Hillonearth

Yeah, good luck to them - I suppose the only real question is that of catchment area. It's open for debate whether there ever was any real appetite for even one semi-pro side in the Briggs but now there's three there, with there set to be two iterations of Rossvale going forward.

That looks like somebody's stuck a set of wheels on the "protest house" on London Road:

Me neither - it has of course already happened with the sugar tax and the reduction of salt and sugar levels in food. I'd much rather that people were allowed to make their own mistakes occasionally rather than gravitating towards bland state-sponsored food and drink because a minority of blimps are unable to regulate their intake.

There's been a family of Canada geese nesting on a local pond, and a few days ago the parents decided to walk the goslings down the hill to the Clyde - must be about a mile. They had a human escort all the way down and pleased to report they made it unscathed. Makes a change from orange walks holding up traffic at this time of year - wish I'd seen this first hand.

I reckon the leagues always came second fiddle previously because clubs were battering their heads off a glass ceiling and the SJC was the only opportunity to test your real strength nationally. It's become more like a normal league setup where the league takes precedence over cup success due to the fact that there's actually something to aim for nowadays.

Also bear in mind that in recent years the former junior sides have pivoted to a situation where a cup competition - any cup competition - is no longer the crowning glory of a season that it previously was. The juniors were always an anomaly in that respect in that the cup represented being the best of the best, but until there's an all-encompassing non-league tournament that's no longer the case. It's a lot more about final league positions now than it ever previously was - the status of the various cups have gravitated to the more usual position where they are nice to have but not the sine qua non of a successful season.

When it came down to it it was just an epic case of musical differences.

I saw the Yoker/Petershill semi and they absolutely played out of their skins that day....was a cracking game to be fair, but I honestly don't see it being anything other than a reasonably comfortable Talbot win which seems to be what's putting off at least some potential neutrals.

Not planning to, and going by what various people I've spoken to have said there might be a relative dearth of neutrals at this one. Absolutely no disrespect meant to Yoker, but on paper this one's got a certain air of inevitability about it that might well impact the attendance.

That looks not unlike something I encountered in Bradford years ago that they called a flatcake breakfast....basically a roll about the diameter of an LP record with the contents of a frying pan dumped into it. Band I was in at the time were recording there and round the corner from the studio there was a wee newsagent that did them. TBH, we'd normally get one of them between two of us...only person that managed a whole one was the keyboard player, which was odd as he was about nine stone soaking wet and normally existed on a diet of amphetamine sulphate and cider. Here's one - glad to see they're still available:

Well, the original series did have that episode called "Bread and Circuses" which seems apt at the moment...

We're fairly guilty of it here....we've got two Dalrys, two Newburghs and loads of Tarbets

Not strictly in my garden, but I took a shortcut through the woods at the back earlier and this is happening maybe 200 yards from my back door...

The top one's along the lines of "We know all the routes you take on patrol. Kherson is Ukraine."

Absolutely - the most reluctant ones seemed to fall into two categories; the ones nearer the bottom of the pile who are run by a handful of older dyed-in-the-wool sorts, and the ones who were content to be huge fish in a small pool hoovering up honours and were wary of the realistic prospect of advancing fairly quickly to a level where they were likely to get hosed every week. As I said, I'd put the number at anything up to 20 clubs who joined the WOS more or less unwillingly because there was unlikely to be anything viable to remain in. If you look back through the old "Junior football - what is the future" megathread it's those ones who only broke cover and declared interest towards the very tail end of the application period when it was clear that regardless of what they thought well over half of the West Region was getting out of Dodge and potentially leaving them high and dry. There was more of an appetite for change than most of the clubs are given credit for though - I was at the two meetings at Hampden and EK just before the first lockdown, and although there wasn't too much chance to mingle and shoot the shit I managed a few words with folk from other clubs at Hampden, including reps from a couple of "traditional" clubs I'd always assumed to be entrenched in the junior at all costs mindset. They'd done their homework though and were all for the WOS...that's when I knew it was definitely happening.

I think the difference is that the East clubs moved gradually across from the juniors in order of reluctance, with the last holdouts that ended up forming Conference X only realising last season that the game was a bogey and moving across. In the West, it's been done in a oner, and it's common knowledge that at least some of the clubs' preference was to remain junior...you can historically gauge who was who by the rough order that clubs initially declared an interest. There probably were around 15 or 20 clubs whose hands were more or less forced as the WOS applications piled in and the holdouts realised they'd end up playing in the kind of blasted hellscape that the last couple of seasons of the East juniors were. The unfortunate result is that there are a minority of clubs who probably don't actually want to be there.

I'm the opposite - I moved out here to the edge of the sticks from the west end maybe ten years ago. Previously I'd have considered seeing a blue tit or a robin in the vicinity of my flat as being a bit exotic, but since we've been here I've logged about 60 species of bird in or over the garden as well as about ten different mammals. Probably the weirdest garden tick bird-wise was a woodcock (we back onto woodland) and it was also a surprise to find out we've got badgers, although I've actually only clapped eyes on them maybe half a dozen times over the course of the decade we've been here.

No, it's a new one I hadn't noticed before, although that being said I hadn't been there in quite a while. It's just called the Helensburgh Bottle Shop on the left hand side of Sinclair St as you come out the station. It's not got a huge stock, but there were a few interesting things...in some cases though they've fallen into that trap of stocking some core range stuff you could easily pick up in a decent sized supermarket.

Picked this one up at the wee beer shop in Helensburgh - barrel-aged imperial stout collaboration between Up Front and a brewery in Kharkiv. A fairly hefty 10% so I'll be leaving it for the weekend.

I dunno... https://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/11278527.man-bites-dog-and-escapes-jail/

I saw the thread just before it got pulled last night - kudos to the mods etc. for looking after one of our own who found themselves in a bad place, and obviously all the best to HR.

You'd like to think that there would be some level or scale of atrocity that would make even Americans start to rethink their attitude towards guns, but if Sandy Hook wasn't it, this won't be it either. They have a twisted atavistic view of themselves as pioneering frontiersmen, and unfortunately that includes an intimate relationship with guns. Especially in fucking Texas. Mate of mine lives in Austin which is the probably the least rednecky and most progressive city in the state, and he was telling me about that time a year or so ago when they had an ice storm and a couple of inches of snow. His neighbours - who he'd thought were a collection of bohemians and hipsters - were almost obscenely eager to put together an armed vigilante group and start patrolling the area dishing out street justice. It's just below the surface in so many of them and this happens so regularly that the only reason this one's getting a bit more reportage than normal is the age of the victims - that being said, a helluva lot of them clearly think it's acceptable collateral damage regardless because freedom or something. Hate to say it, but if they don't seem to care then maybe we shouldn't either.

I've noticed both sparrows and starlings making a bit of a comeback - I've seen one pair of sparrows collecting nest material in the garden and there was a male investigating an old rone pipe the other day, however that's already occupied by the great tits that nest there every year. There's still a good number of song thrushes about but certainly around my bit they seem to have made the collective decision not to be garden birds anymore. Our garden backs onto woodland, and while it's rare to see one in the garden itself you don't need to go far into the woods to both see and hear them.

It's got a great air of finality to it like they went down the Pyongyang route and offed the c**t with an anti-aircraft gun.