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Charles Bannerman

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Everything posted by Charles Bannerman

  1. Rule Number One - he's called Bruce!
  2. It's genuinely refreshing to see a comment like this from a football fan, which comes in welcome contrast with the alarming number of people who always seem to know far better than the manager does. I have never yet understood how all these managers have jobs while the obviously superior talents of these pitch side experts, who seemingly instantly spot the mistakes managers are constantly making, have mysteriously gone unnoticed and unrewarded.
  3. You mean there are TWO intelligent Australians?
  4. Yup. Such as by the outrageously hyperbolic American commentator who once famously proclaimed "Colin Montgomerie is a great athlete"!!!!
  5. Maybe they were siblings of Scarlet's quadruplet uncles/mother.
  6. Has that grandson also inherited characteristics of immortality?
  7. With the relegation playoffs and the top six both possible but unlikely, what a BRILLIANT time to start a thread like this A look at Kevin's CV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_MacDonald_(footballer) may give some insight into the chances of a club with a budget like ICT's being able to meet his likely financial requirements. And that's before you even consider the likelihood of someone who has been 22 years in management accepting a post as assistant to someone with no management experience at all!
  8. Early 50s maybe?
  9. Given that both sides of Bridge Street have been desecrated, this must be late 60s or later but I can't say I remember the trees..
  10. Is that by any chance a Dan Dare plane? I thought the writing was bigger on them though.
  11. Ah!!! The Ness Islands Railway, where I will soon be returning with my grandson who loves it!
  12. Yes, that list is scarily familiar, isn't it?
  13. Yes this does rather look like the Horficers' enclosure. I wonder how many of them lived past 1918?
  14. A wise and telling observation! In situations like this I sometimes wonder what the perceived "victims" of alleged "attacks" would say if they were asked whether they actually wanted their self appointed knights in shining armour to become Serially Offended on their behalf?
  15. On the other hand "You started it you...." OOPS!! "I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!" What I mean is that if you go back through this forum archive you will see that a significant majority of threads on this separation/SNP type stuff have been started by supporters of separation/SNP. In fact I can count around seven and you were very happy indeed to say plenty, for instance when your bubble was expanding during the summer of 2014. The problem is that, having "started it", you chaps' arguments were never particularly robust at the best of times. Indeed now, like your precious oil revenues, they have dried up completely and - in the face of opposition, which is something nats conspicuously don't like - you now appear to be trying to call "foul".
  16. What an interesting illustration of that well established nationalist proverb "if you don't like what they are saying, try to stop them from saying it"! Indeed Nick Robinson wasn't even saying anything at referendum time, he was merely asking hard questions which the nats didn't like, and they took the place down about that and invaded Pacific Quay. Which brings me to my role as a part time freelance journalist. I think we knocked that nonsense firmly on the head during the referendum when a number of contributors highlighted the complete absurdity of linking part time freelance sports journalism with the expression of political views. At this point I would refer back to my opening sentence whilst noting unease at the suggestion that journalists should be prevented from expressing public views, even in areas unrelated to what they report on.... unless of course they are Iain MacWhirter or anyone who works for The National. (So I don't suppose this would be a good time to suggest a Team GB for the World Cup?) There's also a bit of bizarre thinking with respect to it being apparently unacceptable to draw parallels with Germany in the 1920s and 30s. This creates a situation where people can behave completely outrageously and never be held to account for it because censure of what they are doing has been stifled by a bunch of politically correct hand wringers. It's just as well Churchill didn't have to contend with people like that. I also note that this thread has apparently been attracting the attention of the 140 character philosophers of Twitter - presumably including a large clan gathering of Cybernats. All this does is to pose the dilemma of which quote to mobilise in response? Dennis Healy's that being criticised by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep..... or Stalin's question when he learned that he had incurred the displeasure of the Vatican - "And how many divisions does the Pope have?"
  17. Try this definition which originates from the bigger world, furth of the unfortunately parochial constraints of Scotland http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the+great+unwashed Winding up Oddquine? Of course! And great sport it was too while it lasted. I wonder how things are going outside Holyrood? Never mind, in Alex we seem to have the new Oddquine who, give or take occupying the odd Post Office and shooting a few British soldiers, was at least pretty civil. Apology???? Of course it wasn't!
