LongTimeLurker

Best I can come up with is a guy referred to as Festival (mainly behind his back) because of his dodgy haircut, because every Festival has a Fringe.

Watched a Bosnian Serb movie called Neprijatelj on youtube yesterday. Usually quite keen on the cinema of the former Yugoslavia having been introduced to it by a former girlfriend many years ago (if you have a smattering of Serbo-Croat watching how the English language subtitles tone down what they are really saying can be quite amusing) but this one was complete mince and involves a mysterious character who may or may not be Satan and who may or may not be talking Bosnian Serb and Muslim soldiers into murdering each other in bizarre ways shortly after the end of the war there. If it was an anti-war statement much better ones have already been made in that part of the world with characters that are much easier to empathise with. Lepa sela lepo gore probably being the best one in that regard.

Scotland has never been an English colony and respect goes to people like Belfast_Tim from Republican strongholds who are open-minded enough (can't believe I just wrote that) to play and watch cricket because they enjoy it regardless of what nationalist zealots have to say about it. Here's a news flash for you. Football/soccer was traditionally viewed as being a "garrison sport". If you really want to avoid being a "souper" you should probably be following hurling and Gaelic football rather than posting on here.

I know enough about Irish nationalism to know what the reference to soup was all about. People of Irish Gael extraction who have converted to Protestantism are often referred to as "soupers" due to a widespread mythology that Protestant evangelists offered soup to poor Irish RCs during the Famine as long as they agreed to convert. http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2010/06/eoghan-harris-obama-is-literally-black.html

Any chance you could explain that remark? That might provide some light entertainment if nothing else. On the one hand people like you will wax lyrical about the need for Irish unity, then on the other the mask slips in a way that makes it very clear that there would be no place in your brave new world for people who don't fit the mould of your narrow nationalism.

The seethe continues. Ruth Dudley Edwards' book, The Faithful Tribe, seemed to go down quite well amongst some of them despite being written by a woman from Dublin from an irish Nationalist background: http://www.amazon.com/Faithful-Tribe-The-Loyal-Institutions/dp/0002558637 Think that book could be viewed as an attempt at intelligent discussion of Orangeism.

Not a lot of point following up the LOL related posts, because I seriously doubt that most of the people spewing bile about that particular organisation are actually interested in intelligent discussion of the topic as opposed to an exchange of tribalistic insults. If anyone is interested in how the UK's Glorious Revolution related constitution shapes its modern politics and culture in a way that makes it markedly different from most other western countries (the LOL is just one manifestation of that) I'd recommend the writings of Tom Nairn as being worth a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nairn

Tong Greig's faither was from Bathgate, so he might be a contender.

Get a grip. It's equivalent to US troops celebrating the 4th of July or French troops celebrating the storming of the Bastille. Much of the UK's constitution rightly or wrongly revolves around the Glorious Revolution.

Think my grandfather's brother might have because I can remember hearing a story about how he was a scout for "The Rangers" (as my grandfather always used to say long before Sevco Scotland arrived on the scene) in West Lothian at one point, so I suspect he would probably have played the game to a decent standard at some level before his recommendations would be taken seriously. He died quite young in a tragic way, so not a lot was ever said about him when I was a kid. Searching records to find out what that was all about (if anything) would probably be a major undertaking though given he had a surname that was extremely common in the Bo'ness area at the time and all of the generation that would remember are dead now. Have found the hard way that detailed genealogical research on Bo'ness mining families is not for the faint hearted.

The average IQ level in Bo'ness was found to be 10 points higher than in Linlithgow due to the invigorating effects of sea breezes.

Sometimes on youtube the sound gets out of synch with the video stream so not sure that's really dubbed, although it definitely looks a bit weird. Here's a good conspiracy video that is more difficult to dismiss than the Titanic one, in my opinion, because a lot of the information on Iran-Contra is very much in the public domain even if the full implications of the disclosures made about Oliver North's escapades at the time were never spelled out by the media: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgIAFMaEfhU

During the Troubles the media, police and army often needed to know when they were receiving a genuine communique from the paramilitaries rather than a crank call from some wee ned/spide, so they were told code words to look out for so they could tell what was genuine. If those were received it was taken seriously, if not it tended to be ignored. Reading the media reports on this there don't appear to have been any recognised code words in the messages to the media.

