Red and Bluebeard

More likely to find lions and elephants in Tassie than tigers, I hear ... :-)

Crap, and I wouldn't work for Trump in a pink fit anyway. But it will be worth a laugh or two over the next couple of years to watch him implode ...

Trump will need an enormous cabinet, as he is in the habit of firing one person per week ...

Of course!

How about I shout you a ticket to the next Grand Final we play in then?

Sounds like the counter meal at the local rubbity ... :-)

Believe it or not, yes! I have even been to some, albeit many moons ago ...

Merry Christmas to all, and I hope we all get the present we are hoping for in late September, 2017!

Pre-season dinner? While the house is still being trained down?

Thanks OD. BTW how did the post-draft dinner go?

All good. There is no other sort of exchange on this thread!

It was 2013 that we were refused the priority pick as I recall. Sounds like we will have to agree to disagree about the rest. FWIW Jove is no hero, and the Essendon players got off lightly. But opinions differ on all topics and these are just mine.

Bozo the Clown may feel insulted by the comparison :-) One of the main things that sticks in my craw is the way he has handled the Essendon drug scandal. It shouldn't have been an issue whether or not Jobe Watson kept his Brownlow once the appeal failed. This should have been obvious to anyone with a clue, therefore ... On the broader Essendon issue, Gill has never come out and said what I think an AFL CEO should, which is that performace-enhancing drugs are banned, and that anyone found to be using them is not welcome. He has encouraged an atmosphere in which there are ready arrangements for Essendon to top-up player lists in 2016, and that the players are victims of circumstance, rather than professional athletes who are accountable for their actions. As someone said early in the Essendon saga, in what other context woud a professional sporting organisation contact the parents of the players, rather than the players themselves? It seems that the "players as innocent victims" image is practically AFL-endorsed. Where does the buck stop for that? As for the Players Association, I think he should have at least turned up for a little while. What is the AFL without the players? So at least doing something to contact them at the appropriate time seems a no-brainer to me. If nothing else, he seems to have made them feel he is the enemy, rather than someone with a similar broad interest but perhaps some differences of detail which can be discussed. To me, this is Management 101, let alone the top level of the organisation that is supposedly the leading sporting organisation in the country. He seems far more intent on making so-called 'win-win' deals than following rules, such as the way that we were denied a priority pickin 2013, but Brisbane get one. Clearly there is no consistency here. A good CEO would have articulated a general strategy or policy, and made sure it was understood by all concerned. Demitriou may have had his detractors, but there wasn't much doubt what he stood for. Whether it was a good thing or not is another matter, but to me a key duty of an AFL CEO is to articulate and maintain a publically visible direction. Gill? Enough said!

5. He is very far from the sharpest tool in the shed, and seems to always want people to agree with him. Close to useless as a CEO IMHO.

Not to mention my Front People's of Judea one ... or my Judean Front of the People one, or ...

It is a little more disturbing to think that changing the second 'o' in 'Roosey' gets to 'Romsey'

So why wasn't Rome called Romule?

Who?

Perhaps the Vatican in the time of the Borgias might be more in keeping ...

And the dogs sit and chunder all day!

Ernest, you are letting the side down, mate. Surely Greece is the home of classical antiquity! The Romans certainly had the world domination part down pat, having learned from the downfall of Alexander the Wog, and were handy at engineering, all things military, and building arches on every second corner. But when it comes to counting or calendars or democracy, I am sorry, but they suck.

Where seldom is heard, an encouraging word ...

'So give me a home, where the alpacas Rome, ... '

Can it be a coincidence that if you take 'sy' out of Romsey you get 'Rome'?

Excellent!