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Not taking sides here but getting a bit fed up with the one sided anti board rhetoric over the ‘free 600k’ that the board apparently turned down and has been castigated for. So to balance things up a bit, can someone explain the following: Why the Navy Blue group would not disclose who all the investors were and meet in total with the board as planned? Why was it being suggested that the board turned down money when no offer was apparently made? Why did the Navy Blue group cancel the planned meeting with the board and withdraw from the proposal? Why is everyone saying that it’s free money when there are conditions attached that the board say that they could not agree to? Maybe when someone gives us some honest, transparent and reasoned answers the rest of us will be in a position to take sides…

Fair play to you BPM. You’ve consistently given answers to questions on here and you’re not hiding behind a username as I think most of us know who you are. You also manage to provide what appears to be factual information without resorting to the juvenile stuff. I supported the old BTB bib and would probably have supported this had I known about it. The only observation I’d make is the “let the club get on with their business without this distraction”. I agree completely. I just wish some of the posters on here would buy into it.

This is an important thread - I'm glad it's here. I lost my mum to cancer when I was 17. She had it for six years - pretty much all of my time at high school. The first five years had their ups and downs, but she lived a pretty full life through it - she was Finnish (which fairly stood out in small-town Scotland), whip-smart, artistic, had vegetarian/lentilish tendencies long long before it was cool, and I was really close to her. The last few months were brutal. It was hard to process seeing someone you love grow weak, frustrated, and desperately sad about what was happening. The thought of her dying terrified me, and in some ways I did a lot of grieving before it actually happened to the point where things felt quite numb for a while in the aftermath. Also, given the age I was it all played out at a time when outside my home there were usual seventeen year old things like meeting girls, passing my driving test, starting to go to the pub etc. I saw all that as an escape and told very few people that she was ill. If I had my time again I think I'd be a lot more open, but I guess that's something teenage boys find harder than most people. Since then more than 25 years have passed - my father remarried (to someone fantastic), and I've got a partner and two kids who all came along a long time after she died (my daughter gets her middle name from my mum and people who knew her often comment how alike they look). I often wonder what she would have made of the world today and how she would have got on with the family that she never met.

I really hope that everyone who’s struggling with this disease, whether directly or being around nearest and dearest with it, are getting the support they need. My own family has gone through a steady train of brain tumour pish in recent years (my mum’s dad died with one in summer 2017, my dad’s mum died with one in early 2018, and in late 2019 my dad got diagnosed with one). It turns people’s lives completely upside down, totally shattering plans and expectations and assumptions about the way your life is going to be. With dad its like he’s gone senile post op and radio/chemo and we know it’s just a matter of time. That’s obviously rubbish for him but it’s been horrendous for my mum, who had always counted on him being the one to look after her (with all her own health issues) in old age. I’m lucky enough to have them down here at the moment for a bit, and I’ll hopefully be up in August for my nephew’s baptism, but there is that dawning realisation that they gave him 18 months in March 2020, and that despite a relatively stable spell in late 2020 he’s close to borrowed time now. At times it feels like you’re doing the grieving long before he actually passes though, as all the things that gave him joy and all the things that were shared experiences in our father son relationship just become harder or impossible. Dad’s love was classic cars; he can’t drive. We would always banter with puns; he struggles to string a sentence together without using the wrong word. Right now we are watching the cricket and he saw Phil Tufnell and said “that’s that rugby player. Wait. No. Not rugby”. He knows he’s trapped in this cloud of fuzzy nonsense but he can’t quite fight out of it. He came into the study during the pandemic and once said that lunch was “the flat disc thingies” (meaning pizzas ). He would pass some time reading the newspaper early on in his treatment; he can’t now read much more competently than an 8 year old child. It’s the robbed time I resent. If I find a woman who’ll have me he’ll probably never meet her. If I have children he’ll never meet them. They’ll never get to know the sharp silly man we’ve all loved for decades. In many ways I’ve been so lucky to have him in my life throughout my childhood as a reliable and supportive influence. I really do feel for those who lose a parent in childhood. But even though I objectively have my life shit fairly together I still feel like I’ll be totally lost without him when he pops his clogs. What I’d give for just another, say, five years…

