Verbal

Where's the love gone?

No no no no no no and no.

Thank you detective dune.

To give an example of what you don't like is to suggest you've seen it. In any case, I suggest you go and see the film. The audience I was with laughed and clapped their way through it (you have to see it to understand why a wealthy management headhunter comes to be covered in human excrement and driving a speeding tractor with a dead mastiff hanging from it). I forgot about the subtitles for most of what was a superb piece of visual storytelling. And it NOTHING like Girl With...

So cigarettes are not that addictive then?

So what did you not like about Headhunters? (You must have been very keen to see it though, since it's only released today)

I wonder why dune isn't posting on this thread.

I had no idea Saintsweb had so many Inspector Clouseaus.

Go and see Headhunters. Stunning, brilliant film - and saying even that is giving too much away.

So...no, never mind.

So he's in because Saints say he is, or he is out because they say he's in. Or he's out because they're not exactly saying he's in, but this could also be taken to mean that he's in.

Apparently so. The knee-jerk default to authoritarianism here is just another clue as to the thin veneer of capitalist civilisation. Thank (non-existent) god for socialists and their lone defence of civil liberties.

An easy case to prosecute in a proper court of law and they blow it.

Not forgetting David Harewood.

We have seen the face of the enemy, and he is us. I really don't get this claim by May, Cameron, et al, that they're not interested in the content of our communications, only who we communicate with - and yet all ISPs, Skype, etc., would be required to keep all content for a year or more. I suspect the key to this is in the fact that Labour tried exactly the same. It's a pet civil servants' project (because it needs more civil servants) that gets rammed under the noses of successive Home Secretaries, who docilely agree and present it like a giant turd to a distinctly unappreciative and unimpressed electorate. It probably won't happen - although as others have said, it won't really make much difference to the eavesdropping that's already going on.

About ten years ago, I met the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann (the discoverer of the quark). Aside from being a brilliant scientist, he is a world-leading linguist, and has an extraordinary ear for accents. He could, for example, place a regional British accent within a few miles of its geographic origins. Even though my Hampshire accent faded in childhood, after moving to Kent and then London, he was still able to pick out enough detail to guess that I had grown up near Southampton. He is, by temperament, a prototypical Dr Sheldon Cooper (and entered Yale at the same age -15). But his ideas about human language, dialect and linguistic origins are fascinating. His autobiography, The Quark and The Jaguar, discusses this, if anyone's genuinely interested in the significance of dialect (basically that different dialects provide different clues to an original human language).

One too many whats.

From this sentence, such as it is, I would guess that you were a recent guest.

Interesting discussion on this here: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1616085/Economy-watch-Is-Britain-heading-recession.html And here: http://www.ftadviser.com/2012/04/03/investments/economic-indicators/uk-recession-fears-eased-as-bcc-predicts-growth-in-q-U9weTeesPvbCM3LVFLPfyO/article.html Hardly something to get the bunting out for, is it? I'll concede that I'll have to wait for the coup de grace on 25 April, when the ONS produce their stats. Fancy another tenner?

Oh, not 'green shoots' again! It's an old Tory scam to be the 'first' to call a recovery - aka wishful thinking which they hope others will buy on the flimsiest of evidence. And some of those listed above are clearly anything but optimistic. The growth in online advertising, for example, is at the expense, and worse, of 'offline' advertising in newspapers, TV, radio, etc. Financial services is less gloomy because it floats on a sea of taxpayer loan guarantees. Pret (aka McDonald's) is displacing independent sandwich shops in a classic 'clone high street' expansion. The economy is officially back in recession. And UK manufacturing is 'enjoying' a brief respite from a crushing low. Happy now?

She is starting to sound silly to many Argentinians, which counts for more than any appeal to international law. The invasion was carried out by one of the most brutal of modern dictatorships, and is forever associated with those murderers and thugs. Plenty of commentators in Buenos Aires have been making sure no one forgets that connection, and it's having an effect.

True enough, but it was a failure in some part because of the limitations placed on the British by the Reagan administration - even though the damage being done by the Super Etendards was there for all to see.

If we're thinking of the same cock-up, it was after Reagan's prohibition, which was why it was launched from Chile. Didn't stop the Super Etendards, and was a bit of a sad mess by all accounts, barely registering a scratch.

With Reagan's permission, and on the strict understanding that the Argentine mainland was not to be attacked.

I missed the Len Goodman programme, unfortunately. Belfast built the Titanic certainly, but with a host of design and construction faults that ought to add up more to embarrassment than celebration. The cost-cutting and flaky iron ore composites used in the rivets, for example, directly contributed to the domino-effect that ripped open successive supposedly water-sealed compartments. As bulkhead doors were slammed shut in a futile attempt to contain the onrush of water through the ship, dozens of engine crew found themselves sealed in, and would have been carried to the bottom of the ocean. Southampton, from where the engine crew was predominantly recruited - and many from the streets around where St Mary's now stands - was the city that took the full brunt of those design, engineering and construction failures (leaving aside those to do with navigation and egotistical hubris). To answer delldays' point, yes, it was stigmatising to be a single mother in working class communities after the turn of the last century, but much less so to be a widow. Besides, the bereaved families were looked after reasonably well by the standards of the day by a trust. There was also, by all accounts, a great deal of civic solidarity in the city - a source of genuine pride. There are no records that I'm aware of, at least, of families being left destitute by the sinking (happy to be corrected). So a well-designed memorial that highlighted the sinking as a tumultuous event in social history - with fascinating detail on the lives of those who lived, survived and died on the ship - would have made a great and fitting tribute.