Al B

I take the point that we can't think of ways that an outside investor could make any money from Scottish football, so we should be wary of anyone who thinks they can, but isn't that the point of us trying to look outside the "bubble" so to speak? Sort of like a "is there anyone out there that can think of ways to generate business income that we haven't thought of, and are you able to fascilitate that." I hate using Wrexham as an example because it sounds like I'm jumping on some "ooooh we're the new Wrexham" thing which I'm absolutely not, but as it's an easy comparison to make: No-one involved with Wrexham would have been able to think of a way to increase replica shirt sales. It's extremely unlikely any external businessman from Wrexham would have been able to come up with a way to increase replica shirt sales. Even if you expanded that out to the rest of Wales or even the UK, it's unlikely you'd have found any businessman that could sell a Wrexham shirt to anyone that wasn't in, or from Wrexham. It was effectively a closed market with a finite ceiling. A businessman/men then comes on board who's, lets face it, an expert in exposure and global marketing who has the means to also fascilitate it, and they had sold nearly 25,000 22/23 replica shirts by the January of that season. That's almost £1.5 million in half a season, and that's only going to increase. Say just for the sake of choosing a completely random return - Reynolds and McElhinney's own company take 25% of all merch sales. Now again just to clarify I'm not directly comparing us to Wrexham, our situation to theirs, or for a second thinking that that's what's going to happen to us. I'm just saying that for me, the mindset of "no-one's going to be able to make any more money from this than we already are, because we can't think of any other way to generate it", is exactly why we're moving out-with the confines of what we can think of, because there's an absolute f**k-ton of things out there that no-one involved with Motherwell can think of. All with the caveat that we can say no thanks if it seems they want too much in return? It's hard for me to believe that there's anyone that wouldn't want to explore it to it's fullest given those conditions.

Yeah I've seen/heard stories of people getting quite emotional as the approach the lighthouse, one of those trails that's long enough where you get used to a certain way of going about your day, and then don't want it to end. We're both pretty experienced in terms of long distance, multi-dayers and hiking in general. Amongst other LD trails I've done the WHW 8 times with my record being 3 and a half days, and my mate is very close to ticking off his full munro card, so thankfully we've managed to learn a lot over the years (mostly by getting it wrong the first time....the way I'm sure most of us learn! ), and you're absolutely spot on....how you treat your feet will make or break any trip! We've both been lucky enough to have new packs made for us in our own custom colours by the guys down at Atom just for this trip, so apart from a few test hikes this will be their first major outing! It's honestly hard to believe how light they are! We've got a full day off in Ullapool so that's going to be pretty valuable, as long as we don't spend the whole day in the pub . Oh, and we also always hike in kilts

Alright folks! Apologies for chucking a charity thing in here, absolutely no pressure to donate at all (although please do if you'd like to and are able to!), but thought it would be of interest to the good people of this thread. Tomorrow me and my mate kick off our hike of the Cape Wrath Trail which has been the best part of a year in the planning. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, it's approx 380km of unmarked wilderness from Fort William to the Cape Wrath Lighthouse which is the most North-Westerley point in mainland Scotland. It's going to be fully self-sustaining with the exception of a full day off in Ullapool near enough halfway, with just what we can carry on our backs, and sleeping in our tents or available bothys. I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon so it doesn;t leave much time for anyone asking questions or discussing, and for the most part the full hike is off-grid, but I'll pop on when I can before I go, and come back on afterwards to give a full run-down for anyone who's interested. With regards to the charity side, my best mate's dad passed away of cancer a couple of weeks ago, and his funeral is this Friday. When I realised I wasn't going to be able to go I decided to dedicate the hike to him, and see if I can raise a few pounds for Strathcarron Hospice, who provide pallative care for those navigating the final leg of their own journey. A really special place that's fully reliant on donations. Link is below for anyone that would like to make a small donation, but as I say no pressure at all, there's lots of charity things that are close to people and we can;t give to them all. https://www.justgiving.com/page/alan-bone-1711537956667?utm_medium=fundraising&utm_content=page%2Falan-bone-1711537956667&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=pfp-share

I've always loved the riff from Do I Wanna Know, and the drum intro on Brianstorm is fucking brilliant. Everything else I've heard from them.....fairly meh. Actually, in fairness I do like a lot of the stuff of the first album. It's a proper time-stamp of life at a time I have particularly good memories of in general. I wasn't listening to Arctic Monkeys but much like The Fratellis and The View, the songs were everywhere and when I hear them they always take me back to then, which is one of my favourite things about music.

It was mentioned earlier (apologies, I forget who by), but one of the main issues is that what they've deemed a natural arm position to be, doesn't take the context into account. Arms by your sides is maybe a natural position if you're in the queue at the shop, but certainly not when you're contesting a football match. You often see players visibly forcing their arms down by their sides, which by definition actually makes it the least natural place for them to be! The fact that either of those on Saturday is considered a handball by anyone is absolute nonsense, and I don't think you'd find a single fan that in all honesty thinks either of them should be given (although I was screaming for the Shinnie one it at the time....but that's just what you do! ). I do think though that if one is deemed a handball then the other has to be as well (for the same incorrect and absolute nonsense reasons). I tend to think when you have fans of both sides completely in unison on something like this regardless of which side the decision went for, that's a major sign that something's wrong and needs looked at.