This idea is harder to get to f**k than Covid. Us lower league luddites clearly to blame for Scotland spending Tuesday night hoofing the ball into the sun, if only we'd welcomed the OF's kids into our league years ago we'd be getting ready for a last 16 tie against the Germans. Who we'd inevitably pump due to some of our players having spent a couple of seasons getting hoofed into the sun by lower league luddites. If we're serious about improving Scottish footballers then let's try investing in coaches and safe, accessible (free), facilities, give that 20 years or so and see where we stand. If the OF are serious about producing players for their first teams then they should stop paying people like Shane Duffy 44k per week and trust their youths to play the odd first team game. All football clubs have to balance immediate success and future success - the OF have enough advantages, they don't need another one. Doesn't really need said but I won't be paying money to watch my team in any league game involving a colts team.

There needs to be a time bar instated on any discussion of league reconstruction proposals after a package is voted down, this is beyond ridiculous now.

A couple of weeks ago I has a disagreement with @oaksoft about the use of statistics in science. With that in mind I came across a scientific article that made this somewhat bold claim in its abstract. Wow, I thought. That's a claim and a half. So I read the article. The statistics used in it are unbelievable. Let's take one example. They use vaccination data from Israel as they had the big early roll out. Then they compared the number of vaccinations against the recorded incidence of side effects from the Netherlands. Why the Netherlands? Because they reported the highest level of side effects (701 per 100,000). Or, to put it another way, 5 and a half times the EU average. The Dutch number is an utter outlier; the next highest is Estonia at 412 per 100,000. EU average is ~120 per 100,000. The bad statistics continue, but this is the basis of their claim. All their later statistical analysis is based on this initial assumption. The NNTV figure is based on a letter to the BMJ rather than a separate peer-reviewed article, and ignores the fact that NNTV isn't a much used indicator of anything. The figure is from back of the fag packet maths by a retired paediatrician. A take-down of this nonsensical figure is given here I did wonder how they ever got published, and then realised it was in Vaccines, an MDPI publication. I have published with MDPI in the past, but no longer do. Their business model is open access - authors pay about £1400 to get their articles published. This is standard across all journal types but MDPI only do this. And the quality of what they publish is a very low bar; I stopped publishing or reviewing with them when I saw that they were letting anything through. I'd review a paper for them, suggest it be rejected, and find it published online the next week. But that line in the quote above...it has appeared in social media replies to the likes of Jason Leitch and others. This is just anti-vax nonsense. You can read the paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm - it is riddled with bad maths, poor assumptions and weak statistics.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that case numbers - the true case numbers - have always actually been higher since the start of the pandemic than what was ever being reported as many people will have had it without knowing and testing. This wasn't a problem back then but it now seems to be an issue. This new fad of testing twice a week regardless of vaccine or symptoms will be driving these numbers up to a truer representation of cases and if anything, actually strengthns the position of 'open everything' as if there are actually 3000 cases per day and yet still, hospital cases remain so low, it's even less problematic than we think and vaccines have rendered it almost universally non-deadly.

That’s his career over. A PM with such a strong moral code as Boris Johnson is not going to stand for something like that.

This thread is the real covid victim

Paddington away visiting relatives

The blow torch was on loan from HSS.

You're right mate, this is such an important thread and I can't read your story and @Ad Lib before it without crying my eyes out in my hospital bed just now but I'm so glad that it's here and giving folks the opportunity just to get this stuff out of their heads. Much love to you.

As always, the best you can hope for these people is that they recieve even just a small % of the misery they inflict, so on that basis its a positive.

Matt Hancock's world falling in on him. You love to see it.

If you take symptomatic cases, I would be confident that it would not be 99.9% getting “a cough for a day or 2”. I don’t believe that people getting an illness that doesn’t cause hospitalisation should come with a single restriction on our lives, but your repeated hyperbole is incredibly tiresome.

