We don't know whether the young lady who was so pleased that her bodily functions were so appreciated by one and all is the same as the one who made the tearful phone call.

Got a feeling this one could be different from the usual gold-digging. One can easilly imagine a 19 year old's state of mind and hormones after six hours of drinking and being in a group of lads being pawed anf fawned over by Manchester's best looking and seemingly easiest talent.

Hughes interviewed in the Times. He says fan abuse is no worse than it has been before. Proof he does not read brfcs then.

West Ham United Three Kings: 1-Robert Green, 2-Carlton Cole, 3-Mark Noble Christmas Turkey: Lucas Neill

It is worth remembering Benni has scored 8 so far this season- hardly abysmal. That disallowed "goal" at the start of the Villa game is causing all kinds of pain now. Ditto the wrong call of Benni offside when clean through at the start of extra time on Tuesday. He will come good, of that I am certain.

If you have a decent midfield you can play two up top. Its called 4-4-2 or SAS as Blackburn folk fondly remember. As it is, Benni is having to drop back to bloster the midfield. In the box, you are going to get crowded and robbed anyway so a 25% success rate for flicks creates havoc and are appreciated. Playing flicks with 25% success rate on the half way line is a different matter.

I am sorry to say that MGP simply cannot handle the tough physical stuff of the Prem. When he was good, it only took one big hit and he'd disappear. This season, he hasn't bothered with the hits and just disappeared. Against the slightly softer kids last night he flourished.

Just thought I would point out how totally irrational some of this hostility towards McCarthy is. Strikers are bought and paid to score goals. Here are some comparisons of goals to games Rovers career stats- Roberts 7/37 Stead 8/42 Santa Cruz 11/23 Derbyshire 12/42 Bellamy 13/27 Dickov 14/50 Speedie 23/36 Cole 27/83 McCarthy 32/65 Jansen 44/153 Sutton 50/131 Shearer 112/138 Garner 168/484 Interestingly, Bellamy, Speedie, Sutton, Shearer and now already Santa Cruz were/are in by far the most productive scoring form of their careers when at Blackburn Rovers. Benni on the other hand has maintained a high consistency throughout his career other than at Celta Vigo- Ajax 20/35 (one Championship) Porto 57/129 (two Championships, three Cups, one UEFA Cup, one Champions League, one World Club Cup) and he is South Africa's all time highest scorer and has scored in two World Cup Finals campaigns. When he's gone we will look back and think wow, Benni played for us.

I am not 100% convinced partly because I hope against hope that there is a natural blip that will reverse itself. But if warming is man made then there is something man can do to unmake it. Part of me says that if the people (neocon right) who say global warming is not man made have been wrong about practically everything else they have propounded then chances are they are wrong about being climate change deniers as well. The volcano effect is simply a massive amount of dust and particulates in the atmosphere blocking sunlight. Going back through history, there have been very clear strong links between cold snaps and increased seismic activity which in turn have turned the tides of human history. A simple phenomenon is the vivid colours in Turner's paintings of skies are reflecting how the skies were in the early nineteenth century following the Tambora eruption. http://www.scribd.com/doc/323747/1816-Erup...-without-summer

University of Alabama at Huntsville scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer are the two scientists who have mined the vast amounts of data from weather balloons and satellites to compose the troubling tropospheric temperature history. In doing so, they had to correct for environmental effects. The new studies, all of which were published in the online version of the journal Science, assert that their corrections, and hence their calculations, were wrong. One of the studies showed that Christy and Spencer had over-corrected for the sunlight's warming effect on temperature sensors attached to weather balloons. Another put forward that they also made a mistake in calculating for the way wind moved around the satellites. A third study factored in the errors, and came out with a warming of the troposphere very much in line with rising surface temperatures and computer models. Straight cut and paste. Also, according to a new synthesis report on “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere,” previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere that have been used to challenge the validity of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming have been resolved. The report, commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and drafted by the leading scientists in this research area, concludes that recent evidence has increased confidence in the understanding of observed climatic changes and their causes. The report is undergoing a final political-level review and has not yet been approved for release as an official U.S. Government publication. But the report, as drafted and submitted by the scientists, has been posted on the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Web site. Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences. Thomas R. Karl, Susan J. Hassol, Christopher D. Miller, and William L. Murray, editors, 2006. A Report by the Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Washington, DC. The posted Abstract of the reports reads: Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the validity of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite data showed little or no warming above the surface. There is no longer evidence of such a discrepancy. This is an important revision to and update of the conclusions of earlier reports from the U.S. National Research Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since those reports, errors have been identified and corrected in the satellite data and other temperature observations. These data now show global average warming in the atmosphere similar to the warming observed at the surface and consistent with the results from climate models, although discrepancies remain to be resolved in the tropics. The recent evidence has increased confidence in our understanding of observed climatic changes and their causes.

Hughes- Benni short on confidence?

A continuous series of data including a five year average trend line from the English midlands since the seventeenth century. The downward blips coincide for the most part with particularly dirty volcanic explosions vapourising vast amounts of rock and projecting it into the stratosphere. This sort of graph dramatically highlights that something out of the ordinary is going on. Given the massive resources the US Government has at its disposal, the failure to produce convincing science that contradicts the manmade global warming theories has tended me to think that the US Government is wrong.

When Roberts came on against West Ham was it? he hustled to great effect but never once looked like scoring a goal. Benni was disappointing last night but got into four goal scoring positions in his 30 minutes including being put clean through the first time and wrongly called offside (not the second time when he patted it to the keeper when called offside- ref waved play on when the keeper got it but I saw the flag go up again that time and he was off side) Now Santa has hit a rich scoring streak I would play Roberts for his muscularity against Chelsea because in part its needed to counter our patsy midfield but ordinarilly Benni should always start ahead of Roberts.

