Verbal

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.

Pasty eaters of the world unite!

The team has an off-day and it's suddenly an all pervading 'malaise', as if all the other games that led to where they are now are to be discounted? Bonkers. It IS a failure of imagination, and a failure of an understanding of what was, for the city, a peculiarly working-class tragedy, that led to Belfast stealing a march on the city council. That has NOTHING to do with losing to Blackpool!

Here's a full list of the engine crew that night - note how many are from Southampton (many from the streets around the club)...and how many just disappeared. http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-engineering-crew/

Homeland. Singular. And so far, yes, although the wife is oddly miscast.

Lowe's self-proclaimed attempt to change the laws of football physics meant that, PLC aside, he'd created an especially fragile species. Things would work on his sustainability model only so long as all the important decisions were right. And for a short time, they were. But when bad decisions were made about managers and squad (quality and quantity), the whole thing came crashing down. Lowe was just not good enough for Lowe - and we almost lost our club as a result.

We'll never know, because we got so lucky. My point though is that tommac was a hopeless 'freelancer' who thought he could make a quick buck brokering a mega deal with the employer of two lawyers shooting the breeze on one of his company's lease jets. He had no connection to anyone until he dazzled the board with his 'brokered' Allen deal. Lowe, of all the 'big three', was apparently the most sceptical.

You can see it that way if you want. But don't forget how the same antics almost led eventually to the club's extinction. It was that close.

You're being too modest about your own ITK moment, DP. Must be photocopied on your brain surely?

No you wouldn't. You'd vote for George. You're just trying to get his attention so that he can woo you.

Well at the time he WAS believed - not just by gullible ITKs on S4E, but by the board. Leon even blurted out a press release or press quote about it.

I remember your embarrassment well, Frank. The fact was, though, that the ITKs were created because too many people in the club and sniffing around it got it into their heads that S4E had a powerful leverage on fan opinion that would tip the balance one way or the other. I especially remember tommac coming on to S4E making his opening grand post, only to have DT take the **** out of his appalling spelling. Not quite the acclamation tommac was looking for. But it was then followed by a post from Weston saying (I think to Um pahars): 'Is this who I think it is?' Nudge nudge. And on it stupidly went.

If you knew the ins and outs of the tommac business - a loon who had no connection with the club before or since - you'd be less willing to believe the 'big player' idea.

No, there really wasn't.

There was no WHY. Tommac said Allen was taking over to trumpet his own supposed role in the whole thing. He expected shortly to receive his cut as broker. All he actually did is send the SP through the roof on a false rumour.

With a little help from some notoriously ill-informed ITKs. I remember the ticking off I got from Weston for winding up tommac, on the grounds that my posts might lead to him to 'withdraw' (!) But those were certainly the days for fan-in-the-boardroom power-trippers, whose antics lent some kind of credibility to the loons sifting through the entrails of the club. I still have a recording somewhere of Mary Corbett recalling her desperate search for the truth about the Allen 'bid', only to realise that she and the rest of the board had been completely had by tommac.

Who WAS that? Always signing off gnomic and knowing posts with 'IMHO'.

Not bad for a plumber.

You just know trousers will resurrect this thread in seven games' time.

Indeed. Quite a few of us (I used to post as Roman on S4E) somehow managed to wind him up into a pitiable state each and every evening. We were only trying to help, but he didn't see it that way.

Tommac wasn't a 'potential owner', just some jackass who thought he could snooker Paul Allen into buying the club after meeting two of his lawyers on 'his' plane. McLoughlin was a local manager (on an industrial estate in Fulham, not the Mayfair office he claimed to occupy) of a Florida-based aircraft-leasing business. His shenanigans ramped the share price way beyond anything any 'sensible' (these things are relative) potential owner would consider, thus helping to drive the club to the wall. He was a complete Walter Mitty, who unfortunately took in a few of the more august posters on saintsforever.

That would be the Durell Arms?

I think that's right. Galloway strikes me as a dreadful narcissist. Politics-wise, I'm amazed that a party in as much evident disarray as Labour can still push the serially useless coalition in the polls. The last poll I saw (this week) had a hobbled, almost mute Labour Party eight points ahead. After yet another week of fiascos, incompetence and self-serving 'policy-making', I imagine Labour will be even further ahead. If Labour are the Marie Celeste (still afloat, not much else), the coalition are the Titanic.

I have to admit I fell about laughing at this. What an hysteric! I particularly love the bit where you admit your hopeless ignorance about Iranians not being Arabs, and then turn it into (in your mind only) a triumphantly brilliant point. If you really think that Israeli government officials and politicians are so dazzled by 'paranoia', and 'don't rationalise very well', to the point where the lack of a collective noun that incorporates Iranians and Arabs throws them into the sort of confusion you idiotically suggest, then the very outcome you deny - bombing Jordan - is entirely likely. Undone by your own disordered reasoning. You strike me as someone who spend so much time gaining your 'wisdom' from a keyboard that you have difficulty managing your body mass. For your own sake, I'd strongly suggest you go out into the world and se how it really works, rather than look to see your odd little prejudices and preconceptions confirmed by selective googling. Your posts on this thread are just plain stupid, and betray character flaws that you should really get sorted out (those that you can...). Try, perhaps, re-reading the thread. There's an interesting and well-informed discussion much earlier on Ahmadinejad's speech (to which I notice you managed to contribute not one sensible word). It's worth adding to that that it is not official Iranian policy to 'wipe Israel off the map'; he was however expressing a version of Arab sentiment that actually IS expressed in many Arab states, including Jordan (the majority of whose population IS Palestinian), Egypt (often, until Mubarak's fall, in official newspaper editorials that are so stridently anti-Israeli that American politicians like John Kerry have made almost a career out of complaining about them), and, above all, Saudi Arabia. Iran and it's nuclear ambitions are, in any case, a side show. What's happening in Syria will have far more lasting consequences. As someone who has spent time in Homs, Der'aa, Latakia, Hama, Aleppo and Damascus, I'd suggest that this revolt has been a long time coming. The eventual outcome will change the geo-political balance of the Middle East in ways far more profound than Iran's toying with nuclear triggers.

Seems like (a) a successful public interest defence; and (b) the judge was unimpressed with the prosecution.