...or a 12 foot tall shape shifting lizard. I think what kickstarted the recent craze in conspiracy videos was the escapades of Alex Jones and Jon Ronson at Bohemian Grove. Alex Jones is bat shit crazy but there is no denying that he was able to film a weird ceremony involving the American elite and a 40 foot giant stone owl that may or may not be called Moloch. The Alex Jones version of what happened: and the more balanced and rational Jon Ronson version of events: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDVbyRJmvds Beyond that the niche channels on US cable television that used to produce interesting documentaries have degenerated into doing whatever it takes to gain ratings. Hence load of series about aliens, UFOs and hunts for monsters that always lead to SFA ever showing up on the trail cams and the use of the Bible as a historical source and lots of hints of intelligent design being involved in evolution to keep Cletus and Jethro out in the flyover states happy.

The Serbo-Croat for "Hello I'm pleased to meet you" is "Idi u tri picke materine". Eldorado wine was only ever sold in Scottish council schemes and South African townships. Ian Paisley actually did help to save Ulster from sodomy. Studies show that Ballymena in NI has the lowest percentage of the population participating in anal sex in Europe and the lowest number of pet gerbils for any comparable sized town in the United Kingdom. Dundonians only pronounce the word "pie" as "peeeeeeh" as a pisstake to confuse gullible visitors from other parts of Scotland. The Hillman Imp was the most popular imported car in Albania.

If you make it all the way through to the end of the second clip with the BBC documentary I posted you'll find there is reasonably strong evidence available that it was the Titanic rather than the Olympic that sank based on some of the finer details of what has been observed when submersibles have visited the wreck. The bit at the end of the first clip with the "M P" beneath the nameplate letters looked faked to me.

Here's the hardcore conspiracy theory narrative on the Titanic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UWwdkH8UJU and the more balanced BBC look at it that was mentioned above by Kilbowie's Finest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdxJp2fVXJ8

The advantage claimed was that they couldn't get an insurance payout on the Olympic because the Admiralty refused to blame the navy for the collision, but could by effectively scuttling it during the Titanic's maiden voyage.

The boats were claimed to have been swapped at Harland and Wolff. The Olympic was in for repairs after colliding with a navy warship and the finishing touches were being done to the Titanic.

An interesting one I watched on youtube recently was that it wasn't the Titanic that sank but its sister ship the Olympic as part of an insurance scam. Probably bollocks but enough to it to be thought provoking.

No question it was a superb documentary. After watching it I did some googling to find out what the reaction was in Croatia to it and some people including former teammates of Divac and Petrovic were very skeptical about Divac's sincerity but Petrovic's family, including the older brother who was also a famous basketball player and their teammate on the Yugoslav national team, were strongly supportive of him and the accuracy of the documentary.

Definitely a very good documentary but I knew just enough about the former Yugoslavia to notice they left out a very important detail. Petrovic is a very Serbian sounding name and when I googled to check it turned out the ardent Croatian nationalst guy actually had a Serbian father. That left me wondering what more had been left out to simplify the story for an ESPN audience. Have to echo what somebody said about Adam Curtis documentaries always being worth a look. His latest All watched over by machines of loving grace really helps the viewer to understand what led to the credit crunch.

Not in my experience. People should be judged as individuals, in my opinion, and stereotyping is something that is best avoided.

The dictionary definition of bigotry revolves around holding a particular viewpoint to an unreasonable extent, which is something that people from a wide variety of different backgrounds can be prone to, while others from the same backgrounds are more easy going and flexible. In Scotland bigotry tends to be understood a wee bit differently as being a kind of tribal attribute characteristic of certain groups of people, who don't conform to the prevailing consensus on certain social issues which are often arrived at on the basis of what's best for the powers that be in political terms. In Scotland that was usually the Labour party in recent decades, who badly needed the working class RC vote and made certain modifications to normal socialist principles to curry favour with what would normally be their natural ideological enemies within the RC hierarchy, as a result. The Tories were also happy to go along with this because they saw the RC church as a bulwark against schemie Bolsheviks like Tommy Sheridan and generally liked keeping the plebs socially divided. That made the LOL public enemy number one when they pointed out certain awkward truths on issues like education such as sending children to the same schools saves a lot of money and reduces the level of division. End result is it's socially acceptable to go after Orangemen by spewing all kinds of bile and peddling very crude stereotypes to an extent that arguably fits the dictionary definition of bigotry, when in reality the LOL are by no means the only ones who are complicit in keeping the divide going from generation to generation.

Who the hypocrictical bigots are is all in the eye of the beholder.