How to dress: T&B fashion!

First socks, THEN shoes!

You might want to put some trousers or a skirt on before the shoes though. I'm not telling you how to live you life... or am I?

For that superhero look try putting your pants on next. Some of these are ideal:

Then a stylish jumper for the cold weather:

Or maybe just wear this: 

Now THAT'S stylish!

His name is Billy.

I wish I’d believed the warnings at the time. We were told he was a horrible little man, but we just thought they were being bitter.

 

Billy Davies has done nothing but bitch and moan for the last year. If he was the manager of a club in the top half of the Prem it could be seen as clever posturing, but considering Nottingham Forest are languishing mid-table in the Championship it’s the actions of a man who thinks he’s better than his record suggests.

 

I’m not the biggest fan of his tactics but they’re often effective. His persistence with using at least one winger who can’t cross is puzzling but I’m willing to let that go. What I can’t abide is the unsettling nature of his comments. He thinks he’s making his point against the board/transfer panel/whatever abut it just makes him sound like a crazy little man. It was made very clear in the summer that we were trying to sign players (too clear for Cardiff and Swansea) yet he would have us believe that the board is against him.

 

However if he doesn’t shut up and start turning some draws into wins he’ll find it’s the Trent End who are against him. Mid-table and manager silence would do for me.

Update: mofo got a win tonight. Still needs to STFU though.

A ramble I couldn't be bothered to finish

Why does Rupert Murdoch hate English football so much

 

Yet again a Murdoch owned newspaper acts with the intention of hurting English football. 

Can't post direct links ue to paywall so here's this: 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101017/sp_soccer_afp/fblwc2018fifabritainnigeriacorruption

 

It can be argued that it’s valid investigative journalism of course, and there is an argument that corruption needs to be exposed. However at FIFA it’s corruption that everyone has known about for decades. Sepp Blatter has long been known as a dubious and highly inappropriate man. Perhaps that’s a post for another time.

 

But this isn’t about Sepp Blatter, a man who everyone in English football has despised for some time. It’s about Murdoch and the News Corp agenda which seems to be very much against the England team, moreso than other news outlets.

 

An article on the BBC site suggested “Any spirited journalist could've asked those questions from any country, and the answers would've been the same” but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t, be cause they’d quite like to host the World Cup at some point.

On Rooney

Many column inches/pixels have been wasted on Wayne Rooney this year and this blog entry is no exception. Based on a letter to Football365:

 

Alex Ferguson made a bold move in revealing the details of contract negotiations, or lack thereof, in a press conference. In said press conference he question Wayne Rooney’s character and made sure that he used Pravda  MUTV to make this statement:

 

“So there we are, we have got into a situation where we had to clarify this for our fans because what we saw on Saturday was unacceptable. When we got to 2-2 and they were chanting Wayne Rooney, it's a pressure on the players and didn't do the team any good so we had to clarify the situation and put it right."

 

Or reading between the lines: “You’re all a bunch of idiots, how dare you question my authority!”

 

And they there’s a lot of nonsense about loyalty and respect. Respect the club he says. The club which played him injured against Bayern Munich, aggravating that injury and knackering him for the World Cup. Yes, that’s worthy of respect, thanks Fergie.

 

I know everyone thinks their club is special but why they think a scouse lad should have any loyalty to a Manchester club which poached him from his boyhood heroes, bins players as soon as the manager gets sick of them and which represents the deep end crass commercialism in the sport is anyone’s guess.  Hating Manchester United has been easy for years, with much of their fanbase being casual football fans and massive chunks of their home support travelling in from London of a weekend, and a whole lot of arrogance the likes of which Liverpool fans were guilty of throughout the late 70s and 80s. Of course there’s a lot of sensible and realistic Man U fans too, although they are generally not Keane on going against the word of Fergie. His statement has essentially forced Rooney out of the club. There’s no way back despite the ‘open door’ mentioned. The pride of both men has been hurt, and I can’t see either backing down.

