FloridaMarlin

If I was to buy a vintage British car I would buy a Humber Snipe. I am aware that this thread is currently sitting below the "Libel reminder."

These rumours have been floating around for some time. The prime sources of this whispering campaign (for that's what it is) is somebody who was previously chairman of a northern club who were recently relegated from the Premier League amid stories of them approaching the financial brink, before he parted company with them and was then even more recently linked to a consortium who were said to be interested in buying a Championship club not a million miles a way. You can only wonder at his motives or reasoning as to why he would be spreading the story around the football world.

Well, you'll need a pornstar name. You get this by combining the name of your first pet with your mother's maiden name. Mine is Bluey Blake.

There's a part two to this. If you're doing the theme parks in Orlando fair enough, but the best beaches in Florida are on the gulf side and if you want a taste of the more real (there's hardly any of 'real' Florida left) Florida, base yourself in the Naples area and take in as much of the Everglades as you can Miami will make you feel self conscious, both about your looks and your wealth.

If you're driving, go via San Antonio and Houston, and then across the bottom through the gulf states (that's the Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of Arabia). In Dallas, you've got to go to the 6th Floor Museum in the Texas Book Repository which overlooks Deeley Plaza. You can't look out of the exact window where Lee Harvey Oswald took his pot shots as it's glassed off and preserved. But you can look out the window next to it. I guarantee when you look out that window, you will aim an imaginary rifle at the cross on the road where the first bullet allegedly struck. Work out for yourself if LHO could have got off three accurate shots in eight seconds from that range. You've also got to go up and look at the Dallas Cowboys new stadium, just to see what an incredible, 21st century sporting venue looks like. San Antonio has plenty to see, including the Alamo (disappointingly not as big as you would imagine, but still atmospheric), and the Riverwalk, which has got great eats. If you've been to Sea World in Florida, Sea World in San Antonio will be a disappointment. If it's hot, go to the Schlitterbahn waterpark in New Braunfels, the best water park in the world. Houston isn't much unless you like indoor shopping and sprawling cities. But once across the border in Louisiana make sure you plug into the Cajun culture. I'd give New Orleans a big miss unless you specifically want to go there. The best sights of Louisiana are in the back country, in the bayous. You can do all sorts of swamp tours, but if you like your music check out the Zydeco and food at these places: Mulates at Breaux Bridge, and Pat's Fisherman's Wharf. http://www.mulates.com/breauxbridge.html http://patsfishermanswharf.com/ Biloxi, Mississippi has some big casino hotels that were up and running pretty quickly after Katrina. For a spot of luxury, try the Beau Rivage. Last time we passed through, we stayed here: http://www.maisondmemoire.com/ Absolutely fantastic place, and the first time I have had muffins with scallions (spring onions) in them.

Either that, or we are looking into the future and this is Elton John's son at a Watford match. Time hasn't been kind to his dad, David Furnish.

I always preferred it when you could buy it at 6pm on a Saturday night in your newsagents. And the two inside back pages were choc full of local match reports, three paragraphs on the first half half all phoned in by dutiful club secretaries at half-time, with second-half scorers and the results on the final whistle. Oh for the days of Bramtoco v AC Delco, and Saints A team in the Hampshire League. And technology was supposed to move everything forward.

Doesn't MILF in Brighton stand for Man I'd Like to F**k?

Smoking wasn't his only vice or habit! He was also very keen to show his onanistic skills, much to the amusement of us lads who cheered him to his natural conclusion (especially if there were unwitting girls underneath). James his name was.

I'm told the Russian who is trying to buy them after being rebuffed by Bompey lives in Sandbanks! You couldn't make it up, could you? But then why would you want to make it up.

Ted MacDougall. MacDougall's was a type of flour.

I've no doubt that Sky's hard-hitting, all-revealing documentary will completely gloss over the fact that it is the squillions pumped into the game by Sky themselves that has encouraged some clubs' financial irresponsibility. The promise of 'jam tomorrow' doesn't exactly encourage clubs to be fiscally prudent. The fact that it encouraged them to cheat, gain an unfair advantage and trade insolvently as a business is perhaps not something that Sky will want to remind people.

I wasn't refering to the columns LM writes and which go in under his own name. I was comparing his criticism of anonymous internet warriors to the instances where unattributed negative stories in the national media are written by a particular journalist who has been his pet reporter for many years. It's pretty much the same thing, but by a different name, in my book.

Hiding behind the anonimity of an internet forum is on a par with planting mischievous stories in the press via your last remaining contact in the national media.

