pap

Sickening bitterness, more like. https://soulmates.theguardian.com/profile/4d877bb2e9e4c31786cb1034

... double post

Glad you find a girl being assaulted by a car so funny, or of course, the 1,750 or so road deaths that wreck families each year. Y'know, the ones you're trivialising with your fúcking idiocy. Top work!

Ted Heath already been named, but the implications are already huge. I've often said that the establishment always saw leverage over its own as more important than justice for the victims. I think I'm vindicated in that stance now. Heath famously maintained the "dirt book", a list of all the things he'd known his MPs had done, created and updated for the express purpose of controlling his party. Let's step out of the UK for a moment and ponder who else knows. How many times has British policy been dictated or diverted by blackmail and/or fear of exposure? What did the US find out during Operation Landslide, for example? Did the findings have anything to do with some of New Labour's high-profile resignations around that time? Funny thing is, all of these questions would have been treated as complete nutshít a few years ago, but post-Savile they're worth asking. A real exercise in how one thing can make one re-evaluate opinions on close to everything.

Are you saying internet porn birthed sexism? Makes you look at Moses and his tablets in a whole new way.

Think you're far too late, GB. The offered biscuit will already be soggy. Possibly was before SuperMikey made the offer.

I've been in the wars with my viewing this weekend. Over in the film section, I caught Beneath Hill 60. On stuff intended for the smaller screen, I've recently caught up with Generation War. Billed as the German "Band of Brothers" by some quarters, it charts the progress of five Berlin friends on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. Two of the cohort are brothers that are heading to the Eastern Front as part of the Wehrmacht, Charlotte has signed up to be a field nurse, Greta is an aspiring singer in a forbidden relationship with Viktor, a Jew, son to a respected tailor, who is still taking his chances in 1941 Berlin. The series attracted widespread criticism. This Economist article does a good job of enumerating them. http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21574531-new-television-drama-about-wartime-germany-stirs-up-controversy-war-generation Bit more in this Guardian piece. Spoilers on each. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/may/12/generation-war-bbc-nazi-germany I agree with the Guardian piece. It is a compelling human story, and it covers the extremes that both sides went to, but especially the Germans. The five friends are mostly sympathetic in their own way, but events catch up with all of them. None of them are the same after the war. We see instances of collective punishment, the liberal definition of "partisan" (German soldiers could shoot partisans, no questions asked), the justification for the ill-treatment (the Nazis justified the atrocities on the basis that USSR never signed up to the Hague convention), the singling out of execution of Jews, the packed trains full of prisoners on their way to death camps. With this level of introspection, I find that the criticisms of the movie to be a little invalid. This is the Germany looking itself in the eye, and acknowledging much of their conduct in the Eastern Front. Martha Kearney called it "five hours of self-pity". If that's true, I think the Germans are worth their five hours. Most Germans had no clue about the comings and goings in the Eastern Front; the leadership constantly told them that they were on the verge of victory in the East. By that point, the propaganda machine wouldn't have allowed much else to filter through. The plight of the average German citizen in the final years of the war and beyond is something that has not been acknowledged. At the time, few gave a f**k about what the Germans might be suffering after everything that had just been done in their name, and who could blame them? The cynical might argue that the narrative device of following each of the five friends allows the filmmakers to give a sugar-coated view of German activities on the Ostfront, but again I'd disagree. Barbarity and fear creeps into each of the characters. Not one ends the experience as a paragon. Not a lot of good stuff on the Eastern Front out there. This is very good stuff, and even as an exercise in what it is modern-day Germans feel comfortable with dealing with on their Nazi past, it's worth a watch.

I have seen a couple of decent movies over the weekend. First up would be Limitless, which is a competent enough film - quite an interesting one too. Not quite sure if it's a superhero movie in disguise or an allegory on addiction. Both, probably - but Bradley Cooper does a decent job of a main using the 80% of the brain we don't presently use. Nowhere near as popcorn, Beneath Hill 60 was the other film I watched. Australian movie, about a load of engineers trying to tunnel their way under No-Mans-Land, which is something I never realised was tried. Excellent performances from most, but the Western Front is the real star of the show here. They've pulled some punches; it's not quite the body-strewn hell of poison gas, barbed wire hell - but they go extreme in short bursts, and can't really be accused of trying to sanitise proceedings. The exterior shots are beautifully lit, giving a sense of the unending chaos on the Western Front. It'd be an exaggeration to say that the viewer gets shell-shocked, but through the audio mix, the visuals and the performances, hard not to get a sense of it. A must for any history buffs.

