Verbal

Ox would still have left, true. But at least his leaving produced one of Cortese's finest negotiating moments. At the face-to-face meeting, Arsenal's negotiator offered £4m - "no higher". Cortese unclipped his watch, set it on the table, and said: You've got ten minutes to agree to £12m plus £3m add-ons or the deal is off. Arsenal caved.

Watch out for this movie. Ben Stiller's first Oscar - as a director? (And a great trailer soundtrack - Of Monsters & Men)

Keltner is still around. I always thought of him as the greatest rock drummer out there. I think he drummed for all the Beatles post-break-up, except for McCartney. I saw Keltner playing on Clapton's Albert Hall gigs about seven or eight years ago. Still absolutely solid - a joy to listen to. Amazing that such a small town as Tulsa could produce so much talent all at once. Seems we have this thread to ourselves Ducky...

Cale's songwriting legacy is amazing. Aside from Clapton, his songs have been recorded by The Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Synyrd, Deep Purple, the Allman Brothers, Johnny Cash, Captain Beefheart, Bryan Ferry, Beck and Santana, among many others. He's a bit like that other Tulsa native Leon Russell. No one's heard of him either, but Elton John, for one, wouldn't have had a career without him (and it was the only time EJ was listenable).

Completely agreed. I once saw J J Cale play at the Hammersmith Odeon (as it then was), and he was the most retiring frontman you could imagine, hanging around the amps at the back of the stage whenever he wasn't singing. But musically he was exceptional - a guitar player with an easy, precise and sparse style and a songwriter of exceptional originality. After Midnight is one of THE great songs of the 70s.

...you'd have a pound.

Quite. (I'm not sure I've ever seen you post this sensibly, so wildly guessing you've worked in the railways or are from a railway family.)

I've no idea what goes through your mind. Why should you be concerned enough to comment at the number of posts I write? And why is the invitation to take a look at New Earswick acting like a "tourist board"? It's very hard to make any sense of your posts. As for being "creative", I'm all for blue skies thinking, but, used on its own, it always seemed to me the last refuge of ignoramuses - with blue skies being the only recognisable thing in their heads. Far better to look to what's worked in the past and why. Which is why I suggested you look at New Earswick. As a model village it was itself a model for garden cities like Welwyn and Letchworth. You could also look at Port Sunlight, Saltaire and Bournville. The point is, they were all built in the belief that our environment shapes our lives and our behaviour - NOT the other way around. So in NE, for example, Joseph Rowntree wanted something that undid the human wreckage he had found in York's appalling slums. He built a village where workers and managers alike lived, where the ideas of community and civic space were foremost. It was a brilliant success. Rowntree and the other "private sector" social reformers simply had a different idea of working class life to that which became prevalent in the 1930s and instutionalised in the 1960s slum-clearance programmes. For the 30s, take a look at a film called Housing Problems. You can view it here: http://vimeo.com/4950031 Slum clearance is advocated not only on the grounds that the slums are dreadful (which they are undoubtedly), but also that "helpless" working class inhabitants, by their nature, need rescuing by the intervention of the state. (There's also an unstated motive - the film is sponsored by a gas company, whose sales would increase with larger and more connectable homes.) This patronising view of working class people, as a bunch of well-meaning but helpless dimwits, was the underpinning to the slum clearances of the 1960s. Where did the people go? Some into the towerblock wastelands that went up on former slum lands. Some went to what were euphemistically called "overspill estates", built 50 miles or more way. I happen to have grown up on one of these estates. It was a hellish place to live. The model villages and towns created by the late Victorian and Edwardian social reformers, by contrast, have by and large been enduring successes, both architecturally and socially. Contrast this with your "idea" (the quotation marks are required). This is that you would screen out "scumbags", and that this would somehow ensure that all these "entire estates" would work. Frankly, it's a contemptible, stupid suggestion. Fortunately not even this government is moronic enough to pursue anything remotely like it.

