Nerd before it was cool, one time sportsman. Aspiring spine tinkerer and full time dad. All views my own and nothing to do with whoever is my employer.
Northern
Joined April 2012
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Phil retweeted
Liverpool Collegiate Juniors Benefit from Generous Scrum Sled Donation #Pitchero
liverpoolcollegiaterugby.com…
Phil retweeted
An AI platform that builds 3D bone visualization from a standard spine MRI just received FDA 510(k) clearance. MRI2CT's NextMR works from conventional 1.5T and 3T studies, runs in the cloud, and returns bone morphology in under a minute. The pitch: surgical planning without the extra CT — less radiation, less cost, one fewer appointment.
The direction is right. One scan doing the job of two is exactly where imaging should go, and for younger patients especially, every CT we can skip matters.
The caveat: the announcement includes no published accuracy data.
If this class of tool proves out in spine, trauma applications will not be far behind.
diagnosticimaging.com/view/f…
A thing of beauty.
Vakh Abdaladze scoring the type of try that most props lie to their kids about scoring.
#ProD2
Phil retweeted
Best college football movie of all time.
Steve Lattimer said it best:
"I don't know, its the battle, the going to war with the other guys, hanging together, having our own dorm, staying in hotels the night before the games, setting ourselves apart, being different than everybody else, having a chance to be somebody, to do something that people look up to you for, your strength, your courage, not everybody can play football...we're the lucky ones."
s/o @stojk9 Cc: @KennethBoyd80
33 years ago today, “The Program” premiered
Starring @halleberry & @omarepps,
this college football movie told a different side of the NCAA grossing $23M off a $17M budget being regarded as 1 of the best football films
Is this a Top 3 Football movie to you? 🤔
Phil retweeted
Hi Grassroots, I wasn't going to write this but I wanted to get it off my chest. It’s the last few days of the summer holidays. We’re trying to enjoy a bank holiday away and spend some much-needed time together as a family.
But my husband—a volunteer grassroots coach—has just received a lengthy message from a parent saying their child has had a “better offer” and won’t be returning.
The season starts in a few days.
There had been no problem, no warning and no conversation. The only obvious difference is that the new team has the word “Academy” in its name.
Now he has almost no time to find another player, reorganise the team or make sure the remaining children aren’t affected.
He’s sitting here absolutely devastated when he should be relaxing with his family.
Because to you, it might be one message and a move to another team.
To him, it’s the child he has coached, encouraged and cared about. It’s the hours spent planning sessions, gaining qualifications, arranging fixtures, registering players, washing kit, maintaining pitches and making sure every child feels valued.
It’s the evenings he has sacrificed, the weekends he has given up and the money he has quietly spent when the team needed something.
Volunteer coaches don’t simply turn up for an hour. They carry their teams with them every day.
They talk about the players at home. They worry about their confidence. They celebrate their progress. They give up precious family time because they genuinely care.
Of course, children can move teams. But please remember there is a human being on the other end of that message—someone who has invested far more than you may ever realise.
A conversation and a little notice cost nothing.
Grassroots coaches give so much to our children. The very least we can give them in return is honesty, respect and a little consideration. ⚽️
Phil retweeted
sometimes it just boggles the mind
of all the causative claims that exist in all of oncology (including "smoking causes lung cancer") NONE have more CAUSATIVE EVIDENCE than "HPV causes cancer"
NOT ONLY That, but the hpv vaccine has direct proof that it prevents cancer. EVERY WOMAN in Scotland born 1988–1996 was linked with their vaccination records to the national cancer registry and among those vaccinated at age 12–13, ZERO of invasive cervical cancer. Not "reduced." NONE.
unavailable
Phil retweeted
Yes, Jeremy Clarkson bought his farm partly for the inheritance tax break. He has said so himself. Now sit with what that admission actually proves.
The line gets thrown at him constantly. He told the Sunday Times in 2021 that avoiding inheritance tax was the critical thing in buying the land. Cornered by the BBC in 2024, he shrugged that the tax relief comes with the benefit, and said people like him will simply put the farm in a trust, live seven years, and pay nothing regardless.
The critics think that quote is their trump card. It is the opposite. It is a confession to the exact thing the show is about.
Because ask the obvious question. Why was farmland, for decades, one of the best ways for a wealthy man to shelter his money from the taxman?
It was not sentiment. It was deliberate policy. Farmland was exempted from inheritance tax for one reason: a family farm is worth millions on paper and earns almost nothing in cash, so taxing it at death would force the family to sell the land just to pay the bill. The exemption existed to stop farms being broken up every single generation. It was the one thing keeping the family farm in the family.
So a rich man sheltering his fortune in farmland is not exploiting a loophole. He is standing inside the proof that farming does not pay. Nobody parks money in an asset that earns a real return and escapes tax at the same time, because no such asset exists. You get the return or you get the shelter. Farmland offered the shelter precisely because it never offered the return.
That is the whole argument of the show in one line. A thousand acres made £144. A fortune to buy, a pittance to work.
