LongTimeLurker

No funny business behind the scenes apparently:

Initially tactical voting against the Tories and now tactical voting against the SNP.

Izdani Grad (Town betrayed) Norwegian documentary that goes a bit deeper on Srebrenica than most western media coverage does. There's a WWII angle they only have time to gloss over so it's still far from a full picture of why so many people in this area were particularly eager to get stuck in where ethnic conflict was concerned ca. 1992. Ratko Mladic and co lost the plot in a way that deservedly had them wind up in The Hague but the documentary outlines evidence (perhaps a bit too one-sidedly by interviewing only Serbs and the Bosnian Muslim political opponents of the Izetbegovic family) that the Bosnian Muslim leadership in Sarajevo and the Clinton administration deliberately engineered a scenario in Srebrenica that could be used as a pretext for the NATO bombing that brought the conflict to an end. Hence the title: In a similar vein to The World at War Granada's The Spanish Civil War series from 1983 is worth a look from back in the era when there were still plenty of people around to give first hand accounts:

Twitter can be a more effective way to be heard by using their preferred hashtags to push your message.

Think this issue is at the discretion of the board as a new rule allows them to boost membership to 18 as they see fit so no vote for Bo'ness. http://slfl.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/SLFL-Rules-Version-13.pdf B1All clubs must, on the Completion Date,be licensed, full members ofthe Scottish FA. The maximum number of clubs will normallybe sixteen (16)but may be increased temporarily to a maximum of eighteen (18) at the sole discretion of the Board. They may need Kelty to get promoted to be able to do this if that rule applies to the Old Firm colts scenario.

It's ludicrous that BSC Glasgow are allowed to play in Alloa for years on end without developing a ground of their own in their own area. What's particularly galling about this announcement though is that they prefer to push an old firm colts team plan rather than invite applications from below from newly licensed clubs like Clydebank that missed out on promotion this year through no fault of their own. Expanding to 18 that way could have been used as the prelude to promotion and relegation being expanded to two clubs rather than one. Problem with that though is that it halves the time needed for recently licensed former junior clubs to empty out all the former boys clubs and pre-2015 EoS and SoS clubs.

It's very difficult to build up the sort of buzz that the SJC generated amongst the few games a season type fanbase that tended to get drawn in by those games so the SCC is probably going to be more West of Scotland or East of Scotland cup sort of levels of interest for the forseeable future. Think the sort of viewpoint in this recent newspaper article about missing the SJC will be felt by a lot of people: https://www.linlithgowgazette.co.uk/sport/football/linlithgow-rose-ace-ruari-maclennan-explains-why-he-misses-playing-in-the-scottish-junior-cup-so-much-3217365?itm_source=parsely-api but the powers that be at LL board sort of level (i.e. the same brain trust drawn primarily from ex-boys clubs and pre-2015 EoS premier outfits that thinks the old firm colts plan would be a good move) won't be falling over themselves to do anything about it and will be pushing the SCC instead.

The bulk of the comments on the LL thread on this development are of the GTF variety. Far from the first bizarre move by George Fraser and co. If the LL board prefer to operate with 18 moving forward (suspect they may be counting on Kelty going up to make it 16 + 2) then the extra places should have been filled by application to get the likes of Clydebank and Darvel in that missed out through null and void.

Agreed but it's probably going to take a few years for the junior vs senior tribalism to fade. Nobody that matters from the nonleague senior leagues side of things has been advocating merging the SCC and SJC. They were pushing the SCC harder than they really needed to this past season given the issues related to the pandemic. The SCC is their creation and the one they want to push.

That's the thing though. Odds on it wouldn't be viewed as feasible and anyone suggesting it would simply get laughed at. The SJC is no longer the top dog competition for a seperate grade always taking priority over league fixtures that get arranged at short notice to fit around it. In a pyramid context it is now at the mercy of league fixture secretaries agreeing to leave a series of prime Saturday dates open for them when pyramid leagues have to draw their top tier league seasons to a close by late April/early May in time for end of season playoffs and have a 160+ entrants SCC to fit in along the way.