I read very carefully what you'd written because I couldn't quite believe someone was seriously proposing to build "entire new estates" and would solve the concomitant social problems by choosing the right sort of people. Actually it's you who wasn't paying attention. I was talking about the great Victorian estate builders - you read that as no different from the speculative builders whose lines of terraced houses dominate all cities in Britain. The two are from different universes. Try googling New Earswick, for example, built by the Rowntrees. Nothing built from the sixties to the present has the quality of places like this, with its affordable housing (still), generous space and sense of community. All the sociological skills that went into building New Earswick and others have been lost. You think what you propose is novel. It isn't. It's Newcastle city council c.1963.

The very LAST thing anyone should do is "build entire new estates". They become either urban sink holes or suburban death. Housing should be about communities - something estate builders in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century understood pretty well, but we don't. Add this with your stuff about rent controls and land tax and you sound like a regurgitation of one of those northern relics from the 1960s Labour town halls - the kind you see getting tipped off the top of a concrete multi-storey car park by Michael Caine.

It's hardly as idiotic as the help-to-buy policy itself, is it? The policy will create an artificial property bubble - the effect of which is like chasing a balloon that floats every further out of reach. As subsidies drive up demand, demand drives up prices. Rather than this, wouldn't it be far better to insist that people are paid a living wage? The government currently spends £4bn a year on income support, mostly to private sector workers whose employers know they can cut wages below the threshold without penalty. So fewer "entrepreneurs" sponging off the state and fairer pay. Deal? Then we might be able to dispense with help-to-buy, which even the right-wing Institute of Directors calls "mad".

You've got the wrong end of the stick. The Japanese aren't talking about their concern about selling cars here - they'll sell cars to anyone (and to anyone in he UK with a higher price tag). They're talking about their investments here in motor and other manufacturing. The reason they invested here was driven (so to speak) by the UK's position within the EU. Nissan doesn't want to make cars here and then find they suddenly have to leap over trade barriers to sell their UK-manufactured cars in Europe. They will simply move production to Europe. End of story. And for a supposedly arch-capitalist your proposal for British Leyland Mk 2, with a "government-established" volume car company, is quite bizarre. Never going to to happen. The Japanese intervention is not even the first of its kind. The Americans did the same a couple of months ago when they said that they would not consider including Britain in the proposed bilateral trade convention with the EU if it voted to leave. Let's get real here. For all the wishful thinking of the little englanders, the way this is going to go down is as follows: at the beginning of the referendum campaign, polls will show a substantial majority in favour of pulling out. As the campaign progresses, more and more alarming (and some alarmist) stories will be spooled out, so that the pros - which include Cameron - ensure a comfortable victory. In the meantime, large foreign investors, nervous of the outcome, will withhold major investment decisions until there is some degree of certainty. This is will damage the British economy. The anti-campaign is focused on the wrong thing. What we should be doing is democratising European institutions not raising the drawbridge on the real world.

The heart wants what the heart wants. But your maintaining something to be the case doesn't make it any more credible. You operate with the implicit view that the US is the Great Satan, with unimaginable, unmatchable powers. It isn't. You evidently think it can do what it wants. It can't. Very powerful, yes; capable of terrible blunders, absolutely; and brought low by asymmetric warfare, repeatedly. Besides, Afghanistan in the crosshairs of powerful competing regional interests, including Iran, Pakistan, India and the proxies of Russia. So much so that the oil/gas pipeline negotiations in the mid-nineties were between the US and the Taliban, precisely because it wanted to work around some of these interests (notably Iran). As for "getting" bin Laden, they almost didn't. It was a close-run thing after the helicopter accident and looked at one point like it might go the way of Carter's disastrous raid in Iran to rescue the hostages. And if your read the leaked Pakistani inquiry report into the elusiveness of bin Laden until that point, it turns out that the most likely explanation for his continued freedom all those years was that good old standby, hopeless incompetence. The US would still dearly like to "get" Zawahiri (the actual mastermind of the 98 attack and the present head of AQ) and Mullah Omar. They haven't "got" either. Just about the least likely counter-explanation to all this is that the US simply decided at one point not to get him and at another decided the opposite. If you actually believe this, what's the evidence - I mean credible evidence, not just more musings.

