Phlegmatic

• Sheffield United were the most successful club.


• It took Holland until 2586 to win their first World Cup (and to think Skinner and Baddiel complained about "thirty years of hurt"...)


• Lincoln from Gibraltar played 740 games in the Europa League over the course of the millennium and failed to win any of them.


• In 1,000 years, Portsmouth (in the Premier League as recently as 2010) managed just one season in the Premier League.


• Chelsea won the first Premier League title of the simulation, but that was their last title for over 900 years.


• The Metropolitan Police won the FA Cup, and have a 50,000 seat stadium.


• Everton didn't.


• Bromley FC (current stadium capacity: 6,000) have an 86,000 seat stadium.


• Both Celtic and Red Bull Salzburg have stadiums seating more than 600,000 spectators.

Nice little collection of AVRO Vulcan photographs.

Sajid Javid is probably a better politician than standup comedian, but nevertheless this is quite funny.

Wearing skirts is considered to be indecent in Morocco...

...and in Plymstock, Devon.

Strange tales from the bad old days of search engine optimisation.

How much did the coalition government manage to reduce the welfare bill by?

"The next time you see a mob gibbering and shrieking and demanding someone's dismissal, don't hunker down. Speak up. Someone has to, for Heaven's sake."

And this is the person behind the lynching. "A very flawed accuser."

Who can stop the wind turbines?

Uncle Bryn on Gareth Bale.

Really, really bad eyebrows.

Social Justice Warios

How to get rich from tidal energy.

How come Jeremy Paxman is allowed to ask tough questions but Kay Burley isn't?

The Pecking Disorder

Tblisi flooded. Zoo animals escape. Hilarity (and some terror) ensues.

Remember last month when New York was underwater? No?

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission is confused between correlation and causation.

What causes inequality?

Good questions to ask in a job interview.

The hell of being born trans class.

61 deaths in "Game of Thrones" plus percentage chance to return for each. (This is spectacularly wrong for at least one person.)

American Gothic 2015

If Peanuts featured Game of Thrones quotes.

I haven’t done a Phligm Phlagm post since April. (Sorry, I’ve been really busy…) We have some catching up to do. Anyway, I hope you enjoy and / or are informed by these links:

The maths (and beauty) behind a perfect 147. Make sure you watch Ronnie O’Sullivan’s five minutes and 20 seconds 147 – one of the all time greatest accomplishments in any sport.

This is the sort of thing that should be in that Alanis Morrisette song instead of "rain on your wedding day".

Few people regularly make me as angry as this incompetent, ill-informed, hypocritical, leftard.

Great myths of British politics, number 745: "The NHS is the most efficient health system in the world". (According to the OECD, only Ireland and Greece could make greater savings from more efficient healthcare systems.)

Even among countries with similar healthcare systems, the UK's is "below average". (So can we please stop this “envy of the world” bollocks?)

"My obsession with a fictional Football Manager megastar." (I had to put this in quotation marks to make it clear that this wasn't me...)

Diane "divide and rule" Abbott tutting that the "Tories harp on about Mid-Staffs". (Yeah, cos it’s not as if 1,200 people dying because of neglect in a state-run hospital is something politicians should be concerned about…)

"We're a class project."

A Greek God Family Tree

Student union backs excluding white people from 'anti-racism' events.

RIP Yeoman Rand.

PwC is going to ignore graduates' A-level results when recruiting. (This surprises me. When I was being recruited as a trainee chartered accountant, and when I was recruiting trainee chartered accountants, it was generally accepted that A-level grades were the best indication of future success in ACA exams, far more so than class of degree.)

George Digweed, the greatest British sportsman you've never heard of.

You know those really expensive very large Lego Super Star Destroyers? What if you dropped one from a great height? And filmed it. At 1000fps.

10 typographic mistakes everyone makes (and which life is far, far too short to care about.)

• I don't remember ever being aware of today's date in a dream before. Is this common?


• Yes, I have been watching 'House of Cards' recently. I got the boxed set for Christmas.


• Why would there be a stall at the Labour Party conference selling Bill Shankly biographies?


• Why was I dreaming about Bill Shankly anyway?

Worried that you might avoid tax? This helpful guide shows you how to avoid avoiding tax.

Does going to court to change your dead millionaire father's will so you pay less inheritance tax count as "avoiding tax"?

Interesting reviews of all the Gollancz SF Masterworks so far.

5 Misconceptions About #GamerGate and the Truth Behind the Myths

Five Actors Who Almost Played Aragorn (Russell Crowe?)

Whatever happened to Football Manager legend Freddy Adu?

No, unemployment is not the "underlying cause" of ISIS.

"Why are people in Scotland saying I murdered someone called Lucy?"

UKIP Cornwall's website gives Cornish web designers a bad name.

The latest SJW idiocy in SF / Fantasy literature.

I miss 'The Thick of It'. Luckily Green Party leader Natalie Bennett can easily fill the 'incompetent politician gives car crash interview' hole...

The appalling compensation for those people imprisoned through a miscarriage of justice.

It's really cold in New York at the moment.

Evidence used by Henry VIII to support the break with Rome turns up in a library not far from us.

