David McFarlane

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Well, it’s been another mixed bag for British teams in Europe this week.

Manchester United scraped a fairly lucky 1-1 draw away to Lyon in a game they were expected to win easily. I couldn’t believe that Boumsong, who’s now at Lyon, actually managed to PLAY WELL! Why he didn’t do that for Newcastle I’ll never know. I expect United to win the return leg at Old Trafford comfortably though.

Chelsea drew 0-0 at Olympiakos, which is actually quite a good result. Greece is a very difficult place to go to and to come away from the game without conceding is great. I also see Chelsea beating Olympiakos quite easily on the way to the next round.

Arsenal were also playing at home and they too drew 0-0, this time against AC Milan. On paper this looks not too bad, but the reality is that the San Siro is  an incredibly hard arena to score a goal in, never mind win! Unfortunately, I see Milan winning the return leg.

In the final Champions League game involving British teams, Celtic lost 3-2 to Barcelona at Parkhead. This brings to an end Celtic’s unbeaten record in home meetings in Europe, and I can see them going out of the competition in the next leg as well. They played very well on the night though, and were very unlucky to lose.

As I type this, Rangers have qualified for the next round of the UEFA Cup by drawing 1-1 away at Panathinaikos (they go through on the away goals rule after drawing 0-0 at home in the first leg) and Aberdeen have been humped 5-1 by Bayern Munich to the suprise of nobody.

Bolton, Tottenham and Everton are still playing - as it stands right now, they will all be going into the hat for the next round.

For any depressed Aberdeen fans, here’s a video of the first leg to cheer you up (it’s in German, but what the heck).

Time for another political rant. I know how popular these are, so I thought I’d take another pop at those idiots who run this country into the ground.

Northern Rock. Two words that should ring a bell with every person living in the UK.

To those of you who don’t know who they are, it’s one of the biggest banks we have - they’ve recently hit hard times and have subsequently been nationalised by the Government. What this means in layman’s terms is that the Government now own Northern Rock.

It seems ridiculous to me that whilst our schools, roads and hospitals are falling apart both Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling think this is a good idea. It seems even more ludicrous when you consider that the entire budget that Scotland has to run on for a year is one-third the amount set aside to bail out a failed bank!

Why is it that banks couldn’t give a toss for Joe Public’s excuses when he gets in trouble, but when it happens to them they expect a handout?

We are talking about potentially writing off upwards of £50bn here! It’s all well and good say that all of this will go back into the public pot when Northern Rock is back on its feet, but remember that this Governement has cocked up every major financial undertaking its ever been in charge of.

"We will, and always have, put the interest of taxpayers first" says Gordon Brown. If this is true, why did the FSA not head of all this crap from happening by stopping Northern Rock from lending money it was never going to pay back? Why did people not trust what their own Prime Minister, unelected I might add, said enough to stop them from emptying their bank accounts?

What about small businesses who run into trouble, where’s their rescue package?

Northern Rock was a private, profit-making company that cocked up on a massive scale.

It’s a pity that so-called intelligent people make decisions that would make an idiot blush.

Apologies about the lack of blogging over the past couple of days.

I’ve had feck all time to even think about writing anything here recently, but I’ll be back again tomorrow with some extended nonsense.

For now I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Vanilla Ice.

Cheers!

No Newcastle game this weekend because of the F.A. Cup.

Which reminds me, let’s all laugh at Liverpool! Imagine losing to a Championship team that couldn’t win away from home at your own ground! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

Enough of that, we’re talking about my teams here. Newcastle were knocked out of the cup by Arsenal in the last round, the second of two back-to-back 3-0 defeats. The brilliant news is that next Saturday they face Manchester United, although it’s a home game so I’m quietly confident of an upset (sort of).

Dunfermline, meanwhile, drew 1-1 with Partick Thistle. They were actually leading for most of the game, until Kevin Harper got sent off on the 50th minute whch probably rejuvinated Thistle to come back and equalise with only 17 minutes left. Ah well - we’ll win the First Division next season!

Not much else to say (on a Sunday my brain turns to mush), so I’ll leave you with what I’m looking forward to most at the moment - the return of Rambo!

Cheerio.

Here is my cat, Oscar, in a very artistic shot - actually, if you get any closer he’ll have your hand off.

Like most cats, he appears to be the laziest bastard I have ever seen in my entire life. He spends his day either sleeping on a chair, sleeping on a bed, sleeping on a bag, sleeping on the ground or having a shit in the back garden. What a wonderful life he leads.

It makes you wonder what God was thinking when he decided cats should grace this Earth. I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re his way of saying "fuck it" to life in general.

I can just see our fat hairy furball in human form (bear with me on this one) - he’d be the equivalent of that guy who had to get lifted out of his bed on Jerry Springer by a crane a few years back. Actually, there’s a sad story about that guy in that he died a couple of years after appearing on the show. Don’t eat pies kids!

Getting back to cats, I have to say I like them. I wouldn’t want to be one myself, probably because the thought of licking my balls or anus is about as appealing as a very unappealing thing. They just have this amazing knack of being there when you’re a bit angry about something or, and this will make me sound like a right loony, feel like talking to someone.

I need to get a life.

Seriously.