I think the problem is that the kids get ideas about weapons into their heads at such an early age.

It takes a special someone to get myself, Chapel End Charlie and CB Fry consistently having the same opinion on an issue. Sarnia is that someone, and possibly the issue

Boom. That's some nice work from Labour there.

That's because you love Man Utd and their gloriously well sung songs. Fúcking shít from the Itchen. Same as last year, basically. Maybe it sounded better further out

You've picked three sets of cúnts there, OP.

100% agree. Why Mayuka gets a crack I don't know.

Southampton Test and Southampton Itchen are both marginal seats, so at the very least Sotonian residents should feel like they're going to be meaningful in the contest. This election is all about the UKIP effect though. I don't know if they'll gain many seats, but I do think they are going to get a good whack of the popular vote. Many of those voters will come from other parties. It may be a case of who gets hurt the least by UKIP winning the election. I also reckon Farage and co will get votes from people that don't normally vote.

The growth and "coming together" of towns is happening writ large in what's becoming known as the South Hampshire conurbation, or alternatively, Solent City. It's probably one of the reasons Southampton planning is such a disaster. The outlying demand has grown significantly from neighbouring councils like Eastleigh Borough and New Forest without enough infrastructure to support it. All car towns. The M27, once seen as a panacea to solve the area's transport problems, ended up creating the growth that would one day turn it into a bottleneck. My favourite is the M271, the "express" road into the "centre" of Southampton, which just happens to terminate on a road miles away from town that anyone from Totton or beyond will be using. Genius, boys, genius.

Don't know who I'll be voting for if Left Unity don't field a candidate in the constituency. Liverpool tends to be Labour parachutee central, or at least my Labour MPs have been. It's difficult to get too excited for either of them, really. The new constituency is even more of a Labour stronghold. Majority of over 18K in the last election, so I've got two choices. Vote for Twigg and have my vote "count", even though Labour are a load of shíte these days, or express a personal preference. What fúcking value for money, eh?

Good post, Super Michael. The infrastructure is needed come what may, or London will continue to dominate. That helps few in the long run, mostly train companies and those wealthy enough to be established in the city. One of the few decent things the last Labour government did was making an effort to decentralise and move some of those government jobs around the country. Even so, most of our eggs are in one basket, and that basket is beyond the means of most people, even regular Londoners and well-paid professionals. Has been for decades now, which is why there are so many cultureless dormitory towns in its orbit. If Fleet is a good place to expand, I've seen the anti-Fleet far more often. Towns that don't really have the room to expand, are constrained by all kinds of planning laws, but build anyway. Leighton Buzzard is an excellent example. They've replaced semi-detached places with flats, it's enough of a sprawl so that you need a car, but there is no place to park it. Much of the South East is the same, and Southampton has got to be in the running for one of the poorest designs for city living in the country, and it was already crap before it became a magnet for Eastern Europeans. I do think that Whitey Grandad's figures are probably closer to the truth, or at the very least, there are more people living here than official records suggest. The scale of that difference might be putting us into a Catch-22. Realistically, we have to start planning to be a 100m people country. What politician is going to stand up and say that?

Jamie, just for the record, would you mind providing us with what you mean by left-leaning views?

Yes. Good work, Bear.

Or that, which is loads better

6 If you add 2 to the second operand, you get:- 3 + 6 5 + 8 1 + 5 Doing that allows you do change the additions (which would never work to produce those results) for multiplications. 3 x 6 = 18 5 x 8 = 40 1 x 5 = 5 Adding 1 to the first two results gives you 19 & 41. Apply the same logic to the last result and you get 6.

Also known as "having a laugh". Look it up.

My approach has the benefit of not having to dress up like an arse, or searching the Internet looking for people dressed as arses.