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.

Spit Out Your Coffee Funny!

I was just reading Richard Dawkins' thus far excellent The God Delusion when I came to this passage:

The journalist Andrew Mueller is of the opinion that pledging yourself to any particular religion 'is no more or less weird than choosing to believe that the world is rhombus-shaped, and borne through the cosmos in the pincers of two enormous green lobsters called Esmerelda and Keith.'

It was at the point of reading the word Keith and realising the absurdity of a lobster named Keith, or the unlikely pairing of an Esmerelda with a Keith that I had just taken a sip of too hot espresso. The espresso almost made it's way out of my mouth and onto the pages of the book, but I managed to hold it in, though I burnt my tongue in the process. But what was I to do? It was a library book.

The Language of World Domination...

I saw Ken Loach's excellent film The Wind that Shakes the Barley last night, which I highly recommend. There was a song in the film that a group of republican soldiers were singing as they walked through the mist or fog on their way to an ambush which was also used in the final credits. The tune was vaguely familiar and the words were in, I assumed, Irish Gaelic, though a few of them sounded recognizable as English words. The song got into my head, so when I got home I started searching on the Internet and found out this was the song in question:

Óró, Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile

I also found it written as:

Ó Ró Sé Do Bheata Bhaile
Óró, 's É Do Bheatha 'Bhaile
Oro Se Do Bheatha Abhaile
Oró sea de bheatha bhaile

And so on and so forth, etc. Anyone care to try pronouncing that?

Now, I understand there are often different ways of transcribing a language into a non-native alphabet, what with varying dialects/pronunciations etc., and it can take time and effort to get there, but if you are going to adopt that non-native alphabet (whether voluntarily or by conquest), get there you should. All of the Germanic languages that once used runic scripts now use the Latin or Roman alphabet, (Icelandic excluded, they're doing their own thing). It probably took a while for those languages to be, if not understood by others, at least legible to others. Which brings me to my point. In the way that the Welsh never got anywhere because of their ridiculous coracles, the Irish were never really able to dominate the world in any way, because they were entirely incomprehensible. Sure the language has a nice lilt to it and it looks cool and I'll even go so far as to say it's useful...if it's a secret code and you don't want anyone to be able to understand a bleeding thing you've written. Or even have a clue where to begin to figure out how to understand a bleeding thing you've written. And so:


Dear Ireland,

Orthographic reform. It's time.

Sincerely,

TOGM

P.S. We'll even let you have funny symbols over and around your letters like the Swedes and the Vietnamese.

Lies!

Golden Delicious Apples. They are not particularly golden and they are certainly not delicious.

In other news that has not much to do with anything, I may have been jumping the gun a little, but I wore flip-flops for the first time this year, last night. Bring on the nice weather.

Get out of my head!

I was at a party on Saturday night, a party where people were singing karaoke. Someone was singing a Madonna song to which I knew all of the lyrics. That made me realise: I begrudge her the space in my brain that is taken up by her crappy pop songs and all of the other stupid, crappy pop songs that are in my brain, not because I choose for them to be there but because they are ubiquitous. Aarrgghhhh! Now go away.

Many Thanks!

To whomever read my blog yesterday and made the rain stop, I thank you with all of my heart. It was sunny and beautiful today.

Re: The Rain

Someone please make it stop. Now. Please. Please.

Pizza Of The Day!

I like pizza as much as Sparky likes prime numbers, which is a lot. Happy 37th muchacho!


Today's pizza has marinated tofu, spinach, tomatoes, green olives and garlic. And if you'll excuse me, I will now go eat it.

So What!

I found this video over on Parkdale Pictures and it blew me away. I've listened to the tune many times, but seeing Miles & Trane et al. perform it live makes it that much better...

Too much cold!

For some reason that I am unable to figure out my refrigerator is much, much too cold, as evidenced by:
I have it turned as low as it goes and by low I actually mean high which could be confusing. Let's say instead it is as close to cold as it can be without being off while coldest is at the other end of the dial. I've even turned the freezer down. I just don't know. All of my leafy green things, my tofu, and now my yogurt is frozen. It's too much.

In other ice related news, today being NHL trade deadline day, I freed up my morning in case any teams were trying to get in touch with me, but the deadline has passed and I've heard nothing.

Done and done!

I just finished War & Peace, all 1444 pages of it. I should celebrate with a glass of vodka. Budem zdorovy! Vast in scope, it is at times gripping and compelling, other times beautiful and heart-rending, and, not surprising considering it's length, at times just plain old long-winded. I've got to say, the most difficult part to read was the final 44 pages when rather than tie everything up with a nice little bow, our dear Count Leo decided to write an essay expounding his theories on history, historiography, and free will vs. the laws of necessity. Now that this book is done, I'm not sure what is next on my reading list; either James Joyce's Ulysses or Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy.

RRSP

I learned some very disturbing, upsetting, and let's be quite honest, distressing news today. I met with my financial advisor this afternoon. And while everything seems to be going fine, I will, sadly, very sadly, not be able to retire at 35. I'm still dealing with that shock right now. I don't know what else to say. Maybe 40?

Earthquake!

I woke up sometime early this morning to my whole room and bed shaking from an earthquake. I then fell back asleep. When I woke up again I wasn't sure if there had been an earthquake and I woke up from it or if I dreamt an earthquake and then woke up or if I dreamt both the earthquake and the waking up. I'm still not sure. I've not heard anything about it on the news or from other people which makes me think I dreamt it, but at the same time, it felt pretty real. Did anyone else notice it or was it a figment of my imagination?

Snowshoeing!

It's great how, at least for me, getting out into the cold and snow can alleviate west coast inspired S.A.D. Yesterday in Vancouver was grey, drizzly, and all around miserable, as it has been for the past while. Or at least it feels like that. Anyhow, I went snowshoeing on Cypress yesterday with the J-Mac 9000 and what should have been a crap day turned into a great one. As heavy as it was raining down here it was snowing up there. The temperature was just below zero and there was lots of fresh snow. A few times in the past while snowshoeing I've felt that as much as I liked having them I didn't really require them as the snow was already packed down but yesterday they actually felt necessary. We followed a trail up through the woods to the Upper Warming Hut which was indeed a hut but not all that warm. After a little lunch break there we continued our tour by heading a bit further up Hollyburn then through winding and hilly trails in a big loop back to the base camp. We passed a couple of lookouts but visibility was so poor we ended up looking out into a wall of fog. No matter, just being out in the snow invigorated me. And there was hot chocolate at the end.

Pizza Of The Day

Today's pizza has tomato sauce, mozzarella, jerk tofu, red peppers, mushrooms, garlic, green olives, parmesan, and, yes, capers.