Trevor Mitchell's original shop was in Marsh Lane, not far from the bottom of East Street. I was taken in there for haircuts when I was a wee lad. He would place a piece of wood across the arms of his barber's chair for small lads to sit on to bring them up to his level. One day I was having a haircut when there was a car crash on the old Marsh Lane roundabout. I jumped, he jumped and the result was he cut my ear with his very sharp barber's scissors. I bled like a stuck pig. My mum would never take me there again. I think the next time I met Trevor Mitchell was playing in the old Wednesday League - you could start a whole thread on that - playing for Woolston Wednesday. The bottom end of East Street before the East stree centre was built was interesting. They were the Anchor & Hope pub (last time I looked, it was still there, the last survivor of the old East Street) and down from there, you had Isaac's newsagents and the Marsh Hotel, and on the other side Northover's butchers, Jones fishmongers and Bates chemists, who made their own cough mixture, the best you could get. Alongside Northover's butcher was 'Piggy Cut', an alleyway which took you on to Houndwell Place. Northover's did some of their own slaugthering and if you timed your excursion down Piggy Cut wrongly, you would hear the pigs squeal, and then see the gutters run red.

I knew that fella, he was a maths teacher at Taunton's and as mad as a box of frogs. The council (who were prepared to take on the cost to pacify his neighbours as he had flouted the planning laws) did try on a couple of occasions to try and get it on a low loader, late at night, when there was no trafic about, but it always proved too big. Last I knew years ago, he was using it as a hen house.

The white building you can see to the left of the Bargate would be Bourne & Hollingsworth. Next door to that would be Squires, possibly the best men's clothes shop ever. Those were the days when traffic flowed Above Bar. I seem to remember it had a strange, distinctive pink tarmac. Talking of Coffee smells, Cadena Cafe anyone? Where Boots is now. And can somebody also confirm that I am not going mad. I remember Debenhams (possibly in its previous guise as Edwin Jones) having a temporary menagerie on the top floor. I was told that during the winter months Jimmy Chipperfiled tried to save on fodder and feed for his circus animals and loaned them out to Debenhams as a small zoo. I can remember being taken in there and seeing a bear, a lion and other animals in what would now - rightly - be seen as cruel and hopelessly inadequate conditions.

And for what? Because we were told the UK doesn't produce enough scientists both my kids did science degrees. Guess what? There were no science jobs. They both do other things now, probably just as well when I read that Pfizer is closing down its world-reknowned UK research centre in Kent with the loss of 2,400 jobs.

Off camera at that same interview Mark Chamberlain also said that he would be quite happy for his son to stay at Saints for the next two and a half years if nobody came in for him.

Man Utd couldn't keep Cristiano Ronaldo. Not home produced, I know, but merely used as evidence that these days if a player wants to move, no club can keep him. Thank you Monsieur Bosman. Back to Adkins. A mate of mine has dubbed him The Wirral Building Society Branch Manager. His press conferences do produce a fair degree of eye rolling and yawning as he trots out the same line and talks in cliches most weeks. Talks a lot, says nothing of consequence, which you could argue is the product of good media training or media awareness. As to all this stuff about him being promoted from a physio's role. In my eyes, that makes him a hungry young manager, keen to prove himself and his doubters wrong.

In Florida, these are a great way to get free theme park tickets and all sorts of other extras, providing you are thick-skinned enough to resist high-pressure sales spiel. Timeshare companies will offer free theme park tickets if you go along to their presentations, but you need to pin them down first on how long the presentation will take. If you are told 90 minutes, under Florida law, you are entitled to get up after that time, and claim your tickets/freebies. Stayed at a Hyatt down in Bonita Springs, south-west Florida years back, and the front desk asked us if we would be interested in their presentation for their 'Holiday Club' (aka, timeshare). We asked what was in it for us and we were told vouchers for food at the hotel and access to the adjoining Holiday Club's leisure facilities for the duration of our stay. It was worth sitting through an hour of some women trying to sell us something we patently didn't want (and it wasn't too high pressure) for £200 worth of vouchers, which paid for most of our food and drink at the hotel, and a little pass key through the secret side-gate to the Holiday Club's pools and cabanas which were much nicer tan the hotel's. All I would say is: "Caveat emptor."

Quality! And it also looks as though now the cheats will also be able to ally that to quantity.

Tore mine really badly. Four months on crutches, nine months slow rehab. Eventually got back to playing again. I still get trouble from it today. If I step on a dodgy paving slab or something like that, it goes very easily and I get aches and pains from it which over the years you tend to ignore as part of Pain Management. I tore them 25 years ago, by the way, so you could have a future of discomfort ahead of you.

Unless they pay him a chunk of money to make up the shortfall on his salary at Blackpool to help make his mind up. It's not an uncommon practice. I believe such payments made to players to facilitate their exit from a football club are known as 'loyalty payments'.

It's plainly us who don't get it. For a start, Cotterill either lived like a hermit before he took the job, or is completely ignorant and arrogant to think that he does not have to operate under the financial restrictions their situation places the club under. Other clubs might think they have to cut their cloth accordingly, and sign lesser players on lower wages and suffer the possible consequences, that's not the p****y way. Their modus operandi is "let's always sign the best players we can and hang the wages. And if that policy backfires, if we moan long and hard enough, perhaps we can go out and sign some. Like loan players from Man Utd." A mate of mine was at the Bristol City v Middlesbrough game yesterday and the local media were complaining about the performances of their top players who are earning £10,000 A WEEK! But then, they are a fairly sensibly run club, predicate their players' wages on their income, and don't live in a cloud cuckoo land where financial responsibility doesn't exist.