Sherps

The Focus is just an example of the deals on 2014 bikes that are available at this time of year. It really is a great time to buy, as 2015 bikes are out, Christmas is over and the weather's rubbish, so there are plenty deals to be had. If you haven't set your heart on either of the two, shop around and see if you can pick up a full carbon bike for around the same price as the two you picked out. Try before you buy, though, and buy from a local shop also, if possible. If you've got your heart set on one of the two above, though, it really is down to brakes. Disk brakes on road bikes are a relatively new thing but are becoming more popular. They're better than rim brakes, but I can't think of a situation where rim brakes have let me down. If brakes aren't a factor for you, just pick the bike that looks the nicest.

Test ride them both and see which one you like. Aside from the disc brakes, they're both much the same component-wise, so geometry and comfort may help make up your mind. Does it have to be between those two? You could pick up a 2014 carbon bike for around the same price? There should be loads of deals out there. For instance, Edinburgh Bike Co-op are doing a Carbon 2014 Focus Cayo Evo 4 for £949.

Use StubHub for tickets. You can choose tickets based on which area you want to sit in and also price. The majority of tickets you buy will be e-mailed to you. Yankee Stadium and CitiBank are relatively new baseball stadiums, so they're both good. If I were you, though, I'd go and see the Yankees. Neither team are predicted to be especially brilliant next season (as things stand, at least) but the Yankees are the most storied franchise in the sport, so going to a baseball game in New York and choosing to see the Mets would be like going to a football game in Barcelona and deciding to see Espanyol.

Lilyhammer. A funny Sopranos.

Although there are some good exceptions, I found a lot of them to be predicated on some tenuous events and storylines. With "Once Brothers", "The Two Escobars", "Catching Hell", "Roll Tide/War Eagle" and in my opinion the best of the lot, "Pony Excess", there's an actual interesting story there to tell. Was there really an hours worth of material in Wayne Gretzky's trade, Ricky Williams penchant for a toot, Michael Jordan's baseball career? Probably not. Ice Cube wasted 60 minutes of my life trying to convince me that a hat he wore in a video once had some kind of cultural relationship with which city Al Davis was trying to get money out of for having his NFL team play there.

I always felt a bit sorry for English people because, as evidenced by Emily Thornberry's tweet, any expression of English nationalism somehow means you're a racist. The displaying of the flag of St George now automatically seems to mean you're a UKIP voter also. She prejudged someone and that isn't acceptable in her position. It was said a few posts back that if the photo had a St Andrew's cross in it there would be the same reaction up here, but I don't think that's the case. The Saltire doesn't come with the same connotations that certain people give to the flag of St George. We get to use symbols to show pride in our country without it having associations with anything unsavoury.

Irish tactics, or lack of them, played right to Hanley's strengths. Any time the ball is in the air, he looks fine. A liability against anyone with a bit of pace or movement, though, and his distribution still leaves a lot to be desired. Plenty of time to improve and is obviously thought highly of by people who know a lot more about football than me. After his solid display in Warsaw, both with and without the ball, I thought Greer might've taken Hanley's place for at least one of the recent games.

Reminds of when the Welsh only had to play one friendly to avoid being in Pot 6 in our World Cup Quali group. A blogger (I'm sure it was the football-rankings.info guy) e-mailed the Welsh FA to let them know, but they just ignored him and ended up in Pot 6 anyway. As the Gibraltar game will be shootie-in, we may see a friendly round about then, if the SFA are aware of this. A game against a strategically picked, highly ranked but on poor form opponent like a Russia, Greece etc?

Wisnae stooping so low as to tell her I was voting Labour, though!

Kezia Dugdale, who's on the other couch in the original video and opposing Clark for the deputy leadership, was at my door on Saturday campaigning for the Labour candidate who's trying to win Eric "The BofA Bomber" Joyce's seat. Although I wanted to say to say that Labour were fecked and that if Rod Hull and Emu were the SNP candidates they'd still get my vote, I held back. She was too nice and you have to have a degree of sympathy for people who try their best at what will be an ultimately futile venture.

What no one ever points out, though, is that if you wish to implement a football culture/way of thinking/zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it, training up groups players is a spectacularly inefficient way to do it. If you train the coaches then send them out in to the world with the same thinking as you, then in this case you wouldn't just have your national system spreading your methodology, you'd have managers involved with clubs doing the exact same things. The dissemination of ideas and methodologies is spread a lot further than the SFA's sphere of influence. Scott Booth applied for the Stenhousemuir job with Wotte's blessing. Booth now also has loads of interaction with the Forth Valley Football Academy because of his position. Although I'm not 100% sure, I can imagine things would be the same in Angus/East Region with Ray McKinnon.

This is a strange one. I don't think we'll know if Wotte has done a good job for at least another 3-5 years, once the development schools and other systems he helped put in place start producing players. Even then, if results are good, how much of that was down to Wotte and how much was down to Henry McLeish's review? This is the salient point, because, as you intimate, if his work is done, he surely doesn't need replaced. The system produces the players without need for alteration. If the SFA does decide to appoint someone else in the role, which I don't think they should, would they want to change things? Does that mean everything Wotte's done in the last 3 years is then undone?

Tomorrow night sees the first game of the 2014 World Series between the San Francisco Giants (my team) and the Kansas City Royals. This will be the third appearance in 5 years for the Giants, but the first appearance since 1985 for the Royals. Both teams have made the series the hard way by coming in to the post-season via the Wildcard. Bookies make the Royals the slight favourites, but it's too close to call really. I'm going for the Giants to win 4-2. Anybody else watching this or follow the game?

If a Polish guy tells you the boozer/restaurant you are in does a particularly nice dish with raw meat in it, it is NEVER a good idea to try said dish. "Ruined" is the very definition of how you will end up.

The vast majority of wasps die off around September/October, as only young queens hibernate over the winter, and they never re-use to a nest again once it's been left. This gives councils a convenient get-out clause around this time of year. I've been waiting on my council coming to deal with a nest behind one of my facia boards since July, despite calling them repeatedly. There's pretty much no point in chasing it up any more now, though.

This country will never achieve it's full potential until people start seeing through the charade that is the Labour party. People hate the Tories, but they never claim to be anything other than exactly what they are. Whereas Labour have consistently led the people to believe they have their best interests at heart, when they only believe in lining their own pockets. This has always been the left's problem and seemingly always will be.

Sad to see my home town voting no.

Well done Dundee.

Feckin' right. We can do this. Let's see what happens when they start declaring.

Plenty of helpful young chaps to look after your car while you're at the match also.

I know two "internationalists" and it's very difficult to convince them to vote YES, even though it probably conforms to their views fundamentally. They see borders as a bad thing, which to an extent they probably are. Try and push forward Scotland's membership of the EU (rUK's referendum on leaving? more borders/separation?) and UN as engagement/solidarity in wider world issues. As much as I find it patronising, there is also the issue of how we'll show the wider UK how to bring about a more socialist state (true NHS, free higher education, wealth distribution?). The other thing may be to bring up the point that drawing a border between Scotland and Ni/Wales/England is no different to that of drawing borders with Holland/Azerbaijan/Venezuela etc, which already exist. Drawing another border is no different than what we already have. If we have solidarity between the workers in the British Isles, then surely we can have solidarity in the wider world. Make the point that British nationalism, which NO is pedalling to an extent, is no different from any other type of nationalism. What we're voting for is democracy, not nationalism! The only link I can provide is the socialist worker - http://socialistworker.co.uk/ Taking on dogma like "internationalism" was better done by men born 150 years ago, with better beards than I have.

They'll be shitting themselves even more a week on Friday.