amidst-tundra

Kinda glad I didn't travel down for this, it's my closest away day but the wheels seem to have fallen comprehensively off early this week.

How has Cammy Graham done this season? I've been abroad with work with ropey internet, so haven't been able to catch the highlights. He doesn't seem to be getting many minutes and I guess he's still recovering - but he looked like he had some potential.

As evidenced in the cup. That said, I think QP are going about building themselves sensibly. Bring in talent that is good for your current level and build a foundation on that. Teams that come into money and flood their squad don't always do that well or build sustainably...

I mean it's worked. No editor in their right mind would look at that photo and think they're aping Irish caricatures. No editor would do it intentionally unless they were determined to lose their job either. So this is either some astounding projection or some wild extrapolation. He gave a pi**ed off press conference and in lieu of usable images from said press conference, images from another press conference where he was reaching boiling point have been used.

Right? Basically threatened to f*** the investigation and get more people killed. Me and the missus have started watching The Confession Killer, really freaking weird, but I do love these big budget true crime documentaries. I never binge watch anything, but I watched four episodes of The Confession Killer before I was too knackered.

I wish they'd provide a playlist function, I just tend to download stuff to FLAC, stick it on a SD card and play through PowerAmp. But I use Bandcamp for stuff like underground metal and weird ambient music. Doesn't seem to be much pick up in more popular genres. There was a third party app that allowed Bandcamp streaming, but it was ropey and became abandonware after a while.

Is this all still because a picture of Neil Lennon was a picture of Neil Lennon? I'm confused that following a blurry Zoom video of an angry Neil Lennon, how this is now a conversation not about how Neil Lennon, as depicted in a clearer stock image of Neil Lennon looking angry and Neil Lennon'y going supernova - but rather one about bigotry? What wouldn't have been deemed bigoted? No picture? A still from the low res video that wasn't attended by press in person?

These ones. Too many of the episodes tend to be soulless, minimalist glass boxes. I tend to prefer the George Clark shows as the houses don't tend to look like huge white cubes. I used to live down in Bath, and the one that was built on the hillside never got finished. It seems many tend to run into dreadful debt and end up selling. My missus has come across one or two on Right Move.

Not really a music streaming platform, but I tend to use Bandcamp. Artists get decent pay, most streaming sites require millions of listens to generate about £100, but Bandcamp tends to be pretty niche, I suppose if the artist is big enough they probably make a decent amount of cash from other streaming platforms. I don't mind YouTube music, some of the compilations people put up can be pretty good, too bad they don't integrate the playlist which most people put up on the main YouTube app.

Colour me shocked, shocked. No, I mean the other thing... Unsurprised. Don't forget that Celtic have been the hardest done by in all this.

Seems like operation deflect. Seeing as the press conference was conducted on Zoom or something like that and the video quality was pish and would have provided rubbish stills. It would have been bizarre to use a stock image from the dugout, so it would have been hard to find a particularly photogenic stock image from previous press conferences.

It's worth noting I don't want it suspended or banned, but there seems to be a (mostly) media created moral panic about adherence to COVID protocol in football. What I find interesting is that nobody is talking about rugby, where you can be conceivably in close contact with several players for more time than in football. I like to get out of the house and watch sport in the summer and I don't much care for tennis or golf or crown green bowls. Plus you can have a pint at the speedway.

I meant ritual sacrifice in a facetious sense. Although perhaps in the literal sense as you suggested.

Is an impeachment against Trump really a good idea for the Democrats? Aside from stoking the KKKultists, there is a tiny chance he could run in four years that would just total any hopes for the Republican candidate. Surely just let him ride noisily into the sunset instead of barring him from running again.

Zero foreign travel is however impossible. I work in the merchant navy, I was stuck on a ship for five months in the first lockdown, some guys on other ships were on for almost 18 months in some cases. These are the guys keeping commerce and trade going and they can't be expected to stay on the ship forever, especially when there is no shore leave. With the way modern schedules work, when you're working or on standby seven days a week burnout becomes extremely dangerous. 90% of all world trade is carried on ships. I don't believe people should be going abroad for holiday but then this also creates the problem that no punters, no flights. No flights, I'm not sure how sailors and other such workers can be repatriated. I know airlines are not going to be doing the maritime sector any favours, it was like pulling teeth trying to see controlled repatriation recommence in summer.

Against five different clubs from three different nations. Dominance has been a factor forever in football and there are few outlier winners of the European cups, Real Madrid were massive in the 50's, and the start of the European cup coincided with the waning of Hungarian football. I'm not simply talking about winners, the group stage ultimately weeds out teams and has created a general European hierarchy that is much harder to breach than was once the case. I doubt had the group stage been in place in say 78/79 that Malmo would have made the final and now look at Swedish football - it's gone from being relatively present in most European competitions in my childhood to kind of nothing in CL terms now - got to go back to 2015/16 the last time a Swedish team made the group stage and only twice in the last decade. Possibly. Maybe I'm just nostalgic about creating ridiculous European competitions on Sensible Soccer. The fact you have teams like Millwall make an FA Cup final means there is more opportunity for smaller teams in a knockout. The group stages have just allowed bigger teams to capitalize in an annual way for the bigger money pie, while middling nations have to scrap it out to get a tiny slice.

