Pain_Man

British marriage counseling?

I agree corn...I have heard it called 'footie' though.....'nuff said....... In the States we play FOOTBALL....big guys, big hits, big salaries.... No shorts, bowling shirts, long stockings and 120 pounders playing the game..... Even kickers have top 200lbs (80kg?) to avoid getting crushed to death.

True enough. The irony is that the term is a British term. One of those little differences. Brits use "mad" for crazy whereas we still keeps its secondary 18th century meaning of "angry." Bernard Shaw: "[britain & America]: two nations separated by a common language." The old commie didn't realize just how accurate he was. I am an Anglophile. Surrounding by English authors, English music, English movies. But sometimes I have no idea what they hell Brits are saying. Especially the dialects outside of London. The English spoken in Ulster doesn't even sound like English. I don't listen to everyword, if my mind wanders a bit, it becomes gibberish to mein ears.

Naw. They'll start charging in Britain & Canada too. They'll just charge more because of that monster of economic destruction and unemployment called the VAT.

Here's something funny. The only way to see Battlestar Galactica in HD is to watch last seasons episodes on Universal's HD channel! SciFi doesn't broadcast in HD, it broadcasts (I know it's cable, the phrase is one of convenience; I guess "transmits" is the proper word?) is SD. It doesn't look very good. Once I got the DVD versions (first season they suckered me into buying the British version; Hah, not this time! The Brit version's disk holders were held together with Scotch tape!

Let us not forget McDonalds. Ray Krok bought the restaurant from the McDonald brothers because he'd gotten the distribution rights to the famous "5-at-once-milkshake-machines". He started building restaurants in order to have a place to put the shake machines. (!)

Unfortunately, we are followed for good and for ill. Look at the EU DMCA! It's like the DMCA on steroids, meth and a coke overdose.

If memory serves Stevens is no longer in the Senate. He's been replaced by his daughter. And a Federal judge ruled that the FCC had no authority to mandate the "broadcast flag" bullshit.

"Para Ingles, marque uno." I knew it was over when Hillary got elected in NY. I figured even New Yorkers couldn't be that stupid. WRONG! I'm mean think about the contempt and disdain with which NY is regarded by the rest of the country. It took 9/11 to get people to feel anything else for them!

Seems "football" may be far older than any of us realized. Let's see...ahh, I found it. I knew Britannica wouldn't let me down. The institutional basis for the most widely played of these new games was England's Football Association (1863). References to ?Association football? were soon abbreviated to ?soccer.? Since this is a "premium" article, for those who aren't members I'll quote it in its entirely, which I believe is legal as long as I site it. Football Any of a number of related games, all of which are characterized by two persons or teams attempting to kick, carry, throw, or otherwise propel a ball toward an opponent's goal. In some of these games, only kicking is allowed; in others, kicking has become less important than other means of propulsion. For an explanation of contemporary football sports, see football (soccer); football, gridiron; rugby; Australian rules football; and Gaelic football. The impulse to kick a round object has been present as long as humans have been humans. The first game of football was played when two or more people, acting on this impulse, competed in an attempt to kick a round object in one direction rather than in another. Evidence of organized football games in Greece and China goes back more than 2,000 years, but historians have no idea how these games were played. Claims that football of some sort was played throughout the Roman Empire are plausible, but the game of harpastum, often cited in support of these claims, seems to have involved throwing a ball rather than kicking it. Although kicking games were played by the indigenous peoples of North America, they were much less popular than the stickball games that are the origin of the modern game of lacrosse. The folk football games of the 14th and 15th centuries, which were usually played at Shrovetide or Easter, may have had their origins in pagan fertility rites celebrating the return of spring. They were tumultuous affairs. When village competed against village, kicking, throwing, and carrying a wooden or leather ball (or inflated animal bladder) across fields and over streams, through narrow gateways and narrower streets, everyone was involved?men and women, adults and children, rich and poor, laity and clergy. The chaotic contest ended when some particularly robust or skillful villager managed to send the ball through the portal of the opposing village's parish church. When folk football was confined within a single village, the sides were typically formed of the married versus the unmarried, a division which suggests the game's origins in fertility ritual. The game was violent. The French version, known as soule, was described by Michel Bouet in Signification du sport (1968) as ?a veritable combat for possession of the ball,? in which the participants struggled ?like dogs fighting over a bone.? The British version, which has been researched more thoroughly than any other, was, according to Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players (1979) by Eric Dunning and Kenneth Sheard, ?a pleasurable form?of excitement akin to that aroused in battle.? Not surprisingly, most of the information about medieval folk football is derived from legal documents. Richard II banned the game in 1314, and his royal successors repeated the prohibition in 1349, 1389, 1401, and 1423, all in a vain attempt to deprive their disobedient subjects of their disorderly pleasure. Despite the bans, records of criminal trials continue to refer to lives lost and property destroyed in the course of an annual football game. The most detailed account, however, is Richard Carew's description of ?hurling to goales,? from his Survey of Cornwall (1602). That British folk football did not become appreciably more civilized with the arrival of the Renaissance is suggested by Sir Thomas Elyot's condemnation in The Governour (1537). He lamented the games ?beastely fury, and extreme violence.? Even James I, who defended the legitimacy of traditional English pastimes when they were condemned by the Puritans, sought to discourage his subjects from indulging in folk football. He wrote in Basilikon Doron; or, His Majesties Instructions to His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (1603) that the ?rough and violent? game was ?meeter for mameing than making able the [players] thereof.? In Renaissance Italy the rough-and-tumble sport of folk football became calcio, a game popular among fashionable young aristocrats, who transformed it into a highly formalized and considerably less violent pastime played on bounded rectangular spaces laid out in urban squares such as Florence's Piazza di Santa Croce. In his Discorso sopra il gioco del calcio fiorentino (1580; ?Discourse on the Florentine Game of Calcio?), Giovanni Bardi wrote that the players should be ?gentlemen, from eighteen years of age to forty-five, beautiful and vigorous, of gallant bearing and of good report.? They were expected to wear ?goodly raiment.? In a contemporary print, uniformed pikemen guard the field and preserve decorum. (In 1909, in a moment of nationalistic fervour, the Federazione Italiana del Football changed its name to the Federazione Italiana Gioco del Calcio.) As an aspect of more or less unbroken local tradition, in towns such as Boulogne-la-Grasse and Ashbourne (Derbyshire), versions of folk football survived in France and Britain until the early 20th century. Although all modern football sports evolved from medieval folk football, they derive more directly from games played in schoolyards rather than village greens or open fields. In 1747, in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Thomas Gray referred to the ?flying ball? and the ?fearful joy? that it provided the ?idle progeny? of England's elite. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries at Eton, Harrow, Shrewsbury, Winchester, and other public schools, football was played in forms nearly as violent as the medieval version of the game. When the privileged graduates of these schools went on to Oxford and Cambridge, they were reluctant to abandon their ?fearful joy.? Since none of them were ready to play by the rules of someone else's school, the only rational solution was to create new games that incorporated the rules of several schools. The institutional basis for the most widely played of these new games was England's Football Association (1863). References to ?Association football? were soon abbreviated to ?soccer.? Graduates of Rugby School, accustomed to rules that permitted carrying and throwing as well as kicking the ball, played their game, rugby, under the aegis of the Rugby Football Union (1871). When Thomas Wentworth Wills (1835?80) combined Rugby's rules with those from Harrow and Winchester, Australian rules football was born. In the United States, rugby was quickly transformed into gridiron football. (The name came from the white stripes that crossed the field at 10-yard [9.1-metre] intervals.) Although Gaelic football is similar to these other ?codes,? that game was institutionalized under the auspices of the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884) as a distinctively Irish alternative to the imported English games of soccer and rugby. Allen Guttmann "football." Encyclop?dia Britannica. 2006. Encyclop?dia Britannica Premium Service. 12 May 2006 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9389119>.

