cliché bingo

New on unmarked nuclear warheads travel these roads: Football Commentator Cliché Bingo!

New in the life of eldan: time for bed.

posted @ 10:08 PM -

so the USA are out now as well. Today the football has stopped going the way I wanted it to.... I went downstairs to watch the last 15 minutes or so, and thought the Americans looked outstanding, and by far the better team, but it's a funny old game. Speaking of which, the outstanding performance of the day has to have come from the BBC's commentator, who as I was walking out of the auditorium managed to compose a sentence entirely from clichés.

Coming up next week (hopefully in time for the semi-finals) on unmarked nuclear warheads: cliché bingo. Please contribute your favourite football commentator clichés for me to include in the game.

posted @ 10:04 AM -

USA v Germany

I never thought I'd be saying or typing the following:

U.S.A. ! U.S.A. ! U.S.A. !

Gasp as the whole of England becomes filled with USA fans for 2 hours! Cringe as this is all forgotten soon afterwards!

And anyone who thinks the US football establishment is naïve must take note: Bruce Arena clearly understands the mind-games side of football.

posted @ 7:09 AM -

OK, so I was working, but someone just sent me this and it distracted me: India's maddest football fan?

posted @ 7:08 AM -

Just a few final things before I get back to work:

The Guardian on how the footballing world has changed.

David Beckham at Lord Nelson's feet

And a really lovely article from Korea: Let's Play Together Next Time, Chairman Kim!

posted @ 6:52 AM -

Important world news courtesy of peacedividend:

Seal rescues dog, and (presumably not the same one) Seal breaches San Francisco airport security.

posted @ 6:46 AM -

OK, so I can't bring myself to say nothing about that football game. I'm not too upset, partly because how seriously I take football is very selective - unless I'm actually at a game I tend only to take it seriously when the side I support do well - and partly because there's no dishonour for the England team in exceeding expectations and then going to a Brazil who seem to have just found their form. The ref was frankly bonkers, but there's no way he can be accused of denying England the game, having been even-handed in his incomprehensibility. There was a spell of about 10 minutes when I felt like every decision went Brazil's way, but it was straight after Ronaldinho (who had been Brazil's most individually impressive player until then) was sent off for no apparent reason, so I couldn't help thinking the ref realised he'd made a mistake and was trying to cancel it out. I hope that was his last ever international match though.

All this time it's worth remembering that England had one of the youngest squads and youngest starting 11s (except for Seaman, but Martyn only needs another couple of years' experience to be as good) in the tournament. Bring on EURO 2004!

And meanwhile, I'm just hoping Turkey manage to get through to the semis and avenge Rivaldo's ridiculous stunt against them in the group stage by roundly thrashing them. Can't see it happening, but quite a few things that no-one could have seen happening have already....

posted @ 6:35 AM -

posted @ 4:42 AM -

Having had that little discussion with an ignorant lady of the Daily Mail reading sort the other day about immigrants, it seems pertinent to point out an article that the Economist ran a few months ago about how immigrant labour is essential for the more dynamic of Europe's economies. This is one of the few situations when I really do wish government would let itself be led by business, but more importantly when I wish the people of this country would apply some reason. You can't accuse immigrants of taking all our jobs when we are gripped by a labour shortage. I know the usual retort - but these are unskilled people and we need computer experts - but people are not born computer experts. In 2 years of teaching IT in one of Britain's whiter towns, one thing I noticed was that a disproportionately large proportion of my students were immigrants or the children of immigrants, because these are the people who actually value education and skills and try to make something of their lives, while the white British people who complain also take their kids out of school to take them shopping, because they place that little value on education. Then they complain that they can't get jobs and these bloody foreigners can. The 'bloody foreigners' who worked their arses off in my classes to make themselves employable got no better, and often far worse (because Brighton's employment situation is rather the reverse of the country as a whole - a very well educated population competing for a small number of good jobs), than they deserve.

I look forward to a day when people start to learn to accept responsibility for their own failings, and stop blaming others.