Now make me make this clear - I’m not a fan of Sepp Blatter at all. The man has put his foot in it about lots of different things over the years (women should play in tighter shorts, not turning up for the opening of the 2006 World Cup and letting the 2003 Confederations Cup continue after Marc Vivien Foe’s death being, amongst others) and has also overseen the introduction of such ridiculous rules as booking players for over-zealous celebrations and the ill-fated "silver goal" extra-time decider.

When it comes to this nonsense about the F.A. Premier League wanting to play a 39th game in a foreign country though, he’s 100% correct. Blatter said "I thought it was a joke at the end of the carnival season. But it seems it is really not a joke. I will ask the national associations not to accept such an initiative."

People like Brian Barwick and Richard Scudamore should remember that football is not about making money. Football is an escape from the stress and strain of everyday life, not a theatrical performance with highly paid actors - although watching Cristiano Ronaldo may have you convinced otherwise!

We, the average football fan, do not want your stupid ideas implemented. I can’t for the life of me understand why you have to tinker with something that’s perfectly fine as it is. How about concerning yourselves with the more important issues facing our game, i.e. the depressing amount of English youngsters coming up through the game?

Take your 39th game and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

It seems like every week I’ve been posting about somebody who’s died - guess what, it’s happened again.

Roy Schedier passed away on Sunday at the age of 75. He was one of those actors who you knew would put in a good performance, no matter how bad the film was. He was never really considered an "A List" actor, but he never really needed to be one either.

The role he will be most remembered for is, of course, Chief Brody. Even today, Jaws holds up as a very watchable piece of cinema (even if the shark does look a little pathetic) partly due to Schedier’s performance. Throughtout the film his family-man character acts as a stabilising center, the one person we could latch onto and believe in.

He was also in the somewhat enjoyable Seaquest DSV, which I recall watching on a Sunday afternoon on ITV. It wasn’t the best of shows, but it was a good lead in to You’ve Been Framed - please remember that I was only about 8!

I’m glad in some respects that he never returned for the last two Jaws films, as they were rotten to the core. It would have been nice to see him one last time as Chief Brody in a decent Jaws sequel, but alas that was never meant to be.

R.I.P Roy Scheider, heaven’s gonna need a bigger boat.

If anyone’s been watching Ross Kemp In Afghanistan, you’ll probably know what I mean by that headline.

Here we have a former EastEnders actor putting himself squarely in the firing line (literally) by joining up with the Army in Afghanistan. It’s a surprisingly good programme, which is both interesting and also quite sad - to hear from some of the soldiers’ family members on how they feel about their son/husband/dad going to war is quite unsettling.

The thing that truely surprised me was how dangerous it must have been for Ross Kemp to be there. Before the series began I envisioned him seeing battle from a far distance and possibly riding in a tank or something, but instead we see him nearly getting shot! It must have been brown trousers time for him on more than one occassion, but I can also imagine that the actual soldiers might have been a little pissed off about having to make sure some luvvie didn’t end up getting killed.

The show is running off the back of Ross Kemp On Gangs, which, as the title would suggest, was Ross Kemp meeting gangs. He did meet some very dangerous people during the making of that programme - one gang in fact set him on fire as part of a welcoming ceremony (something even Wimbledon probably wouldn’t have attempted back in the Crazy Gang days)!

Getting back to the Afghanistan thing though, it makes you remember that there’s still fighting going on there. We very rarely hear anything on the news, or read anything in the papers about it, but watching this reminds you that it is all still very real.

If you haven’t seen Ross Kemp In Afghanistan yet, it’s on Sky One at 9pm on Monday (and repeated about a billion times on Sky Two and Sky Three throughout the week).

I’m not asking how intelligent the people living in the UK are, but rather how intelligent the politicians running the country are.

From a previous rant you might have thought that I get annoyed with how things are carried out in Blighty and you’d be right - and who can bloody well blame me? After reading yesterday that out of 2.6 million people on incapacity benefit, 1.9 million are fit and perfectly able to work I think I may have gone a little bit mad.

Keeping these dossers idle costs a ridiculous £8 billion a year! Just think about that for a minute - it’s the most preposterious thing I’ve ever heard.

When you factor in the recent bailing out of Northern Rock, this country is well and truely fucked. And what are our superiors doing about it? Sitting around with their thumbs up their arse, as per usual. Morons.

I’ll leave you with something more positive though - the funniest thing Will Ferrell ever did when he was on Saturday Night Live.

Ciao for now.

What an interesting topic title, nobody is thinking to themselves.

Really, I’m curious about the other David McFarlane’s we can find on the Interweb - so let’s have a look!

Google shows us that there’s a councillor in Oxford (who appears twice), a real estate seller in Australia (who also appears twice), some ponce in Scotland (me!), a bloke in a chair (don’t ask), a guy in Livingston, a guy in Perth, a mission worker in Italy and an account director.

MSN informs me that there’s still a real estate seller in Australia (thanks for that Microsoft), that weird bloke in his chair again, a guy who died in 1944, a player for Dumbarton (who appears three times - popular guy), a musician, some guy who’s daughter got married and a web developer (mildly ironic).

Yahoo love me as I appear 3 times in the top five rankings (lucky me), that bloody real estate bloke’s back again (three times as well), the Dumbarton player returns, as does the musician and we have one new entry - someone selling stuff on eBay.

In conclusion, this tells us absolutely nothing about David McFarlane.

Except that Microsoft hate me.