CaaC (John)

New Horizons: Nasa waits for a signal from Ultima Thule probe By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent 3 hours ago The American space agency's New Horizons probe is in the midst of an encounter with a giant ball of ice and dust nicknamed Ultima Thule. The flyby, taking place 6.5 billion km from Earth, is the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object. New Horizons should be filling its memory banks right now with a swathe of photos and other scientific data. Once the probe has gone past Ultima, it will turn to radio home a status report that should arrive at 15:28 GMT. This initial contact ought to give controllers a good idea of how New Horizons performed as it swept over the 30km-wide world just 3,500km from its surface. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46699737

Happy headache New Year from Bonnie Scotland, just dragged myself out of bed.

Bloody hell, poor old Jose ex-United manager was given a one-match ban for kicking plastic bottles. Unai Emery: Arsenal boss fined £8,000 by FA for kicking water bottle towards fans 3 hours ago | Arsenal Arsenal manager Unai Emery has been fined £8,000 by the Football Association for kicking a bottle which hit a Brighton fan during last week's Premier League match between the sides. The FA charged Emery with improper conduct following the incident near the end of the 1-1 draw on 26 December. The Spaniard apologised for the incident, which was not included in the officials' match report. "I said to them I'm sorry," Emery said after the game. "It wasn't hard but it touched one supporter." An FA spokesperson said Emery had "accepted the standard penalty". Speaking after the game, Emery told reporters he hoped the apology would be the end of the matter. "I kicked the bottle in frustration but not at the supporters, not with this intention. It's circumstances. I apologized. I hope it's the end of the matter, yes," he said. Former Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho was given a one-match ban after being sent off for kicking a water bottle down the touchline during his side's Premier League game against West Ham in 2016. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/46720401

By the way, @Cannabis was this you in Edinburgh meeting our youngest grandson Kaiden who is a Super Mario fan

Bloody hell, you have been in my neck of the woods, went to Edinburgh zoo years ago but I don't like seeing certain animals caged up nowadays and have not been since.

Outside a police station knowing @Cannabis

Barcelona deny illegal approach for Paris St-Germain's Adrien Rabiot 5 hours ago | European Football Barcelona has denied making an illegal approach for Paris St-Germain midfielder Adrien Rabiot - but are interested in signing the player. The 23-year-old is out of contract at the end of the season so can speak to other clubs when the transfer window opens on 1 January. According to reports, the Spanish club has already been in contact with the player via his representatives. But that would breach transfer rules so the club has issued a denial. A Barca statement insisted "there was no breach of regulations regarding the signing of PSG players". It added: "The only contacts were carried out last August and now a week ago. In both cases, the contacts took place with the sports managers of PSG. FC Barcelona always wanted to work from the highest level of transparency with PSG and with any other club." Rabiot has recently fallen out of favor at PSG with sporting director Antero Henrique telling Yahoo Sports France he would not play for the French champions again unless he signed a new contract. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/46716663

Finished the Lee Child - Jack Reacher - 'Past Tense' book, good read as per normal now reading...

Hopefully me too without a hangover

Nasa's New Horizons: Excitement ahead of Ultima Thule flyby 1 hour ago History will be made on Tuesday when Nasa's New Horizons probe sweeps past the icy world known as Ultima Thule. Occurring some 6.5 billion km (4 billion miles) from Earth, the flyby will set a new record for the most distant ever exploration of a Solar System object by a spacecraft. New Horizons will gather a swathe of images and other data over the course of just a few hours leading up to and beyond the closest approach. This is timed for 05:33 GMT. At that moment, the probe will be about 3,500km from Ultima's surface and moving at 14km/s.

Not to worry, it's just a saying, Kevin Keegan was strange as a manager leaving Newcastle twice then quitting as England manager just because they lost to Germany if I remember right so really you could class him as a bottler Mind you I do not blame him for leaving Newcastle the second time as they had and still have an arse of an owner in Ashley who got Keegan back and then made Dennis Wise as his Director of Football overseeing Keegan, fucking stupid then Ashley is thick as two planks of wood.

Lol, with SAF in charge of United and what he had won before the 97/98 season I don't think you could call United bottlers and remember the famous treble after the 97/98 season where we won nothing, 1998/99 we made up for that barren season and won the League, European Cup & FA Cup, not bad for bottlers if you could call them that.

For the life of me I just can't see how Keegan lost the plot with the Newcastle side he had then with Warren Barton, Peter Beardsley, Les Ferdinand, Faustino Aspilla, David Ginola and he even got Alan Shearer for a world record £15 mill. in the team, some players they were.

That was some game that, I remember Keegan dropping his head in the dug-out when Collymore hit the winner, my son was only 20 then and got pissed as a newt that night with his college pals because Liverpool had won.

