Ne Moe Imya

I don't know about inside bits, but the part about the valuations being off the scale is definitely true! There is no way Doucoure is worth 75m, and there is no way we'd spend that much on him. That is van Dijk money! The club is not going to spend a near-record transfer fee on a player that isn't a nailed on starter! I suspect that there are going to be a lot of sad people on here when we sign a 35m midfielder from France or Germany who no one had heard of 2 weeks ago (Fofana?) and just roll out some combination of Thiago/Macallister/TAA/Jones/Bajcetic in a double pivot most weeks with this new player just coming in as a rotation option. Just my opinion for how things are likely to end up going down, I just cannot possibly imagine spending over 50m on a player who wasn't originally in our plans at all.

Reminds me of the time (posted on here maybe 8 years ago?) that my missus came out of the bathroom complaining of a "tingly feeling" on her teeth. When I started asking questions, she revealed that she had seen the laundry bleach solution tube I had bought to treat stains on clothing and, not reading what it was for, thought it was for whitening her teeth. Heaven only knows how she's even managed to survive this long!

I would say Kalvin Phillips would offer us more or less what Henderson would have offered us this season if he stayed. Whether you think that would be a good thing or not probably says more about your view of Henderson (or maybe your level of expectation of us this season) than Phillips.

I still think that the best option we have is to somehow convince Zubimendi to leave Real Sociedad, but if that proves impossible, this one makes a lot of sense. A bit of a risk in that he's coming from the Brasilian league, but his statistical profile stands out pretty strongly there. As one Fluminense commenter on a forum I was reading said "makes a lot of sense - Andre is basically just Fabinho with more muscle mass." He doesn't lose the ball, seems to profile a lot like Gini to be honest.

Has there been any mention of a fee anywhere? Maybe I'm getting a bit greedy. A few months ago I would have said they were doing us a favour by taking his contract off our hands. Now I'm thinking we can rinse them for 40m!

I mean, whisper it very, very quietly, but depending on the fee, ... Er, never mind. I mean, how dare they come after our captain!

Charismatic he certainly is not, but the most egregious descriptor on that list is "cool." As if anyone who could remotely be described as "cool" would go to the effort of hiring a marketing firm to promote him as a brand ambassador. Anyone who's ever heard Michael Owen speak would go into hysterics at the thought of describing him as "cool."

I don't understand the point with Threads. Surely, if you're a tech billionaire with unlimited funds, you can understand why you start an app like this. Elon bought Twitter, changed everything, and seems intent on running it into the ground. The only thing you have to do to take advantage of the massive hole in the marketplace is to create something that does what Twitter used to do. Instead, they have basically taken Twitter the way it is now, made it slightly worse, and then said "yeah, that'll do." You literally can't see a chronological feed of all the people you follow! That was the MAIN thing that Elon has tried to get rid of that has made Twitter so much worse! All they had to do was for Threads to offer that and it would have succeeded, even with all of the invasion of privacy that Zuckerberg brings with him to anything he does.

No, it's an attachment that goes under the seat. When you turn the knob on the side it extends out and jets the water straight up into the target. I will say it took a time or two of getting used to it. It is particularly powerful, so I would say if you don't want to clean out your entire lower intestine, you have to be careful when turning it on. But the angle seems to be adjusted perfectly to hit exactly where you need the water to go.

Got a bidet attachment for the toilet for Christmas last year. Not sure if it was intended as a joke, but it's actually one of the best gifts I've ever gotten. Absolutely changed my life. I still wipe dry with bog roll afterwards, but it's genuinely amazing to walk out of the bathroom feeling clean as a whistle.

With some people it only lasts a few hours. When we bought Nunez, there were a bunch of posts on the FSG Out thread calling them out for never spending any money within a day.

Actually, the Szoboszlai signing is a pretty clear signal, at least to me, that we're going to continue with the way we were playing at the end of last season. Trent and Salah both have a tendency to step inside from their wider positions, and Szoboszlai has exactly what you'd want in a player who starts out inside and ends up outside, so it makes a lot of sense from that standpoint. Now you'd think if you wanted to replicate that on the other side that you'd need to find a left-sided centre back who is good on the ball and can come inside to build play on that side of the pitch, because that isn't going to suit Robertson very well.

He's fine, but it's a very "we're hoping to finish 5th/6th" signing. If City signed him and he was going to be a solid backup, it'd probably help them win the league, but as a first choice, he's pretty meh.

