Truck Festival was a real slog this year given the weather. Lovely festival and a cheerful crowd but the elements were bleak at best.

That said, saw a band called The Rhythm Method who were sensational. highlight of the weekend for sure.

It's a good job they didn't pull out.

I heard that we bid £10m for Elneny, Arsenal accepted but player declined as it was London or nothing if he was to stay in England.

any chatter of that from the Arsenal end?

(could of course just be agent/journalist nonsense, as much of this stuff is)

That would come as quite a surprise as I thought he did okay in his first season and he's a player I've liked from the start.

There's been nothing mentioned about it from any of my fairly extensive AFC sources and alleged ITK's.

How does this work? If a club wants to sell a player, does the player have to agree to move to wherever they are being sold to? I didn't realise they had any say in the matter.

It's a bit weird that everything else about air travel is made safer than safe yet they still let people do this and haven't fenced the beach off.

How would you feel if you are the pilot and might kill or injure someone when you hit the throttle?

(what a killjoy I am).

There is a Betfair Sportsbook offer that offers a free bet if your horse wins up to £25 if your horse is 3/1 or more. Is this offer any good maths fans?

I think the best strategy here is to back horses as close to 3/1 exactly so you get 4/1 in effect. Usual operating procedure for free bets is to find something around the 8/1 mark, right?

Pretty close.  I don't worry too much about the price on the first horse.  I tend to just back the ones I like.  I'd be careful of going too close to 3/1.  They can easily start at an SP of 5/2 and you lose the offer.

Ah yes, I didn't see that. I suspect that there won't be many horses that start exactly 3/1 on BF sportsbook :-).

To be honest, I'm not putting any thought in whatsoever as I haven't got time (or skill). Just trying to game the offers. The Skybet free bet refund on the first race seems like a thought free way of making money.

Wow. I'm very sad to hear this, but happy to hear you are on the mend. Please get well soon!

There is a Betfair Sportsbook offer that offers a free bet if your horse wins up to £25 if your horse is 3/1 or more. Is this offer any good maths fans?

I think the best strategy here is to back horses as close to 3/1 exactly so you get 4/1 in effect. Usual operating procedure for free bets is to find something around the 8/1 mark, right?

The SNP's entire point is to keep holding independence referendums until they win one. That's why Sturgeon's "threats" in the past to hold a referendum is laughable- it's like a dog threatening to pee on a lamppost, they're going to do it anyway.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/horse-racing/39138663

Interesting concept.  Not sure how its going to work.

This struck me as being a bit like "Happy Wednesdays" in Hong Kong- they have a disco and a band that plays between the races and there is a lot of emphasis on selling you a hot dog, and less on the actual racing. It works great- I wonder what the horses make of it- they must hear the music in the stables, but then I wonder what the horses make of running around a field surrounded by skyscrapers.

The difference is that Happy Wednesday racing is basement stuff, not Royal Ascot.

To be fair to BoxRec it's all done by automatically, so it's bad judgement by a computer rather than bad judgement by people who watch boxing.

b) the big teams get exposure on tv every weekend anyway

Not on free tv they don't.

The trouble with football is that the rule book isn't good enough. In the NFL they have a rule for every conceivable situation, so 99% of the time if you know the facts, you know what the ruling is. It's quite normal in football to have a pundit's panel say things like "I thought that was a foul", "it wasn't a foul for me", "there was no intent", going in with two feet, off the ground,. all that stuff isn't written down anywhere.

Unless they can clean up the rules, I think TV officials are a non starter.

Click to see full-size image.

I don't know why but I love this story.

Thief gets away with $1.6m bucket of gold flakes -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38164590

Forgot to reply to this at the time. There is just something comic about a bucket of flakes isn't there? Running off with 3 ingots is probably not as much fun.

but Trump is behaving like he is only just thinking about it for the first time now.

There's a reason for that.

Without even considering their histories, the behaviour of the two this week should make it obvious who is the better option, with Giuliani's unseemly public appeals for the position demonstrating his unsuitability. His belligerent personality should have ruled him out of this role from the start, along with his lack of foreign policy experience.

You could say the same thing about Trump, but he's still got the job somehow.

The government pre- and post- Brexit referendum is not really the same government is it? It's a whole new administration.

We are heading for a one-party state a bit like Japan used to be- it's always the same party in power, but different factions within the party keep taking over.