  18. I am perfectly entitled to be offensive about a party and a movement which I find offensive and which, by its actions over a long period of time, has provided plenty of evidence for that description. However, I prefer instead to class many of my observations on these threads as having the intention to ridicule or satirise, to which, again, my targets lay themselves wide open by much of what they do and say. Ridicule and satire, by the way, are very long established means of political comment. Private Eye, for instance, has been doing it far better and for far longer than I have! However, given the well known resistance which nationalists have to ridicule and criticism, despite their quality as targets for same, it hardly surprises me that what I say would simply be taken as "offensive". This comes out of the same stable of grandiose thinking as attempting to present the pointing out of the obvious drawbacks of separation as being "anti Scottish" or "talking Scotland down". I have observed the political scene for long enough to remember the bunch of cranks that was the SNP of the 60s, who then jumped on the "It's Scotland's Oil" bandwagon and sold that hard for years to fabricate their electoral momentum of the 70s. I therefore find continence difficult when I see modern day nationalist apologists dismiss oil as "just a bonus", now that the backside has terminally fallen out of what was the cornerstone of their campaign for decades. It was at that stage in the 70s that straightforward crankiness, which is of course still alive and very well within the SNP, had an objectionable element of nastiness and arrogance mixed in with it. That is the combined ethos which still persists today, especially among the "Alex Salmond" wing of the party. Over the decades I have seen more than enough of the SNP to have become convinced many years ago that there is much which is offensive about it and the manner in which it operates. And I don't give a stuff about what the PC Serially Offended think if I refer back a few posts here to the several clear parallels I drew between Germany in the 1920s and 30s and the current modus operandi of the SNP. I have never been particularly "Scotland" minded and the antics of the SNP have been in danger of turning me literally "anti Scottish" because, with that bunch about, I now find it embarrassing even to admit to being Scottish. In fact if asked my nationality, I now make a point of saying "British" whereas I previously also sometimes used to say "Scottish". Indeed, as time goes on, I find myself regretting more and more that Edward II was such a cr*p military commander because if he had won at Bannockburn we would have been completely spared all this referendum nonsense and all the rest. The Scottish Wars of Independence, after all, were merely the ordinary people being shoved in the front line by the big man with the blue and white face bellowing "Freedom!" and being told to die in order to decide which set of privileged despots oppressed them. So there you go. I have no time whatsoever for any party which has simply come a couple of steps along the road from the ridiculous caucus of cranks with chips on their shoulders which set it in motion and which wants to break up the most successful political union in the history of the planet. I also have no hesitation in saying so, and if the nats see fit to find that "offensive".... well that's just a bonus!
  19. Good Lord! Are they still there? If they are, it speaks volumes for the generosity of our benefits system.
  20. For a one party state to survive, that party has to do one of two things. * Create a dictatorship but, despite the several disturbing parallels I have already illustrated, this in practice is probably highly unlikely. OR * Please most or all of the people all of the time. And this is the great "No Can Do". Westhill1 makes the very valid point about Blair and look what happened even to Churchill in 1945. So far the SNP's strategy has been to attract the votes of the great unwashed by promoting proletarian policies (or at least pretending to, but they couldn't actually give a toss about what to them is no more than ballot box fodder.) And, having wrapped that end of the market up at the expense of Labour they do indeed seem to be chasing the centre ground by, for instance, persisting with free and expensive university education for far too many people, declining to adopt the 50p tax rate although this has emerged as the most popular of all tax policies, paying lip service to their working class support through minimally freezing the 40% cut off as their only tax change etc etc. I also wonder what they will now do, having learned that increasing benefits isn't actually all that popular? Will they get tough on benefits and lose much of their current support or start dishing out all they have the powers to dish out and hence risk their move towards the middle ground? In a democracy, it doesn't matter who you are, your time is always limited before you get dunted by the electorate. The SNP's challenge is to get that second referendum in at a time when the polls are at least showing a safe and totally unprecedented 60% yes. And that is a race against that £15bn and rising black hole, collapsing oil, painfully demonstrable domestic incompetence, SNP support steadily wakening up to the fact that they are being shafted etc etc. Glad to see you on here Westhill1. But where have all the Nats gone? Why just restrict debate to "red dots" on certain posts? Where is Oddquine when you need her? Or if it's not a vote about the "I-word" is she just not interested? On the other hand, maybe she's out somewhere canvassing on behalf of that former Loretto public schoolboy Feckless Fergus Ewing
  21. Not even by the brown stains on their shorts?
  22. Careful! You'll get a handbagging from Wee Nicola for what could be construed as an implied criticism of the E*****h. Anyway , these days it's called a Westminster Cross!
  23. It's either the Canal at Dochgarroch or the away parking for a Highland Derby in Inverness.
  24. Where have all the Nats who used to be so vocal on here gone? Or is it just that policy for exercising devolved powers doesn't interest them since, in best party tradition, they are only concerned about a single issue? I mean, even if they don't have any reasoned arguments to put forward, they could surely at least try the more familiar ground of vacuous sloganising.
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