OK, I'll put here what I wrote on the Nicko/Niko thread. Benni's Rovers career stats are 65 appearances 32 goals 2 assists. That includes this season. Where are the goal every other game strikers to replace him with? Roberts averages a goal every 5 appearances for Rovers by the way. Benni's problem lies in our midfield players collectively not being good enough which I also think is a reason for the sudden catastrophic collapse of our defense.

Rio's party without Ronaldo for those who want to read it.

Mind numbing that RFW allowed Rio to organise that party! How on earth the WAGS gave night passes to an officially sanctioned bordello with hot and cold running floozies is an interesting question as well. BBC name Johnny Evans

Stories linking Benni and Anelka to Chelsea today. I find it amazing that a forward who has scored 8 goals before Christmas is getting this much flak. Is Roberts' total haul for Roves 5 goals?

Frankly, it is little to do about forecasts, American. It is the trends in the factual data over the past 50 years which are scary. Can you point to anything in the data which shows it stopping or reversing? It is all pointing to something that is bad at best and catastrophic at worst. All the rest is bushshit. Picking up on dropping temperatures in Europe, it is worth noting that Europe sits at latitudes which elsewhere in the world north or south of the equator suffer from far harsher climates. IF one effect of global warming is a weakening of the Gulf Stream then Europe's whether will revert to type associated with its latitude which will mean very much colder in winter whilst the lack of moisture will result in arid hot summers in the south of the continent. People in the UK tend to think of New York as being roughly as far north as London- it is in fact on the same latitude as Rome and some of those places having ice crippling storms recently are as far south as Malta is. Talking of which, the skies looking north were full of typical snow clouds with a gorgeous red hue as the sun set. We then got some pretty chunky hailstones for a few minutes. The temperature here at the moment is 16 during the day and 10 at night- the sea temperature is still around 18 which keeps things pretty temperate despite the northerly winds. It needs a strong north easterly to drop the temperature to around 4 which is as cold as it gets. The weather office has a picture of the only recorded frost back in 1987.

That the climate is warming DRAMATICALLY- incontrovertible fact. How much warmer how faster- debatable but it will get warmer inevitably by virtually any method of calculation on any hypothesis The impact on life on Earth and how quickly- estimates vary from bad in our life time to civilisation-ending catastrophic by the middle of the century Non-man made causes- some solid evidence, shaky science in most cases Man-made causes- increasingly convincing mass of evidence with the shaky science being shaken out Sensible approach- accept that the world is getting warmer and man has something to do with it. I think it is pretty intuitive that if you release millions of years of stored carbon over less than 150 years, all that energy and residues are going to go somewhere and do some damage. Now comes the tricky bit- do what? I am struggling to whole heartedly embrace any of the "big schemes" knocking around as unambiguously good or helpful. Oil tars, biofuels, wind power, hydro-electric, nuclear all have big questions over just how beneficial they are on balance. The approach I would immediately take would be to focus on human behaviour and quit all our energy inefficient bad habbits. In the '70s when fuel started getting expensive, best fuel consumption went from 30 mpg to 50 mpg. Now we should be looking for the national car fleet to AVERAGE 40+ mpg in a very short period of time. Walk or use public transport where feasible. Energy efficient lighting should simply replace what we have and conventional bulbs removed from sale. Switch off when not in use when it will make a real saving. Install photo-elctric panels and water heat exchangers. Use electronic means of communication where possible. These are all things we each can do and I do. I don't know by how much this has cut my carbon footprint but I am sure these pretty easy to do, not particularly disruptive or time-consuming changes would make a very significant contribution to meeting the intial targets.

Interesting question. I doubt the Wigan players would have had such a clear run through from midfield to set up goals 1 and 2 if the Axe had been around. I suspect a return to the relegation-avoiding 4-5-1 is on the cards in which case the Axe will get a run in the team before heading off to Ghana. At least this time, we have a 1- Roque is a bit of a step up from Stead or Dickov up there.

Benni is Benni's best friend probably. Going back a while, Hughes was saying it was remarkable how there weren't cliques and how everybody sat with everybody else. That is probably under pressure now and I would tend to think our press boys are getting the goss right, albeit amplified and distorted somewhat, about three 30+ year old players being unhappy and disruptive. Let's see what the team atmosphere is like against Arsenal on Tuesday.

Granted

I think it started as a joke Mozzer. Reasons to be gloomy- Sparky ran out of ideas spectacularly at the end of his time with Wales. Reasons to be positive- if Sparky wants a stellar career this has to be a very good season because of all the hype and attention he has attracted. If Rovers tail off in the Prem and don't win a cup, I doubt Roy Keane will spend the next £20m transfer money at Sunderland as badly as the first lot and Keane would overtake Hughes as the best up and coming British manager around leaving Hughes in a Coppell-type limboland. I also think the Trustees and the Board will back Sparky 100% if he goes asking for support.

It's a tap-up if they were talking transfer. Got a feeling that when/if MGP moves on, we will look in horror and ask why couldn't he produce match winning performances when he was with us for the past n months. I think a far more plausible explanation is that MGP is sensibly looking for helpful input from wherever he can get it. SGE has a certain amount of experience of meeting people where he shouldn't so I'd guess he is more careful about where he does the business end now.

There was a 30 yard through the eye of a needle directly forwards pass by Mokoena that set up the equaliser at Spurs.