Exactly so. I'm afraid complexity doesn't come into pap's world. Bergen wanted an interview. To get try and get it, he called Ahmed Rashid, a Cambridge-educated Pakistan journalist based in Lahore. Rashid had not only interviewed bin Laden a few times, he'd also spent a decade fighting in the nationalist movement in Balochistan. Even so, Rashid was no friend of bin Laden, and felt his life was in danger during some of his encounters. But he knew how to get a request to bin Laden. Bin Laden agreed to the interview because he wanted to make a very public declaration of war by the then newly formed al Qaeda against the US occupation of "Muslim lands". Who better to do with with than a CNN journalist? Despite the fact that bin Laden at the time was living in very squalid old farm buildings in the valleys below the Tora Bora range, his media advisors arranged for him to be interviewed by Bergen in and around a mountain cave, with all the guerrilla-chic that went with it. A few months later, al Qaeda conducted its first major "operation" - the 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It was only after that that bin Laden was declared "most wanted" by the US. The al Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole followed in 2000. And then for all non-paranoids, 9/11 was al Qaeda's third strike against the US. So yes, the interview was very much on bin Laden's terms.

Take a bit more time to read the Frances Coppola debunking. Although public finances certainly need sorting out, the deeper problem (not crisis) is private not public debt. I've never heard the idea before that welfare and the NHS were initially paid for by the empire. In fact, Britain was so in hock to the US because of lend-lease that it emerged from WW2 with historically astronomical levels of debt. As to Charles' question about who is right, I'm more inclined to give a tiny bit more credence to a professionally trained economist than some anonymous figure in the marketing department of a magazine desperately trying to drive up subscriptions.

It's not fully funded. The "profit' is an actuarial one - ie garbage in, garbage out. After years of being deep in the red, the pension scheme suddenly looked healthy just before Vince Cable made the privatisation announcement. The taxpayer will underwrite all future pension payments - as well as having contributed to a just-completed and massive investment programme to modernise the service, especially with sorting-office automation. That investment will be gifted to the new shareholders. The only substantial commitment undertaken by the new owners would be the guarantee of a universal delivery service throughout the UK. This will presumably be enforced and monitored by another new quango rather like Ofgem, which absolutely guarantees that energy customers are not ripped off - ever - by companies like SSE. Shares will presumably be attractive to companies like G4S and Serco, who will no doubt deliver the service by massively overcharging the taxpayer at the drop of a hat.

Indeed. That 'someone' was tommac, who met a couple of Allen lawyers as part of his job as a sales manager for a private jet firm, and who made claims to the club based on the vaguest of conversations he had with them while he was trolley-dollying. Mary Corbett tried to track down the source of the supposed offer and found no evidence for it whatsoever.

South East.

Not so fast Muppet. Phil was chucked out of the Lounge because he couldn't keep up. The Lounge is for the certifiable elite, and we keep numbers low deliberately with the quality of our posts. Only those with impeccable left-wing credentials are allowed in - along with a small selection of right-wing swivel-eyed fruitloops whose presence is designed to make the Right look even more brainless than it is. Numbers mean nothing. We win. And you are Lounge-banned.

So let me see, who to believe? The Royal Statistical Society or some **** on a footie forum? Tough one.

One or two airlines in South East Asia do have a bit of a reputation, certainly - although I'd have thought East Asian ones were on the whole pretty good. Avoid at all costs an Indonesian airline called Merpati - aka Air Crash, (five accidents in the last four years alone, and three of them occurring during landing).

That's a a very good piece of popular physics writing - with some (as it turns out) well-informed speculation.

Just noticed this piece of bizarro. So are you accusing the McCanns of being Masons or Catholic Guilders? Yes or no. And name names of the others you accuse of being Masons. You seem so certain of their identity, so cough them up. Alternatively, ask yourself whether your paranoid view of the world isn't making you say some embarrassingly foolish things about an awful event.

So just the amateur musings of someone who has no knowledge of the details of the case. All you're actually saying is that you represent a strain of public opinion that pillories the McCanns based on sweet **** all - and that you should be entitled to your pound of tax-paid flesh by having them charged, even though they have by now been excluded as suspects by the investigators themselves. Just so we're clear.

You must be incredibly close to the investigation to make this statement. Given your presumed inside knowledge of the case and the forensics, what precisely have the police "invalidly" excluded?