As I’m w*rking this evening, only time for a quick update on the televised matches.

*Or possibly the one who said they preferred the short ones.
On the telly this week
Friday 6th December
| Enisei-STM 12 – 28 Castres | 16:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Agen 3 – 73 Bordeaux Bègles | 19:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Edinburgh 31 – 20 Wasps | 19:35 | epcrugby.com |
| Bath 17 – 34 Clermont | 19:45 | BT Sport 2 |
Saturday 7th December
| Northampton 16 – 43 Leinster | 13:00 | Channel 4 / BT Sport 2 |
| Lyon 28 – 0 Treviso | 13:00 | BT Sport 3 |
| Toulon 37 – 17 London Irish | 13:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Worcester 34 – 28 Dragons | 15:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Bristol 37 – 11 Stade Français | 15:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Zebre 27 – 24 Brive | 15:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Leicester 59 – 7 Calvisano | 15:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Ulster 25 – 24 Harlequins | 15:15 | BT Sport 2 |
| La Rochelle 24 – 27 Glasgow | 15:15 | BT Sport 3 |
| Munster 10 – 3 Saracens | 17:30 | BT Sport 2 |
| Ospreys 19 – 40 Racing | 17:30 | BT Sport 3 |
| Bayonne 11 – 19 Scarlets | 20:00 | epcrugby.com |
| Cardiff 54 – 22 Pau | 20:00 | epcrugby.com / S4C |
Sunday 8th December
| Gloucester 26 – 17 Connacht | 13:00 | BT Sport 2 |
| Sale 20 – 22 Exeter | 15:15 | BT Sport 2 |
| Toulouse 23 – 9 Montpellier | 15:15 | BT Sport Extra |

that’s not a surprise, Ticht. he’s barely played a game for Edinburgh over the last 2 years. is he even playing or still injured?
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He’s played a few club games I think, Chimpie
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He had a brilliant 6 months in a sea of mediocrity. Wonder if his injury did for him.
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@Chimpie – you’re not our expert on outer space though so you’re no help there.
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Not that I want to talk about it. In fact I can no longer talk with anyone at all without becoming furious, and everything I read by my contemporaries makes me quiver with indignation.
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How about typing on OB. does that also bring on the rage?
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who’s the resident expert on outer space anyhoo?
I can do a job in their absence.
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It’s not preventing me from writing posts on here in which I’ll try to spew out my bile. Not for the time being anyway. It may be the case that on Friday the stupidity of the public overwhelms me.
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@chimpie
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Ahem
https://res.cloudinary.com/ratebeer/image/upload/e_trim:1/d_beer_img_default.png,f_auto/beer_171420
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“It may be the case that on Friday the stupidity of the public overwhelms me.”
I just had a conversation with four people on FB, they were saying the boy asleep on the hospital floor was faked. I showed them an article which quoted the Chief Medical Officer from Leeds NHS Trust apologising for the situation. I showed another longer quote from the CMO in the Yorkshire Post. I showed them loads of twitter messages all worded exactly the same, all saying they had a friend who was a senior nurse at the hospital who said the photo was fake etc
but no, “utter bullshit” apparently, it was faked by a Labour activist.
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@Trisk
Further along, Trisk. On the south side looking at Toronto.
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@Ticht – the last nine years drove many insane, made imbeciles of others, and left others in a permanent state of rage. I’m in the last category. It’s the right one.
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Probably me as I’m a big fan of Musk.
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Like toward Niagara on the Lake ? Which – memory recalls – is a very pleasant spot….
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This is what all the naysayers will be saying 9 years after we get to Mars.
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Think I may have exhausted Flaubert’s letter to Turgenev now. Unless more French literature in schools and less PE is a goer.
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@Yos – I was going to suggest you, good to see you step up to the plate. Have we got the reports back yet from everyone that’s been fired out of a cannon at the sun or moon?
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The budget didn’t stretch to space walkie-talkies. I spent it all on cannons and a Tesla rocket-car to ferry my friends around town.
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I know my sputniks if we are talking about outer space as seen through the galactic prism of 50s sci-fi movies.
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Ha, the first half of John Harris’s campaign trail video is from that shithole Dunbar. East Lothian is an SNP/Labour marginal
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2019/dec/10/anywhere-but-westminster-scotland-fear-and-lothian-on-the-campaign-trail-video
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The lass in the video with the glasses is a rapper/mc in a good band called The Honey Farm
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yosoy’s weekly space news
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Not that far along, Trisk. That is on the other end of the wine region. I’m on the less scenic s. (Suburbia won out before the population learned that Ontario could grow decent wine-producing grapes.)
