pap

Bless him. Poor fellow doesn't know how argumentative I am

Just pulled him on that via Twitter. Let's see what sort of response we get

1.2 million difference in worldwide sales at the end of 2013. What do you think the gap will be by month's end?

Ah, the desperation of a major corporation in crisis. Microsoft have been paying users to post YouTube vids speaking positively about the XBox One, and crucially, keep schtum about being paid by Microsoft. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-21-microsoft-paid-youtubers-to-say-nice-things-about-xbox-one-report MS have got form for this sort of obsfucation. When the PS4 was leathering it on sales, their marketing dept was coming out with b*llocks like "200 million miles driven in Forza. 30 million zombies killed in Dead Rising". Sony simply listed their sales figures. They are rightly attracting a lot of criticism for this. Why do they need to pay people to say nice things about the XBox? The defenders on here have every right to be p!ssed off. What you've been doing for free, others are being paid for For anyone undecided, I think this tells you all you need to know.

Seem to remember his agent being his brother at one point, or am I mistaken?

In related news (e.g. Israeli lobby getting involved in football), there's this:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25821058 Palestino FC's Palestine-shaped "1" banned by Chilean FA.

Aye, good post - Minty. More conspiracy stuff on this thread than there is on the David Icke forums

Hull City are another example of this. The owner is threatening to pull funds and walk away because he's not getting his own way over the name change, remarking that the "Hull City til I die" crowd should "go away and die". Venkys, Vincent Tan and even Mike Ashley have all had their bizarre moments; none of them could be considered "safe" for long-term club ownership. Just when Ashley looked like he was turning it around, Newcastle had the grim spectacle of Joe Kinnear's bullsh!t scatter-gunning the press office at St James' Park. Throughout Cortese's tenure, the Liebherr's were criticised by posters on this forum for being completely invisible and never making any statements about the long-term future of the club. KL comes out today, plays a blinder of a statement and is getting pulled for her weight. That's Markus' daughter there - the bloke who saved our club; a bit more respect should be in order, if even for his sake. There are a couple of people who have forgotten where their loyalty should lie; the football club. I'm grateful for NC's ahead-of-plan achievement of getting back to the Premiership, but he'd never have achieved that without a pot to p!ss in. The statement is entirely positive. It can only really be perceived as a negative if KL goes back on it.

I get the feeling that some people know very little about executive responses, judging from the "it's all a smokescreen" rhetoric emanating from some posts. As I said early on, there's no reason for her to make this statement if she doesn't want to. That she's bothered should be a sign of encouragement; either that or it's one of the silliest short-term gambles ever, putting the honour of the Liebherr name at stake over a matter of six months. The transfer window is drawing shut very soon. We'll soon know whether KL makes good on her promises to date, but as I've said, there is no reason for her to have to make the statement unless she wants to. If she wants to, she presumably has some motive. She either wants to do things in the best interests of the club or it's all a nefarious scheme to buy six months goodwill while a buyer is sorted out. I can see Krueger handling the "pally" side with the players that NC reportedly did so well and Williams ensuring that the club is run without fuss. It's interesting that Purslow is slipping out of contention - he was the obvious choice for a sale. I'm cautiously optimistic, with Alpine's qualifier - let's see how those words translate into actions.

That too.

Long live the matriarchal tyranny!

Very nice. Seems like an encouraging statement; one that she would not have to make if she didn't mean it or want to. Cheers, Katharina.

I read a reader review on Amazon about a book that the reviewer considered anti-semitic. He said he was going to buy a copy so he could pulp it.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jan/21/nicolas-anelka-quenelle-romelu-lukaku

"He will be a consultant to the Canada team at the Winter Olympics in Sochi next month, after which he will begin his work in earnest at Southampton. He was present at Monday's staff meeting."

Hired, according to Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jan/21/southampton-ice-hockey-ralph-krueger-motivation

Source: decades-worth of comparisons from Tim's mirror each morning. /ducks

Our minds are aligned today, Bear. Was going to post this myself but got more involved elsewhere. Let's hope the boats don't have as many leaks as the firm, eh?

You have to consider evidence. The main proponent of the story was unreliable, and came across like a complete Cortese cheerleader in the Talksport interview, which just seemed to be an advertisement for him and his billionaire pulling power. Since then, there have been firm denials. If new evidence comes to light, such as Wang making a public statement about wanting to buy us, then I'm happy to change my view. Why do people make stuff up? In this case, to destabilise, but a lot of the time, just adding 2 and 2 together and insisting the answer is 5. It'd be like someone combining your West London status with your inability to find a fiver. Someone may unreasonably conclude that you're a penniless vagrant who spends most of his time sat sullenly on London's streets, miserably wearing a sign bearing the legend "will w4nk for coins"; your only respite the three daily trips you make to the Internet cafe to compose hateful messages to the domiciled. See, it's very easy to do.

Interesting thread, although the revisionism is suspiciously handy for the here and now and seems to segue too neatly with all the justified gripes people have had with Cortese's executive style.

And rather depressingly, we've got even further to go on the vote score. We only needed 15K votes to begin with. Now we need around 50K, more if All-Spark continues its momentum.

Yes. One camp are a bunch of abused kids; one could argue that the code of silence prolonged that and left the door open for more victims. They haven't received any money as of yet. The other was named as a paedophile by Newsnight. He was very quickly unnamed in pretty much the only scenario (mistaken identity) that'd avert further scrutiny and got paid off immediately. This article, published in 1990 (and never contested in court by McAlpine) is some grim reading. http://scallywagmagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/scallywag-magazine-article-on-lord.html

Can you play video games on The Sun? It's not really germane to this argument. A better comparison might be the C64 vs the BBC Micro - contemporaries at the time but with a huge difference in installed base. Did the BBC Micro get games? Sure. It was the original home of Elite. Did it get everything the C64 did? No. Like the XBox One, there were a couple of games you couldn't get on C64 (Stryker's Run & Exile spring to mind) but that was never enough to offset the chasm in the volume of available software. Your "The Sun sells" argument is even weaker when you realise that The Sun is an end in itself. Games consoles are a means to an end; the content you consume constitutes the ends. The same "ends" on PS4 work better than they do on XBox One.

Some sales news:- http://gamesided.com/2014/01/20/hardware-sales-update-playstation-4-leads-way/ http://www.vgchartz.com/ XBox One selling "marginally" more ( 75,559 ) units than the PS4 ( 74,404 ) in the US. Getting f**king mullered in Europe tho'. Three PS4s were sold for every XBox One.

Matthew is on 4.8K votes too