This weekend sees the start of the new Pro-14 season, and the finish of the English Premiership. The only guarantee is that Saracens will be dead last, which will have rugby fans all over Europe crying disconsolately into their beer.
On the telly
Friday 2nd October
| Zebre v Cardiff | 18:00 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Ulster v Treviso | 20:15 | Premier Sports1 |
| Leinster v Dragons | 20:15 | S4C / Premier Sports 2 |
Saturday 3rd October
| Scarlets v Munster | 15:00 | Premier Sports 2 |
| Green v Gold | 16:00 | Sky Sports Arena |
| Connacht v Glasgow | 17:15 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Edinburgh v Ospreys | 19:35 | Premier Sports 1 |
Sunday 4th October
| Gloucester v Northampton | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| Leicester v Harlequins | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| London Irish v Bristol | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| Sale v Worcester | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| Saracens v Bath | 15:00 | BT Sport 1 |
| Wasps v Exeter | 15:00 | BT Sport 3 |
Ovally Balls 
CMW – per Tomp’s post this morning about his racist students. Apparently the Vietnamese stock gnomes in their shops.
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I haven’t heard this before but maybe Marler has. Being an expert.
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I see, you mystified me with a mysterious reference to something that had mystified me earlier.
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Deebee, did you know your grass at Emirates Airlines Ellis Park is lazy?
Never smoked it, so not sure. But it does give the impression of just lying around all day doing nothing.
It’s true the scrum was important in the final but it’d be nice if he’d just owned up and said the Boks were still better all over the park.
Bloody right. Now go get ’em Joe my boy!
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Must admit Craigs, I didn’t notice an abundance of gnomes in shops in Vietnam when I was there. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.
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One for you, ticht:
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This is terrific as well. A-H Wessels, the prop, is going to be a megastar:
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Craigs, one student. Not sure if he’s racist.
The town of Zelazna Ruda’s hard on the border with Germany. Lots of cheap booze and ciggy and t-shirt shops for the neighbours to come and buy. Plus, and this is the strange thing, in the Czech mind the shops in these border towns all sell garden gnomes. The shops tend to be run by people of Vietnamese heritage (it’s a big thing in Central Europe: https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/librarydoc/czech-republic-the-visible-and-invisible-vietnamese-in-the-czech-republic ).
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Who buys the garden gnomes?
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Germans. Big part of German culture.
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See, for instance, Dinkelaker’s 1996 paper “The Renaissance of the German Garden Gnome”.
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As I assume you’ve read Dinkelaker perhaps you can also tell me who makes the garden gnomes?
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John Major and family.
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****Turn’s garden gnome upside down and looks****
å¾·åœ‹è£½é€ ã€‚
As I suspected, ‘Made in Germany’
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Tomp – I don’t think he’s racist either BTW.
I just find the gnome to Vietnamese shop association mildly amusing.
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I’ve no idea if he’s racist, but one student who we don’t know whether he is racist or not is one too many.
Anyway why don’t the (non-Vietnamese)Czechs want to sell garden gnomes to Germans?
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I want to sell garden gnomes to Germans. In fact I’m thinking of putting Sancho Panza, Howling Julio and Austin Rover to work making some for me to sell to Heimat Zwei’s family.
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It’s money spinner, CMW.
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And if I had a shop I’d definitely sell gnomes to the Germans.
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We need Iks to be our man on the ground.
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I could sell in bulk to Heimat Zwei’s visiting grandfather and he could sell them on back in Germany.
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He has no English though so I’ll need Mrs CMW for the communication and she’ll want a cut.
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It’s what Brexit’s for anyway – exploiting child labour and foreign workers to be able to beat Czech-Vietnamese gnome salesmen on price. Should have voted for it really.
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Use the international language of gnomes, CMW.
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Hold on. I’ve just had an idea for a new book.
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Thinking about it if he’s got any Spanish or Hungarian then my staff might be able to help. Or they would be able to if they spoke at all.
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Of course what Brexit is most definitely not about is the Germans getting to sit back and lord it over us so I’ll have to think of something Heimat Zwei can be made to make that can be sold to the Spanish, Hungarians or Costa Ricans.
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Finally, a reason for Brexit that makes sense
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@Chimpie – You’ve just got to think like a Brexiteer and then the opportunitities are endless.
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Is there going to be a share issue in your gnome production venture CMW? I’d like to get in on the ground floor.
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@Chimpie – I’m not going down that route until it’s fully legit in the new year. If it’s successful at that point I might even be able to drop the coercive element of it and launch Childminding With a Difference: Learn a Trade Before You’re Four (access to overseas markets an advantage).
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Alternatively just give me some of what Boris is on.
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He’s using “vexatious complaint” to describe murder again. Wanker.
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TomP vexatiously complains OB into oblivion. At least we’re spared the new book about about the virus humping gnomes unleashed on quaint Czech shops by evil Vietnamese sleeper agents for dissident Khmer Rouge antifas.
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Looks like I finished off the gnomes too. Little bastards had it coming!
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@Deebee – Pretty sure TomP is off compiling the English-Gnomish/Gnomish-English dictionary. Or if he’s hoping to sell any the German-Gnomish/Gnomish-German one.
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Roger Penrose has won the physics Nobel Prize for his work on black holes. He also wrote The Road to Reality probably the best non-specialist maths book ever written. Plus he came up with the idea that quasicrystals (crystals with 5- or 10- fold symmetry) could actually exist in nature.
Clever bastard.
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OT – pretty good. It was always going to be downhill from here though wasn’t it?
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CMW, that’s what he’d like you to believe. We gotta glimpse of his 50 Shades of Covid earlier. I’m starting to think the global relocations are out of censorship necessity rather than linguistic curiosity.
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50 Tests of Covid
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50 Tests of Covid (+117 that we lost)
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Done the Covid book. Working on other respiratory diseases / chronic lung conditions.
It’s handy because wheezing can easily be made to sound like panting.
Plus,, the lusty lexicography number.
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@tomp
Make the next one about pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
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Just found out my boy’s classmate Honza’s mum is called Martina Navratilova.
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Done the Covid book. Working on other respiratory diseases
Bet the main character had a suspicious lack of gag reflex after getting covid in your book.
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@OT – For some reason I once accused Sag of being Paul Coia (or maybe going to school with him). Now I realise it’s you!
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pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Good one.
“He exploded, shooting lumps of love lava from his …”
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Perhaps it should be 50 Masks of Covid. Or 50 Visors. I may have misunderstood the Shades thing from the original though.
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Of course TomP’s prospective book on pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis could well be a worthy recipient of floccinaucinihilipilification.
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