LongTimeLurker

Bonnyton Thistle and Glasgow Uni would be obvious ones and it may not just be the OF on colt teams. Smaller full-time clubs that have a 3G pitch like Hamilton Accies and Kilmarnock could put their U-20 development teams into something like this with little additional overhead compared to what they are already doing. Throw in Clydebank at that point and you already have eight members. Would not be at all surprised to see Rossvale and Gartcairn go for something like this, so think they could find a way to reach viable league numbers without any involvement by traditional junior clubs, although having a few to pad things out to 16 or so in numbers terms would obviously help them in credibility terms.

It's Bo'ness as in an abbreviated form of Borrowstounness with a small "n" not Bo'Ness for what it's worth. Not sure where this Linlithgow Rose thing is coming from. There were some rumours that they looked into it towards the end of last season, but it would have to go to a vote of their membership and I think we would have heard about it on here if that had happened. Bo'ness United have been more vocal about it publicly but are also not at the stage where a final decision has been made, as far as I am aware, but are putting everything in place to be able to get licensing at some point down the road. As things stand a superleague club in the west is having a postal vote of its members at the moment to decide whether to switch to the senior grade. Clydebank are known to have been exploring EoS league entry for next season along with Dalkeith Thistle and a third club yet to be named from East Lothian, who are probably Haddington Athletic.

At least we know the TV series is going to reach a conclusion. Given the age George RR Martin is and the health he appears to be in, book readers may wind up with more questions and answers.

Or they quietly changed the latitude number at some point to keep Montrose and the Highland League happy, because it was definitely the mouth of the Tay initially. The old Tayside league junior clubs tend to have reasonably good grounds compared to those from the old Fife league with many even having the so called devil's illumination installed, so some of those clubs can't be too far away on licensing. Given the Lowland league isn't drastically greater in geographical scope than the East Superleague it will be interesting to see, if not having to go to Wick, Brora and Fort William changes anybody's perspective on what the best way ahead is.

That was the plan originally, but the Lowland League clubs were able to change the rules.

Star Wars Empire Strikes Back {watched it on a plane trip recently and it hasn't aged well in special effects terms} Rogue One ...big gap to fair to middling territory... Return of the Jedi The Last Jedi The Force Awakens ...big gap to not even a rental territory... Prequels

That's the $64,000 question. They need the appearance of a pyramid for UEFA reasons but don't want all 160 or so SJFA clubs joining club licensing en masse, so as long as it is a trickle rather than a flood I suspect they will stay supportive of clubs doing a Kelty for now. Time will tell.

Has the SFA not twisted the arm of the SoS to reluctantly accept the likes of Edusport and Bonnyton Thistle? It's not fully clear yet how much leeway the leagues have on that.

Disney had a problem moving into this trilogy. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher could no longer act at a level that was attracting leading roles in other films and Harrison Ford who can didn't really want to do it and was only willing to do what amounted to a cameo role before his charcater got killed off once and for all. Think when you bear that backdrop in mind the way they have handled it makes sense, i.e. Carrie Fisher's character in a coma for most of one film with Laura Dern shoehorned in as a new character to deliver most of her lines, and Mark Hamill appearing for a few seconds in one and being himself as a bitter old hasbeen in the other. By all accounts the Han Solo prequel film could bomb as the actor hired for the main character can't do the role properly in a Hayden Christiansen I don't like sand sort of way. Much the same could have happend with TLJ if Luke Skywalker was still at the top of his game in the script.

...but are what things could slowly get back to again now that Theresa May has pledged that there will be no hard border. A lot still to unfold obviously, but what May agreed to recently over the RoI-NI border would lead to a scenario similar to the soft and almost transparent border between Norway and Sweden, which happens despite Sweden being an EU member and Norway being on the outside. A hard no deal Brexit would be a catastrophe in economic terms for both the UK and RoI, so Dublin definitely won't be pushing for the hard Brexit outcome that was most likely to fuel SF electorally and result in UI fairly quickly on a historical type timescale, and despite what gets said about the DUP they are rational actors in all of this as well and likely to steer the Tories towards a softer Brexit with the leverage they have at the moment. The bigger problem for Ulster Unionism in a soft Brexit scenario is what Scotland does down the road, because it makes independence more likely and my guess would be more likely than not to have happened after a generation or so.

Yet again this guy can only deal with me as a stereotype. Worth noting that what I wrote implicitly concedes that UI could happen in timelines of about 25 years and beyond, so not sure how that translates to No Surrender, but whatever.

She basically got ragdolled by snoke and had the light sabre bounce off her head and then wasn't able to beat Kylo on claiming the light sabre so it was destroyed? It was slightly more reasonable from that standpoint this time.

Dream on. You must be at the wind up with this as you seem too intelligent to really believe that. No way it happens in a timeline of under 20 years and even after that it's no sure thing. There have been numbers as low as 3% support in NI for UI happening straight away in surveys on the subject this decade and a soft Brexit as Theresa May now appears to have pledged will happen could easily create an environment again where it stays a long term aspiration for a lot of people that they never quite get around to actually doing with NI stumbling on out of force of habit Belgium style. Beyond that the Tim Pat Coogan types always neglect to mention how migration in and out of NI cancels out much of the demographic effect of differences in birth rates, so Ulster isn't quite as doomed as some bloggers would like you to believe.

Their core following will have no problem whatsoever with what he did, so they were always going to be reluctant to do any more than they felt they absolutely had to for PR reasons. To paraphrase Newton Emerson on the Portadown News website many years ago, After first wiping off most of the blood, Gerry Adams extended the hand of friendship to NI's Unionist community...

...Spartans was the obvious one until Edinburgh City moved in there. The weird thing about LTHV is that they talked in the Edinburgh News about having applied for the Lowland League when they had no chance of getting licensed at Saughton and don't appear to have tried to make alternative arrangements. That's maybe why people are suspicious that they are content where they are right now and in no rush to sort things out.

Nobody was buying the lame apology so now his fellow balaclava wearers belatedly throw him under the bus. Guess he'll be standing as an Independent Republican candidate next time around.

Jimmy Carr summed it up best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKwZM8TDEa0

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.