Tamura

I'm all for giving the benefit of the doubt to the victim/survivor, but in the case of Schofield do we even have one? I don't tend to frequent Twitter, but as far as I can see the "evidence" (for want of a better word) so far is a swifly silenced talking head on GB News who wasn't even talking from first hand experience. So is there more to this story, or is it nothing more than malicious gossip based on his brother being a nonce and Schofield having a falling out with Willoughby for reasons that are murky at best? And not forgetting Schofield having had the audacity to come out as gay...

There's a clear and obvious difference between someone's "personal views" and this situation. The couple in question were perfectly free to hold a particular viewpoint. They were also perfectly free to collect as many gollies as they wanted. They could have had an entire house full of them and, unless say they were placed deliberately on display in windows, nobody would have cared. However as soon as they put them on display in their place of work, the rules change especially as adverse inferences can be drawn based on their apparent Britain First sympathies and references to lynchings. Just as adverse inferences can be drawn about people who use the logo of a BNP splinter group for their avatar...

2 hours ago, Boycie said:

Maybe we shouldn't be celebrating people losing their businesses/livelihoods. 

If you'd been around at the time, you'd have celebrated Kristallnacht.

In a cup final last year a Lancashire junior showed he hadn't learned much about sledging when his bowling was hammered all over, using the rather geneic "fat cunt" and "specky cunt". When he was leaving the ground his mum was carrying his gear and my taunt of "if you play in the big boys' league you should carry your own bags" made him blush a bit. It seemed to have robbed him of the power of speech too.

Our season has got off to a bit of a slow start, with the league cancelling the first week in its entirety due to most grounds not being ready, then the second week only saw two premiership league matches take place because of weather. Still, we're off to a decent start with a convincing league away win against last year's runners-up, plus wins in the league's own cup and the slightly more prestigious Heavy Woollen Cup. And as an added bonus, the evil empire at Hoylandswaine have started their quest for a sixth consecutive league title in somewhat embarrassng form, with their new and supposedly improved batting ling-up getting hammered by 115 runs, with only one batsman making it to double figures. Hopefully this means it'll be a slightly more competitive title race this year, the league needs it. 

On 4/30/2023 at 10:39 PM, Tommy! said:

I'm sure that's great chief, but Keith provided what I was after an hour and half before you.

When you consider it's a sport where participants are obliged to wear a tie and a waistcoat, I'm amazed you felt the need to ask in the first place.

2 hours ago, Tommy! said:

We're not talking about behavior or disturbing play, were talking about a dress code which I can't understand the logic behind. Like or dislike rules like noise or moving when players are down on the shot I understand the logic behind them but here I can't, besides the aforementioned snobbery and was hoping for a sensible explanation.

Snooker has a totally different atmosphere to football. In all my years watching snooker, I've never heard a snooker fan ask a player (or fans of an opposing player) if they had an extra portion of quail pie, nor heard them question if the referee knew the exact identity of a close male relative on their family tree. Yet that does happen somewhat often at football grounds. Equally I've never once looked at someone wearing a replica football shirt and thought "Wow, they look smart". It's not like dress-codes are anything out of the ordinary, I've lost count of the amount of pubs, clubs and restaurants that have no jeans/sportswear/trainers/etc rules in place. Despite that some people seem to think a basketball top is classed as "smart casual" (and if you think £40 is expensive for a meal for two merits a response of "Christ alive it is expensive" then it's a shame Little Chef aren't in business any more. And somewhat off-topic if you want really good steak go to Hawksmoor, not Miller and Carter). Since I didn't make the dress code rules I can only speculate, but I'm assuming they are trying to maintain a distinction between snooker and football, or darts for that matter...

7 minutes ago, Tommy! said:

Appropriate for what, sitting in silence? If it's on TV I understand nothing obscene or political on shirts but apart from that it sounds like pure snobbery.

