Aston Villa vs Newcastle United pre match thread

[Baldy]

What about an African swallow?

Doesn't make an African summer.

But it does make an African gulp.

[Risso]

What about an African swallow?

Doesn't make an African summer.

But it does make an African gulp.

Or reverse.

[PeterWithe]

For me, karma doesn't deliver or demand justice, it just requires recognition of interdependence.

But such concepts have no business interrupting my laughing at Newcastle 😉

Ah, a karma chameleon.

Thats a terrible pun. Karma Police, arrest this man. He buzzes like a fridge.

[Risso]

Bit of traffic news for anybody who usually goes back on the southbound M6. It's shut from junction 4 to 3 southbound all weekend, so if that's how you usually get home you'll have to find another route.

[chrisw1]

Them getting relegated when they'd wanted to gloat will always be very very funny.

It was.  It was brilliant.  Particularly as they came with banners etc - 'who are the clowns now'  A tiny bit of light in a very dark season.

[RamboandBruno]

I went on a few of their forums last night. Despite trying, i couldn’t find any humility nevermind a philosophical discussion on the nature of luck. Virtually every post I read about the match on Saturday, was ‘we’re shit’, ‘we’ve had a good run but only played shit’, ‘they are going to batter us’, they f***ing hate us’…..it goes on and on, endless noise and a complete lack of any awareness.

I hope even more than before that we get an Emery tactical masterclass, luck and all.

H&V really is a heady place in comparison.

[LeeB]

I went on a few of their forums last night. Despite trying, i couldn’t find any humility nevermind a philosophical discussion on the nature of luck. Virtually every post I read about the match on Saturday, was ‘we’re shit’, ‘we’ve had a good run but only played shit’, ‘they are going to batter us’, they f***ing hate us’…..it goes on and on, endless noise and a complete lack of any awareness.

I hope even more than before that we get an Emery tactical masterclass, luck and all.

H&V really is a heady place in comparison.

It makes me laugh when I look on other teams forums before we meet and they always cite someone being a bit of a div on Villa Talk as what we are all like.

[Mister E]

Fuck my old boots, could somebody please start a punathon to stop the endless luck definitions?

You should be so lucky, lucky, lucky lucky.

Anyone read 'The Diceman'?

... it's all in the roll of the dice.

[pauliewalnuts]

Fuck my old boots, could somebody please start a punathon to stop the endless luck definitions?

You should be so lucky, lucky, lucky lucky.

Anyone read 'The Diceman'?

... it's all in the roll of the dice.

I read that book as a kid and absolutely loved it.

I sometimes think about re-reading it as I'd not be entirely sure how it'd stack up decades later.

[Mister E]

Fuck my old boots, could somebody please start a punathon to stop the endless luck definitions?

You should be so lucky, lucky, lucky lucky.

Anyone read 'The Diceman'?

... it's all in the roll of the dice.

I read that book as a kid and absolutely loved it.
I sometimes think about re-reading it as I'd not be entirely sure how it'd stack up decades later.

Yeah, I read it in my teens and thought it was really good.
Go read it and review it, Paulie!

[pauliewalnuts]

Bit of traffic news for anybody who usually goes back on the southbound M6. It's shut from junction 4 to 3 southbound all weekend, so if that's how you usually get home you'll have to find another route.

That's pretty unbelievable - the last weekend of the Easter holidays, loads of people coming home from hols, bit of closed motorway right in the middle of the country.

[purpletrousers]

Bit of traffic news for anybody who usually goes back on the southbound M6. It's shut from junction 4 to 3 southbound all weekend, so if that's how you usually get home you'll have to find another route.

I was starting to smile about you railing against the definitions by randomly sharing traffic news, a la nice weather today innit. Then I realised this is real info. And it affects me. What bad luck.

[LeeB]

Bit of traffic news for anybody who usually goes back on the southbound M6. It's shut from junction 4 to 3 southbound all weekend, so if that's how you usually get home you'll have to find another route.

I was starting to smile about you railing against the definitions by randomly sharing traffic news, a la nice weather today innit. Then I realised this is real info. And it affects me. What bad luck.

You're gonna have the Geordies coming down the M42 as well so better diverting south past Cov

[pablo_picasso]

"Luck" & "karma" are merely labels we place on events that are always explainable somewhere down the line. Hitting the post is called "unlucky". But it isn't. Its just poor accuracy from the shooter. An incorrect red card is called "unlucky" for one side & lucky for the other, but its just poor refereeing. As for "karma", we as humans tend to see patterns in life. We like to think that something good happening to a good person is due to good karma, yet we ignore when bad things happen to those same good people. We like to think that bad things happen to bad people, yet we ignore when good things happen to bad people. And most of the time, we don't even notice. We sometimes count the hits, yet mostly ignore the misses. Its selection bias, statistical fallacy, whatever one wants to call it. Religious folk do it all the time. Its a "miracle" when Mrs. Johnson survives her car crash. Ignoring the fact that she got in the car crash in the first place...

Your angle on karma is filtered through a Judeo-Christian prioritisation of individual fortunes, so the whole post is about 'luck', not karma - which is fair enough.

(Glenn Hoddle is one of the worst things to happen to Western perceptions of karma.)

I tend to follow Rory's version of karma here. I don't think it needs to be tied to a particular god/life force/... - you can have a secular concept where you have some kind of indirect benefit from being nice to others, because overall it makes the environment/community you live in nicer.
Same applies to a load of religious concepts I find. You can easily have secular versions of the same morality tales of you particularly want them.


None of this should detract from the fact that Newcastle getting relegated at Villa Park twice was funny as fuck, though.

Tbh, that is the stance I take. My individual happiness revolves around the group happiness, therefore, I try to be nice, so that my environment is good. Not everybody subscribes to that mantra, which is where the balance fails & where "good" & "evil" come into play. Most of the "good" & "evil" choices we make, all tend to boil down to us trying our best to find personal happiness.

But yeah, Newcastle being relegated twice at our place was funny & its even funnier that a lot of them still cannot get over the banter that a few of our fans gave them..

[Clark W Griswold]

Fuck my old boots, could somebody please start a punathon to stop the endless luck definitions?

You should be so lucky, lucky, lucky lucky.

Anyone read 'The Diceman'?

... it's all in the roll of the dice.

I read that book as a kid and absolutely loved it.
I sometimes think about re-reading it as I'd not be entirely sure how it'd stack up decades later.

Yeah, I read it in my teens and thought it was really good.
Go read it and review it, Paulie!

Andrew 'Diceman' Clay? Surely one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.