Hillonearth

It definitely pays dividends to build bridges, but it's unlikely the nature of the experience of transplanting yourself to a new country would leave someone with sufficient free time to get involved in the administration of a club. There's definitely a pool of talent player-wise out there though, although it has to be said transience again plays a part and it's rare for players to stay very long at a club before they require to move for work or whatever. Certainly for us it's led to some odd situations, not least last season when we had a current full internationalist turn out for us as a trialist in a bounce game who'd left his previous club at the start of the winter break and was signing for another club in January. He was over here on holiday visiting friends in the period in between and asked to train...we had a friendly booked and were short of bodies sooo... I can also remember the fun and games trying to get international clearance for a Georgian midfielder...the documentation came back from Tbilisi in Georgian which looks like this

Yeah, saw them opening for somebody (Judas Priest?) at the Apollo around the time that came out - it was huge in the States, but they seem to have been a bit of a one album wonder.

I actually reckon that's probably why Pollok uniquely have held on to a big fanbase among the city clubs...there's that big belt of what the sociologists would call "established middle class" housing from Newlands all the way down to say Clarkston and Giffnock where a lot of their fans seem to come from....they're that bit more settled and if they move around it's to a larger or smaller house in the same general area. Once you live there, you're probably there for keeps and will likely investigate the local club at some point if you're at all interested in football.

I reckon every club's got it's own set of challenges, and while on the face of it clubs like mine have got far bigger populations in their catchment area - we've potentially got from the edge of the city centre right up to Bearsden and Milngavie as ours - we also face far more competition for local attention than someone like Talbot, as as well as the inevitable OF we've got to compete with another fairly big club in the shape of Thistle down the road. Obviously Talbot have Killie fairly close by, but they're something like fifteen times as far away from Beechwood than Firhill is to us. Add in the wealth of distractions the West End has to offer twenty minutes walk from Lochburn and we're never going to be able to attract anything like a similar proportion of people...it's not a dig in any way, but Auchinleck Main Street on a Saturday isn't exactly Byres or Great Western Roads! And you're right, all the Glasgow clubs have varying demographic issues in terms of attracting support with the exception of Pollok who have retained a sizeable although ageing fanbase; Petershill for example are in a post-industrial area where most of the original population has long since moved away to be replaced by new Scots who are probably far more concerned with the inherent problems of living in a new country than finding a team to support. For us, perhaps the biggest demographic challenge is the transience of the population living around the club...a lot of people tend to work or study in the wider West End for a few years, don't put down genuine roots there and move on. It's a problem some of the Ayrshire teams don't have - while there are obviously exceptions, families are more likely to have lived there for generations and are deeped-rooted in the area than is possible in most of Glasgow.

Since we're talking about Johnstone so much, I found my way down there for the second week in succession for my first visit to Thorn Athletic. First half we dominated, going in 4-1 ahead and hitting the woodwork twice. Classic game of two halves though - after the break we threw on a host of trialists and U20s and eventually got pegged back to 4-4...could have lost it in the latter stages if I'm being honest. A word about Thorn...there's been plenty of discussion about the new clubs on here and they appear to be one who are going about things the right way. They seem to be attempting to build something sustainable and substantial rather than going down the glom onto a groundshare/start chucking cash at players route. It's clearly still a work in progress there, but at least there's the sense that progress is being made.

I've said on here before that we perhaps look at things the wrong way by obsessing over getting kids to games, and that it's less them we should be concentrating on and more the Sky Sports generation who are 25-40 right now and who seem to by and large to have been lost to our level. For me, it's due to a combination of them finding other things to do on Saturday afternoon and the inertia of many clubs who didn't move with the times and thought sticking sheets of A4 in corners of a few local old man's pubs was still the way to go about promoting forthcoming games. Attract that lot and the kids will follow naturally anyway...they're the cohort who are their dads after all.

It's always good to be able to tick off a new ground before the season even starts - Thorn Athletic v Maryhill.

Jagner Group

I doubt they'll be lighting a fag after they finish though.

Note to Alanis Morrisette: THIS one's actually ironic.

Yeah, it's almost inevitable that the power base of any band will rest with the primary songwriters. Since Gene Simmons of Kiss was in the news yesterday for showing up at PMQs, they're also a good example; their lead guitarist and drummer left at the start of the 80s and Simmons and Paul Stanley carried on with a succesion of replacements. When they reformed in the mid-90s, the original two were brought back in as salaried employees rather than partners, and when they left again they brought in two journeymen to basically impersonate them for even less money.

