Be Excellent To Each Other

I meant to add that, but thought I'd leave it before I became too annoyed. Irritated and bored to tears by shouty 'FUCK LONDON' types, and all the same rhetoric from the 'FUCK THE ENGLISH' bunch amongst the good people of Scotland. Everyone with so much unreason to hate. You can't help where you come from, you struggle to get by, and pillocks are saying 'f you' or 'f where you came from or live'. Seems fair and reasoned. Can't be arsed.

If you're going to get angry, get angry for the right reason. I'm not saying 'Fuck the poor of London', or 'Fuck the fact that people in deprived areas of London need investment'. I'm derisive of the bourgeois excesses of 'The Capital', where this whole Olympic arrangement isn't the rich opting hard to do something super-nice for the poor, but rather the rich reinforcing the London-bias to make themselves and their super-rich friends more rich. The fact that some of development will peripherally benefit some of the crappier areas is incidental, rather than intentional. Lots of the contracting work will be going towards large London-based companies and London-based agencies will be managing logistics. Basically, a nice cashcow for those that really didn't need it because they live in a giant wealth-centre already.

I'm sure holding it in the North West wouldn't have seen all of the cash go locally. There will still be some greedy nepotistic fucks making sure the wealth gets apportioned where they wanted it, but it would have still been better than this. Chuffing this down as my 'silly bias' against London is a tad short-sighted.

Not anti-London bias, more ill-informed opinion which appears to be based primarily on jealousy/inferiority complex.

Genuine lol. Yes, I wish I worked and lived in London. Except I really don't, but apparently it can't have anything to do with the fact that I think the place is shit, and I actually have to be somehow jealous of it.

Grim... gets excited when I argue with people.

You're in the top ten, fo sho.

But if I was excited about the arguing, I would have used this:

Hehe. I am being unnecessarily argumentative, but most of your points are made-up, and it seems to boil down to "Why does London get to have all the good stuff? Not fair!"

I really don't wish we had the Olympics up here. We can't even handle getting a few fucking trams down. But then it's generally wealthy around here, even with the shitty areas, so it'd still be better off elsewhere.

I'm sorry, but if you're looking at cities in the UK, then London is far bigger than any other (than most of the others put together probably), it's got history, it's got business, it's got culture, it's got pretty much everything. It's got "more" of everything than any other city in the UK (and pretty much Europe, maybe Paris and Moscow might compete) and yes that includes the downsides of cities too.

If you're going to "do" big cities (over 250,000 pop) then you may as well do it properly and go to London.

Most of that is general stuff, nothing to do with the olympics, getting on to that subject, London was the chosen venue for the bid, they tried other cities in the past, and they were not accepted, so it makes sense to try a different one.

Malc

The BOA refused to support any Olympic bid that wasn't from London. So when your own Olympic Association won't support your city, you can't blame the IOC.

I think that the IOC came out at some point and said 'If it ain't in the Capital, it isn't going to your country' to the world in general. Certainly, if should also be remembered that the two previous olympic bids that the UK made were for Birmingham and Manchester, and they got nowhere.

I'm often quite shocked that I can hit something the size of a 5p piece from 25 yards, with a boring, cheap rifle and a sight that is essentially a disc with a hole in it. The accuracy of those things is remarkable.

Shooting is a fairly minority sport in the UK, but I bet there's more people involved in it than many other Olympic sports. There must be more shotgun shooters than there is handball enthusiasts.

I have a friend who grew up in Mumbai. He thinks London is 'cute'. He also thinks Liverpool is 'a village'. It's all about perspective.

I have a friend who grew up in a bigger place and he thinks Mumbai is 'cute'. He also thinks Delhi is 'a village'.

He still has never seen anything as big as your head though.

That's why I specified Europe...

Malc

Maybe his friend lives in Mumbai, Belgium.

I live in the most spiciest city in the world.

They did, but prior to that when Manchester went to UK Athletics having successfully hosted the Commonwealth Games, they were told to get lost.

UK Athletics didn't like what Manchester did in 2002. The original plan was to build a world class athletics venue in the City of Manchester/Eastlands stadium which was supposed to be a dual purpose football/athletics stadium. However, the British Athletics Federation / UK Athletics had its own pet Picketts Lock project in London and refused to support any bid for athletics meets to be held in Manchester. So the plan became that the track would be torn up after the 2002 games and the tier underneath uncovered with the footy pitch (it was in place, under the track when the 2002 games were on).

When all the athletes and officials (including those in the IAAF) came out in praise of the stadium track and facilities and how it was ridiculous that a great facility was being torn up with nothing to replace it (plans for Picketts Lock having crashed and burned in 2001) UK Athletics went really quiet. Britain had to give up the World Champs allocated (2005) because there was no world class facility to host it. And Eastlands made its money back for the council thanks to becoming the new home of Manchester City.

Apparently, there is going to be an "Olympic Flame" ceremony in Knutsford at some point, where some random people parade through the town's streets with a lump of burning wood lit from _the_Olympic_flame_ (ooooooh!!!11), and unfeasibly - people are going to come out and watch this??? [citation needed, but so I'm reliably told]

I was discussing over Sunday lunch, much to the guffawing of my sons-in-laws, how amusing it would be to hijack said "ceremony" by turning up 10 mins before with a homemade torch, parading before the appreciative hordes - only to point out that actually, I was going to use it to light my BBQ and garden burners, in order to get pissed.

