Wolfie

I'll be collecting from the local butcher tonight:

For Christmas eve:

3kg ham joint

For Christmas day:

2.5kg turkey breast joint

2.5kg beef sirloin joint

Plus sausage meat and 20 x large pigs in blankets

Trouble is, there are supposed to be 8 of us but due to the horrible winter cold things going round, there's a good chance it might be only 3 as of this morning.......and Miss Wolfie doesn't really like meat.

Looks like I'll have to try & make some room in the freezer.

34 minutes ago, JoetheRam said:

Without sounding all Larry David, the premature "Merry Christmas".

Been hit with it three times already this morning.

Knocked me right out of my stride. If it ain't Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, just say hello/goodbye.

To you, sir...

I say it to people if I'm not going to see them again before Christmas (and if I like them). You're saying you hope they have a merry christmas

I can't believe I only became aware of The Goes Wrong Show yesterday.

A few Youtube clips at lunchtime kept me chuckling all afternoon.

Maybe we should all stop heating our homes in protest this winter because a lot of our gas imports are now coming from Qatar?.

9 hours ago, Rev said:

As a footnote, my old car has been overlooked for a long while on Cazoo.

It's now up for sale for more than a grand less than I sold it to Webuyanycar.com, yet has been serviced and had the alloys attended to. 

No wonder they've lost most of their peak market value, in an effort to appear honest they're highlighting faults which aren't really there. 

https://www.cazoo.co.uk/car-details/4f5bc4f0-8f30-55f1-ab62-fece7e023452/

The only thing which can't be polished out is the very slight dent in the rear passenger door, which any decent paint less repairer should solve for £100 or less.

It's an absolute bargain at the price it's now advertised as, 6000 miles in 3 years and never been thrashed. 

Cazoo are struggling, so there might be a lot of bargains while they try and shift some of their over-priced stock. Not a great position to be in with second hand car prices now falling from record highs.

I don't know how many sites they have but they've got a big one on the same business park as my company, with thousands of cars parked up, on and around the runway of an old airforce base. In the last year, they've gone from rapid expansion and trying to buy up any vacant buildings on site, to making a lot of people redundant.

12 minutes ago, Ghost of Clough said:

Some people still don't believe we'll be running at a loss this season, so I'll show you the numbers. The cash profit/losses will be fairly similar to the accounting profit/losses, so I'll stick to the accounting losses in this example.

Revenue
Our highest recorded revenue was about £30m (most likely higher in seasons where accounts weren't actually posted though). We're now in L1, which comes with reduced TV money. We'll also see a reduction in sponsorship income (lower league = smaller captive audience, and no shirt sponsor money).
Revenue = £20m.

Costs
Wage bill = £10m
Manager compensation, amortisation, profit on player sales = £5m
Other operating costs = £4m (utilities, maintenance, cleaning, policing, stewarding, etc)
Admin expenses = £8m (lowest since 14/15)
Total costs = £27m

Loss = £7m

Well that's depressing if true.

8 minutes ago, David said:

I mean, that's not an Apple product right? Can't blame them for third party products. 

The AirPods are also super popular now as well, see them used everywhere, can't be hating on them. 

Yeah, £50 for a bit of string looks a bit cheap.

Derby 2-0 FGR

McGoldrick FRGS

1 hour ago, Crewton said:

"Balancing act" is probably the most fitting way to describe it. It's a different balancing act also depending on particular country's credit rating, hence why Argentina's economic problems are harder to resolve than the USA, as an example. For the UK, what the Fed does is particularly relevant. If US base rate is rising, ours will go up too eventually. It's one of the reasons why talk of "taking back control" was and is a meaningless expression. In a global economy, external forces will always have an effect. 

I've had an issue for months about the BoE using a demand side tool in order to try and control supply side inflation but you're quite right - once other trading partners increase their interest rates, then it becomes hard for us not to unless we want to devalue our currency (which is of course bad news for a huge nett importer like us).

Something I only noticed last night - when looking for Strike:

On Virgin TV on demand, it says only series 4 and 5 are available on iPlayer (to watch through the Virgin V6 box) and the rest are there to buy only. However I go the iPlayer App on my TV and all series are there.

Any idea why this is (other than Virgin being sneaky)?

On 13/12/2022 at 12:24, sage said:

Strike

Just watched all 5 series. Excellent. 

Made like a poor mans Sherlock, which still makes it pretty good. 

Cheers for that. We were looking for something new & so started this last night.

Fusion is certainly the cheap & green energy holy grail. My first full time job in 1995 involved working with the JET Undertaking at Culham. The problem is, fusion was then seen to be 30 years away - and it still is.

The final bit of the BBC news article is fairly damning about these new results IMO and there is clearly much work still to be done....

The experiment was only able to produce enough energy to boil about 15-20 kettles and required billions of dollars of investment. And although the experiment got more energy out than the laser put in, this did not include the energy needed to make the lasers work - which was far greater that the amount of energy the hydrogen produced.

23 hours ago, Phoenix said:

Saw the thread about Career advice and remembered cutting some 'ads' out of the Daily Telegraph, probably 2004, under the heading Non-job of the Week.

Here's the first. Bear in mind the salary equates to c. £43,000/44,000 in todays money.

 

That's an awful lot of text to say nothing at all of use. Good grief.

When you've been saving a good bottle of wine for a special occasion and then it's turned to vinegar when you finally open it.

