Scroll down to the comments.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...er-2013-review
That game is lethal. I was in the 2020s with Pats in the 2006 FM; had 3 stints as Ireland manager and most of my first XI were Pats players who couldn't get a game ahead of all the Zimbabweans and Belarussians I had.BNewmark
02 November 2012 10:40am
190
I know of someone who's friends and family had a Champ Man (as it was then) intervention for them. Honestly.
So, these Tayto Cheese n Onion Chocolate bars - yay or nay?
http://www.irishcentral.com/story/ro...202491001.html
We are at war with Eurasia. We've always been at war with Eurasia.
i presummed it was a take the piss
Cyril The Judas
Anyone know somewhere round Inchicore they're selling those tayto chocolate bars ? I need to get some this weekend.
Also, in FM 2006 I won the world cup with Ireland and Jon Macken won the Golden Boot. Best game ever.
Those bars are only available in Spar stores at the mo.
One love *** One club
I had a couple of these the other day (be rude not to eat a few free bars) and I liked them! Although anyone who cant find them just buy a Dairy Milk and a Packet of cheese and onion.
http://www.sporcle.com/games/Thats_a...d-in-europe-ii
Nice little quiz for anyone who's bored. It's fairly hard.
http://www.transfermarkt.com/en/st-p...rein_1189.html
loving the value of some of our players...
it has Barry Ryan at 200k
Cyril The Judas
the first 100k have already sold out sounds like a strange idea but will give it a go if I can find them.Those bars are only available in Spar stores at the mo.
Random thought, just seen the Voltaren gel ad (i think)
I dont get the line, "when you're watching the watching you don't want injury time".
Eh ya do if you're losing the match as i say its just a random thought haha
We All Dream Of A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!! A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!! A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!!
Anyone into signed shirts and stuff Auction at the Louis Fitzgerald hotel
https://www.facebook.com/#!/Malachis...ocation=stream
Another one here for Crumlin Hospital
Fat Michael Keane got aload of jerseys from england for it
https://www.facebook.com/alan.maguire.568
We All Dream Of A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!! A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!! A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!!
Long Post Alert – this is very long even by my standards. It’s a piece I wrote for a mate’s blog that probably isn’t going to happen now. If you’ve no interest in Africa, politics or nutjob rulers, save yourself the ten minutes.
Africa’s Forgotten Madman - Francisco Macias Nguema
While Spain’s imperial grasp on the American continent once stretched from almost the Great Lakes to the southern Andes, by contrast it held only small and isolated pockets of Africa. The only modern state on the Dark Continent that was once entirely under Spanish rule is the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. This country, less than half the size of the Irish Republic, has a population of less than 700,000. Perhaps it’s because of its relative anonymity in international terms that one of the most brutal and corrupt of Africa’s many tyrants has escaped the notoriety in history that his actions merited, as the reign of terror Francisco Macias Nguema unleashed upon his people for eleven years ranks alongside the worst of the more publicized excesses of Idi Amin or Charles Taylor.
Despite the general apathy of the Franco regime in Madrid towards its few remaining colonies, buoyant post-war demand for cocoa, Spanish Guinea’s main export, meant that the two decades prior to independence were relatively prosperous ones for the colony. In 1963, Guineans voted for independence in a referendum. The following year, Spain began the process to full independence by installing a transitional Government, of which Macias Nguema was made Deputy Prime Minister.
Nguema was born in 1924, the son of a witch doctor. His parentage would lead to him claiming supernatural powers later in life that would serve him well among his deeply superstitious compatriots. His rise to power began unsteadily under the Spanish Colonial regime. Even in a country with a backward educational system, by most accounts he stood out as being particularly dim. The Spanish administration favoured Nguema and groomed him as a future leader specifically because of his limited education and mental ability, figuring he would be easy to manipulate and thus allow them a measure of control of the country even after independence. However, despite the colonial regime having facilitated his rise from nobody to a position of power, he held a barely disguised contempt for the Spanish in his country.
In 1968, Equatorial Guinea became fully independent under Nguema upon the conclusion of a presidential election, which has transpired to be the only free and fair election in the country’s history.
The strongly nationalistic and anti-colonial rhetoric of Nguema’s election campaign created a tense post-independence atmosphere in the country. The spark that lit the powder keg was Nguema’s discovery that five months after independence, Spanish flags were still flying in some parts of the country. Nguema ordered mobs of youths and vigilantes loyal to him to attack Spanish targets. Many were killed and within weeks almost all of the remaining 7,000 Spaniards in the country had fled. As most of these had formed the backbone of the civil service as well as providing most of the country’s teachers, professionals and merchants, the administration of the State promptly collapsed upon their departure. When Nguema’s Foreign Minister attempted to repair relations with Spain, he was summoned to the Presidential Palace, beaten with rifle butts and hauled off to prison with broken legs, where he was brutally murdered for being ‘too intellectual’. It proved a harrowing portent of what was to come.
Ten of the twelve ministers in his first government were executed upon his orders. In their place he installed members of his own family and from his own Fang tribe, the largest of the many tribes in the country. A former ambassador died after being repeatedly immersed in a barrel filled with water for more than a week. Steadily he rewrote the country’s laws to give himself more authority. By 1972, Nguema had merged all the country’s political parties into one under him and declared himself President for Life under a new Constitution that gave him absolute power. Thus empowered, he set upon tightening his grip upon his country and its people. He regarded intellectuals, education and foreign culture as the three great evils facing his country and sought to eradicate each of them, with the result that Equatorial Guinea slipped even further into insanity.
