Verbal

Yeah, but good to see some decent strikers among the subs. May need them in this game.

You should perhaps re-read the OP. How the hell this thread got turned into a depressingly dim version of the Moral Maze beats me.

The rainforests of eastern Madagascar. A mountain in Borneo, climbed in the worst humidity I've ever experienced. Polar bear-spotting in Spitzbergen in the Norwegian Arctic. In -35 temps. Freetown, Sierra Leone, staying in a hotel where a massacre had occurred a few years earlier - and travelling to a small island in the jungle where the SAS had rescued British hostages during the civil war. Goree - the 'slave island' in Senegal. The 'devil's anvil' in Jordan - in 129F degrees. (If you know your Lawrence of Arabia, it's where je nearly died in the ferocious heat trying to find his Arab guide.) Crac de Chevaliers, in Syria - the largest Crusader castle in the Middle East. Ran - a tiny 1k x 3k island next to an active volcano in the Banda Sea. The only way to get access to it was to row in a dugout among a sea of shark fins, and within 200 metrers of the larva sliding into the sea. In the seventeenth century, the British and the Dutch swapped Ran for Manhattan. East Timor, while the war of independence with the Indonesians was still on. Swat Valley, Pakistan - two journeys through the valley in 2007, shortly before it was overrun by the Taliban. Plus many other adventures in North and South America, Africa, South East Asia, Australia, etc. Never been to Wales though.

Sounds like Roops has got himself a full-time job.

Agreed, LV, and I hope you escaped your brush with the medical industry with your mortgage intact. To arrive at a true comparison between the cost to us of the rival health systems, you have to ADD the US cost of medical insurance together with the substantial federal and state taxes that pay for their ghost NHS. It'll be blindingly obvious then which is the better value for money. The idea that we pay anywhere near an equivalent amount is frankly laughable.

I predict a bye. Just a hunch.

Nice 'told you so' moment there for one or two on here. At least Lowe didn't waste too much money on the Dutch jokers. JP had to pay £60,000 compensation to Helmond, but his salary was only £60,000 - so he was working for nothing.

No, that's way off, I'm afraid. The cost of health insurance is high enough in the US, and prohibitive for about 40 million plus Americans. But you can't just watch uninsured people die of gunshot wounds, heart attacks, strokes, etc, etc. So the US has a kind of ghost NHS. Part of it is known as Medicare, which is entirely US taxpayer-funded. The other major part is the County Hospital system that you'll find across the US. These are also taxpayer-funded, and are designed solely to treat the uninsured. But even if you're insured, be very sure not to have a chronic or degenerative disease. The insurance companies will weedle out of paying for your treatment, and even the hugely expensive safety nets funded by US taxpayers won't help you.

It was obvious to a lot of us at the time of his appointment that JP knew diddleysquat about the CCC - or anything else about how English football works. What's truly amazing is that he depended on Wotte to compensate for that ignorance.

Are we back to the 'do bears sh1t in the woods when trees fall on them' sub-thread?

For any sympathy I might have for JP (which is not a lot), I don't understand how exactly he expected Wotte to advise him on English football. Wotte knew as little as JP - which is so little that science hasn't developed instruments to measure it. When you take their combined ignorance of the league they were in with the destruction of the scouting system, while the few experienced players were being explicitly ostracised, and all in the name of the 'total football' to which both JP and Wotte put their name, how could anyone be surprised at our relegation, admin and -10?

You don't seem to have received an answer to your question, so here goes... When I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2002/3, the best quote I got was $1200, for a family of three. That was for full medical cover, not an HMO. I thought that was quite reasonable - just $1200 a year...until it was pointed out that that was the MONTHLY bill. I asked around among some of my friends in Cambridge, because, frankly, I couldn't believe it. But, no - $1200 a month was about what it cost them to avoid the ludicrous rip off merchants in the HMO trade. Frightening.

19, I wonder if you wouldn't mind cutting back a little on this childish behaviour? You and everyone else knows you're not going before a judge. It's just ludicrous posturing. And can we please get back to the entertainment, because you sure as sh*t are not it.

Unbelievable. I was scrolling down a diverting thread about something many of us have experienced - meeting Saints fans in the unlikeliest of places - and who should appear, giving pompous, woefully ill-judged lectures on decorum? And, 19, do you not understand that making baseless accusations of racism against the children of another poster is actually little sickening?

What I'd give for a '59 Gibson Les Paul. (Actually, 'give' is probably the wrong word for the world's most expensive production guitar - I'd have to sell the house). LP's death is very sad, but his legacy and influence in modern music is immense.

There goes the neighbourhood.

He's also in the Indy today - as one of ten greatest one-club players. Nice shot of him running rings round Giggs and Beckham.

I still have tommac's email somewhere. I think it's time he made an offer.

Probably. I come from Newport.

10.30 Isle of Wight time. 10.00 civilized world. You've got ten minutes to wait.

I rest my case.

Think of the least interesting team we could possibly draw - and that's who we'll get. Simple formula, works every time.

I see your sense of seriousness failure is ongoing.

I think you've just discovered the fatal flaw in quantum mechanics. Damn. I'll alert Niels Bohr (who is probably dead)

Isn't there a forum member registered as Shrodinger's cat? Never posts, though - probably can't work out if he's dead or alive.