yoda

I went to see TÁR last night. It's objectively a great piece of filmmaking. A great character study. Cate Blanchett is great. I enjoyed being surprised by so many recognisable faces (General Veers!). It looks great. It sounds great. It's well written. Lydia Tár is the Hollywood's worst (best?) "villain" since Daniel Plainview (it's probably lazy but I couldn't help but think of a comparison with There Will Be Blood). And yet... there's a point in the film with, maybe, 20 minutes to go where I just switched off and stopped engaging. That final stretch felt a bit needless; there's a logical end point but they kept going. It went from a 4 star Letterboxd review to 3.5 stars. Even typing that out feels sacrilegious.

Charlie Adam when he went from Blackpool to Liverpool.

There's maybe a decent player in there but, by all accounts, he needs to become a bit more "professional". Whether that's an issue exclusive to him, or just due to a general lack of role models in the County squad, is up for debate.

They were out on the Sunday too. For what it's worth, I've heard from more than one source that the club had to apologise to at least one establishment a few months ago over the squad's conduct.

Andrew Garfield was good in it. I liked him a lot - a millennial version of Elliot Gould's Philip Marlowe. The rest of it was a mess but there were a couple of redeeming moments. I know folk who love it though.

Another Scottish Cup run filed straight into the bin. Let's set aside his baggage - I've shared my views on that before - and focus on his record. It's dreadful. The team was mostly garbage for around half of last season. A terrible first 10 games, followed by a good wee run, then an inconsistent run, then an abysmal end to the season chucking the best chance of Europe we'll see for some time. The squad isn't good enough. Dhanda and Iacovitti are maybe the only two I can see deserving of a step-up to a better club. The rest is a collection of guys who should have been binned years ago, faceless jobbers, the instantly forgettable, and "projects" that might have come good under a more progressive manager. But the club went all in on him so I guess that's it. Either this or an untested Don Cowie.

Angeball's whinging about VAR decisions pays off.

Maybe Malky Mackay isn't the genius that his friends in the media would have us believe. That top six finish (the dismal run of results that followed it doesn't get mentioned) appears to have papered over some amount of cracks. I only see highlights but there doesn't appear to be any style or identity to this current team. There's maybe two or three players who would get gigs at other clubs in this league or a similar level. The rest will be clogging about the Championship or the English Conference soon enough. And given some of the stories about their behaviour, I'd be quite happy to see most of them binned.

I think my top five for the year are (in no particular order): Aftersun Decision To Leave Everything Everywhere All At Once The Worst Person In The World The Banshees of Inisherin

A soft penalty for a questionable handball evens things up for that one against Brian Graham in the League Cup semi-final.

A one goal defeat is arguably a better result than anything Celtic achieved in this year's Champions League.

I proclaim this the "Autumn of George"!

Sounds like Harmon is finally our version of literally every player ICT picked up from the English Papa John's leagues. He's the player I wanted Ben Frempah to be.

That 5-4 game was really fun. At 4-4 it felt like getting a last minute winner, only to see there was still 10 minutes to go.

I saw Sigur Ros in Stockholm a couple of weeks back. They were awesome. I'd happily stand and listen to them play "Samskeyti" on a loop for 2 hours.

The mewling over "a kinder, gentler politics" seems to mean little more than "don't say nasty things about me, a government minister, on Twitter", rather than actually introducing kinder, gentler policies that don't seek to dehumanise thousands of people.

I feel like this conversation comes up every time the Arctic Monkey release a new album (apart from maybe AM because they had two or three songs on that which felt like throwbacks to the first album*). A large chunk of people won't be happy until they're back writing a second "Mardy Bum". I liked Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. It was fun. They embraced a total change of direction and it mostly worked. This new one has some highlights, and other parts that don't quite hit the mark. It's not terrible; it's not brilliant. There are better albums this year and that's okay. *And despite that, Mad Sounds and No 1 Party Anthem were probably my favourite two songs on the album.

Ennstone Cup champions, you'll never sing that.

"Look at me! I'm the Governor of the Bank of England!"

Circa 5 months of decent results sandwiched by terrible results and aimless football. They were the exception, not the norm.

We've apparently signed a creative #10 (who is, presumably, not on a poverty wage) but instead persist with Ross Callachan in that position. And we wonder why there's no creativity. 1 win in 13 is rubbish. You can point to playing Rangers / Hearts / Celtic in six of those games as some sort of excuse. But look at the remaining seven: 1 win, 3 defeats, and 3 goals scored. The team hadn't scored more than two goals in a game since the end of February. They need to be picking up two or three wins from the next four.

I think the idea (or claim) in an earlier post that you can draw a link between the current situation and the furlough scheme is a stretch. The Bank of England showed that domestic factors only accounted for a third of the current inflation - and that's not exclusively due to demand - and most reputable analysts / commentators were pointing out that the debt financing wasn't a huge issue even with rising rates. The current situation (i.e., what is happening right now with the currency and the BOE potentially ramping up interest rates even faster and further than anticipated) is almost entirely down to the government cutting taxes on high earners. You can't have tax cuts of that magnitude whilst also forking out enormous energy costs support. It's not hypocritical to point out that this is bad policy whilst also supporting other forms of government deficits. All deficits are not equal.