...and it's far from clear that the WoS fixture secretary is even going to be able to provide suitable scheduling dates for it next season. 38 game season for WoS premier + Scottish Cup for up to 5 of those clubs that get licensed + an SCC with over 160 entrants + new west cup = good luck with that. Will be interesting to see how many WoS clubs retain SJFA membership this summer.

...and wasn't it made abundantly clear in the original trilogy that he didn't really receive the proper training? If Anakin was too old in the prequels how was Luke going to get everything right after a crash course at an even older age. Shouldn't be a surprise that a new Jedi order he subsequently founded wouldn't work out too well.

If it becomes that there's no obvious reason why you would even need an SJFA. The SFA could organise it like the FA do with the FA Trophy and FA Vase down south. In practical terms given the large number of Saturday fixture dates required in the absence of universal floodlight provision it's a case of either the South Challenge Cup or the Scottish Junior Cup as the flagship cup tournament. Doing both is very difficult logistically when leagues also have 30+ league fixtures to fit in along with extra league specific and/or local regional FA cup competitions of their own. As far as I am aware there has been no indication that the EoS plan to stop having all its clubs without exception participate in the South Challenge Cup next season.

The weird thing is that it's actually many of the hardcore pyramidistas that are doing this who were previously very anti-SJFA. I have been assuming this is all hypothetical. Is there any concrete info available that any of the ten newly entering clubs from the east region south have been able to retain SJFA membership and will participate in the SJC next season? If not, hopefully they'll finally give this a rest now.

Is that even possible in logistical terms though when a large percentage of clubs entering won't have floodlights and travel up to the north region is potentially involved?

Why do that now though when they didn't have to do anything to facilitate that when all the other former east region clubs joined and where do you find up to six free Saturday fixture dates without completely disrupting their EoS comitments?

We'll have to agree to disagee. Your interpretation is one of the possibilities that could be correct but I think the problem has been that too many fans have been looking for 100% certainty over something that has deliberately been left ambiguous which brings us back to the B side of the Sopranos song...

...so given you are far from alone on holding those sorts of sentiments how likely do you think it is that the EoS will be bending over backwards in early 2021 to allow the ten incoming clubs from the east region south to retain SJFA membership and continue their SJC participation? My assessment would be somewhere between highly unlikely and exceedingly slim and was frankly astonished by some of what was being posted on that subject in the complete absence of any solid evidence.

I'll agree that there's a clear trend that he has lost it in the final sequence of episodes and is highly likely to get offed, wind up in jail or possibly even witness protection (speaking to the FBI about the Arabs like he did is a major no no and makes him a rat in mafia terms) in the not too distant future but my personal take is David Chase probably simply got sick of the mentality of the less cerebral portion of the audience so he wound them up big time with the ending by basically having them metaphorically whacked after a blindingly obvious reference to the Godfather had them waiting in eager anticipation for Tony's brains to wind up all over Carmela and AJ. They didn't see it coming when the screen went black and never heard a thing.

Very strange but do we really need to invoke an 8 foot tall primate that has yet to be identified by science to explain that though? It's a bit like all the thylacine bollocks in Australia. Couldn't completely be discounted before people had cellphone cameras and easy access to trailcam technology but incontrovertible photographic evidence would have shown up over the last few decades if they were really there.

It's really too bad Disney didn't ignore all the irate fanboys and stick with Rey being nobody and have Rose Tico and broom boy becoming the champions of the downtrodden in some way to allow the story to move forwards and grow in a way that provided scope for future trilogies based on the new characters. TROS was bordering on unwatchable with the Emperor angle and The Mandalarion is basically just a fan service nostalgia trip. Hopefully Rian Johnson gets his trilogy because as things stand right now Star Wars appears to have run its course and exited on a whimper.

Ind (Walker) is the Northern Independence Party candidate. Keeping their deposit would be a respectable showing.

It was soon revealed that he had really meant to say lap dancing from what I remember but that got nothing like the same level of publicity.