Happy Face

Nope, is yours Leazes' liver ??? No it's the cover of Dross Glop.

Lawro reckons we'll win 2 nowt.

Is your avatar ye olde Swisse Rambler or summat?

So I can be comfortable hoping for a Spurs Chelsea FA Cup Final and Liverpool taking a hammering in all competitions. Goodo.

It's a good question. I have wondered why Sheffield aren't United on a Wednesday. Is it summat to do with the half day?

From that brilliant site Tom linked to.... Our 1.68 PPG would have won the league in 74/75

I want the T-Shirt.

Said earlier I watched the first ep last night and will deffo be watching the rest as i thought it was excellent. The politics of it just irked me a tad, even in the first 60 minutes. Further investigation has confirmed my thoughts on where it's coming from, but that's no reason I won't enjoy it as much as I did 24...for a while.

The more I read about it the less hopeful i am it'll be anything more than a slower paced version of 24 to give it a veneer of respectibility. Howard Gordon developed it from the Israeli show, and he was Show Runner on 24 for the entuire run. He's also a scary promoter of Jewery There is a disconnect [in Hollywood] between the content that we create and its impact on the world. One of the things that Hollywood needs to understand is that it has an impact: We are the face of America; what we create is how people perceive us. I’m not suggesting we create self-conscious propaganda, but we do have an outsized power. It probably wouldn’t be a bad thing if more people like me open our eyes to the influence that we have beyond our own borders. .... We have an opportunity to present certain essential truths about America. America is a country based on ideas and values, so if we represent that, it is going to be seen and exported across the world. That’s the best advertisement for an America that is too often vilified: We’re imperfect, but we’re the greatest country in the history of man.

It's coming to Sky Arts... Sky Arts has acquired acclaimed Israeli drama Prisoners of War (Hatufim), on which hit US series Homeland is based. The foreign-language drama will receive its UK television premiere on Sky Arts 1 in May. Prisoners of War tells the the story of three IDF soldiers who were captured during active service behind enemy lines in Lebanon. Seventeen years later, the soldiers are released (only two come back alive) and the story of their time in captivity unfolds as they attempt to reintegrate into society. As well as handling the national hero status being thrust upon them via the public limelight, they try to cope with the pressures of being reintroduced to their families and friends. Prisoners of War’s plot unravels through three time plains; before capture, life in captivity and the present day, which all intertwine to reveal dark secrets about the soldiers' time in captivity. The ten-part series, written and directed by Gideon Raff, originally aired on Israeli commercial channel Keshet Broadcasting, channel 2. It will air in the UK with English subtitles. Prisoners of War formed the basis for US drama Homeland starring Damian Lewis and Claire Danes, which began its run on Channel 4 on Sunday. James Hunt, Director Sky Arts, said: “With finely crafted writing and critical and audience acclaim when it first aired in Israel, we’re delighted to be able to bring this brilliant and gripping foreign drama to the UK for the first time exclusively on the channel.” http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-02-21/sky-arts-1-to-show-hatufim---the-israeli-drama-that-inspired-homeland

It's based on an Israeli show you know (whey, obviously it's roots are in the Manchurian candidate, but I mean directly). Hatufim it's called. http://www.jinni.com/tv/hatufim/ Might be worth digging out if you can get a subbed version.

I've heard The Grey was very good. Bit of Jacobs ladder to it...and having lost his Mrs in real life, Schindler has good write-ups too as playing a part quite close to home.....punching wolves aside..

24 is shite compared to this. Not that I've watched a single ep of 24. I'd be surprised if you've actually seen an episode of Homeland either

never seen 24, what is that ? One agent is responsible for killing a lot of terrorists and stopping lots of terrorist plots. If you can handle the 24 episodes per series and the fact that it plays out in real time then I reckon it'd be right up your street. It wouldn't most definitely reinforce Leazes world view, aye.

Poof. 24 is largely excellent, especially the first few series. Even the poor ones were better than most of the shite out at the time. Homeland is one that I meant to Sky+, need to get onto it. I thought the first 3 seasons or so of 24 were excellent. The more people he tortured information from to to save 4 or 5 immininent threats a day the more tiresome it got. I kept going until series 6 or something waiting for the one where he stops some rogue US troops pissing on the corpses of collateral damage Afghans. Never quite got to that level of balance

I watched the first episode last night. Dramatically it was excellent. I had to stop watching 24 because it left too sour a taste in my mouth with it's scaremongering, so I'll be interested to see if this manages to keep me coming back for more threat hyping.

