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I dunno, I've never been comfortable with this narrative that somehow the public is to blame. Sure, some people have acted daft, but it also fits the narrative to report it. Basically the government didn't take it seriously, the prime minister of the day didn't attend five cobra meetings when it was kicking off, and his chief advisor said it wasn't a big deal if 'some old grannies died'. They never shut the borders, they spunked money on an app that didn't work and a track and trace that didn't work, owned by their mates, not to mention antibody tests that didn't work and even a sizeable amount of PPE that didn't work. Then they said you could go out to restaurants and go on holiday before often pulling the plug at the 11th hour, causing distress and money down the spout for joe six pack, then they said you could have a proper Christmas, then pulled the plug on that too, causing distress and worry and loss of income. Then said kids could go back to school, then the actual same day said they couldn't, causing distress and panic. Rather than give a fuck about all this though, and the grand theft exacted on the public purse by their chums, the plod and shite media working in concert have literally terrorised people with drones going for walks in open fields, or confiscated their easter eggs. Whenever the cases go up, they send a crew out with the coppers to break up some students having a spliff and a few beers, something which bizarrely me and you are somehow also partly responsible for, even though 99.99% of people are willingly submitting to the greatest suspension of their personal freedoms possibly in the history of this county. That's what we do though and what we've always done, we weaponise ordinary folk against ordinary folk while the media plays cheerleader and our palaces and offices of state are filled with gangsters and thieves.

I know a few people at work who spouted the same shite and they still say the same things now. Like none of the last year even happened. If you talk about New Zealand or Australia they scoff and say it was never possible here. They back borders being closed now but insist it was right not to close them last year. They still say that the vulnerable could be protected by just opening up society for everyone else despite the evidence. They are fucking bonkers and I don’t get it.

Cause he came And got injured in training On the very first day Oh Mandi

The Drowning Man as soon as he logs on

There is something deeply distasteful about Salmond who it would seem has abused his position and actually harmed people then turning his undoubted intellect to point the finger the other way. He must have known exactly how this would be seized upon by the mainstream media and the potential implications for the cause he has fought for for his adult life. Sleazeball

The FA Cup was THE big game of the season back then. Because we had never won it, it was always something we got shit about, shit like "Liverpool will win the cup when the Liver Birds fly away" I couldn't get a ticket so I had to watch it on B & W TV. Went to the Bob Dylan concert that night, not a drop of beer available in town, everywhere had been drunk dry. I have a signed glossy print of this, one of my most treasured possessions. So long Saint, thanks for the memories. My all time hero. Ive got something in my eyes typing this.

Worse personally, or worse society, as it did fuck all for me personally, apart from increase my Council Tax, and did the square root of fuck all for society apart from kicking unemployment down the road for a while longer. We are a point where we need vision and we get real term cuts, to wages and government departments, and a promise to tax business (profit) in line with the rest of the developed world at some point in the future, but don’t worry ‘free ports’, which will do the absoultely fuck all for me and you, in fact they’ll probably leave use worse off in th elong term, but the rich will be getting paid, so that's alright. No words about jobs, green, progress economies. No vision about where we can boost the economy in the long term, for example 95% mortgages when interest is at its lowest will bring long term problems of negative equity. This was the very definition of an empty suit saying empty things to empty heads. Sunak friends are safe though, no income tax hikes on higher earners, no attack on non domiciled or tax evaders/avoiders. Nice and safe for those who really need to pay up. No attempt to reign bonus in with taxation. All manner of simple fixes could recoup fortunes and still leave them astronomically wealthy, yet nothing. Birds of a feather an all that. Literally nothing has changed when it desperately needed to.

????

We’ll beat Chelsea then we’re 5 points behind United and with major players returning can get 2nd place. Still a good CL team it’s all to play for there, then its VVD back for next season and we can put right a few wrongs.

Ha ha ha stupid redshites going on to win the European Cup. Fucking losers.

Yeah, I reckon we'll sell the best centre back in the world, at a cut price, to Manchester City.

