His Name Is Death

No Villa players, though. Sorry.

Can trace it back quite far on both sides (one line on my mum's goes way, way back). Considering I wasn't expecting much when I started out, it's turned out to be very interesting, without giving away too much detail. British, Irish and Silesian German, mainly, with a bit of Polish and Dutch. There are a couple of family legends/tall tales that I'll probably never find the answer to. There's a story from my dad's cousins about French republican soldiers staying in Roscommon after the French expedition of 1796, but good luck ever trying to prove it. Despite the tremendous efforts made to restore Irish public records in recent years, a great deal of them were destroyed in a fire during the civil war of 1922, one of the saddest things being that they were supposed to be even more detailed than the English records you can find in abundance. As it is, I can barely get beyond the mid-to-late 19th century when an Irish ancestor comes up. The other was a claim from a distant cousin that we have Spanish ancestry, which seems pretty unlikely in late 18th/early 19th-century Birmingham, though I did get a 'Spanish & Portuguese' marker on 23andme (same percentage as my 'French & German' one) before they updated the chip. Now I'm "100% British and Irish", which is nonsense. I did trace that particular line back quite far and found no likely candidates. My guess is there was an Irish ancestor with a 'swarthy' appearance and this was taken to mean Spanish by Victorian Brits.

I don't usually click on football articles that pop up on Google search, but I had to on this occasion, even knowing it would be bollocks. The complete lack of shame of it made me laugh. https://www.90min.com/posts/robert-lewandowski-barcelona-transfer-request-summer I still think it's appalling, though, and completely ruining the internet. Does nothing to convince me that most football news outlets aren't just spam and junk.

I sure am glad we didn't buy Édouard in the end (if we were ever really in for him). Easy to say in hindsight but happy we stuck with Watkins.

Picks Toney, no doubt just to tell him to move to Arsenal, or something like that.

Curtis getting an Oscar for that 3-minute canned ham cameo was baffling but can't begrudge Michelle Yeoh winning. I was a little surprised that Blanchett didn't win for Tár, but, again, I can't say Yeoh wasn't great. EEAAO definitely won the PR war in the run-up to the ceremony, so it's not much of a surprise to see it win big. It's likely that the academy wants to be seen as being "down with the kidz", making a statement by rewarding a lot of people's favourite film of the year, even though (or especially because) it's not traditional Oscar-bait.

I don't know what the fuss is about. I've only come in post-penalty, but we've clearly been the ones creating more chances.

Would appear it was also a breach of confidential health information:

Just to show how big of an idiot Elon is... Tesla is currently advertising for a UI/UX designer. Skills required include: Must be proficient and highly skilled in Figma and other design tools Ability to prototype in Figma, Keynote, or HTML/CSS https://www.tesla.com/careers/search/job/ux-designer-design-system-173257 The man doesn't even realise that his precious Tesla screens, user interfaces and design system are built using tools like Figma. All he's proved is that he's happy to laugh at people who are just using industry standard tools applicable to their actual job.

Musk's dickriders are so bizarre. I've seen replies from people who have such blind faith in him that they insist on human trials being 'sped up' for Neuralink. What's most ridiculous to me is being sure that, if George Soros or Bill Gates were trying to develop human brain chips, they’d be shitting their pants and crying conspiracy. But, because it’s epic troll rocket man Musk, they don’t care.

It gets worse than that: This is the dude in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haraldur_Ingi_Þorleifsson Having a congenital muscle disease is certainly some "excuse".

Now that our owners have bought Vitória S.C., I suppose we'll be at the head of the queue for signing Ibrahima Bamba. Are any of their other players worth a punt?

If Conte can't 'sort out' Spurs, it's never going to happen for them, is it? (Not to say I'm not quite envious of their position. Never going to be struggling commercially either.)

Is Tom Hanks okay? Took me a while to recognise him on Saturday. Is his weight loss related to a role?

Most often the correct one, but also the most banal, which is why people instinctively resist it. I used to visit Websleuths and took an interest in the then-unsolved case of a woman who committed suicide, whose family later discovered that she'd altered her identity at least twice in her life but left no clues as to her true identity. The mystery had gone on for some years, drawing the attention of the online Miss Marples, who immediately started linking her to famous crimes, including her being a member of a Satanic murder cult, and came up with a variety of other twisted backstories to explain her behaviour. It was finally solved in 2016 via genetic genealogy, and it turns out she just ran away from home because she couldn't cope with her parents' divorce and mother's subsequent remarriage. There was a palpable sense of disappointment when it was revealed that, no, she wasn't a cultist or a serial killer, or whatever donkey-brained theory they had, and it truly hit home how ridiculous they all are (even if they do, mostly, have good intentions). Never went back again.

Given how enraged Sawiris was by Gerrard and how he made sure the media knew Emery was ‘his man’, I really doubt our owners are not going to give us money to spend.

Funny how easily he can set aside old rivalries as soon as money is involved. Doesn’t matter that Man U, Liverpool and Citeh are meant to be ‘enemies’. That means nothing anymore except to fans. They’re part of the same boys’ club now, and they’ll look out for each other if need be.

That’s a big part of it, yes.

I mean, considering their resources compared to ours (and considering they were promoted after us), we don’t have many excuses.

Rather annoying how good Brentford are at the moment.

Bednarek own goal.

How long will Conte have left?

4-1 lol.

Not just a Tory Britain problem. Plenty of greed and corruption when Blair and Brown were running things and very unlikely to change under Starmer. It's a Labour council that recently let Sheikh Mansour buy up acres of public land in Manchester for seemingly a fraction of its worth. It's a problem that can be solved, but we've never had politicians or legislators with the willingness and gumption to plan and effectively implement any kind of solution.