The fact a team that has won the CL a number of times in the 70's and two UEFA titles in the 90's making a CL semi final is seen as a big thing now shows that it's unusual for someone like an Ajax or a Porto to break into the current European Elite. I mean there have been 12 teams from 5 nations in the last 10 CL finals, which actually isn't as lopsided as I thought, but I think a lot of that has been a product of shifting hierarchies in the big 3 or 4 major European leagues. PSG got there in an unusual year and Spurs have benefitted with the weakening of Manchester United. In the ten years prior to the introduction of the group stages in 91/92 there were 15 teams represented from 7 nations including the former state of Yugoslavia, Portugal, Romania and the Netherlands. Obviously a big part of the success of the likes of Steaua and Red Star was the fact that players were unable to relocate - but the reason the Netherlands, Portugal and France (aside from PSG) are really only nearly runs is because of the constant expansion of the CL and now the Europa League have created bigger disparities between not just the biggest teams in individual leagues but also a bigger disparity amongst the elite leagues themselves. It's sort of sad, but also why if they have to introduce a third European competition I'd rather it was more like the AFC cup, than another tournament spooning up teams from the PL, Serie A, LaLiga and Bundesliga. I guess the counter argument is would fans of Scottish teams relish playing the likes of teams from Macedonia, the Faroes and say Malta - as I'd imagine in an AFC Cup type tournament the Scottish teams would be the big seeds.

You mean when the weather was warmer? Because yeah, they fell and then began to rise again when students went back to university, kids to school and then the seasons changed. Hopefully the vaccine will get rolled out to most vulnerable people by summer, when the weather is warmer again, and then by next winter we won't need the crutch of restrictions. Believe me, I'm not a fan of restrictions, but the anti-authoritarian stance is empowering the types of shoppers getting violent with staff because they're asked to wear a mask which is pretty unacceptable and shoddy human behaviour. Sorry, didn't see your edit.

I've been considering deleting FB since the Brexit referendum. I'm beginning to realize a number of people I knew are c***s and I'm sure I appear the same to them. Problem I have is I work away from home six months a year, but truth be told I tend to find social media just leaves me generally depressed at the state of humanity.

Unfortunately I think many people are and have been doing this for quite a while now. In the flats I live in one person constantly has the stoners from downstairs in his flat or goes down to theirs, while next door have had a number of house parties and as far as I can see these sorts of ambivalence are prolonging these lockdowns. I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but I'm not of the belief that lockdown measures are being used as some sort of population control and we've seen every time a lockdown has been lifted, hospital admissions have gone back up and as long as the weather stays cold I think that will continue if restrictions are rolled back too early.

I mean it's disinformation, but then even evoking fake news can be disinformation in and of itself. The problem of course is that social media has polarized opinion and undermined mainstream media; characterized by social media as constant editorial. It's a facet of social media, I mean while there is media framing (such as say the Independent vs a Daily Mail article on the same subject), the pish you see on social media that gets propagated by an audience increasingly consuming for their own confirmation bias, fake news is just another one of those terms used to undermine mainstream media in much the same way virtue signalling is used to undermine certain movements.

I suspect the scale of the meltdown will only become apparent when the government is no longer willing or able to keep certain businesses afloat. I think there is an argument for writing off certain types of debt at the end of this, but I doubt that will happen.

I'm not sure what will be normal long term. It's frustrating because I love to travel, just started to earn a decent amount of money and then everything got closed down. But I also understand I'm fortunate to still have a job - however restrictions in flights (I work at sea, outside of Europe) means there's no guarantee about crew changes and turnarounds. And I think there will be a significant cascade with businesses collapsing, people out of work and the effect that will have on industries that rely on disposable income. I think the end of the pandemic (which could still be a long way off) will only be the start of recovery in society. I think what was normal will take a long time to return.

I think the narrative is that L1 and below have been a ritual sacrifice following Celtic's Dubai debacle. I don't believe she has been gunning for football because of how overwhelmingly unpopular that would be, in fact she's been pretty loathed to comment on it - I do however think there is some credence in what I wrote above, the optics of the warm weather training were just awful when hospital admissions are skyrocketing. I don't think it will be long before things change down south and all elite sport is shut down considering the media are making a big moral panic about players celebrating goals.

Of course, that is the result of the endless expansion of European competition and particularly the CL. Obviously there were big teams in the 50's that have remained big teams - but you at least used to get some surprise teams doing well in Europe when they were straight up knockout competitions, I mean Dundee United got to a UEFA Cup final. You're not going to see an Anderlecht in a final any time soon or a team like Ferencváros being as big anymore. Maybe a better use of a third competition would be like the AFC does in Asia with the AFC Cup using it for smaller and developing nations, I mean at least the Nations League felt like a small step in that direction giving teams like San Marino and Liechtenstein to play opponents that they could compete against.