LongTimeLurker

Somebody appears to be using multiple usernames.

To be fair to Tom Johnston, if that scenario happened junior clubs could get licensed because they would be in the pyramid. Where things get complicated would be if there were any other conditions added on top of that like progression for licensed clubs being purely voluntary because from what I have heard that was often the main point of contention between the SJFA and the Lowland League pyramid organizer types. You only need to look at the SoS league and the widespread belief that Wigtown, who have since went into abeyance, deliberately avoided winning the championship to avoid forced LL entry to see that the SJFA's posture wasn't completely unreasonable.

Absolutely sickening, but not in the least surprising. None of the usual suspects on here will condemn it as it doesn't fit their simplistic Union Jack Red Hand bad Tricolour Saltire good mindset.

Makes sense. I'm sure they would do well and have a very good shot at getting to the Lowland League within a couple of years of joining. The last thing the SFA full members want is a massive influx of new licensed clubs, so having a semi-detached junior grade that can't get licensed and join them at the subsidy trough is in their interests. Will be interesting to see what happens in the East if/when the EoS stabilizes in numbers terms at around 16 or so. If the HL can operate as a closed shop with no vacancies there is no obvious reason why the EoS couldn't do that as well. If clubs are thinking of making the move I would strike while the iron is still hot.

The original plan in Gordon Smith's time was two divisions of 10 at the fifth tier that would be drawn from top junior teams as well as top nonleague seniors with the junior superleagues feeding in along with the nonleague seniors and that would have worked much better from a quality standpoint, but the Highland League were bitterly opposed and could only be persuaded to get on board if their 18 team division remained intact and the attitude of the likes of Tom Johnston to losing control of their fiefdom is well documented obviously.

The remoter parts of Shikoku (sjc is based in one of the larger cities there) might be worth a visit if you had more than a week and aren't just doing a whistletop tour of all the main tourist traps and wanted to see a bit of Japan away from the conventional the tourist trail. Make sure you know some core Japanese vocabulary and understand your way around the train system, and can use a few Japanese words with people that don't speak English and are not used to dealings with gaijins in shops and hotels, before trying something like that though. Been on Shikoku for a few days a couple of times and although most of it is nothing out of the ordinary for scenery, the mountains in the central part are quite spectacular on a train line from Okayama over the bridge to nowhere then through the mountains to Kochi on the south side. There's a bit of a different vibe about the place to Honshu maybe because it's still more traditionally Japanese, although not as much as with Hokkaido, which is like Japan's answer to the American wild west in terms of being a frontier of relatively recent settlement (they stole it from the Ainu along with northern Honshu if you go even further back). I also used to enjoy the Sea of Japan side of Honshu (especially the Niigata to Akita part) as a way to get off the beaten trail, but maybe more in a way you appreciate when you are working in one of the overcrowded cities on the Pacific coast and need to get your head straight from dealing with a Japanese boss rather than as a tourist. Less industry, lots of space and everything seems to be happening at a slower pace.

Pretty sure they'll have that on Kyushu, although it's probably more Okinawa and the Ryuku islands that are the destinations of choice for that in Japan as they are even further south. Don't know too much about Kyushu, unfortunately, beyond shochu, the local alcohol, being well worth a try as an alternative to sake, as I have only been there once for a single day.

Only to Hakodate at the southern end and after that you still need to take JR Hokkaido local express trains that are quite slow by Japanese standards to get to Sapporo and beyond where the skiing is likely to be, so add at least another 3 or so to that. I'd look into whether you can get a flight to Sapporo linked into the initial flight to Japan. Not sure Hiroshima is worth a visit compared to some of the other possibilities south from Tokyo when you could do the likes of Kyoto and Nara instead. Beyond being hit by the atom bomb it's nothing out of the ordinary as middling sized Japanese cities go given it's long since been rebuilt.

He seemed to be able to track down the poster who used TomJohnstonsmagicjobby as a handle on here and got him to cease and desist, so suspect he knows his way around this forum.

There is a school of thought that all bird species are descended from the dinosaurs, so that's not necessarily true. Beyond that sometimes it's better to let the other person have the last word and let others decide what it said about their IQ and emotional maturity level.

The potential for a car crash in all of this is that the Lowland League playoff games are currently scheduled for the first two weekends of May and that means champions would need to be sorted out almost two months before the junior season typically ends at the moment. There would be a lot to negotiate if the east and west superleague hooked into the LL in pro/rel terms.

...and why would it be Rey that rises so spectacularly to meet Kylo if there are lots of force sensitive people kicking about like the wee guy at the end, and why would she so conveniently run into BB8 and Finn in TFA and know how to fly the Millennium Falcon. You don't need to be a plastic light sabre waving fanboy to expect some sort of explanation for that before the end of the trilogy.

Difficult part is when it has to be voted through by members at an AGM. Think it is Clydebank, Girvan, Rossvale and Gartcairn that are most likely to go for it as they are not traditional junior clubs and it might be the smaller ones that have little regular support and are more under the control of direct participants that might be willing to give it a go if they are not too far off on licensing. At the very least the clubs should be able to use this to demand that the fixture list gets sorted out or else as Kilwinning Rangers appear to be doing at the moment.

Check back through the thread and the first part appears to have been answered in the affirmative.