I've had a bottle of Chateu Musar (lovely Lebanese wine) saved for a couple of years but it was corked when I attempted to celebrate with it last weekend.

Pate is a good shout but I'd probably go with Cheese & biscuits and a nice glass of red wine.

I met Mrs Wolfie via online dating, back when it wasn't realy a thing (pre-Tinder etc) and was considered to be a bit weird. We had messaged quite a few times in the few days before meeting, so I suppose it wasn't really blind.

The only real blind date I ever had was in my early 20's and lasted about an hour because one of the first things she did was tell me off (and properly offended) that I'd had the cheek to hold a door open for her, when she was perfectly capable of doing it herself. We had one drink and I made up an excuse to leave.

Your Christmas or mine?. (new on Prime)

Two young students are reluctantly planning to be apart for the festive period but end up at each other's houses for Christmas due to them both doing a romantic train swap in order to spend it together.

Definitely not a classic and much of it should be a Hallmark TV movie on Channel 5. But for a sugary feelgood bit of festive fluff, it does the job.

A very generous 5/10 because it's Christmas, after all.

Pickford should have got to that. 

14 hours ago, Archied said:

There can be no middle ground you say ,,, erm spot on and you are the other side of the more extreme so called conspiracy theorists ,

oh how easy and intellectually smug to post the stuff above 

mystery ruling elite you say , there’s no such thing unless you can point them out , oh how comforting, there is no erosion of democracy oh how comforting , perhaps those mystery sinister people / powers you smugly dismiss if you can’t put a name on them are simply corporate entities (;people behind them who gradually seem to own / control more ) , the banking world , established long standing wealth holders who lobby , donate , threaten , reward , exert a measure of control over whichever party is elected or being set up to be elected , gather all the dirt ready to use as leverage or released/ leaked at the time best suite and chosen to either out or in who serves them best ,

like or loath Johnson but make no mistake he was got rid of when chosen to get rid of ( the same way he was gotten in to power ) 

like or loath truss but make no mistake a clearer case of things running the government rather than the government running things you will not see , a matter of days and the democratic chosen one was out 

you see you don’t convince me any more than the full on extreme so called conspiracy theorists , it’s a bit like when you’ve been out with the family walking the dogs over the park and you get in the car and you can smell poo , you can all smell poo but some are not sure they can , your checking shoes and can’t seem to find it , but you know what , you can smell it , you know it’s there,

if it’s all the same to you I will put more faith in those who question this poo show and direction of travel that invariably leads to the poorer being poorer , having less power over they’re lives and less and less freedom whilst those elites go in the opposite direction despite the fact that these people are meant to be representing the people who elected them ,

your lack of questioning over covid is laughable, just as a one off tell me who behind who does it suit to pump vaccines into babies as young as 6 months in the USA and here when Scandinavian countries won’t give boosters to under 50 s after looking properly at the data , perhaps they have no real financial skin in the game , that’s just one of multiple issues that clearly makes no sense but I’m sure that no matter what transpires , YOU WONT QUESTION 

 

Why do you always accuse those who don’t agree with you of not questioning, when the reality is that they probably have (I do) and just come to different & more rational conclusions than you?
 

Accusing everyone else of being blind sheeple is what the crackpot conspiracy theorists do. Stop it if you don’t want to come across as one of them. 

Burton 0-2 Derby

Collins frgs

1 hour ago, 1of4 said:

There is talk that this government want to escalate not resolve the present industrial disputes. In the hope it will demonize those striking and the general public will accept the passing of laws to make strikes illegal, thus further reducing all freedoms.

I'm sure there is (certainly in one half of the political spectrum) but I think you're giving the government too much credit regarding their capacity for strategic thinking, to be able to pull that off.

Just to keep it on topic, the same goes for conspiracies around so-called eroding freedoms to reduce pollution and carbon emissions. All of these "grand plans" require democratic governments to plan for longer than the time to the next election and I really don't think that happens much anywhere.

ULEZ was brought in because of horrific air quality in the cities and to try and prevent kids dying from air pollution - just recalling that poor bugger who lived near the North Circular in London.

It's not even as if it's that strict & meant to keep the worst polluters out (without having to pay, anyway) by carrot/stick method to incentivise less polluting vehicles. My 2 litre diesel isn't affected by it, for example.

7 hours ago, TigerTedd said:

That’s what I figured. But still, there have not really been any great shocks in the World Cup have there? It’s always been one of the favourites that end up winning it.

Which makes sense, of course the favourites win it. But football tends to throw in the occasional shock, a Leicester, or a Greece. It’s just interesting that the World Cup has never really had that.

Law of averages says it’ll happen eventually. Maybe it’s Morocco’s time. 

It's the same in any cup competition, though. When was the last time a second tier English team won the FA or League cup?. The closest I can think of right now is when Wigan won it and got relegated from the Prem in the same season.

Lower teams might get away with losing a group game but they've then got to punch well above their weight in 4 consecutive games to win the thing. It's just very unlikely. Akin to rolling 4 consecutive 6's?

1 hour ago, Mostyn6 said:

National Lampoons Christmas Vacation: Chevy Chase (the original Jim Carrey) and his family have extended family over for Christmas day. Lots of things go wrong. Funny in moments without being sophisticated, and the Cat scorch mark gets me every time!

Paul Green/10 (does it job, but won't be considered as one of the greats)

 

 

My favourite Chrismas film.

“Infamy…..”