Snooker is a game that's a law unto itself when it comes to etiquette and proper behaviour. You can't imagine a football refree shushing the crowd when Marcus Rashford is about to shoot at the goal can you?

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

Getting round the "no football shirts" rule with a lovely homage to the 'big T' Talbot Cov shirt today.

Apparently the attempt to make the audience dress more appropriately has been in place since 2018, which is weird since last year I noticed someone wearing a shirt by Dutch hardcore punk/proto-grindcore band Lärm. Front Row Brian should be seething at the injustice.

24 minutes ago, westlondonmist said:

Someone said to me that he shouldn't be sacked for not believing in transgenderism

That's not why he was sacked, although you could say the transgender row was the proximate cause of the sacking. He was sacked for gross misconduct for intimidating and harassing a colleague and breaching the confidence of a pupil, according to what was said to the high court. I'd go further and suggest that Enoch Burke's own behaviour while suspended was probably a contributory factor to his eventual sacking, since if you're suspended on full pay while an investigation is in progess (a standard step in a lot of disciplinary procedures) the absolute last thing you want to be doing is completely ignoring that fact you 've been suspended and keep trying to go into work.

Not sure how many people will be following the saga in Ireland regarding Enoch Burke and his family, but they are very much the gift that keeps on giving.

Enoch Burke comes from a family that are no stranger no controversy (have a listen to the Belfast Telegraph's podcast episode Meet The Burkes for the background), long before the current brouhaha. Enoch managed to get himself suspended from his job as a school teacher in a row over the use of a "they" pronoun for a transgender pupil. Enoch refused to accept this however, and decided to keep going to work anyway, forcing the school to obtain a court order to try and keep him off the premises. Only that didn't work, so Enoch was being fined €700 every time he turned up to school. And that didn't work either. So they locked him up for a while for contempt of court. Only to let him out after a while, and for him to keep turning up to school every day (at least, the days when he's not at a constant series of court cases) relating to the dispute, despite the fact the school's disciplinary process has concluded and he's been sacked. But Enoch doesn't accept the sacking obviously, and keeps turning up to work and getting arrested for trespassing. Enoch rejects this (obviously!) since he can't be accused of trespassing just for going to work. For anyone fancying a deeper dive I'd recommend more Belfast Telegraph podcast episodes (conveniently listed in chronological order), Enoch Burke: What is the Mayo evangelical Christian trying to achieve?, The Burkes: Mayo Christian family cause chaos in court and Enoch Burke claims 'judge laughed, mocked and ridiculed me' - controversial Christian's court travails

CD spines that use small fonts and/or stupid colours like white text on a cyan background, making browsing a frustrating experience at charity shops. I don't know why anyone would deliberately choose to make essential information like the artist and album title less visible to a potential buyer.

14 hours ago, Boycie said:

Right, without wishing to turn this thread into a left vs. right thing, how would you all be reacting had a well known pundit/commentator stepped down due to expressing right wing/anti-immigration views for example? I bet you'd all be celebrating (though if I'm wrong here then I'd be happy to be corrected).

Not a valid comparison.

Despite what some people might think, anti-racism and racism are not opposite yet equal. Is being opposed to murdering Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people en masse using gas chambers an equally extreme position to advocating the same? Of course not. Similarly being opposed to discrimination based on skin colour, gender, religion or sexual preference is not the same as advocating discrimination based on the same. It should be clear to any reasonable person that one set of views are abhorrent in the 21st century, and attempting to portray opposing views as equally abhorrent is intellectually bankrupt.

Sign-makers that can't get apostrophes correct. Especially when they aren't even consistent in the same sign...

The first record I ever bought was Greatest Hits (the 1977 version) by Black Sabbath. One of my older brothers got me into bands like Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest at an early age, and this record seemed the simplest way of hearing their best songs without having to buy all their albums on limited pocket money. The artwork is awesome, sadly the advent of CDs mean you don't often get covers this detailed any more.



