on a bus clothes-shaming a young girl who had just got on. Amidst the tut-tutting and pointed stares, I wasn?t sure of their motives. What dark evil were they attributing to this young person in her pink fishnet stockings, short skirt, yellow shoes and faux fur coat? In short, what was her crime?

And if we are to follow the strict dictates of the chattering classes, when exactly is it appropriate to wear a short skirt? And if not at 16, then when? Because the older we get, the more clothes we are told to cross off our fashion list.

My musings that day brought back feelings of utter exhaustion of when I was younger dressing to please? well anyone except myself. And getting off that fickle and judgmental treadmill was the best fashion step I ever took.

Catherine Summers, of delectable fashion blog, ?Not Dressed as Lamb? sums it up perfectly:

AT THE AGE OF 43 I?VE LONG SINCE STOPPED WORRYING ABOUT WHAT OTHERS MAY THINK ABOUT MY DRESS SENSE. I CERTAINLY WOULDN?T HAVE STARTED A PERSONAL STYLE BLOG IF I DID.

Hurrah!

And her wonderful post ?I will wear what I like? is my must read pick for this month.

As well as her undeniable sense of personal style, Catherine empowers others where those two women on the bus would shame. And Catherine is not even saying we have to make some big, bold statement and wear the crazies as we get older, but simply that women should be left in peace to wear ?what they damn well please.? Brava.

And in that vein, I?m off now to buy some pink fishnets and yellow court shoes while I leave you with Catherine?s online credentials:

Blog ? Not Dressed As Lamb

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And, finally, if you are a quality blogger or writer aged 40+ do register with Post-40 Bloggers as we would love to showcase your work in the New Year.

In the meantime, may I wish young and old a peaceful and joyous Christmas season.

My very best, as always.

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About Melinda Fargo

Post-40 Bloggers ? A content-rich website showcasing the talents of blogging men and women aged 40+. The place where we create, curate and commission (paid in bragging rights) the very best this blogging community has to offer. Some of us are now older parents or continuing the conversation the other side of sleepless nights and projectile vomiting. And if children were never part of the plan, the other side then of wild nights out until 5am and throwing up in the wardrobe. Possibly. Whatever their 40+ situation, the bloggers featured on Post-40 Bloggers do have one thing in common, though ? the ability to produce a quality blog post. Join us if that is you.

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WWE 2K16 Legends DLC: 40 New Images You Need To See

The big guns have arrived.

2K Games2K Games

Right in time for Christmas, 2K Games have unveiled the second part of their post-release DLC campaign with the unveiling of the Legends Pack for fans to purchase now.

That means, rather wonderfully, that you can now play as Dusty Rhodes, Big Boss Man, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Mr Perfect, Lita and Trish Stratus, for the price of a couple of cups of coffee. And with much greater satisfaction.

Obviously, the addition of these six to the roster ? as well as two Terminators (as the pre-order bonus has also been released as a stand-alone DLC) ? means you can relive their classic moments as well as seeing who would win between the legends and their modern world equivalents. Not that there?ll ever be another American Dream of course.

So with the DLC sitting ready to download in stores, let?s have a look at the stars included in all their glory?

40. Let?s Get Rowdy

2K Games2K Games

There?s something of the caged animal about him, which is perfectly captured in his entrance animations. It?s the little details that really sell it.

2K Games2K Games

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2015 F1 season statistics: the year in context | 2015 F1 season review

The 2015 Formula One season will probably be remembered as little more than a continuation of the previous year.

Mercedes continues to win by much the same margin, though once again there was a single driver who was able to beat them on exactly three occasions. And while Mercedes? reliability improved, Renault?s continued problems and the arrival of Honda meant this year?s cars were, on the whole, no more reliable than they were 12 months ago. It made for a rather static season.

However there was evidence that the deeper trends in the sport remain unchanged: especially for longer seasons and smaller grids.

Reliability

The new V6 turbo hybrid engines presented a significant reliability challenge 12 months ago. It caused one of the periodic reversals in the generally improvement of reliability in F1, matching previous setbacks in 2010 (when three new teams arrived) and 2006 (when V10 engines were replaced by V8s).

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With Caterham not returning in 2015, one of last year?s least reliable cars was gone. And with the likes of Mercedes making significant reliability gains, 2015 might have been expected to see another step improvement in reliability.

This didn?t happen largely due to frequent breakdowns at McLaren (who were running a new Honda engine) and Toro Rosso.

