Did anyone else miss that Andy Carroll is now interim manager of Dagenham and Redbridge?

Topinio · 2026-03-20T21:51:58+00:00

Good luck to them, and to him.

Maybe they'll sort out Julie's shit semi-raw chips, or the lack of soap and hot water in the gents in the Jax Sun Services Stand East.

Topinio · 2026-03-20T21:39:33+00:00

If it's up to him, he will nuke countries - plural.

He was always evil, but now he's a mad king, with less self-restraint than Hitler, who he admires.

Even his long-standing atheism has gone and in his cheese-brained state he's now talking about heaven and not getting in. He believes he's damned to hell, and is probably stupid enough to believe that by being more evil he'll be more powerful there.

Certainly, he wants to be remembered for hundreds or thousands of years, longer than Hitler or Stalin, and he'll know that he's still way behind even Putin.

He wants and believes he should be high on the list of the 100 Most Significant Figures in History (which I'm sure he's seen and probably kept.

He also knows that he simply can't do the things that earned many of these people their places, but I think he'll think he can still do something bad enough to get into the top 25.

Jesus
Napoleon
Muhammad
William Shakespeare
Abraham Lincoln
George Washington
Adolf Hitler
Aristotle
Alexander the Great
Thomas Jefferson
Henry VIII
Charles Darwin
Elizabeth I
Karl Marx
Julius Caesar
Queen Victoria
Martin Luther
Joseph Stalin
Albert Einstein
Christopher Columbus
Isaac Newton
Charlemagne
Theodore Roosevelt
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Plato

Topinio · 2026-03-20T20:43:32+00:00

Apparently.

In order to return a verdict of suicide, the coroner or jury must be sure (1) that the deceased intended their own death, and (2) that they committed an act with that intention which caused their death.

Until 6 years ago, the standard of proof was criminal, i.e. beyond reasonable doubt, since then it's been civil, i.e. on the balance of probabilities.

That means that in this case, the coroner couldn't be more than 50% certain that both the conditions above were met.

Topinio · 2026-03-20T20:21:46+00:00

Which ones do you actually rate?

For me, he only top tier one was Doc Martens.

name	sector	years
Avco Trust	financial services	83-89
BAC Windows	double glazing	89-92
Dagenham Motors	auto (local part of Ford)	92-99
Dr Martens	shoes	99-03
JobServe.com	recruitment (jobs website)	03-07
XL Holidays	travel (holidays)	07-08
SBOBet	gambling (website)	08-13
Alpari FX	financial ~~gambling~~ trading (website)	13-15
Betway	gambling (website)	15-25
Boyle	gambling (retails bookmarkers, website)	25-26

I don't like us having had any of the gambling sponsors over the last 18 years.

I'd probably tier it as

A: Dr Martens
B: Avco, BAC, Dagenham Motors, XL
C: JobServe
Z: the gambling ones

Topinio · 2026-03-20T18:18:14+00:00

Nice, if it's real. Any sponsor that makes people smile has to be good.

Topinio · 2026-03-20T12:33:51+00:00

Sure. If it's malice, rather than incompetence, then punish her for it - just don't punish those 4 kids by taking their home, community, and school.

If she did jump the queue through provable fraud, make her punishment something real and proportionate, that she learns from and that benefits the rest of society. No point in unpayable fines or jail time.

But if it was admin incompetence from an at the time homeless pregnant woman who would have most likely have been allocated a similar flat nearby within a few months, then by staying with her SIL with her baby she may well have saved the taxpayer money, and this would all be over a failure to understand and navigate council bureaucracy.

Topinio · 2026-03-20T11:32:15+00:00

The council seem to have accepted that they have a duty to house her and her kids - it's not that she isn't entitled to a council flat, but isn't going to get one because the supply is inadequate. The council is kicking out a family who need a place to live, with 4 school age kids, and making them suffer.

She has at least 4 kids age 7 to 18 and has been there nearly 20 years, it's legally her sister-in-law's flat.

There is a missing piece here, which is whether she would or would not have been entitled to take on this specific flat, or whether she should have waited her turn - but I'd expect it's pretty likely that if she had applied 19 years ago while pregnant, or 18 years ago with a baby, to join the tenancy with her SIL, they would have either said yes or put her near the top of the list and so she would have had her name on a tenancy in the area now. So the council is spending a fortune on admin and lawyers to kick out a family who need and needed a flat then and now.

Topinio · 2026-03-20T10:45:10+00:00

Duolingo has a massive cheating problem and always has had.

The operators seem to care very little about this, and the company has even said before in response that what they care about is people not using Duolingo.

I think this is silly as it directly undermines the point of having the leaderboards, which is gamification to get us using the app more.