It's an extract from a picture called The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I have these.

King of the Death Matches 2001 1/6/1 & 2/6/1 (4 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2002 12/7/2 & 13/7/2 (4 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2003 1/8/3 & 2/8/3 (7 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2004 25/6/4 & 26/6/4 (4 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2007 22/6/7 & 23/6/7 (4 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2008 20/6/8 & 21/6/8 (4 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2009 6/3/9 & 7/3/9 (4 DVDs)
King of the Death Matches 2011 16/9/11 & 17/9/11 (4 DVDs)

I guess it's a step up from the apartment wrestling videos that were advertised in the Apter magazines. Given the internet contains copious amounts of nude woman of all shapes and sizes, frequently performing a multitude of sex acts to satisfy virtually any preference, I'm not sure why people are willing to pay money simply because someone wrestles in WWE/AEW/wherever. 

11 hours ago, Egg Shen said:

Kongo fight was really good

That's probably the first time that's been said in the history of the MMA forum.

Just finished bingeing on A Nightmare on Elm Street blu ray box set. I think I'd only seen 1 and 3 before, and things went downhill after 3 before improving somewhat with Wes Craven's New Nightmare. Possibly one of the scariest things was on the extras where Bruce Wagner was flaunting some outrageous ear hair. 

IKEA wanting £40 to deliver a flat-packed bookcase. Anyone would think it's being delivered by someone from the shop in a taxi.

1 minute ago, Chest Rockwell said:

Except when they're screeching like banshees, tipping bins out and shitting all over the place.

Foxes, that is. To my knowledge bendy buses don't do those things.

The other night I heard some insane screaming and thought someone was being murdered. I had a quick look out of the window and looked up and down the street, before noticing the screeching fox just at the end of my path. There used to be a whole family of them lived in the field at the back of the house, I remember looking out one day and seeing a couple of tiny flashes of ginger following behind their parents.

Seeing an urban fox on my way to the shop.

I remember playing on my friends' computers back in the day, they had VIC-20/Commodore 64 or ZX81/Spectrums. I got horrendously stuck playing Ship of Doom as to how what do with the sonic screwdriver (the difficulty of finding the right verb and sentence structure will resonate with anyone who ever played many text adventures). It saddens me to know the whole game can be done in under 8 minutes according to a walkthrough at what seems to be a regular speed.

Dragon 32
I badgered my dad to get a computer for the family. Since he was a university lecturer, he wouldn't get a computer like a Spectrum since he thought it was more of a games console (he was probably right about that to be fair), so with one eye on an educational tool he bought a Dragon 32 instead. Quite why he didn't get a BBC Micro that plenty of schools used I'll never understand, I really wanted to play Elite (although the one time I tried playing it on someone else's computer I couldn't even figure out the initial docking part, so never got started). But the Dragon 32 did get some of the decent games like Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner. I did learn how to program in BASIC though, which eventually led to me getting a job as a multimedia computer programmer in 1993, so it probably worked out better than if my dad had bought a Spectrum.

PC (386)
Somewhat of an upgrade from the 32K Dragon, although I had to cope with the horrors of the 640k memory and needing boot disks. Insane to think how much tinkering had to be done just so you could play a game with things like the sound on and a working joystick. I think the first game I bought was Phantasie 3, a RPG I'd played on my friends Amiga but never got too far on as he thought it was boring watching me play an RPG (very much correct on that score)
 

I also loved The Secret of Monkey Island, but I think the game that had the biggest effect on me was Civilization, which kick-started an ongoing obsession with Sid Meier games. Strangely though I never played Railroad Tycoon, although I was never into train sets either. Sending a some carriages round, then bringing them back again, then putting then in a siding? What's all that about? Give me Scalextric over a train set any day of the week. Still have a desktop PC to this day.

Playstation 1 and 2
I bypassed the early Sega and Nintendo consoles, and despite work attempting to port some of our software onto the Amiga CD32 never bothered with that either, despite their cheeky advertising campaign.