Not really much else to add to Minty's eloquent, excellent essay there. One direct point: the rumor is that Sony offered the guy who invented the VHS system $50M in cash for the patents so they could eliminate competition to the Betamax before it materialized. Obviously the guy said no or it never happened. (FIFTY MILLION IN CASH thirty years ago?! Are you fucking kidding me? I couldn't have gotten to the bank fast enough.) Then I'll go tangenital. It's a variant on the sell the printers cheap, but, charge through the nose in perpetuity for the ink cartridges needed to run them. This is the oldest trick in the book. Why do fighter jet manufacturers fight so hard to get contracts with governments? So they can sell the planes? No. Money ain't in the planes. It's the spare parts. Once you sell a nation a fighter plane, you've got them locked in for at least twenty years for tens of billions of dollars in spare parts. And since you don't want the airplanes falling apart undearneath the pilots, the parts cost through the ass. Look at the situation with the flinklock musket. You think the real rich guys were the gun makers. Not. Assembly-line gun making didn't begin until the Americans used during the Revolution (we lacked the large number of skilled workers the Brits had, so we were forced to implement the assembly--which, painful as it is to admit, is the idea of a Frenchman, at least the modern version). No, the musketmakers didn't become the richest. The gun powerder makers had the real gig! All that lovely power which the armies were in a huge hurry to fire off vast quantities of and the return to order even vaster quantities. There's a reason why the modern economy was created by war. Armies (and Navys) were the ultimate customers. They buy huge quanities of shit, destroy it, run back buy more. The market economy developed to fill the need to defeat Napoleon or to help him conquer Europe. The civilian economy benefitted second when manufacturers, after peace came in 1815, realized that the same factory processes that made muskets, cannon, block-and-tackle sets could also be used to make flatware, dinner plates, tea kettles, you name it. Destructive as war has been, it has caused most the advances we take for granted in the 20th century. Example: the magnitron in your microwave oven? Just a variation on the radar units the RAF used in WWII to defeat the Krauts in the Battle of Britain.

In KENTUCKY!!??!!* I know. Even in Indiana, the freakin' ballots were bilingual! The home state of the Klan! *who was it, back on the board's previous incarnation, that got torqued because we Yanks were using postal abbreviations for states? Asked us not to use them? I can't remember who that was.

Threw me for a minute. I didn't know what you were talking about. But you meant the SG story was on IMDb. Interestingly, the SG logo is all over the movie Mission to Mars.

Uh, I thought you and I were the only ones who weren't supercomputer geniuses?

Five burners--is that up and running or just the one's you've had? I've got the Benq DW1655 and the Pioneer 110D running at the moment. But I have had a Pioneer 106D, Memorex True-8 (a rebranded Pioneer 107) and my much lamented baby, my dead Plex 716A. (Acutally not dead, it just decided it only wanted to be a DVD-ROM.)

I hate to tell you pain man but I'm neither Brit nor European No reason to hate it. Correcting me when I'm wrong doesn't bother me--long as it's not done with a sledgehammer or obvious sadism. If I want that, I call my first wife. If ya don't mind, where are you, rather what country are you a citizen of? (If you're an American citizen, esp, you could be from anywhere).

works for dvd's also I guess I was being naive expecting industry to produce better originals than we produce copies!!!! And I have noted that about DVDs. I scanned the original and the copy (of a disk that was without CSS therefore making copying not a problem and the topic acceptable because no "rippage" or "circumvention" was involved) and the copy came up with a better scan. Pressing may not be better, it may only be more practical for mass production.

He does seem to drive them hard. On the other hand, to be fair to him, it is a bit of an addiction. I took it up only in Aug of '03 and I've already had five on this Vaio.

i have to be careful on this one as my girlfreind is American and she hates it when i correct her everytime she mentions " Soccer " Soccer = Association Football. The term is British not American. I will admit to certain amount of irritation when hearing football mislabeled as "American" Football. Besides football's become more and more popular in both the UK and Europe. As is basketball, the only uniquely American sport (like Jazz and the Blues are our unique contributions to world music). The irony is, soccer's the only organized sport I ever played. But it was American Youth soccer, much faster and far less somnolent than its Anglo-European counterpart. When it France, I saw a match between Montpellier and Monte Carlo. The only thing that kept me awake was the near riot in le stade. The owners had oversold the seats by one third. Thus there was a huge crush of people around the fence. Good thing I was, then, unaware of the French love of rioting. Besides, the only reason soccer's so popular is because y'all used to own 1/4 of the planet. If it had been the French (the thought makes me shudder), it'd running away from battles as fast as you can. (Is that where the Islamofacsists learned it?) "Jean-Francois once again takes the Cowardice Cup! He beat all the members of his battallion to the rear by 14.3 seconds! Even the German soldiers were heard cheering his astonishing speed." Yep, you run much faster once you throw your rifle away. Sauve qui peut is, after all, a French phrase.