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As mentioned, I see a repeat of the Thatcher / Kinnock election but with some scruffy Foot thrown in. If history repeats itself then Labour will again lose bigly to a transparently despicable character, endure a phase of miserable shabby reality, try to clean the stables and put forward a leader easier on the eye and with more smarts / gumption in the Commons, on TV and in the media generally.
There was a scathing article from Frankie Boyle in the Graun on the state of the election last week which skewered some of this almost too close to the bone.
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@Yosoy
Shotwell likes really likes the words ‘really cool’.
I’m cool with that.
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Really cool news, yos-bro
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MrIks, I saw a quote from Frankie Boyle the other day that said he won’t be voting Tory on Thursday for the same reasons he won’t be kicking pensioners and kittens into traffic.
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Close to the bone skewering is Boyle’s thing.
However, and I’m not really a grammar pedant (honest), his use of commas drove me nearly up the wall in that last effort of his.
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Get your money grabbing grubby little satellites out of my night sky Yosoy!
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Ticht, as you mentionned the Clearances and I had no idea what you meant, I looked it up. Dreadful stuff. Nowadays we’d call it ethnic cleansing.
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“That is on the other end of the wine region”
I’ve had Ontario wine – once a long time ago (two sad stories there in 5 words)
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“Well, you and I
we made our rich sky
where we really had no right to go
and now
its run over and taken
all our lives,
I wish that I could turn
and tell you,
no…”
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Shite got the words wrong. Should be ‘overrun and taken all our lives’
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There was also one awfully laboured pun in the article I read, pun intended. But otherwise Boyle nailed a lot of the shit down in a few scathing words.
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That Boyle article was great.
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Does anyone feel like writing an ATL this week? she asks, hopefully.
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I can do one on space.
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Space rugby? ;-) I’ll take it!
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Unfortunately opinionated talk seems to take place in silos and echo chambers that are bloated with the views of the like-minded.
In bygone days you could trust the BBC or ITV to enlighten the public through broadcasts and exposes because they were the legitimate source of neutrality and truth, albeit for a national but captive audience.
It seems to me that the explosion of sources of information has just created a network of tunnels where you can hide and listen to what you want to hear.
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Flair, there is a Gaelic word “Duathchas”, which as I understand it, is a concept of trust. There was the quite usual understanding between the people who worked the land and the person who was accepted as their leader. The leader would ask them to fight for whichever king, which they did, they would work the land, and in return the leader would offer these folk protection. So far so normal for the time. However the word Clan, or Clann means “children” and there is a much deeper meaning to Duathchas in the Highlands than perhaps was found elsewhere. The understanding was that the land belonged to everyone, the Clans weren’t really based around long bloodlines, more around geographical location.
What I’m getting to was that someone’s word was worth far more than perhaps it is today, and for someone to forcibly remove vast numbers of people to make way for profitable grazing animals was the utmost violation, not only of an agreement, but of a whole way of life, a violation of an entire culture.
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Space rugby is short for the way Finn floats passes against England, right?
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I fucking loath Boris Johnson.
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Let’s see if getting that out in the open is the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Ticht, if I understand correctly, the Clearances also meant Gaelic lost ground to English as more and more people had to leave the Highlands for other parts of Scotland or even worse had to emigrate.
Do you speak Gaelic yourself?
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I can’t do justice to an ATL leading into the Euro cup games, Thauma. I’m just not up to speed on it apart from the throes and woes of the Drags.
I could cobble together a Drags preview. Or finish that bloody cwis in my head but that might cause formatting / preparation problems I imagine?
Help!
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@flair
If you’re still interested in looking at land confiscation on these islands take a look at plantation in Ireland. This is the basis for the modern “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and for the controversy about the Brexit backstop etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland
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Flair, yes that period was important in terms of loss of Gaelic-speaking numbers, but perhaps more so was the enforced speaking of English, by way of brutal corporal punishment, in the Highlands after the Jacobite Rebellion in the middle of the 18th century.
I don’t speak Gaelic, I’m from the Lowlands, but I grew up speaking a mixture of English and Scots. Some think of Scots as a sister language to English which developed separately and at the same time, others view it as merely a dialect of English, but I could begin and end a conversation and not really use English words much at all.
I’ve lost practically all of that.
There is a phenomena called The Scottish Cringe, which means that we have been made to feel embarrassed by the Scots language, it’s okay to sing children’s song in it, but serious subjects should be spoken about in English.
Gaelic has a similar feeling but less so, and Gaelic seems to be going through a bit of a revival.
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OT, what’s the English land grab called?
I should know, something about fencing
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FFS!
Enclosure, how did I forget that?
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