mikey

If you're behind at this point, you're really behind.  So, here's a cheat sheet for the first round.  No winners/losers, just the matches I thought were worth watching.

Day 1
Hiromu/Honma (Honma works hard to contribute, Hiromu works hard on the carry)
Ishii/Despy (the match you never thought you wanted to see until it was booked)

Day 2
Nagata/Suzuki (old fellas bash the shit out of each other)

Day 3
Ibushi/ZSJ (ZSJ might've lost his Twitter password but he still has his talent)
SHO/Shingo (match of the round - they've been building a new style of junior heavyweight wrestling and this is SHO stepping up to join the party)
Tanahashi/Taichi (how did such a missable junior become such an unmissable heavyweight?  I love Taichi now.)

Day 4
YOSHI-HASHI/Tenzan (Not great but considering Tenzan's state, it's one of the best things YOSHI-HASHI has done for years)
Kojima/EVIL (Some people will never be as good as "washed up" 49-year-old Satoshi Kojima, that's how good he was and how good he still is)

So that's eight matches you can easily skip with a clear conscience.

5 minutes ago, iPumaPants said:

Makes enough sense. I didn't see much about Chris Roberts. I assume it was allegations that he admitted to? 

He can't deny one of those allegations, he spent 14 years spreading the story himself to anybody who'd listen and a number of people who didn't want to listen.  If he only loses his job, he got off light.  If the accuser has a legal case, she should work with the police.

I'm really not enjoying looking for a job at the moment and money is getting really tight. It really seems like the ball is in the employers court to an extreme level at the moment, I'm mainly applying to positions online through online agencies and it's a nightmare, they hardly tell you anything about the company so you don't go to them directly,which means virtually applying blind, they insist on being told loads of information before you can send your application and half the time your CV won't even be read anyway because it's been filtered out by a robot for not having the right buzzwords on it. They're getting so many applications that they can be unreasonably specific which means even though I know I could do something due to having good transferrable skills it's hard to get the opportunity. Also despite these all being jobs I could get with my previous experience I'm completely burnt out on 9-5ing for other people anyway so my heart's not even in it.

Feel exactly the same as this. I was made redundant in October and I've rewritten my CV probably a dozen times, applied for hundreds of jobs and tried dozens of different job searches to try and find a job I might have a chance with. I've been to Bristol twice on interviews but it's all a waste of time. I had to sign on, which I didn't want to do, and my wife is sick so she can't work. Just at the end of my tether. I can't make my rent this month, I'm very worried.

Richard Herring, Pret a Manger across the road from King's Cross station, tapping away on a very nice MacBook Pro. Personally, I go next door to Starbucks and just steal Pret's wifi but he might not know that.

I told my wife that if I ever earn decent money again, I'm saving up for a 3D printer so I can print my own wrestling figures. She rollled her eyes like I'm a saddo. She's probably right.

Good luck, Chest. Still without even an interview here. The original plan was to work through til December at the current company, use the money my wife was going to earn from a job she took on and this was going to get us to Chile. This is now out of the window so my wife's dream christmas at home is gone. Looking for contracting work but I'm not even getting an interview. Not sure what to do really.

Thanks Mikey, will drop you a line at some point tomorrow or thursday once I've sorted out getting to Wimbledon and back. Having a quick chat with the chap on the phone, the building is actually next to a college by the sounds of it, and many of their staff either come straight from there once completing their studies, or go there to do part-time brush up sessions for things like Shorthand, so maybe I can do both of those there as well which would be magic.

 

It's just down the road from the Centre Court shopping centre by the looks of it. Do you know Wimbledon well? It seems nice enough.

Was in Wimbledon last night seeing the employment law advisor (I can do nothing, all I can do is try and get a full month's notice in money out of them) and Wimbledon's one of the few places outside central London, probably along with Richmond out that way, where it doesn't feel like the suburbs but a city centre in its own right. Wimbledon station can be unpleasant to commute through due to the sheer mass of humanity but it's full of decent-sized companies, lots of young people and a few students. It can be pricey for food and drink, Wimbledon Common is one of the honeypots for the rich in South West London, but I think it's one of the more pleasant places to work and study in London.

I forgot to post here that I am, for the first time in over seven years, officially unemployed. I've mentioned before the numerous problems with the managing director of the company and they've made me redundant. Sort of. I spoke to ACAS, a friend who is a former CAB advisor and the recruitment consultant who got me the job and all to some extent reckon that this whole situation has been mishandled. To some degree they think I have a case for wrongful dismissal based on mishandling the redundancy. I'm off to see the South West London Law Centre this evening to discuss my options but this fucks everything up. I was trying to get through to December so my wife and I can go away, now that's up in the air. Just it's very frustrating as I always seem to attract dysfunction at work into my life.

Do the NCTJ, it's a prerequisite, but it's about building contacts and writing well in that order. Jason Burt is a terrible writer but his contacts are so good he gets football stories cold that others don't get. PM me and I'll ask my friend Iain, who's a former UKFFer, to get in touch. He's risen fairly fast in sports journalism, his girlfriend is a local news editor.

"It'll be anarchy. That's what could happen tomorrow. I'm serious, I'm serious... We'd have to think: do we have curfews, do we put the Army on the streets, how do we get order back?"

Except it wouldn't be anarchy, Gordon Brown, it would be chaos. Unless the staff of Tesco collectivised and ran the branch as a cooperative.

Two things:

On the Irish Ale front, always had a lot of love for Kilkenny on draught but I have only seen it in bottles for about 10 years.

On the forgotten beers front, I was really fond in the late 90s of a beer called Boston Beer. I assumed it was some American beer that was discontinued and the only Boston Beer brandname I'm familiar with is the parent company of Samuel Adams. Is there a beer encyclopedia anywhere?

This has been the case for years though. You can play bits and pieces cricketers in Twenty20s, you need to hit out and some junk bowling medium pacer can have an impact when he only has to bowl 12 deliveries and can put everything into them. We've moved on in the one-day game but our selectors revert to type and still think they can muddle through. You would hope they would learn but this is a discussion that has been had the entire time I've been a cricket fan.

One of my two locals is the "best pub in the area" but that's like being the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind. I always try a super-expensive real ale, their most notable recent addition being from the Cronx Brewery called "Kotchin'". The brewery is in a small industrial unit on the edge of a shit council estate and the company is named after one of Croydon's more modern nicknames. However, it's a decent enough blonde ale and it's nice to see some small companies reverse the trend of brewing. To be fair, beyond kids looking to get fucked up on a Saturday night, middle-aged bores who drink real ale are probably the only reliable punters for a boozer nowadays.

EDIT: Being down with the urban youth, I have to say "Pint of the Cronx, fam" each and every time I order it.

If they havent said otherwise then I'd take it as you are still on probation.

 

Unless your boss is an arse, there's no reason you shouldn't ask him/her what their plan is regarding your status (unless you think there is a realistic chance they'll terminate you then you may wish to not bring it up?). Or ask HR if you have a contact there.

More the case is that if I'm still on probation, I can leave at a week's notice. I'm applying for other jobs and this would open up jobs with an immediate start date.

EDIT: Had a terrible conversation with my boss, basically I'm shit eventhough I'm now doing a job I wasn't employed to do and am not qualified to do. I'm being treated like a dog's body. They won't let me take time off either, I want to punch the cunt every time I see him.

Don't fuck around with Twitter, I got a stage 2 warning for saying a supplier were shit. They were and are and put a dangerous circuit under my desk which could have led to me being electrocuted but my company didn't care because they were our client, as well as a supplier.

On a completely different subject, does anybody do HR here? I was employed back in December with a six-month probation but have never received either verbal or written confirmation that I am now permanently employed. Back in June, my boss gave me a "pull my socks up" talk and it's two months later and I've had no word about anything. Is there legislation governing this sort of thing? If so, am I still under probation?

We used to be all too very nice about walking. Alec Stewart, gentleman cricketer, who'd always walk and there were a few times where it was shown that the ball didn't carry and he'd given his wicket away by not waiting for the umpire.

Apparently, the Swann non-decision yesterday was because over 50% of the ball has to be hitting leg stump or they can't overrule it. This is a missile tracking system that can measure down to the millimetre. It was going to hit the stumps, you can take that to the bank.

I didn't think the Khawaja dismissal was that controversial. Watch it in real time; there's a sound and the ball deviates. Snicko showed a hefty thud.

The problem is they seem to be stuck in this halfway house of picking older players because they don't have faith in young players and then also picking young players because they feel they ought to. They should just shit or get off the pot here. Either go with the youngsters or pick your best team irrespective of age, as doing a bit of both isn't really working.

http://usvsth3m.com/post/52219683239/14-ki...o-block-but-you

14 kinds of people on Facebook that you want to block. 12 and 13 are the absolute pits.

Just saw this one. For me, the most annoying people are the ones whose lives are going brilliant and they can't stop crowing about it. Worse still, everybody feels the need to congratulate them for being such a douchebag. One guy I know somehow got his way into a really good project management job, he must be earning six figures as he now lives in Abu Dhabi and drives a Porsche around. It wouldn't bother me but he's clearly crowing about it. Same went for the guy who moved to the British Virgin Islands but I know he's the sort of guy who begs his way into a woman's knickers so I'll let him off a little.

With the hair and the change in look, Chappelli looked magnificent. The others looked seventiesed up but if they looked like themselves. That guy looks nothing like how he does in real life. In all honety, I couldn't get past how hot Cariba Heine is. She needs to get herself to Hollywood.

Like all fact-based drama, it is supposed to be ludicrously wide of the mark but was entertaining anyway. The 60's and 70's changed sport for the better and the worse.

I can never quite get past the fact these people who are deeply self conscious about their genital mushrooms etc are willing to have their leaky disfigured bits broadcast on national television. Like an embarrassing vagina, it all seems a bit fishy.

Often, these people can't afford the special treatments they get in this show and so they have to throw themselves into the telly machine. Take the guy who didn't have half his face. He was at the end of his tether and had exhausted all options in the NHS so this show allowed him to get an experimental nylon facial prosthetic which has transformed his life.

History isn't on our side. My concern is that Lord's will be very baked up by Thursday and be like a bloody road. In saying that, they don't have anybody the quality of McGrath or Gillespie now to hurt us.

Given the love shown to it, I caught Searching for Sugar Man on Netflix. I liked it whilst I watched it but catching up on the story around it, it dismayed me to learn that they'd omitted to tell us that Rodriguez had some success in Australia and New Zealand and had toured there in the late 70's and early 80's. They made it sound as though he'd had no success anywhere.

In that version, presumably her inflated breasts are the bit poking out of the snow that attracts the rescue team.