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 |
Ovally Balls 
For those of you who can read French. This is today’s Le Monde op-ed. They’re usually quite moderate but you’ll seldom read a more scathing assessment of the main candidates.
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/12/09/royaume-uni-des-elections-inquietantes-pour-l-europe_6022188_3232.html
Craigs, I met Serge Betsen once two years ago. He’s not particularly tall but he’s wide as a bus. Nice and warm, very gentle, almost shy.
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Aw crap, suavo. That’s bad news
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Ugh. Question time. The whole thing is ghastly
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I’m waiting to hear Pat Van den Hauwe and Derek Mountfield’s thoughts on Brexit before going full Toffees.
Always loved Big Nev, though.
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Flair – thanks, it’s good to get a different perspective on things.
But I’m not sure I agree with this:
Firstly, Corbyn campaigned during the referendum as being 70% in favour of the EU, and in favour of reforming the EU. That’s a reasonable position. Sure, he’s been Eurosceptical in the past, but ‘club de capitalistes’ is not a fair description of his current position.
And he has very much explained to workers that their jobs are in peril under a Tory Brexit. This has been boiled down to the three-word ‘Jobs-first Brexit’ slogan for the hard of understanding, but he’s been constantly talking about how a Tory Brexit will kill jobs and destroy supply chains, particularly in the automotive industry.
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A Canadian cover version of Sonny & Cher’s Bang Bang. It might be marmite for some, but it works for me.
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Iks – I like it, not being familiar with the original.
It turns out that this band aren’t Canadian at all, but I first heard them on a Canadian radio station:
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Canadian reds-under-the-beds:
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Not to mention this (rather better) track/s:
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The brilliant Sarah McLaughlin:
This may have been discussed here (well, on AoD) previously, but she wrote this song about a stalker she had – from the point of view of the stalker. I have a feeling that Ticht enlightened me on this subject.
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Right, it’s closing time…
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That MM Bosstones was so ska I thought I spotted a blond Suggs in the video!
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Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh the Mighty Mighty Bosstones!!!! Maybe I’ll go see them live again. Someday I suppose…
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Whit? Canadian artists and nae Rush?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
I’ll spare Iks 2112 (not my favourite anyway) and give you this wee gem.
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Thaum, for me a man who says he’s neutral regarding Brexit has no right to lead a party and even less the country.
One of the most important issues for Britain in the past 50 years, if not the most important, and the man who wants to lead the country has no opinion on it? Seriously?
To a certain extent, I do understand the legitimate fears of the Brexiteers, even if I disagree with their solution. But to sit on the fence as Corbyn does is unforgivable.
As they say here, you can’t please the goat and the cabbage at the same time.
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Since Flair has made an appearance, and the blog has gone Canadian…
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@ElSauvo
Sorry to hear the news, ElS.
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And Gordon…
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@LADOAB. I have a soft spot for GL, especially Daylight Katy and some songs from the Endless Wire album.
I think of it like a folk music road winding around the borders of country music, thereby avoiding the worst indulgences of both.
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@BB, not bad for AOR. There are parts that sound almost identical to parts of REM’s Man on the Moon. Surprisingly, the guitar-solo bridge was tolerable…
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Sorry to read about the bad news ElS. In an ‘it’s a small world’ way I noticed that 2 of the missing tourists are from Karlsruhe which is nearby here, and where tcod used to live and work.
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@LADOAB
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald… I remember when it first came out in 76. Marvellous song and a great memorial to those who were lost.
also quite horrifying when one came to think of it – that a “storm on a lake” could sink a 26,000 tonne freighter – the scale of the Great Lakes suddenly becomes very real in way you didn’t get by looking at your geography books…
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I was wondering what CJ was up to. Seems he’s become editor of the Times Literary Supplement:
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Nationalise Sausages? No one who it’s suggested would suggest something like that has a right to lead a political party let the country.
It does remind me of a great story I read in one of Geoffrey Hosking’s histories of Russia where he mentions a plot to remove and bury all the sausages in some town somewhere to stop something happening.
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A great story that I can remember extremely few concrete details about.
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One for the social history buffs.
I hadn’t heard that Gordon Lightfoot song before but it set me off googling because ii’s the same tune as “Back Home In Derry” by Christie Moore, a song that tells of a young man being shipped off to a penal colony in Tasmania, or van Diemen’s Land, the lyrics to which were written by Bobby Sands whilst he was imprisoned in The Maze.
I thought Christie Moore’s melody might predate Lightfoot but in fact it’s the other way around.
In fact the melody is very close, if not identical in some versions, to that of a 19th century Scottish folk song called Tramps and Hawkers that tells of itinerant workers going around rural Scotland looking for seasonal work, oftentimes these families were forced onto the road like this due to the Clearances.
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@ticht
Yeah – I’m familiar with Back Home in Derry. I was never sure who “borrowed” the melody (if anyone) – but I’d heard “Edmund Fitzgerald” first.. so always assumed that had some kind of precedence..