These 2 are both big favourites of mine. Still wear them both to 5's. (not at the same time).

I'm generally fascinated by coincidences, which often get caught up in conspiracy theories as being reasons why there must be more than meets the eye. I've been reading a bit about the Malaysia Airlines plane that was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, and noticed that it was Flight 17, it's first flight was 17 July 1997 and it was shot down on 17 July 2014, exactly 17 years to the day later. Coincidences to that level are mind boggling, so interesting.

This chat has completely changed my weekend plans! All my old tops are in the top of a wardrobe at my mums, going to head over and lay them all out to have a walk down memory lane. This is bringing back some great football kit memories in general for me. When I was a young kid and we didn't have any money (no-one did), if you wanted a football top you got taken to Falkirk Market and you got whichever one was cheapest at the football stall, regardless of who you actually suppprted. There's a cracking photo of me in my room (which i'll also try to dig out at my mums), wearing a St Johnstone top with a fake Dundee United tracksuit over it, and my bed has an Aberdeen duvet cover on it .

This was my first, just after we changed from Ian Skelly to Motorola but kept the same top.

How many 4 week-plus injuries do we think we'll announce after this Ayr kickabout? I'm going with a conservative one.

He was also John Lennon's best mate. Lennon was Best Man at his wedding.

Dave's going to be devastated. Like you think you've got something special going with someone and then his ex arrives on the scene and you realise they're still friends and you don't want to be the one causing the problem so you pretend you're fine with it but really you're not and all you want to do is just go back to the way it was but you cant and it just causes a wedge between you then they get back together because you're the one that's made it weird and you're not sure how cos everything was fine and now it's not.

Someone's definitely getting mixed up here...surely you couldn't have been watching football matches on your phone in 2005?

It's certainly a very late studs up challenge, but not by Dan Casey. It's actually a foul to us. Look how far apart they are when Casey plays the ball. Bennett's screenshot above actually has a full yard in between them. By the time they reach each other, Casey has played the ball and his foot is flat on the ground. The Rangers guy arrives there long after the ball has gone with his back turned, his leg in and his studs up, and that leg goes into Casey's knee.

Celtic fans in our stand and crying is one thing, Gerry Britton was in our team and crying!

This relationship is my favourite thing that's happened this season.

Motherwell league wins at Ibrox only exist on VHS and online. It took that long we completely missed the whole existence of DVD's.

I'm torn on this because Alan Burrows is a good mate of mine, but then Neil Warnock is a patronising old dick and watching him go through the process of realising it is very funny. Kilmarnock recently fucked #tb4 and left it as #tb3. Im all for Aberdeen now exiting and leaving Celtic and Motherwell as #tb2.

I noticed the celebration at the time but I was far too busy with my own for it to actually register what he was doing. Brilliant

I'm just imagining the idea of going back to talk to my younger self as he left Ibrox in 1997, and telling him the next time this happens you'll be watching it on your phone through the internet.

Halfway through that trailer I was expecting it to break into... "Rebecca? I did naht kill her, I DID NAHHHHHTT oh hai Mark"

For the first part of my degree we were allowed to take a crib sheet into exams, basically whatever you could write on one side of A4. Essentially means all I really have is a degree in really really really small handwriting.

The only good thing to come out of that period was the joke about the bizarre use of apostrophe's in that banner I think the other thing that's been a factor in the intense flip-flopping of fan opinion between sugar and shite this season, from guys who don't normally react like that, is that players/teams that are capable of the level of quality that we've seen at times, generally aren't capable of monumental f**k-ups on the scale we've seen, and vice versa. Rocking up to Fir Park knowing you could just as easily see an 8/9/10 performance, as a generous 1, is fucking exhausting! I've lost count of he amount of times I've come away from games thinking "how is a team that's capable of that, also capable of this in the space of a few days?"

That's not even responding to you? I'm not sure why you're trying to make (or take) my point as being about either you or "The Sidemen", when I went out of my way to say that (for me) their "content" is absolute nonsense. My point is that if a club is looking for serious investment, and an extremely wealthy investor approaches, you can't dismiss them out-of-hand without even looking at their business plan or talking to them, just because you're not a fan of their work. Do you dismiss an actor if you don't like their films, or a musician if you don't like their songs? My thoughts on this have nothing to do with what RandomGuy thinks about The Sidemen (or anyone else), and they they aren't about The Sidemen. I genuinely can't see what's controversial about thinking any investment opportunities should be explored purely on the merits of a business plan, the investors aims for the club and end-goal, and their methodology for carrying it out. I'm sure someone like The Sidemen would massively fail on one or all of those points, but you have to draw that conclusion through business due diligence, not by whether you like what they do or not. As you say though, I'm sure this has long passed the point of being tedious as f**k to read now, so we'll just leave it there...you either see the point I'm trying to make whether you agree or not, or you think I'm a massive fan of a particular group of people and I'm just annoyed that you don't like them. Either way is cool.

I mean, that's quite the leap from anything I said, but cool.