See, that's what I mean. I needle him, he needles me. No harm, no foul. No offense intended or taken. BTW, THANK YOU! for the tip about ZA. I adjusted the settings for this site and, bingo, the gifs are wigglin' their little butts off. I also adjust the settings for the smiley page and their all moving now. Again, thanks.

I was just pulling crule's chain, not trying to start the ol' cross-pond debate. He needles me, I needle him. Though I do wonder why some Brits and Europeans are so sensitive about this. "Feeble bodies" my dear? I believe you've just revealed a staggering, ah, lack of awareness of football. Football players are so the opposite of "feeble" that the game's becoming increasingly dangerous to play. The players have become so huge, so muscular (in addition to unbelievably fast and quick) that they're suffering debilitating, sometimes career ending inuries way earlier than in past years. Before you say steroids, sad but true, soccer players are no more innocent than any other athletes of that pernicious abuse of sports. BTW, the reason it's called football, as I've explained several times, is because when the game was invented (or adapted) the only way to score was to kick the ball into the end zone, rather through it. Carrying it was a later invention inspired, doubtless, by rugby. And pads are a relatively recent innovation. When my grandfather played high school football, in the '40s--he had nothing but a thin, leather "helmet." Actually "bonnet" would probably describe it better for all the protection it gave to the cranium.

Sorry, can't help myself. It's NOT football. It's SOCCER. (Which, btw, is a British term, not an American one.) Football is played by 22 gigantor guys on a gridiron with an oval ball made out of pigskin. Besides, the Dallas Cowboys franchise, despite their recent woes, is worth more than nearly all the English soccer teams put together. Only the NY Yankees is a more valuable franchise (if they were for sale, the price would be well north of $2 billion). I haven't been keeping up with the NFL much lately, but there's not a soccer player on Earth who could have kept up with Deion Sanders and Jerry Rice in their prime or even in their decline. Not to mention athletic supermen like Troy Aikman, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, and from my own hometown, Dan Fouts. Sorry, mates, soccer players don't even come close. I could tell you how a former starting defensive tackle for USC described soccer, but I don't actually want to offend, just jerk your chain a bit.

I've used ZA for years. I didn't think about that! Jesus, I feel dumb . Thanks. I have animations blocked by default. Apparently, ZA's interpreting them as ads or something like that. I'll change the setting for this site. THANKS.

You sound as if you've had previous experience in this sort of thing.....? and as LFC says, I'll have to dig the movie out and re-watch it at the weekend If it weren't for all the dead cops...no problem. And that prison thing. Prison is what's kept me out of prison--and I had plenty of opportunities in my youth for illicit gain. But I was a skinny, white kid. When they send you up you have to join the white supramacist dickheads or end up being traded for cigarettes. Since that would NEVER happen, I'd most likely end up dead. No, thanks. To turn around a line from McCauley (DeNiro's character), "The money is NOT worth the stretch." (!) No, no experience. Just a lot of time to think about how to get away with a crime. My goal is to write novels. So I spend a lot of time thinking about scenarios like this: "If I were a criminal, how would I get money out of the country? Where would I go? How would I move it?" Etc.

Yep, watch it, again, crule. The stepdaughter gets into Lt. Hannah (Pacino)'s hotel room, runs a bath and tries to kill herself Roman style. He comes back to the hotel and finds the stepdaughter (Natalie Portman) nearly dead in from shock (i.e. blood loss). And yeah, that ultimate robbery scene is INSANE! It's a great movie for turning up the surround sound REALLY freakin' LOUD. The hell with the neighbors for twenty minutes. Sometimes I pop the disk in just to watch that scene. --->>>What a shame that Tom Sizemore can't control his dope addictions. He's such a brilliant actor. I hope he can get his shit together.