Jim Rosenthal: When Ian St John laughed, everybody laughed Ian St John, the legendary Liverpool, Motherwell and Scotland forward, has died at the age of 82. Jim Rosenthal, who worked with St John during his successful second career as a TV broadcaster on the iconic Saint and Greavsie show, explains why he was adored on and off the pitch. ________________________________________________________________ Ian St John was a passionate lover of the game and a passionate human being. Every opinion that he had was a very strong opinion, but if you had a different one, he always respected someone else’s view. He had an amazing twinkle and he had a fiercely competitive heart, but a warm heart. His laugh was one of those laughs that rippled around the room — when he laughed, everybody laughed. It was infectious. As a footballer, he was synonymous with the revival, and the rise to the top, of Liverpool. I always remember what a competitor he was — fearless — with a terrific amount of ability. He was part of that Scotland team that beat the world champions England back in 1967, along with the other Scottish greats of that time like Denis Law and Jim Baxter. He was right up there. He was a player of the highest calibre who had a habit of producing when it really mattered on very big occasions. In the aftermath of his playing career it was a time when the main choices were to try to stay in football or to do something more mundane like run a pub. He was at Portsmouth when they were having a dreadful time, and he managed a bit at Motherwell. Great players don’t always make great managers. In fact, more often than not, they don’t. So he was a bit of a trailblazer in that he went into a media career. Now of course every footballer that stops playing wants to go into the media. Where it was a trickle and a very narrow alley before, it’s now a motorway of ex-footballers that are desperate to get into the media. But the path for Ian St John turned out to be a magical and very important one. The way Saint and Greavsie came about was John Bromley, the iconic head of ITV sport, had the idea to put these two separate entities together in the studio for the Saturday lunchtime show so it really was an inspired piece of team selection by him that paid off for a good 10 years. TV partnerships are very interesting in that you can’t create them. They either work or they don’t and this one, from the word go, clicked. You had the Scot and the Englishman, which was a good starting point for any debate. On screen every Saturday lunchtime for a large number of years, everybody could feel the chemistry there and feel how right it was. The way they approached football punditry on television was pioneering. I’m BBC trained with a lot of the values of the BBC, but it was very straight. What Saint and Greavsie brought to football in bucketloads was humour. And not unkind humour either. It was very gently delivered humour surrounded actually by some quite good journalistic material. So it wasn’t all knockabout stuff. Saint and Greavsie of course had that respect from people on the back of their footballing careers. That ticked the broadcasters’ box but the charisma on top made it special. It completely changed the landscape, to be funny in that environment. As a father of a comedian, I know that being funny is one of the hardest things in the world to do successfully. It gave you football with a smile, which had been lacking, really. If I’m honest with you it’s lacking a bit today as well. It showed that football is an entertainment as well as a sport. Of course, it has a very big serious side. But everybody loves to laugh, and the two of them could laugh at themselves as well, which was another huge ingredient of the show. I was the butt of every report I did. I knew I would probably get a whack when it went out on air. But it was delivered with charm, with no malice. And I think that sums up Saint and Jimmy and the show as well. Today there is a lot more bile and bitterness and plain nastiness around the game, really. Not to say in those days it wasn’t a brutal environment, of course it was, but these days everyone just seems to be so much angrier about everyone — about other teams and players. It seemed a gentler environment all round. I am thankful for that. There’s an iconic programme when Jimmy one time was ill, and Peter Brackley impersonated Jimmy Greaves’s voice with the spitting image puppet on screen. Ian had to play the straight man doing that. That is one of my all-time favourite episodes of the Saint and Greavsie show. Poor Jimmy wasn’t there. But it was brilliant. In the middle of that you look at Ian and go, “Hey, you’re a heck of a broadcaster. You’re a heck of a professional.” He was generous with it. If you were working on a programme with him, you always looked forward to it because you knew he was a team player and he would do his best to help you. He wasn’t one of those who was all “me, me, I, I”. He always had that thought about other people and people that worked off-screen, behind the scenes, as well. Of the two of them, he was probably more of the TV pro that had to hold the show together, Jimmy was a bit of the maverick. He would come in on the Saturday morning, then the light would go on and he would perform and produce. Of course they’re different characters, but for that reason, the jigsaw just fitted perfectly. That partnership was so perfect. We all felt we were part of something special on the show. That came across by the audience reaction. Every show, every broadcaster, I think has its chapter and the 80s belonged to the Saint and Greavsie. When you look back now — obviously before the boom of satellite and numerous stations — they had the stage pretty much to themselves. There were two big actors at the time, one was the BBC and one was ITV, and because we shaped the show the way it became, it was a unique show at that time. Could it be replicated today? Very, very difficult, because the broadcasting cake has now been sliced into so many little pieces. It was television magic, it was television gold, even towards the later years when that sort of punditry started to go out of favour. But the two of them maintained their standards right to the end. The last show, they finished it by going off singing together, “This could be the last time” and that was a lovely TV moment that summed them up really, laughing until the end. His passing has affected so many different people. But what a life, what a fantastic, varied life he had. When his name comes up, people will smile.

Playing centre back for us is harder than playing it for almost anyone else. Nat's been brilliant for us all things considered and he's defo a Premier League calibre player. Stick him in a team like Burnley, Brighton, Palace etc and he'd be sound. He's not quick enough to have a future with us but I've got loads of respect for him for the way he's stepped in for us when we've needed him.

