El Pibe

i thought it was jews and the irish?

"crossbows"?!?! because people shooting cats is my biggest concern there. Of course come the zombie plague, very useful it seems.

I quite liked the Warwick Davis one, Life's Too Short. Possibly, again, because there was not much Gervais. I like Stephen Merchant too.

was that a signature or an answer?

or should that be unpopular things i like?

isn't hating quinoa because it's faddish amongst rather tedious middle class types like hating rice because, you know, wops...or chinks or something....? It's a grain, or a pulse, or something, a traditional object of ire, fecking wheat, splitters...or was that the Bulgars (baddam tish)? anyway it's small and round, like hundreds and thousands but less pink.

that question could probably do with more context. Though without it I'd be tempted to answer 'context'

not as garnish though

pubes?

withnail references, well you've lost otta as a fan now ;)

oh yes!! Also North London ;)

Pot Noodles

michael owen, football or england ernesto?

jeremy, talking of alan partridge, this might be one of the most painful, most partridge things i've ever watched,

:D was that meta comedy?

i've only ever really seen him on panel shows or as I'm flicking past ...at the appollo, and vaguely wondered how he became so big doing dull derivative observational comedy that was tired 20 years ago.

like Michael McCintyre then?

nope me too; I've never even made it out of the bar after the interval.

cool story bro?

Oi :-P

I've menioned it before, but this is a good overview. http://www.theglobalist.com/an-islamic-view-of-history/ chap isn't a historian but he is balanced and gets the broad narrative very well.

I'm not say8ng it's the right reaction. The arab spring was sort of a last hurrah at it, though heavily influenced by a compromise, ie non secular modermism. Sadly our lovely regimes we installed have all been too ruthless (apart from libya, the fool)

That's rather the point though isn't it. Their decline is pretty much a result of our enlightenment. The response was *indeed* to have their own modernist revolution from the 20s to, well it sort of started dying in 1979 thanks to the soviet invasion and the toppling of the shah, and these experiments are deemed by a broad consensus to have failed miserably. Though the bastins of those experiments still live, snd are having to survive through a combination of increased welfare and increased brutality.

I wasn't intentionally lecturing you miga, just musing to myself really on the topics you brought up. IS ceratinly is a kind of logical terminus of the those strands. Hopefully it'll crash and burn horribly, pushing arab reaction to a sort of middle ground. Though IS is also intrinsically the child of the iraqi invasion and the woeful behaviour of US forces/PA there in terms of trigger happiness, detenition without trial and abuse therein, Fallujah and some incredibly stupid strategic decisions politically, along with the powerful Shia arc that has been the ultimate fall out. Chuck in a hideous civil war and a call to arms for every jihadi fool in the world, and well, we have ISIS, and the al-nusrah front, and fatah al-islam, and ansar-al islam and etc etc. I think mainstream arab opinion would have liked a nice peaceful transition to democracies and had everyone butt out of the governments they chose, even if, as in Egypt, they were turning into their previous oppressors with some gusto. It really hasn't worked out that way and Syria was possibly the worst handled of the lot, or Libya, erm or Egypt. I guess until the oil runs out the area is probably fucked, and days like last week are the inevitable fall out, just as the odd massacre is the price people pay for staving off gun control in the US, or the odd missile is the inevitable price israel is prepared to pay for occupation of the west bank.

when london's streets really were paved with....wood?!?! http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015/01/10/the-time-when-londons-streets-were-paved-with-wood/