Twenty dollars in the car, or fifty back at your hotel. You decide.

From the BBC:

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.

They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.

Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.

An interesting point, but it’s a similar analogy as saying “If you stick your hand in a fire, you’ll get hurt” on the basis that if your dumb enough to stick your hand in a fire, sooner or later you’re inevitably going to come to some harm anyway.

So it follows that if your intellectually challenged enough to think that Hugh ‘twenty dollars to do it in the car’ Grant epitomizes love (actually) then you can bet your life that, as inevitably, you’re going to be severely disappointed.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without ……

…… a good old rant about the f***ing x-factor.

Firstly, I couldn’t believe that this insipid piece of manufactured Chav baiting garbage was still being drip fed into the head cavities of the nations most gullible inadequates, but clearly it still is if the front pages of tomorrow’s dog s**t wrappers are to be believed.

For a start, any program that makes that nasty b*****d Cheryl Cole look anywhere near acceptable wants dropping immediately.

I have no idea who’s in it this year and frankly, I don’t give a monkey’s a**e bean.

Anyone still stupid enough to believe that the whole point of the program is anything other than an excuse to dispose the dumb-a*s viewers of the last droppings of disposable income really don’t deserve to have access to cash in the first place. Or sharp objects for that matter.

The final stages are months of amateur never-will-bes murdering turgid MOR R&B standards in an attempt to get some 50 year old with no dress sense to sleep with them.

And anyone who still hasn’t woken up to the fact that the opening weeks of ‘hilarious’ auditions are anything other than the routine humiliation of the talentless & hopelessly deluded sub-human pond life volunteers should get themselves committed. Or an application form for next years show.

If you still watch the x-factor, quite frankly, you’re a f***ing thick t**t, aren’t you ?

But then the multi-millionaire Simon Cowell knows that already, doesn’t he ?

Bloody hell, not again

Another piece of lazy c**p journalism, this time in the Spectator. Seeing as this exercise in weekly t**d polishing is owned by the people who run the Telegraph, you can imagine the b******s that's included.

Read what they have to say here.

Then, here's my repost to Mr Beaumont:

Where to start ripping this piece of nonsense to shreds .....

The quote you use from Bryan Roy is true, I'll give you that, albeit nigh on 12 years old, I bet you're looking forward to that millennium, eh ? And who was Bryan Roy anyway ? A semi-decent footballer who had an off season and threw his dummy out of his pram on his way out. What does he do now ? Is he a town planner ? Some kind of expert on city design ? No, he coaches kids in Holland & models boxer-shorts. Some expert.

Arthur Seaton wasn't real. He was a figment of Alan Sillitoe's imagination. Best be careful of going to the cinema if you think everything's real, best not go to the States in the next few weeks, there's an alien, looks like Keanu Reeves, got a big robot friend, very scary.

All the areas you list as no-go you've clearly picked up from ages old second hand reports. Living in one of them, been raised in another, friends in another and a relative teaching in yet another one of these areas, I wouldn't class any of them as no-go. Basford, by the way, doesn't exist. There's Old Basford and New Basford, separated by one of the busiest roads in Nottingham. Busy despite your incorrect "no-go" assumption.

Rushcliffe isn't in Nottingham. Yes it's a nice area, and yes it's next to a less nice area, but if Rushcliffe was used in the stats for Nottingham in the same way as nicer suburbs of Manchester, for example, are used by your fellow peddlers of cheap rubbish, Channel 4, then Nottingham wouldn't have appeared so far up (down) the list to start with, giving lazy journalists like you somewhere else to make stuff up about. You can't have it both ways.

John Player is still in Nottingham, although with reduced capacity, but it was a sad day when Raleigh closed. Especially that nice imaginary friend of yours losing his job. Fortunately, in its place, we now have a University campus with award winning designed buildings and the tallest free standing piece of art in the Country. Did you forget to mention that ? Or the fact that Nottingham has the highest graduate retention in the country. Forget that as well ?

The closure of the pits has hit every pit area hard, especially Nottingham. I doubt very much whether any other pit areas will have much sympathy bearing in mind the politics at the time, but why Nottingham is so singled out for this I’m not sure. And the vast majority of these areas are in the County. Yet again, changing the goal-posts to suit your story. And if you include neighbouring districts for comparison, include the counties far from unique, but successfully ongoing, struggle to regenerate mining areas, then yes, we can put a plaque up to Lord Byron. And there is one to Jesse Boot, you were clearly looking in the wrong place. If you looked at all.

Australian cricket commentators ? Underwear models ? These are your sources ? Tut tut tut.

Slight dig at Brian Clough OBE, bit under the belt ? He achieved more in his lifetime than both you or I put together will ever dream of. Poor.