For the second year running only three drivers won races and only three drivers started from pole position. Over the past two seasons Mercedes pair Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have amassed 36 pole positions, losing out on just two occasions: to Felipe Massa in Austria last year and Sebastian Vettel in Singapore this year.

The 2015 season was also the fourth time in the last five years that one driver has won ten or more races. Hamilton did so in the last two seasons while Vettel did in 2011 and 2013.

Drivers, teams and races

The 2016 F1 calendar is the largest ever seen with a record 21 races currently scheduled. If it wasn?t for the arrival of new team Haas F1 would have more races on the calendar than drivers competing in them.

The appearance of Haas will help reverse the gradual; fall in team numbers, something which would have been almost entirely unchecked had it not been for the FIA?s efforts which led to three new teams arriving in 2010. Two of these have since fallen by the wayside, leaving F1 a long way from the heyday of the late eighties and early nineties.

The 2015 season in statistics

Review the stats highlights from each race during 2015:

2015 F1 season review

Browse all 2015 F1 season review articles

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Cooking On A Bootstrap: BOOK THREE needs YOUR help!

  

Well hello my wonderful readers. It?s been a year since my last cookbook came out, and I am inundated with messages every day, asking when my next book is coming out.
The good news is, it is nearly written. A hundred budget recipes, in the same style as that surprisingly runaway bestseller A Girl Called Jack, with Breads And Breakfasts, Super Soups, Beans Pulses And Lentils, etc, with extra chapters ?Eat Your Greens? and ?Don?t Throw That Away? for nifty tips on using leftovers. (Stale cake truffles, anyone? Or bread crust soup?) It has been an absolute joy to write; irreverent, cheeky, nifty, thrifty, and delightful. I?ve stripped it back from the gorgeous gloss that was Book Two, as beautiful as it was, the glass slipper didn?t quite fit my budget foot, so I?m going back to basics.
My first book came about by accident. Some of you may know this story, or most of it. I started writing a politics blog after a local councillor declared that ?druggies, drunks and single mums are ruining our town? in early 2012. I started going to the council meetings, as an unemployed single mother, and writing about what I saw. The blog expanded to a diary of my day to day life, the impact of housing benefit paid 11 weeks late, of cuts and suspensions to benefits and the real impact that had on a young mum and a two year old boy. Of turning the fridge off because it?s empty anyway. Walking everywhere in the pouring rain in your only coat, dragging a child behind you, into every pub and every shop in walking distance to ask them if they have any job vacancies. Of trying hard not to go red when the person behind the counter assesses your ripped jeans and scruffy jumper and the crying child behind you and says no. You add the ?not for you? in your head, unsurprised. You drag that toddler home and pour the last of the tin of tomatoes over some basic pasta and you try not to hurl it at the wall when your three year old says ?I want something else, Mummy.? Because there isn?t anything else.
I made a decision, then, to try to feed myself and my son as well as possible on the scraps of change I had left at the end of the week. My first recipe, a carrot and kidney bean soup, had 100x as many hits as my previous blog post on local election results, and so I carried on, documenting my food shop, poring through famous recipe books and adapting their recipes to the contents of my local supermarket basics range, forensically costing it, and uploading it onto my blog.
The recipe blog turned into a publishing deal, and in February 2014, A Girl Called Jack was a runaway success. The letters and emails pour in daily from readers who have learned to feed themselves and their families on low incomes, well, and simply. I never set out to create a movement, I just wanted to share what I was doing with others. Yet still the letters come, from desperate people trying to make meagre incomes stretch to meet rising living costs, growing children, and demanding working hours. Students trying to supplement their loans with part time jobs balanced between their studies. People who have just left the military, having joined in their teens, unable to cook a meal for themselves. People from all walks of life, who want to learn to cook but haven?t the money for fancy gadgets or premium ingredients. People asking me, when are you going to write another book? We need another book.
So here we are. I?m not looking to make a fortune or have a number one bestseller (although the first one was nice!); simply to write and deliver a book to anyone who wants it, and to be able to pay my bills. I?ve decided to do it like this, myself, because I?m a bit of a maverick, and so I can deliver something affordable, authentic, from my heart to your kitchen counter ? the best book I can write, to the people who want and need it, as quickly and directly as possible.
 I might not succeed ? Kickstarters are only successful if they reach their full funding amount, and I have crunched the numbers to try to keep my costs low to deliver an affordable cookbook, without compromising on the quality. I?m going to try ? for every one of you who has asked me for a third book, I?m going to try my damndest to give you one. Will you help?
TO PRE-ORDER A COPY OF ?COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP?, CLICK HERE.