Then in October 2024 the government scrapped the relief on farms over a million pounds, and the mask slipped. The same politicians who spent years calling it a rich man's perk suddenly needed you to believe those same farms were poor family concerns that would barely be touched. They cannot have it both ways. Either farmland is a shelter for the wealthy, or it is the threadbare livelihood of families who will have to sell fields to pay a death bill. It was always the second. The relief existed because it was the second.
And none of this dents the message.
He has since said the tax line was a joke, that he really bought the place to shoot, and only led with inheritance tax because admitting to pheasants sounded worse. Untangle it how you like. It changes nothing, because in the same breath he confirmed the relief was real and that he would use a trust to sidestep the new charge. The man is rich. He had mixed motives. Pheasants, money, a television show, all of it, admitted with a grin.
It does not matter, because the numbers on the screen are real. The £144 is real. The drowned crop is real. The council that shut the restaurant is real. The subsidy that vanished overnight is real. A messenger's motives do not change a message you can verify with your own eyes over four series.
They want you to throw out the evidence because you dislike the witness.
The witness bought a farm for a tax break that existed because farms do not make money. He could not have proven the point better if he had tried.
Phil retweeted
Jeremy Clarkson made £144 farming a thousand acres in his first year.
In year six he lost five thousand.
His own words to his land agent: dispiriting enough to clear a hundred and forty-four quid at the start, and here we are six years on, down five grand. The harvest had been projected at thirty-seven thousand profit. Weather and prices took it.
Now look at what that thousand acres has behind it that yours does not.
One of the best land agents in the country. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. A farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, bestselling books, more than a quarter of a million in subsidy across three years, and a television production paying for the entire thing to be filmed.
It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and the farming still loses money.
That figure should end every conversation about British agriculture, and it is the one number that never makes it onto a campaign graphic. Not the glyphosate. Not the pig housing. The margin.
Because everything people object to on a farm grows straight out of it. The field pushed to the very edge. The hedge that came out because the government paid to have it removed. The shed instead of the yard. The supermarket contract signed below cost because the alternative was no contract. Nobody intensified out of malice. They were priced into it over sixty years by a policy that decided cheap groceries mattered more than a countryside, and by a retail sector that kept the difference.
Britain now grows around sixty per cent of its own food. More than a third of British farmers are past sixty-five.
The man with the Amazon cheque cannot make a thousand acres pay.
The seventy-year-old with three hundred and no film crew is doing it anyway, and being told by people who have never sold a tonne of anything that he is the problem.
Phil retweeted
Consultants in England are “quiet quitting” or looking to escape to Canada and Australia because they feel undervalued and disrespected, senior NHS doctors warn
bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026…
youtube.com/watch?v=_OGSli92…
Phil retweeted
If the news of Shaun Edwards parting ways with France rugby are true you’d hope Bill Sweeney has the cojones to pick up the phone and offer him a 5 year deal to run through the next 2 World Cups. We can’t miss out on him again!
Phil retweeted
Win 2 Nights in York
To enter simply like, RT, drop York in the comments. Finally give us a follow on instagram for when we announce the winner ❤️
For all the people re-xraying torus fractures ‘for the parents’
This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
Phil retweeted
And me! I’m a woman too, but I am not on anyone’s slate. Nobody is pulling my strings.
Phil retweeted
MPs pay rise should be in line with the lowest public sector pay rise they offer
If it is good enough and affordable for themselves it should be for all
MPs are accepting a pay rise of 5% bringing themselves up to £98k meanwhile expecting NHS workers in England to accept 3.3%.
There is always enough money for a nice MP payrise sonehow...
We deserve more than 3.3% after years of below inflation awards.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgv…
Phil retweeted
"I’ve been watching an absolutely heroic amount of pearl-clutching lately from people who insist that J.D. Vance would somehow be “worse” than Trump once Trump’s inevitable political and biological expiration arrives.
Let’s get something straight: it has never been about Trump, not for one second.
Trump is just the mascot. The real story is the people who finally saw themselves in him and felt validated by what they saw.
I actually believe most of them will drift away when the cult collapses, like embarrassed fans of a one-hit wonder. Many of them will swear they were never really into him at all. The MAGA amnesia is going to be epic.
I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is.
I don’t wonder anymore.
I think he won for that exact reason.
He wasn’t a candidate. He was a mirror.
If you were a racist, you found your guy.
If you were a misogynist, you found your guy.
If money was your only religion, you found your guy.
If your heart was armored shut, you found your guy.
If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy.
If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy.
If you were a rapist, you found your guy.
If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy.
If you’d done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy.
If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy.
If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy.
If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy.
If you were a conman, you found your guy.
If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy.
If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy.
If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy.
If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy.
If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy.
If you’d never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy.
If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy.
If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy.
If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy.
If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one.
This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated.
Trump didn’t create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate.
He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity.
If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”
That’s the part that should chill the spine.
Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power?
Perhaps we were living in a fool’s paradise.
We aren’t anymore."
— Michael Jochum
Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art,
Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.
