JonM

Exactly. No attempt to use his arms to make a tackle.

NFL has already paid out around a billion dollars in compensation related to concussion and head injuries, with more to come.

Still used in quite a bit of low level computing - the Java virtual machine is all RPN, for example.

Only when looking to see whether the Lebanon RL team got any publicity by playing in the world cup. In answer to your other question though, Lebanese people I know here all have family in Australia, Canada and elsewhere too, and might go "home" once a decade or so. They still consider themselves and others like themselves as Lebanese and I don't think would care about the fact that all or nearly all of the team was born elsewhere.

The last two times that Lebanon have played here, it appeared to generate rather more TV and newspaper coverage in Lebanon that England RL gets in England.

The news on CBS said that 19% of Americans had bet on the game, which is shocking to me, considering it was basically illegal before 2018 and still is in about a third of the states.

Yes, I was at a party, and the to comparison with cricket is a good one - people very much were dipping in and out, until the fourth quarter and overtime. I suspect watching in the UK you probably don't get the full set of advert interruptions they have here - really quite jarring to cut away to an advert say for a politician less than a second after the player has run over the sideline. I'm staying a couple of minutes from the 49ers stadium, which is about 60km out from San Francisco, in silicon valley. The next event is a golf day in April!

This is not a valid reason...

Barely gets a mention on the local bay area news this morning, although the half time show gets a nod

I guess overtime wasn't the best news for those of you watching in the UK. Streets are silent here in the Bay area.

That wasn't my point - I was just imagining Ray French or Eddie Hemmings moaning about the amount of penalties or dropped ball to the exclusion of everything else. Which is emphatically not what the commentators here are doing.

I'm in California - finding it a tough watch as a non fan, so many stoppages and adverts. Funny to think what an RL commentator would make of a game with so many penalties, dropped ball costing the first TD, scoreless first period and so on.

It's an all seater stadium, so yes. The crowd for the challenge cup game against wests warriors last year was only about 100 higher and they brought quite a good following up from London so I think the number of people staying away in protest against Chris Hamilton is a bit overstated. First game I've missed in quite a while - in California on business.

India started to look a bit rattled at one point, so clearly they thought England might do it. The series has caught the imagination of cricket fans in India too, which is really important. Test cricket has faded in popularity there and they are the biggest and richest market, so it's important in keeping test cricket alive to play exciting cricket. Hearing a lot of positive comments from Indians about the atmosphere generated by the English fans in Hyderabad and Vizag and how the locals have responded. I'm expecting India to win all of the remaining tests but should be a great occasion at the world's most beautiful test venue at Dharamsala.

Re-read both of these recently after a gap of 20+ years. Possibly a controversial opinion but I don't think Orwell's writing has aged well at all, Animal Farm being perhaps an exception. With Vonnegut on the other hand, I've gone out to buy his other books - just full of great lines and ideas and ways of looking at the world.

Pretty nice, positive piece from Gavin Willacy on London, in spite of the headline. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/no-helmets-required/2024/feb/08/london-broncos-are-back-in-super-league-but-doomed-before-it-starts

Well, given that he has Bradford in 7th followed by a comment about how they still managed to sit inside the top 6, I'm speculating that arithmetic is not his strong point ? Nice article though.

I make it as follows: Group 1: Barrow are through Group 2: Winner of Keighley vs Bradford go through. If it's a draw, Bradford win the group and Keighley also through as best second place. Group 3: Wakefield go through by beating Newcastle (or a draw). York are also through as best 2nd place team unless someone else wins big. Group 4: Oldham go through if they draw or beat Rochdale. If Rochdale win by 76 points, they go through, otherwise it's Halifax. Group 5: Batley go through if they draw or beat Hunslet. If Hunslet beat them by 99 points, they go through, otherwise it's Featherstone. Group 6: Swinton are through. Group 7: Sheffield go through by beating Midlands (or a draw). If Midlands win 68 points or more, they go through, otherwise it's Doncaster. York are currently the most likely to go through as best second place. The only realistic result that puts them out is a Keighley/Bradford draw. Could change if there's an upset in one of the above groups, or if Whitehaven beat Workington T by 76, or Widnes beat North Wales by 80. Neither seems likely. Nobody is mathematically out of it yet, even Newcastle can go through if they can just beat Wakefield by around 170 points.

He's in his sixties and had a year off due to heart surgery, so I doubt he'll rack up 25 years at Widnes...

They'd gone bust, and he was one of the people who restarted the club, IIRC.

It varies, but I aim to keep it around 120/70. The second number (diastolic) has always been fine, but the systolic number was much worse before I started tracking it & working out what works for me. I think for those under 60 who have high blood pressure, there's something like half of cases where there is no obvious underlying medical cause. As JohnM points out, it needs to be kept under control. There's no symptoms until you get a heart attack or stroke or whatever. One of my GP friends has a little 'joke' that he uses with students, which is 'what is the most common presentation of a patient with heart problems' with the correct answer being that the patient is dead. I think that has changed recently (in the sense that it used to be the case that there would've been no prior indication), today we have a lot more screening.

That's one part of the job, yes. I'm sure we can all think of clubs that have had plenty of investment that hasn't produced success. There's clearly many other areas that someone has to run - the whole matchday operations in terms of getting games played - pitch, kit, ground safety, drugs testing etc, the spectator matchday experience, ticketing, marketing/promotional/ media stuff and that's before you think about player & coach contracts, running teams for women, disability, wheelchair and so on.

Probably Oldham fans are more familiar with the situation than me, but my understanding is that he put a certain amount of money from his accountancy business when he started there 25 years ago and then transitioned to it being his full-time job/ source of income. And the situation with the ground/ playing squad reflected the lack of anyone putting money into the club. Whereas Mike Ford and the new owners have been able to put significant amounts of new money in.

He was appointed by the board to run the club, as a full-time employee. There's been a fair bit of staff turnover, both playing and non-playing, since he joined. From the outside, it's hard to know whether he's done the right things or not, but he certainly seems to have a knack for making enemies, and I think it's probably correct to say that this season Widnes will be looking more to beat Dewsbury, Whitehaven, Swinton etc. and avoid relegation rather than vying with York, Batley, Halifax etc for one of the lower play-off spots. There are some great RL people on the Widnes board with pedigrees that would warm the hearts of expansionists on here. Roger Harrison has an MBE for services to schools RL; he was taking Widnes u-11s teams to play in London 40+ years ago. Rod Steele who used to post on here set up an amateur team in Colne and so on. But being a retired primary school headmaster presumably doesn't give access to huge amounts of money or much experience of running a professional sports club. I'm very reluctant to criticise the board at all though. They stepped up with their life savings to rescue the club - a thankless task to some extent - and I suspect I'm financially much better off than some of them.

Indeed - back playing in their home town at a proper stadium in Boundary Park. Squad that looks like it would be competitive in the Championship, not league 1, well known new owners generating a lot of excitement.