the stain

Is this love? Poll please mods....

If it can't be replicated on a Sunday League pitch, it should not form a part of the rules of the game. The referee is right, his decisions may be marginal, but he is right. He will be reviewed by a panel of his peers, that system is in place, but on the pitch he is the law. It is not for Sky or any other broadcaster to tell us he is wrong. They so consistently misinterpret the rules themselves, why should we believe them? The argument that there is too much at stake is an argument that puts money ahead of the game. Look where this argument has got us: clubs going bust, rubbish players are millionnaires, football as soap opera... Basically no, no, no. It's a terrible idea. We don't need infallible technologies to make sure high profile games run without incident, we need to stop acting like children and learn to take the rough with the smooth in the spirit of the drama of the sport. Like we always have done. If you haven't enjoyed football up until now I suspect that's not because of a wounded sense of injustice at contentious refereeing decisions. And if you have enjoyed football, why not carry on enjoying it and ignore the media puffing smoke up the anushole of the Premier League's self-importance, because that's what this is really about.

Dear oh dear oh dear...

Ask him if he ever thinks about me? About our love? About our child?

This is very sad news. Am listening to Good Morning Spider. One of the great albums of the 90s. RIP

Well that's the fear isn't it. But I tend to think that the bigger danger is that the licence fee is being expected to produce too much output and the majority of it then becomes mediocre. These moves ought to be a reversion back to a time when quality broadcasting rubbed up against populist broadcasting and generally made them both the better for it. When you look at the 'new' BBC channels (TV and radio), the only one that really stands up as a success is BBC4, and even that recycles its output too often. The crossover between 6 Music, Radio 2 and late night Radio 1, even the weirder end of Radio 3 is massive. Radio 7 is pretty much a glorified i-player. BBC3 is execrable and all the best comedy that they show comes from Radio 4. The good stuff on 6 Music used to have a home on Radios 1, 2 & 3. I always thought the move towards genre compartmentalising music (like they do in the US) was a mistake and would work to the detriment of music.

Under

Suddenly I agree with jeff.

Freak Zone is good. But didn't R1 have Out On Blue 6, back before they ghettoised specialist music? Back before they marginalised taste? Back before they enshrined conservatism by putting the indie kid out to pasture? 6 Music is the Radio 2 for the Smiths generation. The longer 'alternative' music stagnates there, the greater the remove between the unjustifiable snobs and the mainstream becomes.

:p:p

So you're saying the BBC is largely poor or average? About time they stopped spreading themselves so thin then, maybe cut a couple of stations. 6 Music is the good bits of the old Wuneffem excised to digital and padded out with comfort music for 30-somethings who can't grow up. Compartmentalising of taste has been its own undoing.

Just started Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. An almost-contemporary account of the descent into fear, madness and death of London in 1665. Brilliant, terrifying stuff that puts me in mind of Day of the Triffids, 28 Days Later, all that unknown terror and collapse of civilisation fiction. Except real, of course.

Gems

Venture

More Iris Murdoch. A Word Child this time. I'm obsessed. She knows me from the beyond.

Stop being ****ing pillocks. Cheers.

http://www.football365.com/john_nicholson/0,17033,8746_5970386,00.html

Mustafa Ozkent

King Midas Sound, Pantha Du Prince, Kemper Norton and Amon Duul II. Not all at once, but again and again.

In 1992 I went to see Extreme at Wembley Arena. They did 'Get The Funk Out'. If you don't like What you see here Get the funk out! Yeah!

John Fahey - The Legend of Blind Joe Death

I've had loads of problems with this. My doctor recently gave me a load of Temazepam. It's the sh1t. I'm barely even sentient now. :smt059

This table strikingly resembles the same point last season. Top on goal difference, my only points dropped being to the second placed team. last time out they went on to beat me in the final fixture and then lost in the play-off. This time I will prevail. And then lose in the play-off.

I'm literally gagging for this.

Is the missing word 'anus'? I would also anus myself. When will the mods see sense and give us all a chance?