andy steel
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Everything posted by andy steel
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Rangers had a striker in the early days called Speedie. I wonder if young Struth had him as a favourite player?
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Ah, but Lord Turnon moves in mysterious ways, you see. His Hand reaches everywhere, from the internet even into Chilled Bear's marriage. Cross Him at your peril!!! Love the jpeg or gif or whatever the hell you call it btw!!
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I admit it, you got to me the other day. When my team reached the giddy heights of the Ramsden Cup semi-finals, I expected the usual doom laden chorus of nay-sayers to come floating out of the crypt, issuing dire warnings. probing the entrails of goats and generally bringing everyone down, lest anyone of a Blue persuasion experience anything akin to happiness. And sure enough, there was Hugh Keevins, sternly informing me that to actually be happy at winning a minor pot would be very, very wrong, and possibly raise the wraiths of Struth and Waddell to bring down the walls of Thebes (or Ibrox). He was easy to ignore. He is, after all, no prophet. A Tit, yes. A Tiresias, less so. You, though, were harder to dismiss. An ever popular figure amongst fans and media, your brash denunciation of the Cup Final being held at Ibrox bit to the core. You mentioned integrity and you balanced it against the mere accumulation of money. You spoke with feeling about how much more it would mean to Raith Rovers to win a pot themselves, rather than merely enrich themselves by a few hundred thousand pounds. A tear was not far away, I confess. And then, as I sat there reflectively stroking a pensive eyebrow, I realised that Rangers had no chance in this fight. For when you, Turnbull Hutton, say something, there is neither man nor beast can stand in your way until thy will be done! Who can forget your tireless efforts to bring about the vote of no confidence in Stewart Regan and Neil Doncaster, first announced by your good self, with the usual gravitas, back in about April of this year? Doubtless the delay in that vote actuaaly happening is merely administrative. Those slow moving apparatchiks at the SPFL will feel your well fed wrath descend upon them shortly, of that I have no doubt! For when Turnbull Hutton speaketh, the earth trembleth!!! I for one have firmly believe that we shall see you at Hampden soon, bringing down the statue of Belial and emerging from the dust like Charlton Heston in a Cecil B DeMille movie...only, you will be the better actor. It is the same with your unquenchable Corinthian spirit. Only a churl amongst us would point out that the man who spent over a year helping to re-arrange the deckchairs on the SPFL steamship Titantic - with the specific aim of bringing more money into division one clubs, of which Raith Rovers just happened to be one - didn't seem to be overflowing with the sporting ethos of the game when he shafted every part time club in the country to gain a few more pounds. It is not for mere mortals such as we to wonder why you have gone from money grabbing backstabber to embodiment of the Olympian Spirit in the space of a few months. I have already slapped down a few coarse, crude types who tried to suggest you were an enormous bag of wind, which the media let open every so often and print the resultant ephemeral, noxious but essentially meaningless gas. Their low minds don't appreciate you the way I do, Lord Turnon of Bullhut. They cannot see how you represent all the aspects of Scottish football in the way I do. They say: he's a bumbling hypocritical oaf, who loves the sound of his own voice but can only just make it out because his head is so far up his own arse. I say: Smite them, when thy has the time. I believe in you, oh Lord Bull! I believe!! Were any sign needed of your great omnipotence, it is the way you gave your people Your Word on the Cup Final location BEFORE THE DRAW WAS MADE!!! Once more, some gutter dwelling people have suggested that the way you anticipated avoiding Rangers in the semi final and getting a fairly easy ride for The Rovers into the final looks like the draw was fixed. If only they could understand that Your Vision is limitless, they would easier come to heel. All kneel before Turnbull Hutton, avatar of morality, principle and integrity!!!
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http://www.theguardian.com/football/video/2013/sep/19/james-richardson-european-paper-review I reckon most people will know about this but if you don't, it's fantastic. Plus, most of us on here will remember Football Italia in the 90's, James & his ice-creams & cakes....have a wallow in 90's nostalgia.
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The spin you mention has been mince, Zappa. I've a good mind to create a start-up PR outfit after next year because the standard we've seen seems to be 'say any old pish'. Anyone can do it! A Politburo hack back in Brehznev's day would have been embarrassed at that line about 'impressing the investors'. It's infantile, unconvincing and amateurish.
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In the meantime, is there any way a supporters' body could petition the SFA to investigate whether Olverman is an appropriate employee at one of their affiliate member clubs?
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THE Ibrox Bar – Official Opening Saturday 28 September.
andy steel replied to ian1964's topic in Rangers Chat
That's a start. I'd like a site which can hold about 2,500 never mind 250 but, it's a start. -
You think that's where Whyte hid the Arsenal shares? He'll have a hard time selling them now, I'd imagine.