How do you judge when reading a book will inform and educate Leazes? Rather than misleading you down a namby pamby, ladi dadi, hoity toity, loony lefty, sandal wearing, Guardianista path of do-gooder misinformation lacking any real world experience? Seems to be a fine line, what with all the books you're recommending at the moment.

Hardly going to raise spirits that they couldn't attract the dregs they were offering the job to.

Home Man City (0) Liverpool (0) Norwich (3) Mackems (1) Stoke (3) Wolves (3) Bolton (3) Away Arsenal (0) Chelsea (0) Everton (0) Swansea (1) WBA (1) Wigan (3) 60 point finish

Good Work I'm still lost. Is it better for our european hopes to finish 7th behind Liverpool than 6th ahead of them

Has anyone hoyed up the european qualification criteria this year? I know the league is 1 Europa place for those in 5th as standard, nowt for 6th or below. Not sure how the cups work it though, seems to change regularly. Wondering if Cardiff could end up getting our place. EDIT: It's in the OP man

Hurrah for Sky, saving non-league football..

What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection. In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light. The team has now found two problems that may have affected their test in opposing ways: one in its timing gear and one in an optical fibre connection. More tests from May will determine just how they affect measured speeds. The Opera collaboration (an acronym for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus) was initially started to study the tiny particles as they travelled through 730km of rock between a particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland and the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy. Its goal was to quantify how often the neutrinos change from one type to another on the journey. But during the course of the experiments the team found that the neutrinos showed up 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have done over the same distance - a result that runs counter to a century's worth of theoretical and experimental physics. The team submitted the surprising result to the scientific community in an effort to confirm or refute it, and several other experiments around the world are currently working to replicate the result. A repeat of the experiment by the Opera team will now address whether the issues they have found affect the ultimate neutrino speed they measure. Faulty connection? The two problems the team has identified would have opposing effects on the apparent speed. On the one hand, the team said there is a problem in the "oscillator" that provides a ticking clock to the experiment in the intervals between the synchronisations of GPS equipment. This is used to provide start and stop times for the measurement as well as precise distance information. That problem would increase the measured time of the neutrinos' flight, in turn reducing the surprising faster-than-light effect. But the team also said they found a problem in the optical fibre connection between the GPS signal and the experiment's main clock -quite simply, a cable not quite fully plugged in. In contrast, the team said that effect would increase the neutrinos' apparent speed. The team had carried out their measurements for more than three years, exhaustively scrutinising their methods and analysis before announcing the results last year - so why had they not found these issues before? "It's sometimes very difficult to tell whether this thing could have been done before - because in a sense the answer is always yes," said Sergio Bertolucci, director of research at Cern. Prof Bertolucci outlined the complexity both of the experiment and the analysis of the results, stressing that the hunt for just these kinds of problems had been relentless. "One has to realise that the collaboration has never stopped to try to 'kill' the measurement (proving that it was erroneous)," he told BBC News. "Their constant search for systematic (errors) has never stopped, for more than a year." Given that the opposing effects only seem to muddy the waters further on whether neutrinos can exceed the "universal speed limit", only more experiments will put the matter to rest. For its part, the Opera team said in a statement: "While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012." Facilities also at Gran Sasso called Borexino, LVD and Icarus will also take part, along with Minos, based at Fermilab in the US, and a Japanese facility called T2K. With so much at stake, Oxford University particle physicist and Minos spokesman Dr Alfons Weber said these international efforts will go ahead no matter what. "I can say that Minos will quite definitely go ahead," he told BBC News. "We've already installed most of the equipment we need to make an accurate measurement. "Even if Opera now publish that 'Yes, everything is fine', we still want to make sure that we come up with a consistent, independent measurement, and I assume that the other experiments will go forward with this as well." But Prof Bertolucci at Cern says that there are wider implications of the neutrino story, which is playing out in the public eye. "All this story has shown to the wider public how science works," he said. "Of course the people of Opera are not happy; they would have preferred that the neutrinos stayed [faster than light], but the fact that they came out and they put themselves to the scrutiny of the wider collaboration... I think makes a good case for science."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9aeGHsZCdo The new Sleigh Bells album's out. Woo Hoo!

Mothers day!