The Kraken

I was only chuckling to myself the other day about the whole 5K walk episode with Eddie the clown. Halcyon times.

Soggy having a normal one again. What an awful man.

I’m refusing to use mine. I gave it a go for a few days but they’re fucking shit. The indoors one for the kitchen looks shite, the bin bags they provide you with are absolutely useless and just fall to bits, and both indoor and outdoor bins seem like they’ll just attract flies and stink to high heaven once hot weather gets here. Plus they’re massively limited on the types of things you can and can’t put in there. Not for me.

Such a tragic man. Fuck me

NHS waiting times, and the NHS in general. It’s still a massive mess but the stats and facts tell my eyes and ears that it’s getting a tiny bit better in certain areas including waiting times for surgery. Even jolly old immigration figures are significantly better in some areas than the previous regime. It’s still a dismal plod into far too many people coming here and far too little preventive activity, but the numbers of illegal arrivals being processed are massively up, the number of asylum hotels are massively down. Corruption from top officials seems to be less widespread and obvious. The Covid times are now a long memory away but the amount of law breaking and pocket lining by those in power at that time is one of the more disgusting things I’ve been witness to in all my voting days. Just having a man in the hot seat who doesn’t try to deceive his public every day by telling shamefaced lies then laughing about it is an improvement of sorts. Or having a PM who is so egregiously incompetent that she crashed the financial markets within a couple of days, and who to this day denies it was anything to do with her while spending her time trying to cosy up to the politics (and money grift) of those around Donald Trump. So, yeah. It’s still a massive shit show. Things haven’t improved enough, or quickly enough. Some things won’t improve enough under current policy so they need a massive rethink. At the polls I had a dismal choice to make as there were no leading candidates. There still isn’t. But there are at least signs of some of the country’s decline being arrested. On the flip side I’d be interested to hear what the ‘eyes and ears’ are telling in more specifics as to what hasn’t changed at all, or has got worse, and what benchmarks we are applying to expectations of improvement. Goodness knows that Labour have been a massive disappointment, especially to those voting for them (like me) expecting a lot more. But to hit a par score, what needed to have happened by now? Genuine question.

Well of course you do.

Key lime pie Raspberry and white chocolate cheesecake Strawberry pavlova Carrot cake, and coffee and walnut cake are lovely. Brownies epic too. But my top 3 is a lock.

£120 price on the adult shirt! Absolutely scandalous, they deserve it if people look for other distributors. If the likes of DHGate aren’t using the same factories, then they’re surely getting hold of the original design work and using similar factories to knock them out. Like you I haven’t bought a shirt for a few years but as I said, the ones I got back when I used to buy them were flawless. Back then it was different in that you could only get the bigger sides in each country, but still a decent collection. Nowadays you can get so much. Ore, including our own extremely bespoke design. I saw the reviews of Saints fans on here when they received their shirts and it looked like everybody was delighted with the quality and the sizing.

From reviews on here and on other forums, DHGate get plenty of brilliant reviews. For the price it’s a bit of a no brainer. Just the delivery time and sizing that you can be unsure about. With the Saints anniversary shirt in particular (but most of them really) it all points to the fact that it’s the very same factories that churn out the replicas. I don’t think even a Chinese sweatshop is going to waste the time reverse engineering a design as complex as the anniversary shirt, with all the embedded signatures and what not. The shirts went on sale the same day as the official release, so the factories likely do a massive amount of overruns after the “official” ones get done and flog those through their own channels including DHGate. Even going back 5-10 years I used to use sites like that for buying shirts for playing five a side. I used to buy a couple every year, I can’t ever remember getting anything that didn’t look completely genuine. They even come with all the official tags and bags.

You would definitely have to say that Still wasn’t helped by Spors and the team behind him. Tbf he had right backs, up to a point. James Bree didn’t go out on loan until 1st September, he played in pre season games but got a knock in the last one against Brighton and that was about it. By the end of the window we had signed Jelert and Roerslev (remember them? Nah me neither). So a failure of the recruitment team in that those two haven’t looked up to it (injuries also a factor of course). I can’t remember off hand how bad Bree’s injury was in August, but it can’t have been too bad if Nate picked him up. So yeah, there’s mitigation around RB though I’d question why Bree left in the first place. I have sympathy on the striker front. Downs was a complete failure of recruitment, and an expensive one. He also is, despite his physical size, not a striker who plays how we look to play now, he’s very much off the shoulder of the defender rather than a hold up man. Also, Stewart was on the books and hardly made an appearance before “coming back” in October then promptly doing his hammy. We also had Arma and Tasmin at the time, neither of them cheap. An extra CF on top of all those, I can get why not. Recruitment failure to get Downs. How much input Still had, don’t know. Also, not getting a keeper in the summer, I reckon recruitment failure. Maybe if Still had more gravitas he might have said “this lad is garbage, the fans who have seen him all know he’s garbage, he needs replacing”. But I think Spors was far more influential about that than Still at the time, and it wasn’t deemed a priority. Despite all that I think Still made some awful decisions and definitely we did not have any sort of ‘style’ under him, it was very much throw a lot of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Very little actually did. Eckert has definitely had the fortune of having better resources available to him. But he has also made a much better fist of looking like he knows what he’s doing, learning from his mistakes, and planning much better around the resources available. Still was hampered by his recruitment team but I feel he compounded that by picking a team out of a hat every game and sending players out who have commented since that the current manager makes it much easier to understand what he wants them to do.

Apparently they’re doing two more series of PB, so one would assume it’s Duke at the helm for that. Really, that is a massive downgrade on Cillian Murphy. Also no Arthur and Ada, and obviously no John and Polly so the whole of the original gang is gone. I’m sure it’s get viewers but I’m not eagerly anticipating that. I thought the series had done enough by getting where it did by the end. If anything I thought it was a series or two heavy. Duke wasn’t good but the plot of the film was ridiculous.

Just watched the Peaky film. Very well shot, great music, but I thought the plot was weak. Also Duke didn’t have the gravitas I’d expect of a leader of the Peakies.

Holy shit!

I’m just suggesting….if you’re going to call people thick, maybe try and make sure you don’t look a bit dimwitted yourself whilst doing it. Twice. Whatever, it was a funny so 👍

The aintforever edited version, ‘The general public are way to thick too grasp that though.’

A surprising one as at the start of the season Nick Pope’s star was on the rise, yet now he’s nowhere, dropped for his club side and national side don’t want to know.

“The general public are way to thick to grasp that though.”

Ouch. Got my notification yesterday, So’ton going up by a tiny smidge under 5% (police and fire up by slightly more).

Looks like HL are saying it's not. In a statement on Friday morning the company said this was impacting the ability to perform account transactions but said clients' assets and data were "secure" and there was "no evidence of any cyber incident data breach".

Yeah I couldn't get in on my I-pad and phone apps last night either, then tried it online with my laptop and that was buggered too. Tried it now and got an immediate "we're currently experiencing technical issues" popup. I hope they haven't been hacked....

Yeah hilarious, dead mum gags are brilliant.

That’s a reasonable approach. I would want any manager to be a full part of a committee of people who review signings together then agree them together. The manger will recommend some players he knows from before, the DOF does the same. Then the transfer committee choose who we we sign. As Lighthouse is advocating by saying “Tonda, if you get promoted you have zero influence on transfers”….”welI just think that is a lunatics approach.

That’s is just barmy. Wow,

I wouldn’t be surprised if he failed every eye test in his life 😉

I think you’re missing the point.