Update at 1048: Polly Toynbee has a well-argued column in the Guardian about why we do need to tighten border controls at the same time as increasing the number of people allowed to legitimately immigrate, and handling refugees better. By the by it also mentions that 30% of refugees come to Europe with degrees - that's the same proportion as UK adults, putting paid to any idea that refugees are the great unskilled.

posted @ 7:19 PM -

There's a fascinating debate going on in the States about whether hugely obese people should be forced to pay for two seats when they fly. I particularly like the bit about passengers complaining that they were "sat upon" by people overflowing from their seat - captures the image perfectly....

posted @ 6:47 PM -

England v Brazil

Not much to say on this one, just that we can win it, but I'm still not convinced we will. Oh yes, and that there are bound to be plenty of goals - Juninho insists that Brazil will continue to play as they have done so far - with a ferocious attack and pathetic defence. I'm looking forward to it, even in spite of my lack of confidence about the result I want actually happening.

posted @ 6:35 PM -

The Sun is on form today, as is often the case when there's big football coming up. Although it does have some of the usual crap, like a report telling us that our heroes checked into their hotel with confidence, and a truly stunning announcement that the England team will party if they win tomorrow, it also has some very funny picture stories. They've turned Rio's landmark Jesus statue into a statue of, well, Rio, and trawled the web for a mock-up of what the Queen would look like with England fan face-paint.

posted @ 6:39 AM -

According to a report I heard on Radio 5 this morning, the World Cup has not only increased booze sales, as might have been expected, but also herbal tea sales have gone up by 70% and condom sales by 50%. Herbal tea?!? I can only assume that Sven must have been seen drinking some or something....

posted @ 4:19 AM -

I had the mother of all weird dreams last night.

Somehow I was working in an endangered species' park, and a joyrider broke in. He ran amok in the park, with staff (including me) trying to stop him by standing in his way and catching him (it being a dream, the difficulty of catching and holding a car wasn't relevant). Eventually after colliding with one of the giant pandas (who looked like a cross between gorillas and pandas and were dressed in suits) he spun out of control, and overturned his car. Having (somehow) assured ourselves that the car wasn't about to catch fire or explode, one of the other staff and I opened the doors, dragged out the joyrider, and proceeded to give him a good kicking, while he played innocent and said but I didn't hurt anyone.

Must be some significance to all this.... I know that there's a good reason why I've been having spiteful dreams about drivers recently - some sort of arsehole driver encounter happens to me every day or two on the commute to work and back. No idea where the rest came from though.

Every now and then I have an episode of really mundane, boring dreams, and I have to say I prefer the strange ones. It's also a very good sign that I've been programming for 2 weeks and not yet had a dream about that activity. When I used to work from home and basically sit at the computer till I dropped I would dream the continuation of what I had spent the day doing, whereas now that I leave work behind, travel for half an hour, and then do other things in the evening my dreams are free to be random.

A few years ago I thought that working at home was an ideal arrangement, but after doing it for a couple of years and now managing a change of routine, I'm convinced that not only am I unsuited to working at home (I still think it's great for someone more disciplined than me), but also that a certain length journey between work and home (my current one is probably longer than I need, but the 5 minute walk I had to where I used to teach was too short) is psychologically beneficial.

posted @ 4:19 AM -

Sore losers

It's bad enough that each time Italy lose they go on and on and on about the poor refereeing, but this really takes the biscuit:

Ahn Jung-Hwan, the scorer of the goal that knocked Italy out of the World Cup, has been fired by his Italian club. Not because he wasn't good enough or asked for too much money, but because he has affronted Italian pride and offended the country.

How's that for unsporting conduct?

posted @ 11:18 AM -

Time slips away

I'm about half-way through the development time available for my MSc project. I have a lot left to do. I'm beginning to see how 4 months, which I thought was way more time than I needed, might still not be enough....

posted @ 9:12 AM -

Poll-tastic

58% of Guardian readers expect England to beat Brazil. Meanwhile, in response to stories about Beckham's hairdresser flying out in the place of his wife, the Times are running a poll in which a slim majority suggest that Samson should keep his hair unchanged.