You’re not the first to have a lazy dig at Nottingham, sat in your office of a Friday afternoon, bit of a deadline, stuck for a story. Then you remember. That stag-night you went on a few years back, up to Nottingham, on the promise that there’s “seven women to every man”, you had a good time, yet you went home unrequited, unloved, unwanted.

Maybe that’s the real story.

Whatever next ?

From the BBC:

A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend.

This is quite serious as I like a nice passionate kiss every now & then, but this could have serious repercussions.

What next ?

Your hand will ache with a slight touch of foreplay ?

You could get lock-jaw from love bites ?

Romping in haystacks could lead to back injuries ?

Bloody hell, they’ll be telling us you can go blind next !!!!!!

Nottingham's great, oh yes, except for just one thing ........

Nottingham is officially the best place in the world to live, no arguments, no discussions, a card hard fact. End of. Everything here is the best it can possibly be. More pubs per square mile than any other city in Europe ? Check. 7 women for every bloke ? Check. The best place for a night out in the world ? Check. Best shopping ? Apparently, so check. Quite simply the best of everything.

Except one thing.

Why is it that when it snows everywhere else in the country, we get a sprinkling so sparse you’d mistake it for the toilets in the Pitcher & Piano on a Friday night. And yet as soon as the temperature hits anything below, ooh, about 10 degrees, everyone insists on checking the weather on t’internet every 30 seconds or watching that mad bloke who used to be Lennie in EastEnders bouncing around in front of a pretend map of an evening.

I keep hearing the following on t’tram:

“Ooh, it’s going to snow at the weekend” ; “Is it ?” ; “Yeah” ; “Best stock up on bread and soup then, eh”

Like a touch of snow is going to stop people in Nottingham shopping !!!! In the event of a nuclear war there’d still be people walking round Slab Square with Primark bags.

In Nottingham, even if you spend just ten seconds with your blowers on the windscreen before setting off, you can bet that the roads will be full of either morons going 5mph or idiots in 4x4’s who assume that their time has come. A touch of frost on the roads and it’s as if hell itself has frozen over.

Everyone remembers the last bad snow we had, it was f***ing eighteen f***ing years ago, when the power went off for a couple of hours and a few people got stuck in the Clothes Show event at the NEC, which down here is the equivalent of sitting in an Antarctic tent up until your birthday and then deciding you’re going out for a short walk.

If you want the best life you could possibly have, live in Nottingham. Unless you want snow, in which case move to Norway.

Glasvegas - Nottingham Trent University

It’s been a few years since I’ve been to the Poly for a gig, the Fall (I think) nearly twenty years ago, certainly before the scruffy f***er who eventually served us at the bar had been born, although it did feel like we’d been there his whole life.

And don't let anyone fool you into believing it's a university, it was always Trent Poly and it always will be. Anywhere where they let you in for having an 'E' grade in General Studies and a 25m swimming badge does not qualify as a university in my book, especially when we've already got one of the best universities in the country just down the road as it is.

Glasvegas, for me, have already peaked. They’ve got their small group of fans following them round from gig to gig, their show is well produced and the wall of noise is certainly awesome, but my worry for them is this; where do they go from here ? They’ll pitch up at the bigger Rock City in February, where they’ll need to produce more than this meagre 40 minute set, as part of the NME tour and there’s no reason to say they’ll not blow them away that night, but there’s only so far you can go with their unfathomable lyrics especially when their new songs sounds remarkably similar to their “old” stuff.

I predict they’ll disappear shortly after releasing a disappointingly received second album.

However ……

Supporting them last night (after a more than decent Thomas Tantrum) were White Lies.

They couldn’t have been more Interpol, even if they’d come on stage and said “Good evening Nottingham, we’re Interpol”. The flattened hair, the standard uniform of black shirts, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. The bass players Hooky moustache completing the derivative look.

But, if you’re going to be derivative and you can pull it off with your own original material, then Joy Division / New Order, Cure, (heavier) Ulrtravox is as good a place to start as any.

White Lies will be back in February as well as part of the NME tour, after the release of their debut album. If there’s any justice it’ll be them headlining, not their soon to be fading tour mates.

Forest 1:0 Barnsley

A pretty poor game, but three vital points, so who cares ?

We started the game literally all over the place, no-one having the foggiest idea where they were supposed to be playing, the 'Diamond' formation, apparently. Rubbish.

We ditched that, moved to 4-4-2, passed the ball, crossed the ball and scored. How simple does this game get ? Why does Calderwoodout choose to make it so damned complicated ?

In order to confirm how simple 4-4-2 is, we reverted back to the 'Diamond' soon after and the game went back downhill. Oh well.

Barnsley had their chances, but missed a couple of sitters, so tough.

Barnsley fans only have one song, and that's to shout the word 'SCAB' in unison. Muppets.

The equation for me is now 15 points required from the next 6 games, starting at Coventry on Saturday, and that will see us out of the bottom three quite comfortably. For me, this is Calderwoodout's last chance.