@Harvsky would more than likely answer that better but I dug this up from Wikipedia. Newcastle led the league for virtually all of the season from August until mid-March, and by Christmas had established a 10-point lead over Manchester United. Though they lost 2-0 at Old Trafford on 27 December, they still managed to extend this lead to 12 points on 20 January 1996, putting them in prime position for the title with 15 matches remaining. However, Manchester United – bolstered by the return of Eric Cantona from suspension – then enjoyed a surge in form, while Newcastle dropped vital points away to West Ham and Manchester City. A 1-0 win for Alex Ferguson's team at St James' Park on 4 March ended Newcastle's 100% home record in the league and cut their lead to a single point, and further away defeats at Arsenal, Liverpool and Blackburn Rovers allowed Manchester United to overtake them and establish a lead that would ultimately prove decisive. Ferguson's mind games added further heat to the title race and provoked an infamous rant from Keegan live on Sky Sports on 29 April 1996, following his team's 1-0 win at Leeds United. A 1-1 draw at Nottingham Forest three days later left Newcastle needing to beat Tottenham Hotspur, and Manchester United needing to lose against Middlesbrough, if the title was to return to Tyneside for the first time since 1927. In the end, a 1-1 draw proved academic as Manchester United beat the Teessiders 3-0, thus winning by four points. Nonetheless, Newcastle's second place was their highest finish for decades – and a far cry from the position they had been in when Keegan had taken over four years earlier and third-tier football was looking inevitable. Not to be deterred in his quest to bring the title back to Tyneside, Keegan purchased Newcastle-born striker Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers for a world-record fee of £15 million. However, he would resign as manager in January 1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995–96_Newcastle_United_F.C._season

I had edited and corrected my original post just before you posted this lol, I realized I had the wrong table up

I know Kevin Keegan is not a Jürgen Klopp and Newcastle are not a Liverpool but I remember in January 1996 when Keegan's Newcastle held a 12 point lead at the top of the table, and I know at this current time Man United are not a Man City but at the end of the season in 1996 a Manchester club ended up champions, just a thought. Edit: Had the wrong table up at first, corrected

Hangman with Al Pacino, not bad but I have seen him act in better movies, 7/10.

Jesus, he gave up the role of the Director of England Cricket in October because "citing a wish to spend more time with his wife while she was undergoing treatment for cancer." she was only 46 when she passed away. R.I.P. Ruth, my thoughts go out to Andrew and all the loved ones you left behind.

Daenerys’ Dragons Are Not Actually Dragons Chris Edwards 22 hrs ago © HBO Daenerys Targaryen's dragons in Game of Thrones aren't actually dragons after all. So here's a meaningless but interesting Game of Thrones fact for your Christmas holiday: Daenerys Targaryen's dragons aren't actually dragons. As pointed out by an eagle-eyed Reddit user, the mythical creatures in the drama can't actually be dragons as a dragon is meant to have four legs and two wings. Instead, Daenerys' fire-breathing pets fit the description of 'wyverns', which have two legs and two wings, using the wings as an extra pair of legs. So she's not the Mother of Dragons. She's actually the Mother of Wyverns. Less of a ring to it, really. The Reddit post has received over 2,000 responses from people whose minds, of course, have been blown. And on the topic of fantasy wildlife, George RR Martin may have given us reason to believe that season 8 of the show might just feature massive ice spiders. The A Song of Ice and Fire author recently posted a picture of the terrifying ice spiders talked about in Westeros legend by Old Nan to Bran. The picture is for a 2020 calendar, which depicts white walkers riding the terrifying beasts (side note: do they really plan calendars that far ahead?). Could this mean that the upcoming final season of the show will depict the creatures roaming the land? They certainly wouldn't look out of place... After all, we're expecting a big showdown between the humans and the White Walkers, and with an ice dragon in tow, why not just bung in a few massive ice spiders to make everything even more chaotic? https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/tv/daenerys’-dragons-are-not-actually-dragons/ar-BBRwrKV?li=BBoPWjQ

Still working fine with me but I am using my laptop not mobile? I do what I normally do and 'click' the 'copy image address' and just paste it onto the post and it attaches ok, have you tried clearing your browser (cookies etc)?

Madagascar pochard: World's rarest bird gets a new home By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News 4 hours ago The rarest bird in the world - a species of duck called the Madagascar pochard - has been given a new home in time for the new year. An international team of researchers released 21 of the birds at a lake in the north of Madagascar. It is a step towards the recovery of a species that just over a decade ago was thought to be extinct. Rescuing the species could also be a first step in protecting Madagascar's threatened wetlands. Wetland habitats in the country have been so polluted and damaged that these few remaining birds had been forced into this last untouched area. But, as Rob Shaw, head of conservation programmes at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) explained to BBC News, they were only "clinging on to existence in a place not really suited to them". Their last pristine refuge was too deep and too cold for the pochards to thrive. "The threats that they face across the rest of Madagascar - and why they've been wiped out so extensively - are vast," explained Rob Shaw. "They range from sedimentation, invasive species, pollution, poor agricultural practices - a whole suite of problems that create the perfect storm making it very difficult for a species like the Madagascar pochard to survive." In a painstaking effort - it has taken more than a decade of work. The international team, which included WWT, Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, The Peregrine Fund and the Government of Madagascar, rescued a clutch of pochard eggs and raised them in captivity. They then scoured Madagascar for the best site to bring the captive-bred birds back to the wild, settling on Lake Sofia in the north of the country. The team has worked closely with the local communities around the lake that rely on its water, fish and plants, as WWT's Nigel Jarrett explained: "It takes a village to raise a child, so the old African proverb goes - but in this case, it has taken a village to raise a duck. We have been preparing for this moment for over a decade. "Working with local communities to solve the issues which were driving this bird to extinction has been essential to giving the pochard a chance of survival." The team hopes that making this reintroduction a success - and bringing back a bird that was on the very brink of extinction - will provide a powerful example, not just for how to save the most threatened species but how communities can support both people and wildlife in such valuable habitats, even in areas of significant poverty. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46703335