It seems that Nguema’s own lack of intelligence fostered in him a deep distrust and hatred for anybody or anything he deemed ‘intellectual’. In time the word ‘intellectual’ itself was banned and anybody found wearing spectacles, a sign of superior educational accomplishment in his mind, was executed. Libraries were closed, newspapers and printing presses were banned. To be found in possession of even a scrap of printed matter was often enough to warrant execution. Education was declared subversive and eventually banned completely, children instead being taught political slogans.
The Catholic Church, regarded by Nguema as a foreign influence, was also targeted for reform. All churches were forced to hang his portrait and under threat of arrest and execution, priests were forced to tell their congregations that ‘there is no God other than Macias’. Eventually religious meetings, funerals and sermons were banned. Christian names were abolished. Many churches were commandeered as warehouses, with the capital city Malabo’s Cathedral being used as a weapons store.
Medicines were also deemed ‘Unafrican’ and were banned.
He took a succession of women as lovers, usually completely against their wishes, and had their husbands and ex-lovers murdered – and on occasion their families too. In other cases he would execute the husbands of women he coveted simply out of spite and jealousy. Whole villages were massacred merely on the suspicion that one person living there had transgressed his laws in some way. He celebrated Christmas 1975 by herding 150 of his opponents into a football stadium in Malabo and executing them by a firing squad dressed in Santa Claus costumes with the Mary Hopkin song ‘Those Were The Days’ blaring over loudspeakers.
Unsurprisingly many Guineans sought to escape the madness and a third of the population fled into exile during his reign. Upon realizing this was happening, he ordered the destruction of all boats – banning fishing and trawling in the process – and had the main road out of the country landmined. The refugees brought their tales of terror to the outside world and earned it the moniker of ‘the Dachau of Africa’. UN Resolutions condemning Nguema were passed but predictably had no effect.
Nguema naturally turned his attention to the coffers of the Country’s Central Bank, intent upon ensuring it became a private fund for himself and his family. A Central Bank Director who attempted to prevent him doing this was executed. Thereafter, foreign currency went directly to Nguema’s house and was hidden in suitcases under his bed or in his hut – Nguema having by now abandoned his Presidential Palace in the Capital in favour of his family’s ancestral home for fear of opponents. The chaos enveloping the country was having a devastating effect on its economy. A Director of Statistics who presented figures indicating the extent to which the economy was collapsing was dismembered to ‘help him learn how to count’.
In the end, Nguema’s inability to control the economy proved his downfall. Civil Service and military wages had always been in arrears but by June 1979 even the salaries of his most trusted National Guard had not been paid for months on end. Six members of the National Guard, led by Nguema’s brother and nephew, went to Nguema asking him to release some of the money he was keeping in suitcases to pay the men. Outraged by their impertinence, he had all six shot dead on the spot. This convinced another nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, that he must act or expect the same fate. He convinced several of Nguema’s inner circle that a coup was necessary and after a brief struggle, Nguema was overthrown and taken into custody. A month later he and six of his closest aides were sentenced to death. Nguema himself received 101 death sentences for crimes of genocide, mass murder, embezzlement, human rights violations and treason. Belief in his supernatural powers and the fear that he could wreak vengeance from beyond the grave was so widespread that a team to do the shooting could not be assembled among the Guinean army. So it was that on Saturday September 29th 1979, the day over one million people gathered in Dublin’s Phoenix Park for the visit of Pope John Paul II, a hired Moroccan Army firing squad ended the reign of terror of Macias Nguema in another devoutly Catholic country with a shower of flying lead.
Estimates on the death toll from Nguema’s reign vary from 50,000 to 80,000, with up to 150,000 additionally having fled the country – this from a population of just 400,000 at independence. The country was left completely bankrupt, with an entirely dysfunctional economy and without any development plan or even an accounting system to estimate government funds.
His nephew Obiang Nguema rules to this day. While the extent of the sheer lunacy that hallmarked his uncle’s rule has diminished, the concentration and abuse of power has not. In the 1990s, Equatorial Guinea struck oil offshore and this has made Obiang and his family, but not their country, very rich. The World Bank estimates it has a GDP per capita of over $36,000, placing it as the 21st richest country in the world (ahead of the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and the EU average) but it ranks just 121st of the 177 countries assessed on the UN Human Development Index. Its history of State-sanctioned violence, its corruption and wealth disparity have led some commentators to describe it as a microcosm of all that’s wrong with modern Africa.
We are at war with Eurasia. We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Good article Gaz.
There is no emoticon for what I am feeling.
cracking read.
Cyril The Judas
My mate from college lives here. BBQ in her back garden. She hates football. Biiiiitch!!! Haha
Proof that when you have a good game in football, you really have a good game. Also proof that football can sometimes be at it's most entertaining in the lowest possible league.
Greek 4th division striker scores a hat-trick, three players then get sent off, the third being the keeper so he hops in and saves a peno and then the retake. Special mention for the best peno I've ever seen.
Anyone recommend a decent gym in Clondalkin? one that is not that expensive
We All Dream Of A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!! A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!! A Team Of Curly Wurly's!!!