kick it off

It's burgundy in my book

I wouldn't have chosen that, but as a Washington Commanders NFL fan, I can get on board with the burgundy and gold colour scheme. I quite like it.

Not sure that's right - I'm a small tshirt from most places, medium from a few. I'm short, broad and quite stocky - I bought a medium home shirt and fits perfectly. XL would drown me

"Up" north? You're fooling nobody, a proper northerner would surely be using the (regionally) grammatically correct "oop north". I call fraud. 🧐🥸

I read somewhere that Rothermere has told his editors to turn on Johnson. Sounds like it might have some merit.

@Herman The East of Turkey is well worth a look too. Capadoccia, nemrut daği and Lake Van. Found out yesterday that I am off to Iceland next Feb. School trip so its working rather than a straight up holiday, but I've been meaning to go for ages, so I'm happy. Fingers crossed I can tick the Northern lights off my bucket list on that one!

Anybody able to comment on the quality? I hated the kit last year because the quality of material was really poor. Shame as I really liked the design. Love this kit but hesitant to buy after being stung by Joma's awful material last year... this looks to be more like the errea material?

Good thread 👍 Sounds like you're off to some interesting places/have visited a fair few. I'm going to Istanbul for 6 days in August. Lived in Ankara for 6 months in 2009 and fell in love with istanbul and spent most weekends there. Been back once in 2014, and not managed to get back there since so I'm really excited to be heading back to the shores of the Bosphorus. Have a really good friend who lives there so looking forward to catching up with him, and spending some time visiting the sites I have never got to visit. Been to quite a few countries, Thailand and Cambodia was my favourite trip. Went all over Thailand, spent some time at the elephant sanctuary (not one of the horrible abusive trekking camps) and spent 4 days with a private guide visiting the temples around the Siem Reap region (Angkor Wat and various others, private guide allowed us to access some very remote non-touristy ones).... Heidelberg in Germany was also a great trip - lovely city. Least favourite trip was China. Did 3 weeks there in 2018 and would never go back. Food was awful, culture was very unpleasant and the sights were all disappointing except for the Great Wall which was stunning.

Seen foals a few times, they're brilliant live but felt they started to drift musically over last few albums. Will give the new one a listen now

https://theathletic.com/news/stephan-phillips-norwich-resign-exit/cgsK0nV9OWxh/

I usually start with adieu and then ports. Today's was tricky, figured it out on the last go.

I know a lot of forest fans as I used to live in Nottingham - consensus from them was that he was their best player last season and many of them thought their season was over when he got injured. They all rated him very highly. I haven't really seen him play so I don't have much to add to that but certainly the forest fans liked him and wanted to keep him.

Not worth it's own thread so il post in here. Anyone else not remotely shocked by this?

Ruling letters out can be as useful as ruling them in 🤔

🟡⚪⚪⚪⚪ ⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪ 🟡🟡⚪🟡⚪ 🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢

It's on Disney Plus, not netflix. I thought it was ok. Not brilliant but watchable. The actor playing Johnny Rotten has him absolutely nailed. Unbelievably good acting.

If you missed it the first time round, Manhunt is very good. Dramatisation of the hunt for Levi Bellfield in season 1, and the night stalker in season 2. Its based on the memoirs of Colin Sutton who led both investigations. Martin Clunes plays Sutton. On ITVplayer and worth going back for if you missed it. I've just rewatched both series

Akala did a pretty good job. Tommy Robinson is neither talking truth or very clever by the way.

Got tickets for Bon Iver in October. So stoked for that one!

Disclaimer - Im not professing to be any kind of expert, but I do have a degree in International Relations and teach geography so have a decent understanding of geopolitics and have looked at Zeihan's work for a while now. Zeihan is very good at cherry picking to support his arguments. He presents an interesting, often provocative perspective but his predictions are variable - sometimes he is on the money (predicting Ukraine invasion several years ago, shortly after Crimea - albeit he wasn't the only one predicting that, he did call it correctly) but other times he is wild and it's unclear where he is coming from - China to collapse by the end of the decade? Seems pretty far fetched to me from my understanding of China. I'm not wanting to sit here denigrating Zeihan, but thought it worth pointing out that he is a polarizing figure in the geopolitics world because whilst he makes some valuable contributions to discourse, he often says things specifically designed to provoke and draw attention. I don't disagree that he makes some very lucid arguments, but I do feel he makes some extreme leaps of faith in terms of the conclusions he draws. For example, in the video you link, he draws Japan as an example of a country that is really well placed to thrive in the post-globalisation world - Japan is a country with few natural resources, heavily reliant on imports and a massive ticking demographic timebomb with an ageing and declining population. They already have people working into their 80s becase they've had to reduce pension payments. The OECD average pension spending is 8% of GDP, Japan already spends 10% of GDP on pensions and this problem is getting worse. There's already 50,000 people aged 100 or over in Japan. The population is also declining with 600,000 more deaths than births last year and there are huge issues rapidly eroding living standards. He mentions the demography as being an issue but brushes it off as minor when it isn't, he totally ignores the decades of real terms wage decline, eroding living standards that were lower anyway and much higher poverty levels than Europe. He is right in terms of their government's ability to provide their own financial mechanisms and support, but says they are one of the countries that don't need to spend on defence... when your neighbours are China, North Korea, and Russia, you probably need to spend on defence. I won't go any further with the critique as I stated before, Zeihan makes plenty of salient points, and is well qualified to give his opinions, but it is important to note they are just opinions and predictions, not anything that should be taken to be more than that. There are plenty of other opinions in the room.

Well received news in these quarters too. Decent player and in a position we desperately needed a quality addition. Adds a physical element we were sorely lacking. Bonus is that he has some technical ability too and can thread those through balls that teemu thrives on, presuming pukki stays.

I liked Errea - we got bespoke kits, some cracking designs and the quality was decent. Bought a home shirt last season and won't be making the mistake of buying any more Joma kits - the quality was absolutely atrocious. Errea kits were light years ahead of Joma in terms of quality

Rotherham is a decent away day and Birmingham not bad either. Il prob do both of those. Sheffield is great but I massively prefer Wednesday away to Sheffield United away and obviously theres no hillsborough game next season.

I found that bit quite amusing. They're on a messageboard of a Rounders team literally nobody outside the US has ever heard of and making "small time" comments aimed at a club that has spent a fair amount of recent years in the most watched sporting league in the world.