In this instance it's probably been made to sound way worse than it probably actually was...it's almost unheard of for a non-original member of a successful band to be brought in as a full partner, and much more likely for them to be a salaried employee. Sometimes it can be beneficial as you'll still be paid as per your contract even though the band as a whole's career is in the shitter. It can sometimes happen that they become a full partner in the fullness of time, but the likes of Ron Wood spent 20+ years as an employee of the Stones before he was made a partner sometime in the mid-90s. In terms of the publishing deal, that would always be heavily weighted in favour of the people who actually wrote the songs, and a non-writer would normally only be due mechanical royalities for performing on the tracks. Since your man didn't seem to contribute writing-wise, that's all he'd have been due and he likely wouldn't have a voice in discussions about exploiting their back catalogue, far less due a cut of the proceeds other than what he'd be due automatically.

Given the fact that the actual moon landers are visible through powerful telescopes, it's a no. I do think however that some of the photographs they took on the moon were edited and later released in primitively touched-up form which obviously has been fuel for the later flat-earthers and conspiracy nuts.

He's reached his Vanishing Point.

Same. I remember the last thing you see as you walk out onto the park was a sign above the door saying "Welcome to the wind..."

There was an approach made towards the end of 2021-22 with the argument in favour being that it wasn't the same personalities in charge there as it had been previously. There was however enough strength of feeling from people who had been there during the previous episode that it was always more likely than not to be a non-starter. If nothing else, it would have looked hellish for us in terms of optics.

A guy in my work used to complain about seagulls attacking him when he was out running at lunchtime. We thought he was overdramatising the whole thing until somebody looked out a window and saw him running along the street with a couple of lesser black backed gulls on his shoulders pecking f**k out of him.

Likewise, we're a fair bit further away from the release of Nirvana's Nevermind than Nevermind was from the formation of the Beatles. In terms of family connections, my old dear knew her grandfather when she was a young kid just before WW2 who had married late in life and had been born sometime around 1850...working back the same amount of time from his DOB as it is to today would take you back to the reign of Charles II.

Went to a gig at Ivory Blacks with a mate of mine who turned up pished and showed no sign of slowing down. After the band had finished about 12.30, he sat down at the bar and passed out - I was over the other side of the club when I saw him getting dragged out by two bouncers still sleeping, only to wake up as they got him to the door and the cold air hit him. I asked if there was any chance of him getting back in, and evidently there wasn't, so I just got on with the night. The place was open till 3 so I stayed, got something to eat at the kebab shop next door and hopped a taxi. Just as the taxi was turning into Argyle St I saw him in the distance looking purposeful and stomping away in the other direction. Phoned him the next day to find out why he was still bumbling about the city centre 2hrs+ after he'd been flung out - he said he had no idea when he'd got home, but asked me if he'd been carrying anything when I saw him - he hadn't been. Turns out somewhere between Glasgow city centre and the South Side in the early hours of the morning he'd managed to acquire a horse's saddle which was sitting in his hallway. He's still none the wiser.

"To all intensive purposes" Seen it a couple of times in work...worryingly, from different people.

I'd agree with that, but again was under the impression that clubs were required to commit to having certain measures in place within a finite time upon accession. Finnart are a good example - it's clear that Springburn Park is utterly useless going forward as a venue for this level of football, however it's also clear that the club are working all hours to secure a better location, be it at Crownpoint or elsewhere. There has to be a sense of progress towards something, which in their case there clearly is, as opposed to a club entering the league, and thinking "job done"

Broadly they do, although standards clearly vary. For me, there needs to be some acknowledgment however that by joining, clubs are entering a spectator-facing arrangement as opposed to a purely recreational football setup. Cover for X amount of fans isn't completely essential, nor are stepped terracing rather than hard standing, catering, toilets within the ground and so on...it's just when it's obvious none of them are being addressed and there are no plans to put any of them in place it begs the question of who they're hoping to attract to the games when exactly the same spectator experience can be had for no cost at any ammy game at a school 3G. For me, I've made a point of checking out the Div. 4 clubs at home on occasion in desultory groundhopping mode - at some I've quite enjoyed the experience, but others I've walked away thinking "why did I even bother doing that?" There was one in particular last winter which shall remain nameless which was just a basic cage with absolutely no effort made to cater for spectators, with the weather sufficiently poor that I walked out before half-time...I wasn't the first one of a sparse crowd to do so either. That's not great either in terms of building a fanbase or for longevity of the clubs in question...once bitten, twice shy.