The thing that remains to be explained about Rey is why she is so strong with the Force and the Anakin reincarnation thing would tie that up nicely and silence all the Mary Sue complaints once and for all, especially if she is going to be the founder of a new Jedi Order with Yoda showing up as a force ghost to guide her as appeared to be the reason why she would wind up with the old books from the island. With that out the way they have a clean slate for the next trilogy revolving around the first generation of new Jedi that she trains. Given the same director is involved on that as with TLJ the only reason for the convoluted casino planet side plot appeared to me to be to set the stage for that in some way.

Think the powerbrokers would have two major problems. Firstly persuading the HL to move away from its current 18 team format and potentially include colt teams from Perth and Dundee, and secondly persuading the smaller full-time clubs in the west of Scotland that the SoS league is where their U-20 development side belongs. The moves by BSC Glasgow would help to address the second issue with potential entry into the new League 3 being their true unstated motivation.

There was a newspaper article a few months back that I am currently unable to find that claimed there was a plan to start a new ten club League 3 with four colt teams and the top HL and LL clubs that would have automtic pro/rel to League 2 and that the bottom club in that new division would have the playoff game with the HL and LL champions. Find it hard to believe that a club like BSC Glasgow are doing something on a WoS League in isolation that is not tied into other moves that are already underway at the moment on league restructuring given they would stand to benefit from that type of restructure of tier 5 of the senior grade's pyramid.

The more obsessive fans that understand all the timelines involved think the sister of Kylo thing doesn't work. No idea how that works, but they usually get those things right. At the end of the teddy bear's picnic film in the first trilogy Anakin Skywalker appeared as a force ghost along with Yoda and Obiwan Kenobi after Luke had a funeral pyre for his father's remains. That raises the question of why he doesn't return Yoda and Obiwan style to tell his grandson Kylo Ren to get a grip and drop his Darth Vader fixation. Think the answer is that he has since reincarnated as Rey somehow and the next episode will be Vader wannabe last of the Skywalkers vs Anakin reincarnation and new chosen one bringing balance to the force. The wee dude with the broom at the end will probably be the hero of the next trilogy, so Rey is very much expendable if Daisy Ridley sticks to her guns about being out after the three trilogy films she is contracted for and will probably be no more successful than Luke was on bringing everything to resolution anyway given that would be no more trilogies.

Would be good, if that was really the end game, but do the existing SFA full members want 160+ junior clubs gatecrashing their party when it comes to receiving subsidies from the SFA? Why not just have the east and west superleagues hooking in as feeders to the LL and have any junior club that gets licensed and wins the league title in the LL playoff? The only reason to launch a WoS league is to keep the juniors semi-detached and blocked from pursuing club licensing and full SFA membership. I strongly suspect any WoS league is really about shoehorning colt teams in rather than having the likes of Talbot, Clydebank and Pollok gatecrashing the old EoS premier's new playpen, unfortunately.

Not sure it really ripped up where TFA was heading, if you had no preconceived ideas from the extended universe. On Rey's parents, for example, people tied themselves in knots in youtube clips for two years over it, but in the final analysis what kind of parents other than a pair of total wasters would leave their sprog in the care of a character like Unkar Plutt? That was a good fit for what happened previously and I suspect it's heading for a reincarnation of the special one reveal from Yoda's force ghost in the last installment of the trilogy now Luke's out the way because a "Rey I'm your son" moment would have been too weird. On Snoke, is the lack of back story any different from the way the Emperor character was handled in the original trilogy and was the death not somewhat similar? Nothing hugely untoward there. The character was very much in the way of the ultimate Rey vs Kylo showdown that will round it all off, so had run his course as a plot device, if Kylo wasn't going to be redeemed.

Guess if anybody is in the know on here they've been told to keep it under wraps. As things stand there's nothing stopping a Colt team playing in the EoS or SoS, but they can't get promoted any higher from there. Hibs operated a team like that in the EoS a few years back, so there is even a recent precedent. The end game though appears to be eventual entry into the SPFL through promotion where the Old Firm are concerned. Given that appears to be about as welcome as an Ebola outbreak among the followers of League One and Two clubs, the full-time clubs probably need the nonleague full members on board when rule changes come to a vote at SFA level, so some wider revamp of tiers 5 and 6 and cash injection might be on the cards.

Happy Life Day everybody!

To be fair though all of the films had major plot issues like that. Rogue One was an elaborate way of finally explaining away some of the absurdities of the original installment. In general this latest film focused on providing an entertaining couple of hours to the watch it once and then move on mainstream audience and was basically the Star Wars version of Bill Schatner's it's time to move out of your parents' basement Saturday Night Live skit where the obsessives are concerned by deliberately not focussing on Snoke's backstory and Rey's parents. What George Lucas needed to do at some point with the prequels basically instead of going all trade negotiations and mitochlorian on the audience.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/poll-half-of-scots-back-an-independent-scotland-in-eu-1-4646247 16-34 year old 66:34 Yes 55+ 36:64 46% of 2017 Westminster Labour voters would vote Yes, while 14% of SNP voters would vote No 19% each of Better Together and Indy voters have changes sides since 2014. Better times ahead again for the SNP by the looks of things if there is a soft Brexit as the deal over the RoI-NI border seems to require.

A reminder on what the SPFL have been up to on Colt teams and that it isn't just the Old Firm that are potentially involved even if that's the angle that the Daily Record always talks up: https://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/competitions/premiership/spfl-consider-introducing-colt-teams-into-league-system-1-4473517 Glenconner claimed a while back that six SPFL clubs had expressed an interest: