norwaysaint

He didn't make so many mistakes in the second half, but I thought that was mainly because of sterling work by the defence and Arsenal having no end product. Boruc was a liability today and we can't say he improved when Arsenal had just one shot on target all match. He was far more shaky than KD and made more mistakes than Gazza has during a match. I really hope he gets better, because he deserves a few more games to prove himself. On that evidence, he rates as worst of our three keepers though. Let's see if he gets better, everybody else ficked up and got another shot.

I thought we were very good. Guly actually looked like a prem player to me, his strength on the ball really made a difference. Ramirez was very creative and he just loves to get the ball. Same for Puncheon who would be worth more than GR if he could shoot. Lambert played well too, I thought. Luke Shaw was equal to the Arsenal players he had to stop. I thought Davis would be the weak link, but he was okay too. NA has to be congratulated for the way we play, I thought the subs coming on fitted right in very quickly and seemed to be keen to keep up the momentum. I hope Boruc improves, he was woeful at the start, making more serious errors than I have seen from either Gazza or KD in one match. I was terrified of seeing him properly tested all match, but luckily he never really was. People say he was better second half, but I thought he was actually lucky that our defence shielded him so well and that Arsenal had no end product today. Right now I have no clue as to who is our best option in goal, does anyone? It's Boruc's turn to get a run of games though.

Pleased to see that most posters with any sense can see that Guly's miss wasn't that bad. I thought it'd be a flood of thoughtless blame. A shot at speed, first touch, at an angle on his wrong foot. How is that an easy shot? If he'd been a left footed player, he probably should've got it. Ramirez, with his unusual ability to make time slow down when the ball touches his boot, might have managed something, but any other right footed striker in the same position would've done as well as Guly did and needed a good slice of luck to bury it.

His appearances coincided with the two matches that I thought were our lowest points that I'd seen this season. I thought we were horrible in those games, especially the defence, and we got better soon after he was dropped again. It may have been coincidence and Kelvin's had a second chance after a weak start. I was glad to see him dropped because I felt the team was so poor with him in it, but maybe it's time to see if he can improve things.

This is odd. I didn't get to see the game today, but the other times I've seen Ramirez, he's been a class above everybody else in the team. Seeming to be able to react and create things in the same time most players can manage a poor reaction shot. I would have said he was clearly a player that had the potential to be worth what we paid, but you need to see a player over a pretty long time to really know. I mean, no player can prove that value over ten games, or prove he's not worth it over a similar amount of games. After the last few games people seemed to be fairly unanimous in saying he was a superb talent. Yet after the game I've missed, everything seems to have turned on its head. Now it seems people have enough to decide his value. This must've been a very telling performance, that was enough to discount the talent we've seen before and rule out any other common reasons for a bad game.

Oh, atheism by definition absolutely means not believing in a god, but my point is that this doesn't mean not believing in anything. Atheism isn't the end of how most atheists would describe their beliefs, it's only the beginning. I would say that the decision to stop believing in a god is in fact often spurred by a belief in something else. atheism defines what you don't believe in, defining what you do believe is a whole other subject. If you met somebody who said they didn't like football, you wouldn't decide that that person had no interests in life, or even that they didn't like sport. I'm not going to go into my beliefs and what I have faith in because I think that would send the thread in a whole other direction and I only have three posts a day so I wouldn't be in a position to respond explain or develop any comment I made. My decision to stick to three posts a day is entirely because I don't want to become one of those people who get addicted to posting their opinions endlessly on every subject. I like to have a life separate from this place. Out of interest, do you think you would have chosen Christianity if you had grown up in a culture dominated by Islam or any other religion? to me there seems to be a lot of people coincidentally choosing religions that happen to be dominant in their surrounding culture. Christians tend to ask "If you don't believe in God, how do you explain where everything came from, nothing can come from nothing." But I would never claim to have answers, to me it's a mystery and that's fine. Science doesn't claim to have all the answers. By definition, science is about constantly facing your own ignorance and being open to being wrong, that's how every single hypothesis and experiment starts. I don't think that mystery is solved by shoving god into the equation, to me that's more of a fear of the unknown and an attempt to avoid the enormous extent of our ignorance with a single, comforting fix.

So we've started with Christmas and are now onto Hitler? Fair enough. Nearly all information I've found points out that while Hitler's belief in Christianity is unsure due to conflicting statements in private and public, there seems little doubt that he believed in a God, so the evidence seems to be that he wasn't an atheist. One common mistake seems to be that atheism is a lack of belief and faith. The dawn of my own atheism was the beginning of my own beliefs and faiths. These are ideas I came to myself and are very important to me. Atheism is often characterised by very strong and passionate personal beliefs, just not in a god. I think this is due to the fact that atheism is so often a very personal and individual decision, whereas religion is often (not always) characterised by being a "taught" faith, passed on by family, geography and the culture one is born into.

Horrible stuff, too many of my students use it, it's very popular over here, about as common as smoking. Obviously the upside is that nobody has to take it passively, the downside is how stupid people look with that lump bulging on their upper lip, talking to somebody and witnessing that disgusting trickle of ****ty brown liquid dribble over their teeth and the fact that they're even more lazy than smokers about disposing of their debris, leaving those nasty little teabags stuck to walls, or spitting the loose stuff all over the place.

It's a bit surprising, after all, if everybody on just on SWF made a list of their top 100 players only in the PL, I'd be surprised to see him get a mention.

I never understand why some tracks are classed as Christmas songs. What exactly has Stay Another Day by East 17 got to do with Christmas? Not a single reference to Christmas or Winter in the whole song. It's a bit tenuous with Stop the Cavalry too, I mean he does mention Christmas once, but it's not about Christmas is it?

Somewhere down the road. I don't usually do much downhill, it's usually a big rip-off. I do a lot more cross country skiing, it's better exercise, more interesting and fulfilling, nicer with the family and completely free of charge. You also get to ski down plenty of hills too, although you'll have to ski up them first. Like Sweaty-crotch from Sweden said, it'll probably be better around Easter though.

It's been discussed here many times before that although the name is from Christianity, celebration at this time of year goes back way beyond that and most cultures have a midwinter festival, regardless of religion, it just seems a natural human thing to do to celebrate being halfway through the toughest time of year. It's also natural to have a celebration of family at some point of the year. Christianity chose to put their festival up at that time because it was already such a time of celebration, rather than the other way around, so there is nothing strange about non-Christians celebrating at Christmas, it's always been the case. What I was wondering about is how much religion actually finds its way into your Christmas and how much has no connection at all. I know some parts of the festival have pagan roots, but those are irrelevant to their inclusion for most of us and are more included because they are cosy or traditional. Is your Christmas Christian? For me Non-Christian: Tree, decorations, giving of gifts, images of santa, snowmen/flakes, rich food, gathering of family, non-religious Christmas songs, pantomime, stockings, joining hands to sing around the tree, candles, advent calendars with gifts in, lights Religious: A few carols on the Christmas CD, hearing the kids mention they've learned about baby Jesus, the name

Did you agree to meet him at the rendez-vous he gave you when you asked then? Excellent, good work, I take it back. I got the impression you'd tried to change it to your local instead, which looked a bit weak. My apologies. Have a good night lads!

If I'm reading this right, DPS tried to be a hard man and square up to the Stain, then backed off when he was given the time and place he asked for. Keyboard warrior alert!

If you can't ban somebody for a being a ****, what exactly were posters like deppo banned for? he posted mostly innocuous stuff, but was banned for basically being a bit silly. Being nasty is allowable, but being silly is worthy of a ban? Wow.

Sorry to hear you've had such a tough year Avenue Saint, Christmas can be a hard time when things are tough at home. What a nasty, petty, little man you are. How could that be anybody's first reaction? Don't you think escapism is exactly what some people would need for a while at times like that?

If you really need to explain this, you can draw a large circle or square, dividing it into 4 sections. I each you draw 25 people/dots/whatever. It will then be clear that each quarter is 24 and three quarters are 75. In other words 75 hundredths is the same as three quarters. then explain that the decimal notation of 75 hundredths is 0.75. Honestly, though, I don't feel it's entirely necessary at first. I would say that it's enough to know those three decimals correspond to those fractions and the understanding of decimals can grow out from there, rather than expecting them to understand the concept of decimals first.

US population: 315,000,000 31,224 firearem related deaths 2007 (including suicides(about 17,000 of them)) I make that about 1 fatal shooting per 10088 people. UK population: 62,000,000 59 fatal shootings in 2007 I make that about 1 fatal shooting per 1,050,847 people. So availability of guns does seem to have an influence on how many people are killed with guns, although there could be other factors, like availability of bullets.

I can't see that tweet on the actual account. Possibly not real. It's very counter-productive if people start making stuff up now. Doesn't help anyone.

They won't be changing their beloved constitution any time soon. Now would be the perfect time for Obama to try though, right at the start of his final term. Even to be remembered as a president who tried but failed to change the gun law would give him a greater legacy. If he doesn't try, he's just another one in the line of presidents who took no significant action. The problem is the general American view of federal interference, Americans generally prefer to be governed by their state and see federal intervention about the same way as we see European intervention in our countries.

The Norwegians killing themselves are doing it mostly because they wanted to be in the EU. (Actually, I believe the figures are skewed by a much higher suicide rate in northern Norway, where during winter, the sun barely reaches over the horizon, creating depression in many people. We still get daytime down here, so we manage to resist the urge.)

I pay about 33% tax, tax is very high here on everything. Much higher than in the UK. I don't understand what you mean by the false position thing. Are you simply saying that having oil makes Norway richer than it would be without oil? Well yes of course, most countries would be poorer if you didn't take their natural resources into account. Without oil, Norway would still be the poorer member of the Scandinavian states that it used to be, poorer than Sweden or Denmark, but Norway has oil. There's nothing false about it. Norway has also been investing heavily into life after oil as well, so the wealth won't be running out for some considerable time.

Well, nobody over here wants to join the EU. I can't remember the last time I even heard it being discussed. The situation over here is very different though. Norway is very wealthy, because they kept the oil business nationalised (the tories sold off the British oil industry long ago). Most of the money Norway makes is actually saved or invested for the future in an "oil-fund", so despite being wealthy, it's not that flash. I know the standard of living is higher than most, I have no idea if happiness levels are higher, with half the country barely seeing sunlight for the next few months, probably not. Oh and plenty of Norwegians complain about high levels of immigration here too, although they seem happy with "invisible immigrants" like me. I'd never return to the UK to live, but neither would most of the ex-pats on this board who are residents in other countries. I've not heard of anyone discussing the problems of Norway mentioned by Cameron before. I think we're generally satisfied with our position in Europe.

Okay, it's a flippant title for a subject perennially worthy of discussion. Here are a few bitesize stats to set off some of the more angry types. I keep saying UK, but actually much of it's just England and Wales, apologies to all the Scotch people, I'd hate to offend them. The Christian population of the UK is down by 4 million from a decade ago, 33.2m people Muslims now make up 4.8 % of the UK population, up from 1.8%, (2.7m people) "No religion" (That's not necessarily atheism) up from 15% to 25% 7% growth in population, more than half of which is down to migration 45% of Londoners are white British, down from 58% White British population down 400 000, 80% from 87% 13% of usual residents were born outside the UK. Non-immigration/ethnicity stats: while fewer people own their own home, more people own it outright. average of 12 cars for every 10 households - up on 11 cars per 10 households in 2001. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20677515 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20675307 I, for one, am only happy because of immigration, but that'd be me immigrating to Norway, where I am a bloody immigrant stealing their jobs and turning them all into Muslims.