LondonLax

Is that Megrahi dead yet? Seems like he probably should be seeing as he "only had 3 months to live" back at the start of August.

And there's been a goal at the Walt Disney Stadium, but which way has it gone?

How good would that be!

The ultimate mickey mouse club

I think it looks pretty smart as new developments go with the single tier kop breaking from the symetrical lines found at other bowl type designs. One thing that hasn't been mentioned in the new development details is the transport links. I've been to White Hart Lane a couple of times and it's an absolute nightmare to get out of being served only by rail with no tube station. With a a potential extra 20k every game how the hell is it going to work?

Yes, the transport links are very poor.

I think it might be a sticking point for the council in the planning application.

Spotter card in question.

Miss "I" appears to be Jennifer Aniston and it looks like Mr "L" is possibly under suspicion for drug related offences.

That does make central London seem awfully small though. Its a good 40 minute walk from Marylebone to Kings Cross for example. Without all the side streets and half the main roads missing, it makes it look like they are a virtual stones throw from each other.

I have completed the Monopoly board pub crawl a grand total of 4 times, drinking an alcoholic beverage in all 26 pubs (includes stations but no utilities) on each occasion (usually a half pint of bitter...)

Agree they should be kept as they are. Players ought to be reminded why they are on the bench!

That is the way the board and management feel too according to the general.

Players should get all comfortable on the bench.

Good stuff, and 4-4-2 with petrov. Sidwells run continues.

There is another interesting article from Matt Tiabbi, like the one on Goldmans above, on one of the dodgier ways investment banks make money during financial crisis

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid. continues...

here

The Rolling Stone Magazine's take on the Goldman's empire: here

The Great American Bubble Machine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

Vs

The Times columnist's take on Goldman's bonus payouts: Here

You ain’t seen nothing yet at GoldmanIan King: Business Commentary

The people at Goldman Sachs are only human. They want you to know they feel your pain. They accept that, as an investment bank, they will be among the first to benefit from any economic recovery and, accordingly, know they must handle the bonus issue sensitively. Continues...

Vultures do tend to thrive on carcasses.

Massive profits are no doubt helped along by mythical accounting. Weren't Enron by all accounts well run until we all learned it was a con?

But yes, a positive news story; let's not question it at all; let's celebrate the excess; let's not learn any lessons.

You think JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are involved in Enron style fraud?

How can you make this type of money and produce nothing? The world has gone mad and we do not seem to able to put the brakes on, another economic crash is in the wings. Might sell my house and buy gold.

Financial Services are like the oil that keeps the economy turning and company's like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs making profits is a positive story that the economy is moving in the right direction again.

Neither of these companies recieved bailout money from the government of either the US or UK and by all accounts were well run allowing them to weather the economic crisis and come out the other side in good shape.

A positive news story on the economy for a change. I'd much rather be hearing these stories than headlines about these companies needing government bailout money.

Well they should keep making them until they stop making money from them obviously. I have not actually seen any of them though.

We were the same as the French until somebody drew a line on a map a few years back!

Quite, although there are less people still alive who remember when that happened...

Its not the same. The French & the English are separated by a natural line that is difficult to cross ie: the English Channel.

the line drawn to separate Bangladesh & Pakistan from India, was just a line on a map.

Also the European boarders were created by the Europeans themselves usually based on language and cultural differences. The dividing up of India in the 40s was fairly arbitrary and done by an outside power.

But all country boarders are pretty meaningless at the end of the day when looking at a persons race which I think was what The Rev was getting at.

We were the same as the French until somebody drew a line on a map a few years back!

Quite, although there are less people still alive who remember when that happened...

Guess what I just did?

I just watched "The Big Lebowski" FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER.

It was, err... good.

Of course, you now have to watch Fargo if you havent seen it already. Then you will get the "joke" of why everybody always says..

Shut the **** up, Donny.

..to Steve Buscemi.

Already seen Fargo. Preferred it to TBL, if I'm honest.

Ah but The Big Lebowski is at its funniest at about the 7th or 8th viewing.