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SPFL Loony Tunes brigade Suggest Sash Bash at Parkhead?
andy steel replied to Zappa's topic in Rangers Chat
I can't see any reason to make amateur publishing adhere to professional guidelines. -
Henryson is quality. Timeless, really. Cynicism about humanity is always going to be topical, I suppose. But I'm a huge fan of Buchan, who has unfairly become marginalised with so many High Empire writers as jingoists or racists. Completely untrue! And in so many of his books he preserved the language of the Border farmers which he knew was dying out even as he lived, weaving their environment in with the classical inheritance he loved, to create not some noble savages roaming the heather clad hills, but a separate culture, certainly Christian but heavily flavoured by paganism, the strength of which allowed the likes of his Hannay or Arbuthnot to roam the globe, safe in their own certainties. He gives us a fascinating look at the conditions which produced the kind of people who built the Empire, and what built them. Not always positive but always brilliant to read. It's criminal that he is not up there with Burns, in my lowly opinion. Should be taught in every school, should be revived on stage, should be movies (and not the shite versions of 'The 39 Steps' which come up every few years, either). John Buchan Loyal!
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Just about all that remains in my mind from English Language course I did about a year ago is that Scots is most certainly considered a language by the people who work in the field. Although, as you say, it has survived strongest orally, the advent of computer power has allowed the formation of this: http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/ "Recent years have brought significant changes to the political situation in Scotland. This new political situation has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in the languages and culture of Scotland. On 1 July 1999, for example, in an historic address, the late Donald Dewar offered a 'handsel' to the Queen at the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. A 'handsel' is a gift intended to bring good luck to something new or to a new beginning. He was thus marking this special occasion in a traditional Scottish manner. Scotland has a distinctive and colourful language heritage. The present-day linguistic situation in Scotland is complex, with speakers of Scottish English, Scots, Gaelic and numerous community languages making up Scottish society. However, surprisingly little reliable information is available on a variety of language issues, such as the survival of Scots, the distinguishing characteristics of Scottish English, or the use of non-indigenous languages such as Chinese and Urdu. This lack of information presents significant problems for those working in education and elsewhere. A New Era in Language Studies Advances in computer technology have now made it possible to store and analyse very large quantities of information in a way which would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. As a result, in recent years much research in the Humanities has focused on the building of large text archives and corpora. Such resources offer exciting opportunities to study language on a broad scale and with an accuracy which would otherwise be impossible. The SCOTS Project The SCOTS project is the first large-scale project of its kind for Scotland. It provides a large electronic corpus of both written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland. It has been online since November 2004, and, after regular updates and additions, it reached a total of 4 million words of text in May 2007. It is hoped that SCOTS will allow those interested in Scotland's linguistic diversity, and in Scottish culture and identity, to investigate the languages of Scotland in new ways, and address the gap which presently exists in our knowledge of these. It will also preserve information on these languages for future generations." Also available at the same address: "The Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW) is an electronic corpus of written and printed texts from the period 1700-1945, complementing the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots (1450-1700) and the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (1945-present day). CMSW contains over 350 documents, containing approximately 5.5 million words of text overall."
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I can't see how, if there is any official investigation, there can be any vote at the AGM. We need to know absolutely and clearly, and as soon as possible, if there is any investigation. If so everything else will have to be held in abeyance until it concludes, surely?
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At the risk of not taking this thread seriously....oh, you would?
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There's no doubt that Scots was heavily influenced by Northumbrian English, due to the coastal trading network which was used before the in-country land was cleared. Add to that the Flanders trade links, the remnants of Celtic/Gaelic which had been pushed eastward, and the heavy influence, as you say, of Norse which remains to this day in the rural north of Scotland, and you had a language (Scottis) which differed significantly from your English of the day. As I understand it, it was the printing of the Bible in what became standard English which tipped the balance. People wished to speak in the sacred language of The Book, this tongue was adopted earliest by elites, gained status and has filtered down ever since. Nevertheless, as the fiction of John Buchan will show you, even up to the early 20th century Scots contained a massively separate lexus from English. My own wee Grannie, Ayrshire born and bred, only died in 2008 and my goodness, some of her dialect was completely incomprehensible to me (only speak Weegie English). I regret the standardisation of English into estuary English; it seems so boring. Further to the comments on another thread last week about impressions of the DDR, I did a little scouting around recent publications (@2000-present day) and the movement appears to be that initial depictions of a living nightmare were overdone, and that the DDR was more bewildering than totalitarian - there are a wide variety of descriptions given it now, to wit: autalitarian: a mix of authoritarian and totalitarian Stalinist: given the cult of personality around Honecker Diktatur der liebe: A loving dictatorship Erzeihungsdiktatur: Education dictatorship This second wave of western scholarship on the DDR insists on so-called 'ego-documents' (diaries, personal interviews etc) to build up a deeper picture than one could get from only reading the Stasi files, I suppose. The tension seems to be between the aim of the DDR (emancipation) and its chosen method of achieving this (repression). Seems like a lot of justifying for nastiness, but there you are, that's how it stands at the moment. info from: The GDR Remembered (editors Hodgin & Pearce); 20 Years On (editors Rechtien & Tate); The East German Dictatorship (Corey Ross); Dictatorship & Experience (Konrad Jarausch).