THANKYOU!!
Jack Monroe. Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr: @MxJackMonroe

Sebastian Vettel voted F1 Fanatic Driver of the Year 2015 | 2015 F1 season review

Sebastian Vettel has won F1 Fanatic?s annual Driver of the Year poll.

The Ferrari driver won three times this year and was the only non-Mercedes racer to take victory all season long.

Vettel also won the Driver of the Weekend poll four times, as many as world champion Lewis Hamilton. The other drivers to win Driver of the Weekend more than once this season were Max Verstappen (three times), Nico Rosberg and Sergio Perez (twice).0

Felipe Nasr, Kimi Raikkonen, Nico Hulkenberg and Romain Grosjean took a win each.

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2015 Driver of the Weekend winners

2015 F1 season review

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Mercedes raise the bar as their rivals come up short | 2015 F1 season review

Mercedes team stats 2015

Best race result (number) 1 (16)
Best grid position (number) 1 (18)
Non-classifications (mechanical/other) 2 (2/0)
Laps completed (% of total) 2,220 (103.06%)
Laps led (% of total) 936 (86.91%)
Championship position (2014) 1 (1)
Championship points (2014) 703 (701)
Pit stop performance ranking 1

Mercedes surely cannot have expected to have dominated the second year of F1?s V6 hybrid turbo regulations as emphatically as they did the first. But in terms of pure results they actually did better.

After 19 races they had amassed more points ? despite 43 more points being available last year ? and achieved more one-two finishes and front row lock-outs. They won the constructors? championship one race earlier and Lewis Hamilton sealed the drivers? title with three races to spare ? where last year it had gone down to the wire.

Although Mercedes looked even further ahead at the first race weekend of the year, over the course of the season their performance margin over their closest pursuers was slightly reduced. What made the difference this year was that the team?s off-season focus on improving reliability delivered results: the W06 only failed to see the chequered flag three times due to technical problems.

Watching the same team start and finish in the top two places week-in, week-out is never going to be a recipe for exciting races, but Mercedes cannot be blamed for their rivals failing to put them under greater pressure. Had Renault made the kind of gains in the winter Ferrari had, we would have seen a very different championship. Instead they ? and by extension Red Bull ? drifted further away.

While Mercedes had opposed the FIA interpreting their rules in such a way which permitted in-season development, this decision went against them. Nonetheless they remained the team to beat throughout the season and debuted an upgraded engine at Monza. This gave them one of the few reliability headaches of the year, as a failure forced Nico Rosberg to go back to an old unit ? suffering a failure at the end of the race ? and he concluded the season with a more heavily used engine than his team mate.

Nico Rosberg, Mercedes, Yas Marina, 2015Rosberg turned the tables on Hamilton ? but it was too lateMercedes also sharpened up in the pits, producing consistently the quickest complete stops of the season, although a slow one for Hamilton in Spain delayed his efforts to reclaim a place lost to Sebastian Vettel. The Ferrari driver was a regular thorn in the side of the silver cars.

In Malaysia he wielded the Ferrari to brilliant effect on a hot track, opting against mimicking Mercedes? early pit stop under the Safety Car and making his escape while the W05s lost time in traffic. Mercedes treated him more warily from then on, and even late in the season they were always careful to avoid giving him a chance ? notably in Brazil where they followed him onto a three-stop strategy.

The most embarrassing moment for the team came in Monaco where they made the mistake of pitting Hamilton under the Safety Car. This was at least partly at Hamilton?s urging, and problems with the team?s timing system contributed to the confusion. Fortunately their second car was close enough to collect the win, though of course that was no kind of comfort to Hamilton.

A mystifying performance in Singapore saw the two silver cars occupying the third row of the grid and only one of them reach the chequered flag ? Rosberg?s, in fourth place. The one-off dip invited many theories ? some more outlandish than others ? but the combination of an unusual track where Mercedes had also been less competitive 12 months earlier plus post-Spa changes to tyre pressure and camber settings appears to have contributed.

This was also the point at which the pendulum swung from Hamilton to Rosberg in qualifying performance. It was too little, too late to help Rosberg in the championship ? Hamilton wrapped it up in America. But that was the last time he saw the chequered flag first, which leaves an intriguing question mark over the balance of power at F1?s dominant outfit heading into the winter.