Though i recall seeing a BBC2 doco some years ago (probably Arena) – about the origins of US music (thesis being that it’s mainly Irish/Scots on one side plus African on the other). Pete Seeger came on and seemed to ‘prove’ that everything was derivative, borrowed, and mixed up – with stuff crossing “cultural” lines in all directions…
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*dons sackcloth, picks up ashes”
I stuffed up there, and I found out by singing the songs in ma heid – I was wrong about Tramps and Hawkers being the same, it’s a different melody altogether, Tramps and Hawkers is the tune Christie Moore used for Ninety Miles from Dublin, which he wrote after visiting the H Blocks.
But Trisk, yeah it’s along tradition of using/borrowing melodies. there is a great story about Andy Irvine (the Irish musician, not the Scottish fullback) who whilst learning a song accidentally had the page turn whilst he was looking the other way and he came out with the lyrics from one song and the tune from another song entirely.
These old folk songs were collected by Francis Child and are known as The Child Ballads
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Arse. Missed world tunnelling day on the 4th December. disaster
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Did you know many tunnels feature shrines to pay homage to Saint Barbara, the patron saint and protector of miners and tunnelers?
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Chimpie, we’d have known that from the old AOD Sunday Supplement
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‘the long-standing tradition to place a statue by the entrance of tunnel projects during their construction. Saint Barbara lived in the 3rd century and is considered in many countries to be the patron saint, or protector, of miners and tunnelers’
well there we have it.
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We would indeed Ticht.
I suppose working down a mine might give one a superstitious bent given the risks (especially back in olden times), but surprised modern tunnelling types would be quite as much. Rather lower risk activity using modern TBMs.
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Monbiot is interesting this morning.
I was saying to ‘er outdoors earlier that this election is rigged just as well as if they were stuffing ballot boxes and closing polling stations in “unfavourable” constituencies.
Years and years of disinformation, lies and deceit have left us with a proven liar, a man who has been sacked twice for it, most likely to become PM after nine years of cuts and increasing debt that somehow they have convinced the electorate was nothing to do with them. Likewise it was them who voted against the Brexit deal and kept it going for three years, yet somehow Bojo the Clown is going to “get it done” by this time next year, which no sensible commentator is saying is possible
Thursday evening is the Christmas whisky tasting, I’ll probably spend the rest of the night shouting at the tv before falling into a restless stupor.
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…my point being that we need a free press and to somehow control social media, I’ve read dozens of examples this morning of “bots” being deployed to debunk the story of the boy with pneumonia asleep on the hospital floor. All the messages say the same thing, that “a friend” of the poster is a senior nurse at the hospital in question and that the mother made the boy lie on the floor, took the photo and then he hopped back up onto a bed.
Then there is the case of all the major media outlets reporting that a Labour supporter had punched an aid to the Health Secretary in the face. Of course they later retracted the story when there was video evidence that it was untrue, but the story was already out there in the wild.
Surely the first job of a serious journalist is to check the facts of a story before presenting them as true?
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…and Johson has already threatened the BBC (oh the ironing as Sag would say) and Channel 4 with retribution if he wins
I can sort of understand the ire he has with C4, they have at least tried to hold him and his party to account.
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“Surely the first job of a serious journalist is to check the facts of a story before presenting them as true”
There’s the old trope about “if X says it’s raining…. your job is not to repeat it but to stick your head out the window”. Slightly trite – but a grain of truth. I get the feeling we did more double checking when we wrote the Qs for 15-to-1 than some journalists are currently doing in a more serious situation.
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Pffft. Facts are so last century.
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This kind of wilful distortion and nonsense has always been around but does seem to be getting worse at the moment, and gets called out less as there’s so much of it. A tidal wave of bilge
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Reckon we’ve gone past the peak of the current phase of world civilisation. A collective failure to face facts and reality, political degeneration and collapse of the systems that support life.
DOOOOOOOOOMMMMMEEED!
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if embra give up the 1872 cup to the weedgies we’ll know the end times are here.
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@Chimpie – I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it?
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also quite horrifying when one came to think of it – that a “storm on a lake” could sink a 26,000 tonne freighter – the scale of the Great Lakes suddenly becomes very real in way you didn’t get by looking at your geography books…
As Gordon points out, Lake Ontario isn’t as grand as Lake Superior, but I learned not too long ago that there is a winter surfing culture on Lake Ontario.
I also recently lucked out, and I am now renting a place facing the lake with nothing between the building but a bike path. I move in next month.
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I feel irredeemable barbarism rising from the bowels of the earth.
Wasn’t sure I was right about this, but our resident geologist type seems to be confirming it.
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RIP Marie Fredriksson
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@ladoab
“I also recently lucked out, and I am now renting a place facing the lake with nothing between the building but a bike path”
Sounds great – in downtown Toronto…or further along the shore….can’t recall where you said you lived? (Mississauga? )
(how many Ss in Misssssssissssauga????)
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Sounds cool, LADOAB.
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Blimey, OT, that’s sad news.
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Darryl Marfo “to leave Edinburgh with immediate effect” … “to allow him to find a new club”
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Bowels of the earth? Pffft.
It’s all being stoked by the lizard people. Outer space innit.
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