 

The media have of course gone apeshit, and have created a variety of reasons as to why this has occurred.  I imagine they haven’t seen eye to eye ion a few matters, but I think that the summer’s transfer activity was quite telling. Rooney wants to be in a trophy winning team. Manchester United seem to be lacking the resources to build one now that the interest payments are biting. Making such huge losses without a massive pile of cash to back it up is unsustainable, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. They can’t compete with Chelsea, Man City or Real Madrid in terms of financial muscle. It seems to me, and many other neutral observers, that it’s not the money or the press hounding, more a case of him wanting to win something in the next few years – he’s not exactly short of a few quid. This is why all the best players keep leaving Arsenal – ambition. This is also why Manchester City are becoming increasingly attractive to players (as well as the massive wads of cash) – eventually they’re going to win something.

 

Times change, clubs rise and fall, and I think the sun is starting to set on the Fergie era. You’ve had it good, now you might have to suffer like the rest of us.

 

Well, I say suffer, we’ll have to suffer the whinging on a grand scale, until the fair-weather fans disappear again. I can’t see a team that hasn’t won a trophy in a few years and with no star players left selling many shirts in Singapore, Malaysia and the like. How many Chelsea fans did you know in 2001?

A Short Pointless Post About Nothing.

As I was invited to post on this blog, and after promising I would several weeks ago, I think it is about time I did so.

Now, I could talk to you about the things of current interest to me, such as how music should go beyond the recorder or the humble glockenspiel in the primary school, or how well Ariel gets my whites so gleaming white, instead, I am going to go back in time a few months ago to a petty niggle which affects my life in now way, shape, or form and talk about plagiarism... That's right, I am talking to you Mr Gates, Windows 7 was not your idea, it was Apples idea. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how similar it is to what Apple have been doing for years on their computers?

Windows 7 is like a Walrus dressed as a flamingo, it is not offencive in anyway, it can be endearing, though it will never be as

Guest writers have been asked to do some posts. Expect some at some point.

Dragon Quest IX: A ramble

The thing about blogging is that you can cover slightly different ground to traditional media. The following ramble is not necessarily the best example of this.

Well what have we here?

Possibly my favourite RPG since Final Fantasy XII, that’s what.

For the Japanese Dragon Quest is right up there with FF as one of the premier game series, spawning an absolute ton of merch and sales in the millions every time. Previous incarnations of Dragon Quest have sold modestly in Europe and the US. Even with the popularity of the Final Fantasy series RPGs have not really gained the same sort of sales here that they do in Japan.

This time around Nintendo have decided to publish the game on behalf of Square-Enix, and have thrown their PR machine behind it big time. If you’ve not seen a Dragon Quest IX ad on TV then you’re probably not been watching TV for the last month. Like all current Nintendo advertising they seem to be marketing it to a very wide audience, with ads featuring teenage girls and mid-20s men grappling with the menu systems and putting on bunny ears, although no celebs so far (they seems to have been saved for the current Mario push; Jamie Redknapp WTF!? I was waiting for him to say “that’s top, top platforming”).

There’s not really much to say about the gameplay itself. It’s all menu systems battles, old school RPG style, and wandering around looking for stuff. Actually that last bit sums up almost every game I’ve played this year. I digress. Where the appeal lies is in both the customisation (heavily featured in the ads) and the exploration, not to mention the localisation. Whoever did the translation job deserves some kind of award. I’m not supposed to be laughing out loud at RPG dialogue, but DQIX gets me on a regular basis. The various bits of map feature different British dialects including Welsh, Scottish and Cockney, a sort of generic northern and southern, and Australian for some reason (disappointingly no one says ‘flaming galah’), but it’s been done by someone who has a good grasp of such things, and can be hilarious, particularly your companion Stella’s mangling of common turns of phrase when ever she opens her mouth. I imagine her speaking like Dick Van Dyke for some reason.

Being a Japanese RPG the thing is epic, and there’s a ridiculous amount of things to collect. I’ve burnt 80 hours on it so far, and I’ve not even touched the multiplayer mode. And there’s downloadable content free via wi-fi, including extra quests on new items. I fully expect to still be dipping in to it in the New Year.

If you think the idea of fighting cucumbers and robotic pigeons whilst dressed as a Playboy bunny or in a tasteful leopard print dress sounds like a good time then this is definitely for you. Even if prefer shooting at things this might provide a respite and prevent you getting carpal tunnel syndrome.