Oh yes, and <ahem> Graham Poll was the 4^th official in the Japan v Turkey game. It's just a poll-tastic day <ducks and runs for cover>

posted @ 10:29 AM -

So Turkey are through. This is good, but I have to say I wish they could have knocked someone else out other than a co-host....

posted @ 4:39 AM -

The Date Project is well worth a read because it's well written, describes a plight that I think just about everyone can identify with to some extent, and, well, I feel rather more empathy with its author/protagonist than I probably ought to admit.

posted @ 7:02 PM -

I had a near miss today. With a pigeon. It was strutting its stuff at the side of the road, I approached at considerable speed (downhill section, no traffic, nice bike - I race the cars), and must have been pretty frightening to it (consider the relative size), so it decided to take off and escape in the air. Except that it flew into my path, and not being sure if there might be a car passing me (they tend to pass way too close, at unreasonable speed and without warning) I wasn't willing to swerve. That bird (and I) had a lucky escape....

posted @ 3:52 PM -

It's just like watching Brazil

England can beat them. But it won't be easy, and it certainly won't be a boring game.

posted @ 9:30 AM -

order of posts

A request for feeback:

Now that I've made the separation between days more visually obvious here, I've changed the settings so that within a day the posts are listed oldest-first (though the order looks slightly scrambled to me right now). I'm not actually sure that was a good move. I see the advantage as being that when looking back at past days each day reads more naturally, but there are two drawbacks: the order within days is not consistent with the order of days, and the most recent post is not necessarily visible without scrolling, which could lead people to not notice it's there.

Should I switch back?

posted @ 6:21 AM -

USA 2 - 0 Mexico

and that wasn't some freak lucky result - they were by far the better team.

Well... if there's anything that will make people in England support the USA it's a game against Germany....

posted @ 4:27 AM -

Sorry that last post rambled so much, but I just had to get it off my chest. On to nicer things: I will be rooting for the USA in a few hours' time. Round here that's a fairly uncool thing to say, but it's also true. And now I need to get to bed because I've spent far too long writing here tonight and I'd better get some sleep before work.

posted @ 9:35 PM -

Why is it that so many people are incredibly bad at arguing?

I mean arguing rationally, as opposed to just shouting loud, which is a skill many people have honed even better than I have.

Perhaps I ought to explain why this is particularly on my mind today:

I went to London for a few hours today, to have lunch with my dad for Fathers' Day. This involved several hours on trains, but that doesn't bother me, because it's a route which I normally enjoy travelling (as opposed to the Bristol - Brighton direct line which is so awful that I will travel to Brighton via London in future). One of the reasons I enjoy it is that I normally have a seat booked, and the trains are normally empty enough anyway (I avoid rush hour by default because I have a late start and finish at work, so even on a Friday evening I find the quiet trains) for it to be a quiet, comfortable and relaxing journey. On the way to London this was perfectly true to form - I slept a bit, read a bit, gazed at the pretty hills for a bit, and arrived thoroughly relaxed. The way back didn't work out quite so well.

I wasn't on the train I was booked on, so I had no seat reservation, and for once there were no proper seats free, so I found myself sat on one of the little fold-away seats by the doors. Not a great hardship, but less comfort than I'm used to on that service, and the ends of the carriages where these seats are bounce far more than the middle, so reading was tricky. Anyway, I thought, one of the other reasons why I like travelling by train is that it's often a chance to have conversations with interesting people, and striking up a conversation is much easier when things aren't quite going right with the journey. The other fold-away seat was taken by a lady who was reading a newspaper, or rather failing to read it because of the bumpiness of the ride, so in true British style something as mundane as the state of the track started a conversation.

The conversation soon moved (I always try to take a back seat in these things, because I never want to foist my life story on others (the advantage of this narcissistic page is that I know you've chosen to read it and could stop if you wanted to) and because most talkative fellow travellers have turned out to be interesting), predictably enough, to a general rant about how this country is going down the tube and it's the government's fault. