Ivo den Bieman

Gas- Nah und Fern

Embarrassing!

Basic Channel- bcd-2

Fabric Live 52 mixed by Zero T. Bit of a mixed bag, but on the whole not too bad.

sure thing, Adolf

...at being the pantomine fascist villain. C*nt has been at it a lot longer and is a little bit better at it than you.

^^ trying very, very hard

Yeah, it's a fantastic book,, few are as good as this author at getting across the claustrophobic pettiness of living in a dictatorship. I also read Wolf Amongst Wolves by the same author earlier this year, a similar style of writing set in the hyper-inflation year in Berlin in late 1923, and it was just as compelling. Falladas was almost impossible to find in English translation for a long time, so it;s good to see his novels coming out in new editions.

The Mondays for me. Fool's Gold is an all time classic by the Stone Roses but not much else of theirs really grabbed me. It's hard to look back on the Inspiral Carpets and the Charlatans with anything other than faint embarrassment. The focus on the big four/five/six "Madchester" bands took away something from the genuinely revolutionary things going on in the dance scene at that time: folk like 808 State, A Certain Ratio, A Guy Called Gerald, etc etc.

This thread is fast becoming like a Samuel Beckett play. Two West Lothian down and outs, on a scrap of waste ground, sit and argue for months, waiting for one to be proved right about a matter they've both forgotten about, and the moment (i.e. one of them being right) never arrives. Edited to add: :lol:

:lol: (just thought I'd join in )

I agree with Knightswood Bear. The only Irvine Welsh worth bothering with are the first three- The Acid House, Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares. The gap in the quality of the writing between Trainspotting and Porno is pretty stark. The main interest in the book is working out where Welsh took these five characters next, but otherwise it's a poor, poor book. Glue is alright-ish but about 200 pages too long, and a bit of a re-tread. Filth and If you liked school, you'll love work are just embarrassing and not worth the paper they're printed on. Welsh is a bit of a cash register on the basis of his first three novels, but the number of copies you'll find of his books from Glue onwards in charity shops or for 1p on e-bay shows that that's pretty much dried up.

naturally, a privately-educated Edinburgh schoolboy would have his finger on the pulse of acceptable employment levels at local authorities, before he's ever had to pay any Council Tax in his life. You've never had to work for a living, so I guess it's understandable that you can be so cavalier with a trifling matter such as unemployment.

er, 300k wiped out (plus whatever money has been lost as a result of the subsidised rent you will pay for this and next season) could have saved anything between 20-100 jobs, depending on what jobs are being cut and in what service areas. Yes, it wouldn't have prevented the majority of the 1,000 jobs lost, but it would have softened the blow for the local area a bit and kept some folk in a job. Keeping people in a job is much more important than the tiny minority of the town's population bleating aw ah want's a team tae watch oan a Setirday. Still, I'm sure the club will generously offer those newly unemployed free tickets. PS Blackburn and Bolton were key towns in the English industrial revolution and exported cotton all over the world for 150 years. They didn't need football teams to publicise their name. And, as Mr X points out above, I'm not sure the kind of publicity "Livi" have generated in the past ten years is the kind of publicity that a town really wants, to be honest.

The only slight difference being that Bolton and Blackburn were founder members of the Football League, whereas "Livi" were only shat into existence barely ten years ago. It really will stick in the craw of the local authority workers being laid off, that the council has written off six figures worth of debt, and provided council facilities at a subsidised rate for this and next season, to a demonstrably failed venture such as the Franchise. New businesses will invest in that town because of its location, infrastructure and business opportunities/special rates made available by local government, not because the re-named Meadowbank Thistle cheated their way to the SPL, by spending money they had no intention of repaying.

Watched Black Dahlia on DVD, done by the same guy that did LA Confidential but it's not as good a film. the period detail is beautifully observed, even in the performances of some of the actors, but the plot is over-complicated, with at least one element too many, and you very easily lose track even paying close attention. Maybe a film that will get better with repeated viewing, but only a 6/10 on first sight.

Try James Kelman's A Chancer, or Jeff Torrington's Swing Hammer Swing!....

Hmmn, their best chance, if the weather wipes out the rest of today, is to batter up to a lead of 150+ as quick as poss, the pout England under pressure for a minimum of four and a half sessions. Different scenario to the one which would have obtained without this storm, they;d have batted today and half of tomorrow, put on a lead of about 250-300, the bowl again in a much stronger position...

A quite monstrous thunderstorm, the ground is under water, prospects for any play for the rest of the day "bleak". How bitter would you be as part of the SA camp. Clearly better in three of the four tests, thwarted twice by a no. 11 and now by the weather. Topping batting and bowling averages yet still losing 0-1.

PS: It's colder in most parts of Scotland than it is in Moscow and Tallinn at the moment.

Enjoy your inevitable cold! In the middle of Perth, the Tay is freezing over: two large banks of ice are forming and gradually reaching towards one another. With the forecasters predicting it to be even colder this weekend and early next week, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see it frozen over by then. I shall take a picture in daylight tomorrow. If anyone fancies seeing a lower league football match before the end of this month, tough titty, I think. Can really see almost all of January's card being wiped out in Divisions 2 & 3, beyond the odd game at Hampden.

Yep, I'm fucking sick of it as well.

Yeh, it's only two days before Christmas to boot. How unforgivable.