Funny funny how things change @henrywinter Apr 30, 2020 mcfc fans @MoSurrey & @IanCheeseman took views of 2,000 fans and wrote to @premierleague@FA "to respectfully consider: No football behind closed doors; Cancel the season now to show respect for all the lost lives to the pandemic & the heroic acts of sacrifice shown by so many." https://mobile.twitter.com/henrywinter/status/1255813984508424197

Japan didn't "lockdown" but they did lockdown. Pretty similar to the deceitful Sweden argument, which implicitly suggests that they just carried on as normal. They didn't. And, neither did Japan. It's disappointing that people still can't have an honest discussion about Covid/lockdowns. "Masayuki Kichikawa. chief macro strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui DS Asset Management, explains the domestic economic hit despite the lack of a nationally mandated lockdown. The Japanese people took it upon themselves to modify their behaviour to curb the impact of the pandemic. “It was an invisible and informal type of lockdown,” he says. In other words, Japan was different, in that the economy suffered a partial shutdown as a result of voluntary action rather than government fiat. “The basic functions of the economy were never closed,” says Richard Kaye, a Japan fund manager at Comgest. “In fact, the non-basic functions of the economy were never closed either. Japan never closed restaurants, never closed bars, never closed shops. The only things it closed were sports events and schools for about two months. The rest of the economy and the rest of life were kept going”. At the same time, people started working from home on a large scale for the first time ever. This is the backdrop against which trends in Japanese equities need to be understood. It would be a mistake to look at the casualty figures and assume COVID-19 had a minimal impact on Japan. It was rather that tighter regulations largely took the peculiar form of an ‘invisible lockdown’ rather than a legally mandated one. Citizens could be trusted to follow government advice, rather than being subject to compulsion." https://www.ipe.com/home/briefing-japan-emerging-from-its-invisible-lockdown/10049837.article

I particularly enjoyed these posts when cases were starting to accelerate in September. The graph is actually pretty accurate compared to what happened.

Going by your input on this thread there is a very good chance you misunderstood what you read.

After the Gold Rush and Hounds of Love.

I’m pretty sure James Milner played for England U21s until he was about 30, anything is debatable.

I don't think there is any real rationale. It's just phenomenally stupid, gullible, and trusting, people. You're often met with "Wel, culd u do ne beter? "Deyr doin der best". The UK has a really fucking bad serf mentality.

Because, yet again, you're completely glossing over the massive effect that lockdowns have had on curbing infections and the subsequent knock on effects on hospitalisations and deaths. We've has this all the way along with you. It's never the blindingly obvious reason that preventing people getting together and spreading the virus stops infections, it always has to be something else.

Aye. City winning the league is as close as you can get to null and void without null and void, and that makes sure everyone keeps their TV £££ and the other main prizes in the league still get settled. Nobody's that arsed and there's a nice straightforward explanation for it. It's like we can go "oh yeah well done" and everyone gets on with talking about West Ham in the top 6 or celebrating Fulham's potential Great Escape. Last year there was a big problem - scousers winning the league boils a lot of piss (not to mention a 'hilarious' "never won the PL" comfort blanket was going to get snatched away) and there had to be grudging respect for the manner in which it was achieved. For a lot of fans, seeing a nuclear explosion to the finances of the PL and all the other prizes get chucked out at the same time was preferable, because it's a sport infested by cunts.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a general population so ambivalent to so many deaths.

I think it's a combination of lazy and selfish. Too lazy to think it through, too selfish to care.

What day is it? Tuesday. All day. Die.

City could be playing at the bottom of my garden and I wouldn’t open the curtains unless it was against us.

You need to be on the recieving end of what you've typed this past year. Every time you've found a crank idea that this was all over or not as bad as it seemed or whatever you've posted it. Then gone on to support those ideas. Then when a million epidemiologist say "lockdowns are the only way to deal with this", you ignore it and go and find an opposite version "the virus started to dip 42 minutes before lockdown was announced, I can prove it with some random graph. It's just a coincidence that the R rate is reducing because of lockdown, the virus had already run its course". You're right you're not the only person to think some of the shite you've posted this last year. There's cranks all over the internet spouting it. It doesn't alter all you've done for 12 months is try to find the most positive narrative you can and rejected the obvious. If that's how you deal with things, good for you, but it doesn't alter most of what you've posted in here for 12 months has been crackers and in many cases dangerous, as casual observers might actually believe you.

He's free and comes with a Barry Manilow song.

What happened to Rupert Murdoch and Kelvin Mackenzie...

I don’t know if it’s on there. It’s airing weekly and I’m watching on Kodi. Third episode goes out tonight.

VID-20210303-WA0004.mp4

Haha. The little fucker! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-56271478

I think this may be the greatest gif of all time. Turdseye should have it tattooed on his fod.