But there was a lot of buzz around the Playstation launch so I took a punt. Things had come a long way since the eight minute playthrough on Ship of Doom on the Spectrum, the playing time on Final Fantasy 7 was ridiculous. The quick playthrough took long enough, but the repeat play to find Yuffie and go through the whole chocobo breeding and races in order to get to the difficult locations for things like the Knights of the Round summon materia and killing Ruby Weapon and Emerald Weapon. I was a bit slow off the mark getting a PS2 (around 2011 I think!), I only bought a second hand console so I could play Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (as Baldur's Gate 2 on the PC is my favourite game ever), only to be a bit disappointed that it was more of an action RPG (I really should check these things before buying).

Maybe one day I'll get a Playstation 3/4/5, but I'm happy enough playing strategy games from 10+ years ago. When you start your gaming with grapihcs like Pettigrew's Diary, there's never much of an urge to spend lots of money just to get the newest console that has slightly better graphics than your perfectly fine current console.

Mine is whether Roger Hollis, Director General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, was a spy for the Soviet Union (specifically the GRU, for reasons which will become apparent). This theory that Hollis was a GRU spy with the codename Elli became known to the wider public on publication of Chapman Pincher's Chapman Pincher book Their Trade is Treachery in 1981, but probably became known to a much wider audience as a result of the attempts to ban former MI5 member Peter Wright's book Spycatcher from publication in 1987. I never gave it much thought at the time, and it was only after sorting through my dad's things after he died that I found a copy of Spycatcher and decided to give it a read as I remembered the controversy. While Wright may be unreliable on some aspects of the Hollis case, there's plenty of anomalies regarding Hollis's career that just won't go away. He was supposedly cleared by a statement in parliament by Maggie Thatcher, but anyone who thinks that closes the case would be advised to remember Kim Philby was similarly cleared by foreign secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955, before his 1963 defection and exposure as a Soviet spy since the 1930s. Some historians, chiefly Christopher Andrew and Ben Macintyre (both of whom have worked with KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky), claim Hollis has been exonerated by Gordievsky's claim that Elli was in fact Leo Long. The difficulty with that being that none of the known facts about Elli actually match Long, specifically Long was a KGB spy not GRU, Elli is known to have had access to MI5 files about Soviet spies and Long never worked there, he worked for MI14 who dealt with Germany during World War 2. Andrew's claimed exoneration has been debunked at length by Paul Monk in Quadrant magazine and Chapman Pincher's 2011 book Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups: Six Decades of Espionage, rather than refute that many strange anomalies of Hollis's career Andrew simply ignores them completely. While the case against Hollis being Elli is far from completely proven, it's a significantly stronger case than Leo Long being Elli which rests solely on the evidence of a KGB defector (who would have no knowledge of GRU spies, the KGB and GRU being rivals, despite being sister organisations) saying that was the codename on his KGB file, despite other KGB sources who say his codename wasn't Elli anyway, it was Ralph. To me, it's strange that Andrew's claimed exoneration of Hollis as Elli rests solely on Leo Long actually being Elli. Andrew accepts that there was a GRU spy Elli who worked in MI5, yet then turns round and says Leo Long was Elli despite being a KGB spy (not GRU) who didn't work in MI5. Yet he has the brass neck to criticise "conspiracy theorists"...

On 12/30/2022 at 7:34 AM, Egg Shen said:

Still unsure if iPlayer are showing it though. In Amercia I believe the Bellator vs. Rizin main card is being shown on a 24 hour tape delay, so maybe it'll be similar here?

It's on BBC3 from 9pm onwards tonight, at least according to my onscreen guide.

Was wearing this while shopping in Sainsbury's this morning and the assisstant says "you're not the only one mate". My faith in humanity has been restored. For the background story on the policeman, see this article on the Battle of Orgreave.