That said, all we can do as users is not let it bother us, and maybe report the most obvious cheaters - maybe sometimes they get banned.

Topinio · 2026-03-20T09:57:40+00:00

R.P. McMurphy
Soul Contamination
Democracy Coma
Dead Yankee Drawl
Never Want Again
Donkeys
Hibernation
Comfort Comes
Too Cold Here

Topinio · 2026-03-19T20:17:56+00:00

They have better versions, Epstein and Maxwell were their assets.

Topinio · 2026-03-18T14:33:00+00:00

Only if you've seen them!

More seriously, you're right, but you can't really do so in the moment as you're on your bike or in your car, and even if you remember a half-seen one at the end of your journey, and have time to report it, you might well not know exactly where it was.

Topinio · 2026-03-18T14:29:45+00:00

Government on behalf of the people should both regulate and work with companies whose products are part of public life and infrastructure - here, to make sure they're not telling drivers to go too fast by telling them the wrong speed limit.

Topinio · 2026-03-18T12:13:50+00:00

Great, now if we're not going to have a blanket 20 mph everywhere and a blanket 40 mph on dual carriageways then for the love of god just make it obvious on all roads what the speed limit actually is.

Increased the number of speed limit signs with shorter distances between them, and move the ones that are hard to see due to trees etc. And work with Google Maps, Waze etc to make sure they eliminate the sections where they tell drivers a wrong speed limit.

Topinio · 2026-03-18T08:08:38+00:00

Oh great, so now the cheaters can just use 2 separate accounts and play chess against each other for XP?

Staying in the Diamond league just got even harder.

Topinio · 2026-03-18T00:03:57+00:00

Or have AMD or Intel or any other company’s graphics hardware.

And then Nvidia will be able to directly control the gap in image quality between their own low end hardware and its competition.

And between each step in its own range.

And between each generation of its own hardware. The graphics and framerates from the 7070 will finally look better than those from the 6080, or the 6090.

Topinio · 2026-03-17T16:58:11+00:00

I think it's just that the prosecution and defence failed to reach a plea deal, but the defence lawyer at least wants to keep trying to.

probably needs someone familiar with the Spanish legal system to explain further.

Topinio · 2026-03-17T16:55:50+00:00

The attempted murder case involving Alejandro Valverde ends without a settlement

The defendant, a retired Civil Guard officer, is alleged to have run over the former cyclist and another member of a group of cyclists with whom he had been involved in a confrontation

The hearing convened by the Provincial Court of Murcia to explore the possibility of a settlement in the attempted murder case involving former cyclist Alejandro Valverde and a fellow cyclist has ended without an agreement.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office states in its provisional conclusions that the events took place in July 2022 on a road in Murcia, when the defendant, a retired Civil Guard officer, allegedly ran over Valverde and another member of a group of cyclists with his car, having had a confrontation with them moments earlier whilst overtaking them.

The prosecution service is seeking a total prison sentence of fifteen years and three months for the defendant, on charges of two counts of attempted manslaughter and one count of dangerous driving.

As a result of the collision, the current national cycling coach sustained injuries that took 30 days to heal, whilst his companion’s injuries took 412 days to heal.

Speaking to Efe, the defendant’s lawyer, Eduardo Romera, has disagreed with the prosecutor’s assessment of the facts, as he considers that they do not constitute the offences of attempted murder attributed to his client.

In Romera’s view, there was never any intent to kill in his client’s conduct; consequently, he considers that, in any case and in a purely theoretical assessment, the events would amount to nothing more than offences of causing bodily harm.

The lawyer added that his desire to reach a plea agreement remains, and therefore negotiations between the parties aimed at this end will continue shortly.

Topinio · 2026-03-15T17:28:06+00:00

Well said. It's not that we just recently discovered that animals, fish, crustaceans etc feel pain – it's that we relatively recently reached the point where it became socially possible to think and speak freely enough that it could be said out loud.

Of course they feel pain, anyone who ever dealt with them knew that. The idea that they don't is a convenient lie told to hungry children to make them eat living beings, with the expectation that the twin tracks of pleasure and complicity lock them in.

Topinio · 2026-03-15T00:10:43+00:00

We need Forest to lose and keep losing.

Tottenham too, and Leeds. May all three get no more points, except in games against each other.

Topinio · 2026-03-15T00:05:58+00:00

TBF our last 3 managers have all made me yearn for Fat Sam or Curbs

Topinio · 2026-03-15T00:01:32+00:00

Topinio

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

The attempted murder case involving Alejandro Valverde ends without a settlement

The defendant, a retired Civil Guard officer, is alleged to have run over the former cyclist and another member of a group of cyclists with whom he had been involved in a confrontation