Why we shouldn't clamp down on zero-hour contracts.

"NHS 111 to blame for rise in A&E attendances is a really dreadful explanation for something that did, in fact, not happen". (Thankyou Steer for a good piece of analysis.)

Ed Miliband thinks that an Italian who runs an American company and lives in Monaco should pay "his (British) taxes". This is a Labour policy I can get behind – get foreigners with no connection to the UK to pay all our taxes. Brilliant. I would totally vote for this policy. (When you think about it, it’s pretty much the policy that successive Greek governments have adopted for years…)

The German government uses Battlestar Galactica LARP (on an actual warship) to train diplomats.

Apparently women aren't rational. (This is the latest in a long line of what I like to call ‘pseudo-economics’ books that litter the shelves of high street bookshops. Just as you find history shelves full of books about secret societies and how the freemasons are looking after the Holy Grail until the aliens land, you will find books in the ‘Economics’ section written by the sort of people who think Adam Smith is a member of One Direction. Pfft.)

Hmm. We've been thinking we could do with a projector for the business...

Schoolboy suspended for saying he could make classmate 'disappear' with the One Ring. Actually, the funniest thing about this story is that there is a town in Texas called ‘Kermit’. *

The To Kill a Mockingbird sort-of-sequel. Should we be suspicious? Yes. No. Yes.

Rotherham Council, the council that allowed 1,400 children to be gang-raped and sexually abused by muslims, is to be taken over by central government until elections can be held.

Is Rotherham the tip of the iceberg? "How much does the Labour Party know about the stench of corruption, sexual malfeasance, public maladministration and greed, incompetence and pro-Asian bigotry emanating from Labour's heartlands?"

Or is the whole Rotherham problem simply a case of a "rotten borough"?

Top 10 'Things that Ed Balls Has Forgotten'.

"How Sci-Fi's Most Prestigious Awards Became A Political Battleground"

Bryan Henderson doesn't like the phrase "comprised of".

"Big accountancy firm accused of saving people money" I particularly love the phrase “in blatant accordance with the law”.

Adding up the wealth of the poor - the meme that refuses to die.

The World's Poorest Man.

The Information Commissioner's Office is the public body that enforces privacy and electronic communication regulations. Guess what they forgot to renew.

Random Guardian comment generator.

Today is the 40th Anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming leader of the Conservative Party. The Labour Party has never had a female leader, but it clearly knows how to attract female voters.

* Has anyone else read ‘A World of Ice and Fire’? Lovecraft references I can take, but Sesame Street…?

Christmas trees are "like catnip" to lions.

So you've spent thousands on gold-plated network cables and power leads, but there's still something not quite right about your hi-fi. Could it be your NAS drive?

The bows of The Hobbit.

The Yamural Curse - most residents of this Colombian village have dementia by the age of 40.

KILLER NAZI SUPER-COWS!!!!!!

How do dragons get their hoards to where they want them?

Red hot nickel dropped in water. You need the sound turned on to appreciate this.

Billy Joel playing harmonica looks like dying Anakin Sywalker

The Israeli government has had enough with anti-semitic LibDem MP David Ward.

Here's a great time-sink - side by side historic maps and modern maps.

Immigration will add a city the size of Birmingham to our population every 18 months for the next 75 years.

Pictures paint a thousand lies. And facebook makes it easy for idiots to propagate them. (Thank you to parrot_knight for that one.)

The internet. Not just about porn, kittens on skateboards and idiots.

Power firm announces £460m living wage contract. Yeah, because all those highly skilled engineers and contractors working unsocial hours in and around the North Sea aren’t already earning £7.85 an hour… (I used to audit a company in this industry, and those guys get paid serious money.)

Hang on, since the Scottish separatists got thrashed in the referendum, how come they're now dictating terms?

Orkney Library on Twitter.

Gordon Brown is to step down as an MP at the next election. Guido Fawkes looks back on his greatest hits.

You know the genre of music that gets played in cantinas in Star Wars? Do you know what it's called? I can't actually put the word in this post, or this won't get past some people's work porn filters!

"My iPod no longer works..." Really woossy fundamentalist muslim terrorists.

Why are rubber-like blocks marked with the word 'TJIPETIR' washing up on beaches? (Thank you to neuromancer for this one.)

One Dutch trawler owns 23% of England's entire fishing quota.

Lewes seems like a cool place to be on Guy Fawkes Night.

Plymouth University has spent £300,000 on giant external video screens, but they won't be allowed to play video because they overlook a main road. That's an expensive billboard.

This isn't an ad showing girls playing D&D in 1980, it's a magazine article, and cooler for it.

Have you ever been unfaithful to your spouse? I bet you have.

FIFA is insisting that all Women's World Cup matches be played on artificial turf.

The teacher who hasn't taught since 2000, but has been paid more than half a million pounds by the taxpayer.

No, ebola isn't our fault.

'Requires Hate' and the evil of social justice warriors.

Remember this post from a couple of years ago? He's out.

Jessica Ennis-Hill wants her name removed from one of the stands because of the above story. Guess what happens on Twitter.

17 Nick and Karren Apprentice Reactions for Awkward Everyday Situations.

How to turn Barbie dolls into Weeping Angels.