The Mantis

Naked Radio produced a special called 'Only an Excuse' by Jonathan Watson and Tony Roper IIRC. It took the pish out of a TV programme with William McIlvanney called 'Only a Game' from 1986 which took itself a bit too seriously.

More than that, I've still got the audio tape from the original idea which was aired on 'Naked Radio' IIRC. But very few people here will recall the show it was actually ripping the pish out of?

Are you not confusing the stadium with your bedroom Move back to Muirton Park, sign Alex Rennie and Ally McCoist. Watch the crowds rocket.

What an intelligent, impartial and thoughtful article. Sometimes I wish I was a teacher. I suppose that should be 'wish I were a teacher'.

The BBC commentary kept saying it was a decent game to watch and we were just beaten by a better side. Also that Tokes kept making great recovery tackles and was MoM. Kind of glad I didn't travel all the same

I had a mail from a chap asking if the stripes from 69-70 and 72-3 were Caley's change kit or main kit. I'm afraid I couldn't help him. Anybody remember?

Back in the 70s he faced great Scottish players like Hugh Jarse aka John Greig.

Mrs Mantis has bought me a balloon flight. Stands back and awaits all the obvious jokes.

I'll be bumping into my young niece on xmas day and I've just remembered she asked me 3 months ago how she could get a website for her hairdressing/beauty business. I don't think she wants very much, just a presence on the web. I've been through a few things in the past, using freenetname and madasafish and so on, building web pages from scratch and uploading them, but I'm way out of touch now. I'm not keen to get involved except maybe taking a couple of photos, so is there anything out there she can get which is just templates she can update herself? I see her email is btconnect and I see BT offer hosting at ?5/month but any other advice?

From what I've seen of McCann, it's his defending that's the problem, not his attacking play. Most of the guys who sit with me at games would agree.

You don't have to go back very far. What about the first day of this season. Hayes looks like running amok first 20 mins so Ledley(?) halves him in the middle of the park and doesn't even get a card. Obviously wee Jonny is knackered and doesn't contribute much to the game after that. Also Samaras- 3 blatant handballs from the big girl's blouse, fouls awarded, but no cards. Fast forward to the League Cup tie at Celtic Park. Wilson (or Ki?) assaults and severely injures Lee Cox and gets a yellow. Imagine if big Rossco had done it instead. As for the other lot of the ugly sisters, it was only about 2 years ago that it was shown that Celtic had had about 5 decisions in their favour and the season was only a few weeks old. For example, the wee cheat Nakamura 'won' a free kick which produced the only goal of the game at Love Street. Meanwhile Rangers had suffered a few wrong decisions such as a disallowed goal at Pittodrie. If I was of the hun persuasion (which I'm not) no doubt I would be able to remember more details, but that would spoil a fine story wouldn't it. A plague on both your houses.

Totally agree, not often you see someone lob the keeper from 90 yards out. Nonsense, it was about 130, he was in the stand with us when he hit it.

This is a thread about ICT v Rangers. If you want to discuss paranoia/masonic refs, do it in 'other football'.

Pedantic note: I believe the acronym used by the green half of the ugly sisters is, in fact, 'orc' but obviously dougal, with his knowledge of union flags, highland history and culture etc, will inform us what 'orks' are. Natives of Kirkwall perchance......

Cannae beat Slade, or a bit of Greg Lake if yer pished and sentimental

Naw, hope to come up next week though.

So were Elgin depending on who you ask. Mainly because both clubs dominated the trophies. Obviously with your deep knowledge of North football and culture you knew that already. However in 17 years I have yet to hear ICT described as the Rangers of the North.

I appreciate Mannie a lot. The old git reminds me how young I am

What CB said, added to what SC said. I started teaching in 1981 and I still have the old exam papers from that year onwards. The difference in standard between then and now is embarrassing. In my subject they simply miss out the difficult bits so more people can pass, then they claim standards are rising. Absolute shoite. Also the young people have been weaned on a culture of 'is this in the test? Then why are we doing it?' And also 'I couldn't do that question. You never taught us that. It must be your fault'. I started to have my suspicions a few years ago when I gave some first years a test. After they got their marks back they asked 'when are we doing the test again?' I was baffled at first, then I realised they had been brought up in a primary system where they did a National Test repeatedly until they scraped a pass. So I get a bunch of S1 kids who have passed at level D but are no more able to understand level D work than fly in the air. But try telling their parents that. Back in the good old days they had the Scottish Examination Board, a respectable institution. Then in the mid 80s along came Scotvec, a sort of privatised vocational body which was very fond of internal assessment so the responsibility was thrown back on to the teaching staff. Now we have the SQA, which is simply the bastard offspring of the two and seems to be all about making money.

That's easy said but you should have seen the amount of snow we had down here last week. I live in a typical housing estate. I started clearing the path and a bit of the pavement every day. A couple of hours later and there was another two inches. This went on all week till there was nowhere left to shovel the stuff. All the streets had piles of snow all over the place (and they're still here after 2 weeks). At our place there's not enough room for everybody to park at the front door. The garage is in a narrow wee lane round the back, which never got a tractor till Thursday (and it snowed again that night). I'm lucky I can walk to work, but I had to dig a path out for Mrs Mantis and the car every morning, which usually took the two of us the best part of an hour. One morning she didn't get out at all. Nothing to do with tyres or whatever, just the fact the snow was so deep the car just ploughed into it. Some people got round this by just parking on the main road every night so they could get away in the morning. Add to that every house that's got more than one car and it was getting unworkable. Not to mention the huge council estate on the other side of the main road where the streets are tighter than our private estate.

Ditto the Diggers but if you squeeze in we usually get the room at the back.

Just thinking about getting the train up for this game. Is it definitely on Sunday then? I mean isn't Boxing Day on Monday?

Is this one of those Ardath cigarette cards? I've bid for them once or twice on eBay but no luck. OK if I use it on the Caley site? You want a namedrop?

I've got the booklet Charles - think I got it from Stewart Davidson in Renfrew who publishes a lot of non-League stuff.

Would you recommend anybody else to get their car done by Caley 100?