To be fair genetically aren't we like 50 percent banana. It's all complicated when you delve into anything. I dont see why its so offensive to say there's the biological sex you are born and the sex you become or identify as. Not identifying with the sexual organs you where born with doesn't change that basic biological truth or cheapen you're identity. Why am I even putting my oar in I dont give a fuck, do we all need to have an opinion to fight for on everything. Theres plenty enough people fighting this fight I'm going to focus my energy on the ever dwindling flavour and quantity in snacks.

"Embarrassing."

This is worth a watch, she's very good- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08bphs2 Slow burning detective series with some stunning Canadian scenery.

People who leave shopping trolleys on supermarket car parks instead of putting back in the little collection areas. Lazy, lazy cunts. Karma should dictate that the next time they park up, an immensely forceful gust of wind blows one straight through their windscreen.

Hounds of Love has received a lot of plaudits over the years from outside the forum. This is from its Wikipedia entry-

I think I can answer this. Yes, they will.

My Spotify playlist. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7iSZ2I69USPT9j6nmisghb?si=dj-iv_EjQ9-E36gcWqzjTA&utm_source=copy-link (The name comes from an old joke about a compère at a cheesy Northern Working Men's Club, using a dodgy microphone to introduce the next act "some Country & Western".)

You started on the new series of Snowfall?

Anyone else really struggling to find anything worth watching at the moment? I'm down to watching C level shows that I lose interest in very quickly.

This is my ‘go to’ thread when my decision to go self employed hits the inevitable bumps in the road. Although I’m financially worse off, I’m reminded that I’m considerably better off in every other way. I feel your pain but I’m glad it’s your pain and not mine. Never again! Thanks and in your faces.

I couldn't find a dedicated Dolly thread, so this'll have to do. Very cool-

Probably will. Shadow chancellor Annalise Dodds will probably say we acknowledge these interiors need an update. Labour needs someone who's as big a cunt as Trump, someone so thick and so thick skinned he dosnt care what he says and who he offends. If you play politics the establishment way you're on a loser now anyway the cards are too heavily stacked. Trump would hold a rally it would probably go "Boris the Bonzo getting charity to pay for his girlfriends new curtains, how sad for Britain. I've nothing against charity paying for things, some wonderful things, some beautiful things were paid by charity, beautiful things beautiful charities.Look at these marvellous old soldiers raising money for our NHS, millions of pounds to our beautiful nhs, and it is beautiful right? I was only saying to my wife Melania last night how beautiful our NHS is and of course she agreed. Our beautiful NHS. Of course the people who raise money for it are the best of british, walking round gardens saving lives, up and down this great country of ours. Did Boris the Bonzo serve? No I dont believe he did. Our magnificent NHS and it is magnificent and the people who work in it are magnificent, arnet they magnificent? Our beautiful NHS made by a beautiful Labour Government, of course the lame stream media and the BBC dont tell you that, Labour made it, they break it, the people fix it. Boris the Bonzo wants charity to pay for new curtains. His wife Carrie wants new curtains. Is she his wife? No sorry its not his wife, it's his girlfriend, anyway whatever she is she needs new curtains and new furniture. Id say you the people want charity spent our magnificent nhs and I do too but I suppose that's up them.. of course the lame stream media wont report what you want only what Carrie and Bonzo Boris wants. Let's make our NHS great again. Now I'm off to make my golf swing great again.

That’s disingenuous. A lad who wasn’t ever supposed to be near our first team being compared against the first choice of a premier league team is nonsense. our back ups this year we’re whichever of Joe or Matip, plus Fabinho if we needed him to be. think that’s a bad strategy with or without hindsight by all means, but Rhys Williams was on loan at Kiddie last year and Philips at Hamburg or wherever it was. Neither were actually supposed to be backups. If van dijk hadn’t been smashed out of our season and we’d had to play Fabinho next to him all year, I’m pretty sure we’d have as good a back four as almost anyone in the league, but when you’re down to choice 5 and choice 6 out of 3, it’s no surprise they’re not as good as Burnley’s first choice for Christ’s sake. he’s nowhere near good enough but he wasn’t supposed to be, so fair fucks to him for doing his best and getting to live his dream for a year playing for the reds every week.

Yet everyone last year wanted them to stop us winning the league to "save football". We were the only ones to push them and give them a challenge , taking their title off them for a season. We at least made it interesting. Wonder if Evertonians will be wanking about how great City are if they knock them out of the FA Cup in a couple of weeks stopping them winning a trophy for a 26th year?. Or if they overtake their 9 league titles in the next few seasons. I still find it funny that Chelsea are still only on one CL since they were reformed in 2004 and all the money they've pissed away, inflated transfer fees and complete pisstake of the loan system. Yet most neutral fans bang on about Liverpool being the worst club and set of fans in existence