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2015 F1 season review

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The Brothers Grimsby gets a new poster

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In the action-comedy Grimsby (aka The Brothers Grimsby), when Sebastian Graves (Mark Strong), a deadly MI6 agent, takes on a mission to prevent a massive global terror attack, he must unfortunately reunite with his long-lost brother Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen), a sweet but dimwitted English football hooligan? proving that behind every great spy is an embarrassing sibling.

Nobby has everything a man from Grimsby could want, including 11 children and the most gorgeous girlfriend in the northeast of England (Rebel Wilson). There?s only one thing missing: his little brother, Sebastian, for whom Nobby has been searching for 28 years, after they were separated as kids. Nobby sets off to reunite with Sebastian, unaware that not only is his brother MI6?s deadliest assassin, he?s just uncovered plans for an imminent global terrorist attack. On the run and wrongfully accused, Sebastian realises that if he is going to save the world, he will need the help of its biggest idiot.

Louis Leterrier directs the film, which also stars Penelope Cruz, Isla Fisher, Ian McShane, Johnny Vegas and Gabourey Sidibe.

Grimsby opens in 2016.

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December Video Round-up & a hello!

videoHello and welcome to my first roundup as video editor! I?m thrilled to have been asked to fill Nadine?s shoes, and hope I can live up to expectations! This month I?ve been on the hunt for your festive videos, and with lots of people joining in Vlogmas this year there?s been plenty to choose from! To kick things off you can have a look at my latest video which shows you how we put together our huge Christmas scene, which pretty much takes over our living room but really gets us in the Christmas spirit!

Top of this month?s Vlogmas vloggers is Katie from Mummy, Daddy & Me. Katie really does create stunning videos and I?ve loved following her getting into the festive spirit. This one features her family?s annual festive day, and is such a lovely video to get you in that Christmassy mood.
Another blogger killing Vlogmas is Emma from Brummy Mummy of 2. Emma always makes me laugh with her fantastic honesty and humour about parenting, and she also has a December baby and has been celebrating her daughter?s fifth birthday this month. Watch her enjoy her special day in style!
The final Vlogmas video comes from Jess from 2.2 Children And A dog, who has done a Q&A for her two children as part of her December videos. Her little girl is so sweet and her boy has some fantastic facial expressions whilst answering his questions ? priceless! 

Jane from practically Perfect Mums has been shopping for her son this month and discovered which store has exactly what she has been looking for for her tall slim boy. Sian at Helpful Mum visited the fantastic children?s Museum, Eureka, in Yorkshire this month where her children met Santa. She shares her footage from the day which includes a look at the recently opened section of the museum and other festive happenings there.

Collette at We?re Going On An Adventure recently visit Stocked Park for their Christmas Adventure. It?s a place I?ve wanted to visit for a while now, especially at Christmas as it just looks so magical, so do have a look at this video to get you feeling in the festive mood!

In a bid to deter her children from watching endless Playdoh and Kinder Egg videos on Youtube, Tina from The Mother Geek has been putting together a book advent this month, where she reads a different book every day. I think this is such a fantastic idea and a great way to encourage reading to those who maybe aren?t so keen or too young to read.

My two love the book, Stick Man, and I have to say it?s one of my favourites too, so when I saw My Twos Mums had visited the Stick Man Trail at Moors Valley Park I was a tad envious. It looks like such a great day out and their little man certainly looks like he enjoyed himself.

My husband and I have always opted for a fake Christmas tree, but there is something special about going and choosing your own as Caro from The Twinkle Diaries shares with us. Her and her family visited their local farm and enjoyed mulled wine and mince pies, as well as meeting all the animals whilst their choosing their tree.

Finally, not exactly a Christmas video, but perfect nonetheless is this beautiful pregnancy announcement from Chloe at Sorry About The Mess. A lovely little video to announce the arrival of their next little one, I can?t help but feel slightly broody watching it!

So that?s it for December and 2015! Please do visit each others posts and comment and support each other and our channels!

Submissions for the January/February round-up must be in by 13th January 2015. You can tweet me, @hollybobbs, or email me through my blog Hollybobbs. You can also join in my linky, Your Youtube, which is every Friday on my blog.

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Button expects no change from 2016 tyre rules | F1 Fanatic Round-up

In the round-up: Jenson Button says the complicated new rules on tyres for 2016 will not have a significant effect on the racing.

On this day in F1

Prince Birabongse Bhanudej Bhanubandh, better known as B Bira and still the only driver from Thailand to race in the world championship, died on this day 30 years ago.

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