Had to let our dog go a few weeks ago. She was a few days after her 15th birthday and her quality of life was rapidly going downhill. Could barely get herself out of bed by the end and she was terrible at night, barely able to lie down. During the day she'd usually pick up but the gaps between the good days and the bad were getting longer to the point where it would have been unfair to keep her going. Devastated to lose her.

What a load of complete and utter shite. I'm not familiar with James English or Andrew Tate but whichever one of them came out with that needs multiple kicks in the bollocks. My wife has suffered from clinical depression for most of her adult life, while I myself am dealing with a lower grade version of it. I think I'm more familiar with the issue than either of those two ring-pieces. To address the points in bold: 1. "We need to stop telling people it's a disease." Mental illness IS a fucking disease. More people need to hear this, not less. 2. "Stop telling people it's not their fault." Mental illness is NOT the fault of the people who suffer from it, any more than cancer or appendicitis. It's 2021 - how can there STILL be people with such ignorant opinions? 2. "If they work hard then they can feel better." Every day is hard work. EVERY...FUCKING...DAY. Getting out of bed. Showering. Making breakfast. Driving to work. All the simple things that healthy people do without a thought are ridiculously hard work for people suffering from depression. 3. "Stop automatically putting people on pills" I take pills every day but there was nothing automatic about the decision. If it wasn't for that medication, I would be a suicide statistic by now. 3. "Tell them to start exercising." Does this fuckwit seriously think that depressed people are just lazy? That it's never occurred to them to exercise? Or that nobody has ever told them this...hundreds of times? Severely depressed people can barely fucking MOVE. Just getting up and being functional is a major achievement. I typically walk between 13,000 and 20,000 steps a day. I ride my bike regularly, hike and even run sometimes. I don't personally know anyone my age who exercises more. And while it does make me feel better, I still have depression - go figure. The opinions you find yourself agreeing with aren't unpopular. They're hateful, dangerous and pig-ignorant.

When I launch my hostile takeover of the club, my number one and perhaps only priority will be to restore the old badge.

You're not wrong.

This video is very satisfying. Have already watched 4 times.

I saw them supporting Oasis back in 1997. They were shit.

Paton wasn't linked he was signed. We know this an absolute certainty because Shadwell told us. He also told us he has a very good source so if Shadwell says we paid a fee to Cove, then we paid a fee to Cove. That's all there is to it.

That really is a shite post.

It can't be fun doing this.

A virus truly weaponised for political gain and control the populous. Sullied and silenced. Herded like the sheep we have become. Politicians are worst c***s at the best of times, but in Covid they have surpassed themselves. Get every c**t back to work now and get on with it. Listening to MSM there are many a lazy b*****d not wanting to end the pretend home working and furlough. Fucking shops are rammed most days with the fuckers. Have never seen shops so busy midweek. This shit show needs ended and normality resumed.

That’s the dream.

Feeling quite tired today. Must be long covid

My little meatball mate Mason and a Picasso sculpture in the background, life is good and dogs are brilliant.

- So who are the 11 and who is the proposed board member with significant football experience? Why the secrecy around who the "Navy Blue Group" are? - How do the Falkirk Supports Society fit in? Why are the two fans groups not working together to secure 1/3rd stake? There are a lot of positives about the proposed bid and a lot of reasons that you can see the board would not want to accept. For the majority of fans, a fundamental question has to be who these 11 are? Give us names/background and reason to trust this is a group who know what they're doing. Otherwise this is all just turning into playground he said/she said bollocks.

