SEE YOU! A brand spanking new modern fitba thread 2020/21

Tell you what guvnor just for you, cash and you can have it for £150K on the nose.

Thierry Henry ROOKIE Sticker - Panini Foot 1996-97 - BGS 9.5 (9.5,9.5,9.5,9) | eBay

 

For England cannae dae it 'cause they didnae qualify

Love it.

 

Don't tell me he can do more than 2 laps of the field at a time

 

Haha... nearly everyone looked over 40 in the 70s. People seemed to jump directly from 15 to 42 without passing Go.

 

Looks like Maggie Thatcher in the Thumbnail.

"And I said to Mr Nesbitt, No! No! No!!"

 

So I am sat there doing my crunches and I hook up the laptop to try and keep my mind off this lactic inducing bollox so I finish off a good Lozza Fox/Peter Robinson {no no that one} interview.


That finishes and it autoloads onto a "Goodfellas Podcast" {HR McMaster, Neil Ferguson etc} not my sauce and I am contemplating my options when I spy out of the corner of my eye "Live Stream, Germany U21 vs Romania U21".

Fairly poor stuff, nearly as bad as the womens football but like the man says that's not why you called.

I sit up on the exercise bike with this blaring. My upstairs is warm and I am not feeling a 10 mile cycle so out of PURE curiosity I hope off the bike and check the odds.

10/11 Germany Win, 6-1 Romania.

I put a fiver in my book and stick 3 of it on Romania OR Germany.

Heavy duty stuff.

Straight into the old Toilette with the rest.

Straight off the bat, sweet as a nut, number 36, lovely, my £0.25 pays out £9.

Stayed on it until I was up and down to £29, cashed out.

That's Saturdays birthday cake for the house mate sorted plus a few bits off ebay.

Get on that Boris, get right on that, you won't stop me lad.

 

She wants a cake from "COOK"......there's one callled, appropriately enough, "ETON MESS".

EDIT: £29 profit I made. Put that in your balance sheet Rishi mate.

 

OK COOK don't have the Eton Mess in stock. This is become aggravating. I have the fucking money I just went out and stole it off Bet365. I am holding up my end every other cunt is failing.

You can't get the people anymore. You just can't.

 

Cracks me up that this Liverpool side needed extra time and penalties and a penalty miss by Stevie G's cousin or something to beat CARDIFF in the League Cup Final in 2012

 

Meanwhile ..........

Qatar 1-1 Republic of Ireland - Kenny's search for win continues

 

International fitbaw is crap so Im gonna babble about The gorbals, Glasgow. Surely one of the most dramatic city planning debacles, anywhere, in modern history?

1880-1930. One of *the* most densely populated neighbourhoods on planet earth (literally up there with lower east side nyc), estimated at 150k people in about a square mile at the out break of ww1, mainly housing Glasgows immigrant population of irish, italian & eastern european jews along with displaced gaelic speaking teuchters migrating from highlands and islands. Thousands of commercial units and businesses - over 200 pubs!!











1940s-1970. Overcrowding & ethnic gang violence problems get compounded by under investment and physical decay, springing first from initially well intentioned rent control measures, latterly from the effective redlining of it as an area earmarked - for decades as delays set in- for 'comprehensive redevelopment'. All of this backdropped by britain's long running industrial decline. Cramped flats were never rennovated or modernised & by the 60s the rich architecture of the place was soot blackened, literally crumbling through neglect & regarded as nothing but an archaic dickensian impediment to a coming modernity of grassy spacious suburbia and wide arteries of traffic flow.

 

1970s-2000. The cure, worse than the disease. Bulldoze the entire thing, ship most the residents out to dead-burbs and new towns and replace the tenements with rows of commie towers surrounded by unused patches of grass and widened roads. Awful. You know the rest. Poorly built, poorly designed, aesthetically grim and sorely lacking the shops, amenities, community of the old gorbals: the high rises were unpopular from the begininng and, as thatcherism & heroin kicked in, genuinely grim within a decade. Only those who couldnt get out didn't - largely OAPs and the junkies who mugged them










So now it's was back to the future...or forward to the past? Most the high rises have been demolished, the original street plan more or less reinstated & new tenement neighbourhoods gradually being laid back upon the dizzying tabula rasa. Pretty decent stuff in the main if rather denuded of the architectural flair, urban drama & bustle of gorbals 1.0. The current masterplan is about half way in and probably won't complete for at least another entire decade. Having fallen from 150,000 to around 5,000(!) 20 years ago, the population is expected to swing back to around 50,000 when work is done.







Hows that for a whole six going on seven or eight decades of wasted labour? If theyd just fitted some fucking indoor plumbing & given the place a scrub itd be hipster HQ right now.

 

Big densely populated quarters of cities, inhabited by a cultural mono- or at least one made up out of people of whatever race/origin who feel some class solidarity- are vital to not just cities but to the country. Nothing on fire, no cunts refusing to go to school because "Muh Hair" or "Muh Uniform". Fuckers back then would have killed for a school uniform, free clothes basically.

Most people- me included- will live happily away in those circumstances.

Once you let University educated civil servants near anything they fucking wreck it. They wrecked the Irish slums and replaced them with the same shite you mention. They ripped up the trams, then replaced them 50 years later with.......trams. Wankers.

