Verbal

But he still had to widen the scope of the rules to make it stick - and insist on denying Southampton the right of appeal. Hardly natural justice, is it? And if something is 'deserved', then surely that implies that Mawhinney be consistent. In which case, Bates would not still be at Leeds (for 'misremembering' that he's not actually the owner, despite claiming he was); Briatore would not still be at QPR (it seems an open-and-shut case under the FL's own rules that he should be banned from part-ownership of a FL club); and Notts County wouldn't still be getting away with the claim that their ownership is transparent, when in fact it's lost in a fog of tax-haven companies whose personnel were photographed last week doing deals in North Korea.) Mawhinney has been a disaster. Good riddance.

Quite.

A tricky problem for physics, Mr Smirk, until someone came up with this reasoning. If time traveller came back from the future to alter an event in some way, everything from that moment on would split off into a universe of its own. That universe alone - not ours - would include the altered event. Which is why, incidentally, we haven't met anyone from the future. Read Michio Kaku on parallel universes for the best explanation - but it's all down to the paradoxes of the quantum world we live in (or not)... Question is: is it possible to traverse these parallel universes in some way? That may be an explanation for the repeated failures at LHC. Confused? you will be.

Is he from the eleventh dimension?

At goalkeeping?

'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'. This should be our national anthem. 'Life's a piece of sh!t When you look at it...' Always brings a tear to my eyes.

It was Leeds United away in my flash-forward. So you can take that as gospel.

No, he's definitely British - but left for New Orleans knowing that it would never suffer from anything remotely connected with climate change. And if it did, his mate George W would sort everything out.

Can we get back on topic please? We've reached the 'STFU' phase and I need to know the outcome.

Are you PFC's accountant?

I've been there too - while the LHC was under construction. While I was down in one of the caverns the Spanish constructors managed to tip over a three-storey crane. Someone or something really doesn't want that thing to fire up!

You're going to poke someone's eye out with that pointy head of yours.

Don't bring your hippy trippy stuff into this. This is a thread for real men in plaid shirts who tear up to a Welsh choir singing the Times crossword.

Yes, Bexy, that's exactly what happened.

More randyoldgit then? I always find the stress worse while listening to a game on the radio than actually being there. But yes, it's good to feel smug...

Are we just keeping this thread going to embarrass Eric?

They're searching for, among other things, the Higg's Bosun, a particle that only ever existed at or very near the beginning of time. Worries about what would happen if it were in effect re-produced led, for example, to the book version of Flashforward. Just a piece of clever science fiction of course - but some scientists seem spooked enough to have considered it to have some basis in science-reality.

While my mind is truly boggled by your lecture on posting etiquette, I don't see any problem with Matt-Le-Non-Existent-Deity's lists. You can, after all, pick and choose...

So every month we're going to have a 'guess whether the players get paid' competition? And someone, surely, is joking about the name of the solicitors, Fuglers - it just sounds like a name designed to avoid the swear filter.

How long is your nose right now?

They will thank you for wishing them well.

I think it's a false dichotomy. Any properly thought-through atheism does not depend on proving or disproving the existence of a god. 'Proof' is a scientific concept. You can't apply science to faith. (Not that it hasn't been tried, as the creationists and their close relatives, the intelligent designers attest.) The idea of a god is simply - to an atheist - uninteresting.

But talk of breakaways are back on the agenda among the big clubs too, some of whom see bigger pots of gold elsewhere. And in any case, the actual and unprecedented collapse of clubs in the Prem will surely focus a few minds this time around.

Phil Gartside, the Bolton chairman, is about to upset the apple cart again by proposing a two-tier premier league. The reason is that, outside of the top four or five, the costs of competing in the league - and the Sword of damocles that relegation has become - have wrecked the finances of clubs like Hull and Pompey, and will wreck many others to come. He put this idea up a couple of years ago, but suggested then that there wouldn't be any relegation to or promotion from the Championship. Now he's dropped that idea. But he's proposing that any club with enough points to be promoted from the Championship must also prove that it has a big enough supporter base and good enough facilities to actually qualify for promotion. That last bit is good for us, I'd have thought. But do we really want a two-tier league? http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/nov/06/premier-league-two-division-gartside

It's all but irrelevant. Religious texts, by definition, can be read any number of ways. You can be an axe murderer and claim religious motivation, or you can be the most altruistic person, and argue that your moral convictions stem from religious faith. I personally believe all religion is twaddle, but that doesn't give me the license to decry people who believe. But what is demonstrably wrong - and immoral - is to declare that anyone with a particular faith as inherently evil because of that belief. In the end, it's their actions and the consequences of those actions on which anyone should be judged. I think we can all agree that Osama bin Laden, because of his belief in mass murder as a fund-raising tool, is a particularly evil individual. And the child-snatching gangs in East Africa, under the influence of a fundamentalist Christian leader, are hardly sanctified by their loud profession of faith. Not, of course, that lack of faith is necessarily the road to enlightenment either. It's easily forgotten that Stalin and his brand of state-religion communism killed far more than Hitler.