The current case numbers flying thru the roof, and making next to no odds to hospital numbers is simply further proof that demanding vaccine status or negative tests actually doesnt keep anyonw any safer and is in fact, nonsense

No one knows how McGinty will perform for Ayr. Maybe the pressure and being coached by Jim Duffy will be the perfect storm for him and he'll have a great time. Or, he turns on the usual performances that stunk out Greenock last season. There is no surprise that Ayr fans favourite times were when we played attacking football on the deck. The McCleod era, the Daziel days of Hurst, Teal, Lyons, Kerrigan, Ferguson and Horace, The McCall Era of Shankland, Moore and Moffat, Where the likes of Burley and the long balls to Graham, The Reid era of 6 at the back are not thought of as fondly. Hopkin has set his stall out to play a brand of football that has never been popular at Ayr and has signed players that have not been particularly successful elsewhere. He is making a gamble that may pay off but it will have to pay off very quickly or fans are going to be vocal about it. He didn't need to do it, we are not struggling like the days of Roberts or Connor or Reid, we have a budget, we could have signed 4 players in May that have proven their use in the lower end of the premier top end of the Championship. Signed wide players, signalled an intention of playing passing football. He didn't so he is either convinced that this will work or he has no ideas what to do other than this.

The same mob who, upon losing the last derby, chose to remove all trace of the buildup and reports of the game from their official pages and pretend it didn't happen.

I wonder who the source was. For privacy’s sake, let’s call him Dominic C. No, that’s too obvious, let’s say D Cummings.

I really don't like that. I guess I was never quite as in love with the half and half strip in 08/09 as some, and this just looks like a cheaper version. The printed badge effect is silly, it's just sitting there not really adding anything and the red flashes are bad but the red sponsor is awful. Kinda sums up our close season tbh... promises a lot, delivers Dario Zanatta.

I’m not surprised by the OF trying to push this over and over again. They are the only ones who will benefit from it. However, when the fans have said no over and over again, it is beyond a joke that the other 40 clubs even agree to listen to their proposals. We don’t want it, under any circumstances.

Along the lines of this, I start a new job on Monday. The basic pay is better as is and in a few years once I pick it up and pass certain certification it far outstrips my current and potential ever salary so the travel time isn't really a problem. Imagine my raging boner when on the time sheets I was sent last night to be filled in every week I have to write down the time I leave my house as they're paying me travel time too, on top of the already higher wage. I've fallen off a bridge and went upwards.

Falkirk thread for crowd wanking pish like this.

A&Es 'overwhelmed' by children with mild winter viruses, doctors warn Not a surprise that so many parents have become hypochondriacs over their children getting a simple cold or other common respiratory virus after months of media and government coverage of covid. Of

Guesses for Bitcoin and Wally gets me a 10 for Friday.

Yes a small number of people will always be hospitalised with covid for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately some will also die from it. Illness and death are not totally new concepts and we have to accept the (now very small) risk from covid just as we do with other illnesses and potential harms.

The Roberts biographer posted shite like this about people who were irrationally, maliciously against Roberts for the purported, specious "crime" of "not being very good at managing the football team", and continuing to spread scurrilous rumours that if Ayr continued to "lose" games then they might be "relegated" to the "bottom tier". Bitter, horrible individuals. Certainly not fans of the team. Frankly they were almost certainly Kilmarnock posters in disguise.

This can get to f**k. Granny Budge will have a fucking heart attack about more clubs.

Get fucked you absolute mentalist.

What a week for daft wee Nippy: Admission, at last, that IndyRef2 money was pockled to pay her husband's wages OECD report confirming what we knew that education in Scotland has been systematically dismantled during almost a decade and a half of a Nationalist government. Her new Lord Advocate having to state that she will, in fact, act independently, honest - and thus throwing her predecessor under a bus. Not only overreaching her power with the Manchester travel ban THEN picking a fight with Andy Burnham but THEN briefing against him by leaking a confidential discussion. More embarrassment on the ferry vanity project with news of further delays and additional costs. To cap it off she picks a fight with wee school weans over a daft - but basically harmless - song. No wonder #Long Sturgeon is trending on Twitter.

They do it in Albania, Armenia and Azerbaijan, too. Fancy emulating their Euros performance?

What do you want him to say, that he thinks we've signed a pile of shite?

I think the word you are looking for is less "unpopular" and more "harmful and wrong"