Hamilton Saint

May I offer a reminder about basic forum etiquette? Give your thread a title that indicates what the subject is. "I think it's obvious" could be about anything. If you had called this thread "Obvious that Cortese struggles to find players", I would have known what it was about and avoided it! Danke!

Don't know what you have against Canadians, mate. Canada was one of the first countries to support Cuba (thanks to Pierre Trudeau, back in the 1970s), when the U.S. was bullying everybody not to go there. You're the one who sounds obnoxious, to tell the truth. Your main interest seems to be alcohol ... sound like a typical Brit tourist. I've always found Canadian tourists to be friendly, courteous, easy-going, and keen to help the locals. I've been to Cuba with my family three times - Jibicoa, on the north-coast about 45 minutes east of Havana. Had a great time each year. Cuba is a welcoming place, with fiercely proud and enterprising people. Things are slowly changing for the better, as Castro's brother has liberalized the rules to allow more private enterprise.

Quality seeker! Sounds good to me!

Your thread title seems to be posing the question 'are women tennis players athletes'? Well, of course they are. Next question I can help you with?

Interesting technique. We tend to go to two or three places for several days each, and walk around each one (if big cities), or take day-trips away from them - when there are interesting things to see nearby.

The kits from 1950-1974 are the best: shirts with red-and-white vertical stripes; black shorts; and socks with red and white hoops.

'Twould be better if they were spherical, I reckon.

As a liturgical colour for the R.C. church, red symbolizes the Passion, blood, fire and martyrdom; white symbolizes light, innocence, purity, joy, triumph, and glory. White is used much more in the Catholic liturgy than any other colour. Red-and-white stripes, therefore, would be more versatile - would match the needs of many more days than a kit that is predominantly red.

Ron Davies.

Yes, if you turn the amp up to 10!

A big influence on Van Morrison! Turn On Your Love Light, I Pity The Fool, Ain't Nothing You Can Do. R.I.P. Bobby "Blue" Bland

The Beatles - Rubber Soul Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde Neil Young - After the Goldrush Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning G. F. Handel - The Water Music

Chapel End Charlie wrote: "One of the many things I tend to keep quite about on here is that, although I was born in Dorset, there is actually plenty of Welsh blood flowing through my veins. Perhaps this genetic inheritance explains why the works of Dylan Thomas have long appealed to me ... or maybe it's just because the man was a bloody genius. In any case whether you hail from Swansea or Swindon, Dylan's wonderful prose style combined with Richard Burton's oh-so-perfect delivery results in something that is really rather special methinks" I love Dylan Thomas's work, too. Every Christmas season I listen to the great man himself reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales". Absolutely brilliant. My favourite poem of his is Fern Hill - another mesmerising depiction of his childhood. It is chockfull of references to the natural world. It's a portrait of a child enveloped by an almost holy awe for nature. Here's a YouTube video of Dylan Thomas reading the poem. His style of reading is completely idiosyncratic - sounding weird, at first, but then carrying you along with its perfect delivery. As close to singing as reading a poem can get, I reckon.

Nice! B&W beats colour any day!

Here is a poetic piece excerpted from Leonard Cohen's second novel Beautiful Losers read by the author himself in 1967. The Canadian folk-singer Buffy Ste. Marie later turned it into a song.

Roger McGough - as many of you probably know, but some may not - was a member of the 60s/70s band The Scaffold , along with John Gorman and Paul McCartney's brother (known then as Mike McGear).

Who are you? - who? who? (who? who?) Who are you? - who? who? (who? who?)

Not a lot of good English on here, mush, most of the time.

Non-locals would find the intense level of irony and ****-taking on here difficult to interpret much of the time.

My friends and I at university had a remark we used at least once a day: "I resemble that remark!"

Here are three aspects that tell part of the story: 1) the scapegoat factor - bullying behaviour intensifies when people smell blood; 2) the xenophobic factor - you might blame Fawlty Towers for this one!; 3) the tribal factor - some posters seemed to dislike his perceived presumptuousness (his "foreign" intensity and serious passion for the club ran counter to their banter-based, clannish insularity). As I say, that's only part of the story, but - as another "outsider" - that seemed to me to underpin some of the negativity.

"Afterwards" by Thomas Hardy

"Church Going" by Philip Larkin

Yes - time to brush up on my Latin!

I wasn't being "sneering and snidey" - I was just offering observations on what I see and hear. I don't know what parts of what I've said are "pathetic" and "moronic". You've been living in the US for three years? Well, I've been living close by to them - in southern Ontario - for almost 45 years, closely attuned to their culture and news media. Canadians are exposed to US media to a huge extent - but we also follow events in Europe and around the world. Americans do not pay attention to Canada to the slightest degree, even though many of them live very close by. They know virtually nothing about our history, geography and culture.