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Sadly football has become the de rigeur vehicle for all kinds of political statements. Hardly a week goes by without a black armband for someone or other until we reach the point we're at now, where it has little or no meaning. I reckon the fact that clubs which trade in the millions send players out with black sock tape round their sleeves instead of spending about £70 on actual armbands tells its own story about the falseness of such gestures. That said, if it does any good then fine and well. Attitudes to homosexuality have radically altered since I left school in the late 80s and this kind of thing is about a decade overdue. I'd have thought there were more effective means available, though, than some indistinguishable coloured laces. From my perch high amongst the rafters I can rarely tell who is playing, never mind the colour of their shoewear.
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SPFL Loony Tunes brigade Suggest Sash Bash at Parkhead?
andy steel replied to Zappa's topic in Rangers Chat
Ah, the usual East Coast Bias. I'm prepared to go as far east as Cumbernauld. Broadwood & no further! -
Is the German for born not geborn? Or gebornen? Refuse to use Google translate when dB is here anyway. I love how the languages are virtually identical sometimes. Compared to my nasally attempts at pronouncing French in school, how easy it is to reach for the lower throat and rasp out some (no doubt inaccurate) German!
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Ramsdens Cup Draw: Stenhousemuir v Rangers
andy steel replied to 54andcounting's topic in Rangers Chat
'Marching time'. Fucking illiterate rubbish, written by and for dullards. Anyway, we must be in with a good shout of winning this cup, since it has suddenly become the focus of a devaluation campaign last seen when Geoffrey Howe was Chancellor of the Exchequer. & if the day ever dawns when any sane Bluenose needs Hugh Keevins to tell them what to think, I will then give up. -
As long as we're winning, it's hard to get too upset about it. I don't think it's a very good idea to move players about, but if the results are there....<shrug>
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Ramsdens Cup Draw: Stenhousemuir v Rangers
andy steel replied to 54andcounting's topic in Rangers Chat
:laugh::laugh::laugh: I know we are a somewhat exceptional club, but becoming the first side ever not to celebrate a Cup win would really take things to a new level! Think Shug is really losing the place. -
After the last few years, and with the few still to come, perhaps we should replace 'Aye Ready' with 'Profoundly Depressing'!
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I hadn't realised we were still quite such a basket case that a move to Coventry City - ! - was considered a good career move.
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Then he wins, Frankie. We need to be the better guys, here, not drop to his level, even if purely for tactical reasons. Agreed, but it will. And he will come out on top afterwards, when we are slated for being dysfunctinal, anti-social, toxic & so on. It'll take about two days for any censure he may get to be consigned to history and the story will be us, again, and not positively. I don't find it amazing at all. When a Rangers hater is actually on the spit, he and his pals are going to look for something to take the heat off. If we give them that something, they'll use it. I'm dismayed that you guys disagree here because if you don't dig this, what chance of the thickos getting it? And that means we will lose, every time, always, forever. What a dismal thought! It's always possible that the BBC decision on this may take no notice of the doubtless bulging dossier of abuse Spence will tremble behind, fearfully glancing at the door lest a horde of Blue clad savages burst in, intend on inflicting the ancient Mongol execution of 'the bloody eagle' upon him. They might slate him for ignoring his employers rules and decisions, kick his arse and issue some version of an official warning. They might disparage his 2 years and more of constant sniping and carping, his complete lack of objectivity when reporting on Rangers, or even his inability to express a sentence without horrendous pauses, stutters or roaring at his own hilarious jokes. But the idea that a bunch of journos will side against a journo who pleads intimidation just seems unlikely. So, lets stop giving even the thinnest of excuses to plead that way, and get the bastard on the rack where he deserves!
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I don't have your faith in our fellow fans and can't buy this. It's wishful thinking which brings to mind the two Lennon-bombers, of whom we were told for months that there was no evidence they were Bluenoses. My intense love for Rangers doesn't blind me to the presence of the arseholes among us, and just as those two twats were Rangers men, so to will whoever shouted abuse or whatever at Spence & Spouse. It would be the absolute height of insanity for Spence, with hard copy prof of abuse from his twitter and BBC accounts, to invent this and then go to the cops with it. I have no time for the man's intellect - I think he is an idiot and an appallingly bad broadcaster - but its pretty obvious he's been getting advice from the professional sectarianism industry in Scotland and there no way, in my eyes, that they would have made the mistake of reporting an invented incident. Ignoring or denying what is alleged to have happened is, on one level, akin to condoning it. We need to be sending out signals to the Lame Brain Order of fans that giving wallopers like Jim Spence a get-out only helps him and hurts us. There's no middle ground, or gentle way to do it, or to avoid sounding like some bighead. If you're happy to let haters of Rangers continually get away with it, then deny we have idiots who undermine the club at every turn in person and on social media. They will do it again, and again, and again, because they will think they are being backed, or at the very least not chastised. If you love the club and want to get revenge on haters, make it clear to those who find it hard to work things out for themselves what's a help and what's not. Explain why abuse - though bloody well merited in many cases - only makes our case harder to win and, distasteful as it may be, we need to learn to bite our tongues and box clever.
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Fell Asleep Loyal. The over-40's demographic of Gersnet kicking in there, I feel.