HeartsparkDollarsign

It's as well there's sub-editors working there. "Rebel" was probably spelt "rhebel" in the original copy.

We are Rangers Super Rangers No-one likes us And actually upon reflection we are starting to think we may have failed to anticipate some of the long-term ramifications of this. Doesn't quite scan, but hey ho.

It's an aspirational image. The crustacean is the life-form that the descendants of the average RM poster might evolve into in about twelve million years.

Quite right, there's nothing to hide. And the reason they were shredding all that documentation was because they had just got a new pet hamster at Ibrox and they needed something to line the cage.

There's a mindset among the Rangers support that was firmly in denial of their club ever possibly having done anything wrong. Now as the evidence starts to pile up, that mindset has predictably moved from denial to deflection: from "we never done nuhin wrang" to "aye, well, everybody else wiz daein it except wurser". I suspect the author of the blog is having a litttle fun exploiting this.

This is a misunderstanding that has grown arms, legs and tentacles. In fact, Marseille were found guilty and punished by Uefa for cheating in a French league game against Valenciennes in the run-up to the CL final, not for bribery in the CL itself. http://www.europeancuphistory.com/bribe.html

You just have to approach it in the right spirit. "Let me taste your tears, Scott."

It was published Down Under, and is to my knowledge still in print there. If you root around some second-hand bookshops, you might be able to track down the original Australian version. It was published in August 2001, a few weeks before the book came out in the UK, and carried the tag-line "Terrorism. It's the new rock n roll". As the UK publication was about a fortnight after 9/11, this was swiftly removed and the book re-jacketed.

Lucky for me we took the foot off the gas at 6-1 then. B)

The Dirt - Motley Crue. I thought I was genuinely too old and gnarly to be shocked anymore, but blinking flip if this didn't have my eyeballs on stalks. Normally there is an element of vicarious thrill to hard-living rock memoirs, but at absolutely no point did I want to be in their unwashed skin-tight leather breeks. A truly astonishing book. Unflinchingly honest, toe-curlingly ghastly, as well as being starkly insightful and surprisingly touching in places. Moving on to "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" - an oral biography of Warren Zevon compiled by his ex-wife Crystal. Old Warren will have to go some to compete with the Crue, but one chapter in I've already learned his dad was on the FBI's list of top 20 gangsters when Warren was a teenager, so it's looking promising...

That's the chap. He was a leading conjuror before increasingly turning his mind and efforts to sceptical investigation of the paranormal. It was his expert knowledge of conjuring techniques that allowed him to spot the ruses being employed by the likes of Uri Geller, and faith healers such as Peter Popoff.

Just finished "The Never Ending Days of Being Dead" by Marcus Chown. I'm hoping my cerebral cortex can have the knots untied some time over the next few days. Fascinating stuff on cosmology. Some very heavy going about mass, the vacuum and inflation pertaining to the early moments after the Big Bang, but on the plus side, it's the first thing I've read that gave me an inkling of understanding General Relativity, and even why it's called that. Loses it a bit towards the end, as it explores the theories of Frank Tippler, who is a highly esteemed physicist but unfortunately also completely bonkers. In Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things", there's a whole chapter on Tippler entitled "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things". A head-melting read, but nowhere near as good as his previous book, "The Universe Next Door". On to "Conjuring" by James Randi now.

I read Tokyo last year and thought it was superb. Pig Island was a bit of a let-down by comparison, unfortunately. Still romped through it, though. High quease factor, natch. Best thing I've read this year is "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. It's about the golden age of American comic books, the era of Joel and Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee etc. Anybody with an interest in comics would love it. Amazon listing

Mitchell Library. Details at the link on previous post.