I am not saying things were "Perfect" back then, but a lot of the difficulties were extant in and of themselves- medical science, classism, for example., rather than the living quarters or the neighbourhoods themselves.

Some manufacturing technology {cheaper showers/toilets...better plumbing basically} and a bit of antibiotics, Rentakill, and those places are all sweet.


Gloucester Diamond, Dublin, home of Irish street football.
















How it was by 1980..........

 

There's something about colour film from the 1970's/1980's that really brings the SHITNESS out in certain scenes.

 

I think it was just the decades themselves- cities were all falling apart. Pretty much all too, in lockstep

 

And there has to be a reason for that. Somebody somewhere decided that people could not be "allowed to live like this"..........it's like they laid out the operating theater to perform an operation which had it been completed would have borne fruit, but they stopped half way through and let the anesthetic wear off and the patient got up and left the hospital and is still wandering the streets.

 

I am always thinking about population density. I have watched a few videos where they talk about a misery index tied to people per square mile/kilometer & how people start to feel squeezed for space, supplies, etc.

This goes right along with my "nothing I do makes sense" theory for myself. I am a person that values privacy & personal space much more than most people. I live in a country that has only 87 people per square mile, big roads, big houses, plenty of space in between homes. Plenty of open space between towns.

And the two countries I like & would like to move to are both densely populated islands. The UK has over 700 people per square mi (take Scotland and Wales out and that number is higher just for England.) And Japan is worse that that. The Tokyo/Kawasaki/Yokohama area is the most densely populated in the world.

My favorite city in the UK = Liverpool (over 10,000/sq mi.)

My favorite city in Japan = Yokohama (over 22,000/sq mi.)

What the fuck is wrong with me?

 

My association with density is just amenity, personally. More pubs, more restaurants, more supermarkets of different types nearby, more people to watch. Ive never seen the association between density and misery either personally or in studies- altho there must be one with overcrowding. Japanese cities might cross some insane density threshold ive never experienced (going on how insanely busy the numbers say their train stations are they might!) but within a european/american context id say the denser the better.

 

I can say that in both of those places, I haven't been overwhelmed by people. In Liverpool, you come out during the day, you know Bold St, Hanover/Ranleigh St & Church St (which is wide as hell) are all going to be crowded as fuck. And Mathew St at night and worse on weekends. If I see a pub or restaurant that appears crowded, I'll skip it and find some that aren't.

In London, I try to avoid taking the tube through central London during rush hours. I often have a pretty big suitcase & backpack with me. I try to get into cars on the ends of the train since most people shoot to the middle. I have been on the tube it's so fucking crowded that I actually got out before my stop. To try my luck with the next one.

 

Central Japan (Tokyo to Yokohama area) alleviates some of the optic of being overcrowded by building straight up. High rises everywhere. Big fucking 50 story, earthquake resistant, white buildings everywhere. And that's how most people live in that area.

Now if you're traveling just in Tokyo or just in Yokohama, you can take their subway systems. Same as London. They're crowded during rush hour and not so bad otherwise. If you are unfortunate enough to go through a main train station during rush hour, you're in for it. They have people in Tokyo and Yokohama stations whose job is to forcefully push bodies into the train and then get more people on and push them in as well. You're in a human wall in there.

One problem they have in Japan is you have these schoolgirls in there in their short skirts and these old men on the train get a hand through and grab a handful of arse while no one can really move. They have female only cars because of that.

 

Yeah but sometimes large numbers of dudes with video cameras get in there and do cat-in-the-hat to the young ladies private bits.

But they are gentlemen, they pixellate it.


As for this fucking guy, he needs to up his game, bigtime. Nobody is going to buy his "Packed Carriage" routine.



Meanwhile in IRELAND

 

LOL. They caught some fuck in Hong Kong who was wearing Crocs with cameras in the holes and trying to film up women's skirts.

The guy in the bottom pic, Shameless Seamus.

 

Scotland refusing to take any shit from outliers - literal outliers- Faeroe Islands .

In the War between shall0w-gene-pooled men from the Lands of the Ice and Snow, there can only be one.

England doing what they do best, beating smaller teams who are missing their star players, usually with the help of a penalty and lots of nice words about Mongo Harry and Repo Raheem.

 

The crowded cities in the UK do well with their city layouts from what I have seen. They seem to be built from the city centre outward. And easy to walk around. The oldest part of the US (Northeastern seaboard) is built similarly.

The South & the West of the US are much more spread out. Lots of space but good luck trying to walk anywhere.

I think of Liverpool as a big city because of how it's regarded historically. But area wise it's only 42 square miles. Much smaller than the city I live in. And the population is just under half a million. My city has about 350,000. And no one would ever think of Bakersfield as a big city.

 

I am glad some people like living in big cities. I would prefer a place with light flowing traffic and more affordable houses.

I always wondered how eight million people could stay in NYC knowing that what they pay for a small one bedroom apartment could rent a three bedroom house in about 15 states. But some people just love being right in the mix.

 

Id sleep in a morgue drawer to live in Manhattan for a year.

 

Im.a bit of a nerd for this stuff, cities, urbanism, urban economics etc - i think the best single metric for 'city size', 'big city-ness' is city centre/cbd employment. Its the best quantitative proxy for how much you'll find when you arrive at a place, how many people, how many things to see, etc. Albeit not the easiest stat to source