Divers Beware!

Mr. T weighs in on the subject of simulation in football.

Nicely Played!

Arsenal's 2-2 draw with Tottenham today means 2 things:

1. We need only 1 point from our final 3 matches to sew up a Champion's League spot.

2. Today is St. Totteringham's Day! Enjoy it.

Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off to the Whitecap's home opener in my spanky new 2006 USL Champions jersey.

Toots!

As part of my ongoing project to see as many of my ska and reggae favourites in concert as I can, I went to see Toots & the Maytals at the Commodore Ballroom last night. My concert review: Wow! Sixty one years old and the man still has it. His voice sounds just as good and soulful as it does on my recordings of him from the sixties and seventies. The audience was very much into the show, the Commodore floor was bouncing, and Toots knows how to work a crowd. "Funky Kingston" and "54-46 Was My Number" were two of the best examples of audience participation I've ever witnessed; for both he had us all singing, shouting, hopping and dancing. Those two songs, along with "Pressure Drop" and "Time Tough," and also "Monkey Man" for sheer dance energy, were the highlights of the night for me. I could have danced all night if he would have played all night; as it was I left the show sweaty and wired and very happy that I had decided to get my tired ass off the couch and go.

I Love You, My Weng Weng!

The second in an on-going series of entertaining videos of midgets from Asia:

The Doldrums or Mid-Table Mediocrity

This season has been a tough one for Arsenal supporters. Sure, there have been flashes of brilliance, a spanky new stadium, a lesser cup final and a view of great things to come, but for the most part this season has been a write off. Too many injured players, too many suspensions, too many early goals allowed, and way too many missed chances have combined to put us in the position of struggling to hold on to the fourth Champion's League spot. So this is what mid-table mediocrity feels like. And really it isn't so bad: If we're fourth, there are sixteen teams behind us. And even though we lost the Carling Cup final, sixteen or seventeen other teams won't play in a cup final this season. We expect more from our team, but that is because of the dizzying heights (yes, I said it) we've reached over the past decade. The last time we finished below fourth was 1996. Of the past ten seasons, only twice have we been out of the top two, we've won the league 3 times, the FA cup 4 times, 2 doubles, and played in a Uefa Cup final and a Champion's league final. Throw in an unbeaten season and a 49 game unbeaten stretch to boot, all the while playing some of the most attractive football around. But while Arsenal is experiencing this one-off (I trust) bad season, for the large majority of football supporters every season is like this or much worse. By the mid point of the season, most teams have almost nothing to play for, save for those far enough down the table to have a relegation battle on their hands. Chelsea who are currently buoyed by billions of Russian roubles are flying high, but before this run they hadn't won the league for 50 years. That means there are Chelsea supporters that if they started supporting the club when they were young boys, wouldn't have experienced the joy of being champions until they were well into their fifties. There are also football supporters whose teams will probably never win the league, yet they still keep going. And good for them, I say.

Cheddarvision!

Alternate Title: Why the internet is a beautiful, wonderful, and mysterious place...

I was reading an article on the Guardian website about some of the most boring webcams on the internet today and learned of what must surely be the cream of the crop. It is called Cheddarvision. The Cheddarvision website has a webcam that is focused on a wheel of cheddar cheese that is aging. It is aging. You can go to the website and watch a wheel of cheddar cheese age. That is even better than watching paint dry, which you can do at www.watching-paint-dry.com. If you're the impatient sort and don't want to watch a wheel of cheddar age in real time, you can watch the time lapse video of the first 3 months of aging here. It gets very exciting when someone puts a sticker on the cheese which later falls askew and then later still is re-aligned and so on and so forth . Also, I think at one point someone stuck a red clown's nose on the cheese. Everyone, even the cheesemaker, is a comedian apparently.

This has got me thinking of the webcams I could set up around my house. I could have the moss-growing-on-the-deck-cam. That would have been very entertaining last Saturday as I scrubbed some of it away. Or the dust-collecting-behind-my-bedroom-door-cam. Dust collection punctuated by me sweeping it away every few days. Or even the what-is-in-my-fruit-bowl?-cam. Right now, it has two navel oranges and two spartan apples. Two days ago it had an orange, an avocado, and a tomato. See the possibilities? I think the best one, though, would be, and this would take some fancy engineering and a tiny transportable camera, the how-big-is-the-cyst-on-my-eyelid?-cam. Yes, I'll work on that one.