Report back then about which one you like more...

Yu will share the day-to-day running with Pannu and admits it is taking two men to do the job previously done by outgoing managing director Karren Brady.

Wow she must have been quite the pro!

So when's Blu-ray coming out? I heard Lucas was going to add yet more footage to update the movies once more. :?

He has a mortgage and kids to think about don'cha know...

Ewoks mde tht movie.

Yeah, when you were ten...

Haha I voted for Phantom Menace but in reality they are all pretty crap movies except for 'Empire Strikes Back' which is actually a good film and 'A New Hope' which is not too bad despite the cheesy cliché plotline.

The other 4 are kiddy trash though...

I agree that Empire Strikes Back is the best. However to call Return of the Jedi 'kiddy trash' is just madness. Madness I tell you!!!

Yeah, cause fluffy "Ewaks" tripping over the elite republican soldiers whilst making cute noises isn't stupid. Not to mention the 'i'm your sister' plot twist which they messed up by having them get it on when they wrote the first movie.

Haha I voted for Phantom Menace but in reality they are all pretty crap movies except for 'Empire Strikes Back' which is actually a good film and 'A New Hope' which is not total rubbish despite the cheesy cliché plotline.

The other 4 are kiddy trash though...

Konnie Huq is of Bangladeshi descent!

same thing! 8)

It was the same thing until the British Raj decided to draw a line down the map a few years back....

I find it a bit frustrating with the reactions to the Carew/Heskey discussions.

Carew lost the ball nearly every time he was passed it tonight, it was so frustrating because he was getting about the pitch and looking for the ball but he could not make them stick and gave it away even when not under a great deal of pressure time and time again.

Heskey came on and was a lot more composed, held it up and found a player, won loads of flick ons to team mates yet he just gets slated on here. I know he is not going to be a goal threat but you can see why he is in the england side when he is so much calmer and stronger on the ball than Carew was tonight.

Dunne was a monster though, what a top game all over the pitch. My only fault I could find was that I thought he could have come out to close Ireland when they scored their goal.

As soon as you put a cap on wages you will see a flood of people moving to places without a cap on wages.

Living in London it is crazy how few people born in London you meet. Everyone is from somewhere else and a lot of people have moved here chasing the money in the financial sector.

If you cap pay they will just move to Zurich or Frankfurt or New York and the UK economy as a whole will take a massive hit.

On a semi related note, I was reading an article about a Russian oligarch who had bought an old mansion on hamstead heath and was applying for planning permission to do £50m worth of renovations under the building to install underground cinemas/games rooms and whatever else. The reactions from the newspapers comments section were, to a man, saying that these people should go back to Russia, the money is disgusting, the council should reject the application etc etc but that seems crazy. If some rich Russian guy wants to bring £50m over from Russia and spend it on builders and contractors in the UK than that sounds like a really good thing, not something to be hated.

every time you look at the sky at night youre seeing the past

doesnt make your eyes a time machine though

Every time you look at anything you are looking at the past. There is no such thing as the "present", it's indefinable. If you assign any kind of value to it, no matter how small, that value can be divided into a past and a future. In reality there is only the past (which we live in through our slow senses) or the future.

If you could manipulate how fast the past reaches your senses (via manipulation of gravity perhaps?) you could manipulate how far back you can see/hear into the past. That would be a type of time travel I would think.

It's a mind boggler for sure.

Isn't it already possible though, in a very different way?

I'm talking about those satellite photographs that show pictures of supernovas and whatnot from billions of years ago.

That's nto time travel though, that's light travel. Comparable to looking at your TV of some recorded programme. If you look at your hand, you arent seeing your hand as it is now, you're seeing it as it was 0.0000000000000000....000..0001 seconds ago.

As for is it possible? Not a chance.

But I would argue that is in itself a form of time travel. Looking at a spot as it was 1 billionth of a second ago is no different to looking at a spot as it was 2000 years ago when Jesus was preaching for example.

In either case we are observing the past. We will probably never be able to interact with the past but we may be able to observe it at periods of longer ago than 1 billionth of a second.