Imagine if disgruntled Aegis employees stole some tanks from Alanbrooke Barracks and then took over Sunderland. It's utterly, utterly mad what's going on.

Russian state television continues to spread the absolute worst kinds of dehumanizing talk about Ukrainians:

Last night the neighbor came over to say that the car in our drive had the brakelights still on, despite being off and without a key. Go outside, sure enough, they weren't making it up. I thought I'd have to take it to the mechanic and pay an arm and a leg to sort it. But on a whim, I googled the problem and figured out it was the small plastic bushing that keeps the brake switch depressed that had broken. Popped off to the parts store, 5 quid later I had the bushing. Spent 10 minutes removing panels, getting it press-fit into place, and putting everything back the way it should be. Very short job but felt like I had conquered the world when I was done!

Commentator: "That Liverpool midfield not looking quite as mobile as it should." No kidding! Fabinho playing like he's wearing cement boots and Milner running as if he's just been diagnosed with arthritis.

If Lukashenko dies, that's really, really bad timing for Putin. It may sound crazy, but the range of possible outcomes resulting from that go from "basically nothing, Putin replaces him with another strongman" to "it turns into a Berlin Wall moment and ends up being the straw that breaks the camel's back with Putin's whole regime." Seriously, the last election in Belarus was such a poorly managed sham that half the country protested vehemently. It was only by extremely oppressive crackdowns and Russian support that Lukashenko barely managed to keep hold of the country. One can easily imagine a scenario where Belarusians demand new elections if he's dead, Putin doesn't have the bandwidth or military capacity to quell the budding protest movement and from there things can spiral out of control for him pretty quickly. If Belarus were to see a successful protest movement leading to some increase in democracy (or any democracy at all), the rest of the so-called "Russian sphere of influence" (i.e. the former USSR countries) will see that as a massive signal. At that points all bets are off in terms of which countries start to realise they can take advantage of the situation to reduce their dependency on Russia. Georgia could rise up and throw Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream out, or Kazakhstan might move to distance themselves more from Russia, or maybe Moldova finally decides Russia's not a threat and moves against Transnistria. Or none of that could happen, Putin could find enough FSB not already busy in Ukraine to send to Belarus, squelch whatever's happening there before it starts, and find another toady to put in Lukashenko's place. But it's definitely a potential black swan event if he dies, especially if it happens while he's in Moscow if there is any suspicion that the Kremlin did it.

He's averaged 1400 minutes/season the past 5 years, and those were his prime years! Makes Keita look like Wolverine.

In positive news, there are reports that Chelsea are going to offer 70m for Vlahovic and United are going to pay stupid money for Neymar, so at least our rivals continue to make mistakes. If we can indeed make some good decisions ourselves, at the very least a path back into the top 4 is right there. Not sure if it matters much in terms of competing for the league title, with City finishing on 90+ points every season, but it is good to see those clubs wasting money.

It's a bit of a weird one, isn't it? On the one hand, it's kind of hilarious that they're printing out ballots for the "referendum" on Belgorod declaring independence. Also that this "Russian offensive" has gone further in a day than the other one did in 9 months in Bakhmut. On the other hand, a few people (at least) have actually died, so it's probably not that funny for them! One has to suspect that the real motive here is to force Russia to re-deploy some troops to their borders, thus reducing the numbers at the location where Ukraine is going to spring their counteroffensive.

Oh, the shark wasn't anywhere near 5 meters! That would have been more than a "swim over to my float and calm down," that would have been a "get out of the ocean and never go near it again" type of thing. Brilliant pictures. It's really something to be in the ocean, isn't it? I find it compelling in a way that is strangely inexplicable. Even if I'm not seeing anything worth shooting, just snorkeling along while the small reef fish like minnows and grunts are swirling around you - it's borderline magical!

I have been getting into spearfishing lately and about a month ago I was diving under a bridge in some pretty bad visibility. Could maybe see 6-7 meters or so, that's it. So you can imagine my surprise when I got to the bottom, looked over and saw a decent-sized bull shark, maybe 5 meters or so from me, just drifting along with the current! Thankfully he wasn't interested in me in the slightest. I still had to swim over to my float to compose myself for a few minutes before I could carry on. Got the heart pounding for a moment, that's for sure!

37% to finish fourth right now on 538! Honestly can't believe it's even close at this point. In February you'd have said almost no chance at all.

22% now on Fivethirtyeight. At this point, we need to win all of our games, and have one of Newcastle or United pretty much have all the bounces go against them.