You mean http://www.london2012.com/olympic-torch-relay

Yeah, that's it Pliss, cheers.

Incredible. Nice to see Lloyds TSB sponsoring it as well; like they've got nothing better than to spend their our money on?
Pfft, bah humbug etc.

Is your first name Trenton?

Mrs Grim... was short-listed to do that, but the "confirm you want to be a nominee" email went into her spam box, and she didn't reply in time.

Um, no?

The guy that "protested" at the boat race.

Oh, right.
Nah. I'm not planning on really disrupting the flame-torch-ceremony or whatever; if people actually enjoy it, then fine. I was only making a joke, obv. More to the point, it's not as though we haven't already spunked away 99% of all the costs of the Olympics anyway, so I/we might as well make the best of a very bad job (IMO).

The time for protest, if I could've been arsed (which I wasn't) and even then, if I thought that public protest in the UK actually achieved anything (which I broadly don't - witness the 2 million who came out on the streets to protest about the impending Iraq War), was probably 3-4 years ago, not playing the spoiler at the kick off party or whatever.

People tried, but it was largely overshadowed by the fact that some people tried to blow London up* the day of the announcement (or maybe the day after, can't remember).

*really, really badly

You (meaning people, not you specifically, unless this relates to you specifically) can't decry London for getting the olympics and say it would be better in another UK city, yet ignore the fact that no other city had a chance of getting it.

By all means hate the olympics and everything it stands for, but don't hate it for being in London, it's not London's fault that no other UK city was in with a shot of hosting.

Plus, it's going to be awesome, and most people I know are quite excited about it (ticketing farrago notwithstanding).

Well the consensus round here is that it might as well be in another country, as no normal person had a chance of getting tickets for anything not shit, and transport issues would mean that you wouldn't be able to get there anyway. Fuck off Olympics!

Am I allowed to hate the Olympics and everything they stand for, AND hate London because it's full of Cockneys?

Oh, for sure. You just can't hate London for being the host of the UK Olympics.

London would be nicer if it was actually full of Cockneys.

Lloyds have always sponsored such things heavily, and this would have been signed and sealed before the crash. HMG aren't going to tell one thing they're bankrolling to stop putting money into another thing they're bankrolling and likely to end up looking foolish over somehow anyway.

I'm Scottish and I love the Olympics. I'm looking forward to it, I'm really pleased for the British athletes that they are part of a generation that gets to compete on home soil and I would go if I could. My uncle (who lives in Essex) put in for tickets for a variety of events. He was randomly allocated track side seats for the day of the mens 100m final. Him and his wife are very excited, I'm very jealous.
I thought the royal wedding was a great day as well. We ended up in London during that by accident and were initially a bit put out about the thought that people might think that was the reason for the trip, but we ended up just embracing the silliness and having a great time at a street party in Soho. It was a great weekend, the atmosphere was amazing, it gave people an excuse to have street parties and it boosted the economy. Wasn't it thought that the increased revenue from that extra bank holiday helped us avoid a double dip recession?

I love visiting London but after a few days there I'm always ready to come home. If I was to move to a city again it would have to be one of the small ones like Glasgow or Cardiff which I went to recently and thought was lovely. I couldn't live in London, the business, the stress, the cost, the traffic, the pollution, the tourists etc. There seem to me to be a lot of downsides to London so I don't grudge them the odd special event, which I'm sure a lot of Londoners don;t want anyway since the special event makes all the negatives about the city even more pronounced.

How come we have a Great Britain Olympic team, but a England/Scotland/Wales (lols) football team?

Whaddya mean? Those are the same, surely?

Historical reasons. The Home Nations take up 4 (I think) of the 8 places on the IFAB board, which governs the game internationally. If they were to combine to a single GB entity, they would lose that influence. FIFA / UEFA have always insisted that a GB Olympic team would not set a precedent which could be used to removed the Home Nations from the IFAB but the likes of Scotland and Wales have, quite rightly IMO, decided that FIFA and UEFA are a bunch of mendacious lying bastards and don't trust them. Therefore we are unlikely to see Scottish or Welsh players as officially part of Team GB. The players could declare themselves available of their own volition of course and they wouldn't meet too much opposition from their home FAs, but certainly they wouldn't get support.

Edit: The IFAB governs internationally in the same way the Royal and Ancient Club of St Andrews governs golf or the MCC governs cricket. Sets the Laws of the Game and all that stuff. All FIFA and UEFA do is create tournaments from those Laws.

Plus, if they merged the football teams, none of the scots or welsh players would ever get a game.

Gary Linekar is really good. I think he should be in the England team.

Gareth Bale is calling you a liar.

I rather like the idea of a UK football team. Firstly, I'm a Unionist, so it'd show how great the four countries can be when working together, and secondly, it'd really piss off the Scots...

So 100 days to go.. can we have a counter or something...

Why would the location of such missile installations be publicised anyway?

Besides, missiles? Are we taking lessons on crowd control from the Chinese Communist Party now?

I think they are more for scattering hijacked airliners over the rest of the city so that the running races aren't interrupted.

Because bits of aeroplane falling over a wide area is preferable to one bit hitting wembley. Or Something.

They're only Star Streak missiles though - they're pretty small in the grand scheme of things. You can shoulder launch them, or have a multiple launcher on the back of a truck. A full Rapier battery, now that would be something.

Nimbyism is quite alright when it come to having surface-to-air missiles installed on your roof, I should think.

These will prove their worth when a small fleet of terrorist Apache helicopters attack us.