metalman

And, after you get all their card details, what are you going to do with your £11.52?

Do Bristol and have little lines showing the wards that Massive Attack, Tricky and Roni Size come from

you're gonna have to draw lines connecting Jay-Zed to EACH of those places

They are putting an offstage China in this wtf

Don't often post here, but I just read a book that I think some of the people here might quite like - White Tears by Hani Kunzru. It's about rich white hipsters, "authenticity" and blues music. Better overview of it here - https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/theo-tait/three-minutes-of-darkness "A novel is not a proposition, but it sometimes comes close to being one. White Tears is in part a thesis on the white cultural appropriation of black music – inspired, as Kunzru’s acknowledgments make clear, by Marybeth Hamilton’s interesting book In Search of the Blues. Hamilton argues that the whole idea of the ‘Delta Blues’ was largely a retrospective fiction. Robert Johnson, for instance, only ever sold a handful of records in his lifetime. A sociologist who surveyed the black bars of the Mississippi Delta late in the Depression found not a single local performer on the jukeboxes. Instead, people there were listening to the same music as the rest of black America: Count Basie, Fats Waller, Lil Green. Johnson’s significance is largely an invention of later white enthusiasts looking for a particular primitive thrill in their black music: what the field recordist John Lomax, who toured the prisons and work camps of the South in the 1930s, called ‘uncontaminated’ black singing, not spoiled by the record companies and the cities. In Hamilton’s account, the collectors were often explicitly racist – looking for music unsullied by the corrupted ways of the city Negro."

This is the best thing to have happened in sport since England got beaten by Iceland.

Sure. She's be a great fit on Scottish Spotify. Right now it's just all Bay City Rollers and Jimmy Shand. Speaking of which, I bet this is crazier than any gig you people have ever been to:

I've heard the album cover's going to look like this:

That's not how music works. :/

tbf, it doesn't really bother me. I don't really follow football except for international tournaments (though I know what's going on because I listen to the Guardian football podcast when I'm walking to work). And as a casual follower, hearing that the Champions League final features Real Madrid yet again doesn't really entice me to watch. (Though I did watch it because I didn't have anything better to do :/)

I dunno. I mean, it's great that you guys enjoy it - different strokes for different folks and that. But I just think a competition where only five or six teams from two or three countries have a realistic chance of winning isn't very exciting. I feel like a competition should require more teams who are actually competitive. Particularly considering that in the not so distant past we had teams from the former Yugoslavia, Romania and Scotland getting winning or getting to the latter stages. I just feel the sport has become so stale and needs some form of reform. The dominance of Bayern and Juventus in a domestic context isn't exciting for me. Spain and France aren't much better. England is a little bit better in that there are five or six teams with a realistic chance of winning, but there are so many dreadful teams below that. But yeah, I don't know how I'd actually reform it. Maybe make regional leagues from some of the smaller countries to give them a higher standard of opposition - maybe a merger of Scotland/Belgium/Netherlands or something. A bit like that league in rugby union with teams from Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy.

Yeah, while it might have a taken a team this long to retain it, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid have been semi-finalists more often than not over the past few years. That's not interesting. "Team with most money and highest paid players wins tournament AGAIN" is not a fun story.

The Champions League is boring. Sure, Real Madrid are a good team, but I don't think them winning 3 out of 4 is something for the rest of us to celebrate. It's a sign of a tournament that is urgently in need of reform.

Will you be friends/dragons with me?