Verbal

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Quite. I was really thinking of those ouija board things that get pulled out at slightly trippy student parties - and then it all gets a bit too serious. In any case, I think there are bigger mysteries to solve - like how some posters have the most enormous avatars.

Why are we here? And what the hell is this place?

Could that read: 'Total sceptics who have seen never seen any convincing evidence to change their minds'? Some of the most visible examples of these 'events' are notorious, constructed fakes - like the whole Amityville nonsense. Others are mostly explained by a combination of natural phenomena and our own natural (instinctual) susceptibility - who HASN'T been spooked at a hands-on-a-cup seance?

Pass.

Back to FF's question, it's fairly obvious that he's answered it himself. The reason the Lounge is more interesting is at least partly because the most interesting thing about Saints right now is our collective glee at Pompey's imminent demise. (When was the last time a thread hit 3000 posts?! You have to go back to the epic takeover threads to find a count that high). That old saying about history being repeated first as tragedy (us), then as farce (them), has never been truer.

Why go for the poor imitation when you can have the real thing - tommac. The hyperventilating trolley dolly is dearly missed.

Some of what now passes for Americanese is Irish in origin. George Bernard Shaw was the loudest advocate for simplifying spelling and punctuation. Read any of his plays and you'll see what I mean. Of course, he delighted in suggesting that to insist on good spelling - in all its convoluted Englishness - was to act as a British imperialist lackey. So colour became color, judgement became judgment, and commas went the way of T Rex. Arguably, without it, you couldn't have had Ernest Hemingway. Or Jeffrey Archer.

There was a time when you could post a letter in London, addressed to your personal banker in Zurich (as you do), and it would arrive later that same day. That time was the 1890s. How? All that nasty old technology, like mail sorting offices on railways, an efficient railway system, properly staffed - plus a bit of co-ordinated planning across national boundaries. There's a best-selling book to be written by someone about how successive waves of new technology have degraded our lives in quite measurable ways. Newer isn't always better. I'm not entirely sure what the detailed issues are in the Royal Mail strike. But this current outbreak of 1970s-style industrial relations does seem to have been stirred up by a peeved Peter Mandelson, angry at his thwarted attempt to privatise the RM, and ably assisted by a worse-than-useless Crozier and a poorly communicating Communications Workers' Union led by someone doing a fair impression of Peter I'm-Alright-Jack Sellers.

I hadn't heard of him but I'm not surprised he exists. But for the avoidance of doubt, as lawyers say, I'm not being entirely serious. Dummett's book is interesting because he felt he needed to take time out from his day job as one of the world's outstanding philosophical minds to write a book that might help his students write a decipherable sentence. Along the way, it's very funny.

I'm just being uncharacteristically obnoxious. (I'm right though. Please see Michael Dummet, 'Style and Grammar' - the best and most entertaining book I know on the subject. It's pedant's heaven.)

No offence, but you should re-read what you've read very carefully - and then admit the calamitous error of your ways. Don't make me quote chapter and grammatical verse at you. It could be the worst bloodbath over a comma you've ever seen.

Please see post no.3. I'm shocked.

Yes, you. You have officially failed the pedantry test.

There should be a comma after 'grammar' and a full stop after 'right'.

Oh dear, there goes the thread.

Meaning: "I thought about it for five mad minutes, but after that - no way!"

Indeed.

With too many Bennys.

And you could run it any day of week at the moment. Gloating aside, the whole thing is just weird. Freakishly weird.

Snowballs.

Thanks Micky, and I share many of those sentiments. BTW, Roman has been away making a film for Channel 4. Goes out 9pm tomorrow (Monday) I think.

I bet you spellchecked that REALLY carefully.

There's moaning and then there's out and out bitterness. What the hell is with you? You used to be funny.

The Lounge is the home for the club's resident racists, lefty tree-huggers, 9/11 truthers (a number of odd-mods included), moon-landing deniers, ultra-loony nationalists living in New Orleans (wrong Saints, surely), and smugly glib submariners. So yes, more interesting - sort of like a human zoo of bonkers ideas, put forward with not a shred of self-doubt. An anthropologist would have a field day - let alone a psychotherapist.