Verbal

Read their surname again, and then, very slowly, ask yourself that question again to see how hopelessly ill-informed it really is.

Laissez-faire is the name of a political philosophy that advocates an individual's freedom from state limitations, and is historically anti-Royalist for that reason. I always find it odd that swivel-eyed right-wingers (not you, of course) are so staunchly royalist when their supposed core beliefs should lead them to be exactly the opposite. So on this, the right and left should unite: free us from those putrid 'Sachsen-Coburg und Gothas' (to give them their German names in German).

I wonder why that question comes up. Royalists are fond of saying QE2 has no power. Actually of course, the recent scandal over the government's going and kneeling before Charles to get his approval over all kinds of legislation gives the lie to that. So an alternative to what? To a bunch of usurpers who, so embarrassed by their German-ness during the first world war, invented a silly surname, nicked from the castle they'd 'inherited'? Constitutional reform has been held up far too long by pathetic kow-towing to these dumbasses. As a consequence, we already have a dangerous merging of the executive and the legislature, rather than a clear separation of powers (the liberal constitutional ideal). Reform that reintroduces that separation is good for democracy, and if democracy is so intimately intertwined with neo-liberal economics, as the swivel-eyes on here insist, then if they're right we'll all be better off and, they too, should be anti-Royalist. At the moment, we have an unelected figurehead, and, often, an unelected Prime Minister (as happened with Brown - but he's by no means the exception. Major took over from Thatcher before he won the General Election in 1992, and Calaghan before him, etc, etc). We have these little coups and no one bats an eyelid - or very few anyway. It's time to constitutionally grow up, drop the mother-fixation with QE2, ditch the monarchy, write the damned constitution down and be the mid-sized liberal democracy we can be.

Once QE2 is gone, and the succession delivers Charles to reign over us, the royal mask will well and truly slip, and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas (to give them their proper surname; 'Windsor is just a made-up name) will go back to being as rankly unpopular as they were this time last century.

As the article says: The truth is rather different. There is far more genetic variation within racial groups (around 85%) than there is between racial groups (just 15%). Indeed, surface appearance is often a highly misleading way of assessing the genetic distance between populations. And this is especially true of black Africans, among whom there is FAR greater genetic variation (hence the 'Out of Africa' theory) than between a black African and a white Norwegian.

Trolltastic!

Oh, hence the name.

The one with the squid face?

Then consider your forelock tugged and your knee scraped.

The 'et' is presumably redundant, or pronounced silently.

You haven't made a point of any substance.

To be fair to Cameron, it wasn't a U-turn - just Gove being a dickhead.

Better idea: give them Britannia back (which is sinking) and take them on a tour of Italian islands.

We're just waiting for you to learn how to spell.

trousers, ask yourself where the royal duchys came from. They were landgrabs, largely of public (ie our) land, privatised for the benefit of our dumbass royals. Your (oddly American) YouDune does of course gloss over this. Chuck the royals out, exile them back to Bavaria, and open up all the castles, grand houses, to the public and turn over the Duchys to the National Trust. We'll make just as much money and likely more. And the latest news is Cameron has junked the idea, thank ****.

Off with their inbred heads.

That is pretty shocking. Arrest on the way I hope.

For about a minute. In a crap film.

Okat then, how about buffers at the end of the runway? Or inflatable ejector seats?

The fix is longer aircraft carriers. Seems simple enough.

Possibly, but Moneyball is all about how the A's were to survive the next season, after having all their great players swiped by the Yankees and the Red Sox. So the question was: who to buy, and with much less money? Their answer to that question has been hugely influential in baseball.

You should all pack yourselves off to see the movie, Moneyball, and see how a small baseball team, the Oakland A's, managed to take on the big money clubs. And the A's actually did it by CUTTING their spending on importing players. It struck me, watching it, that Brian Clough and Peter Taylor's Nottingham Forest were way ahead of smaller clubs in US baseball in realising that club management too often look at the wrong things when they consider which players to buy. I'm not saying it's THE way to go - just an interesting perspective.

Harrison Ford's objection was more about quality than quantity. He said: 'George, you can write this sh!t, but you sure can't say it.'

I'm sorry to hear that, SG. My condolences.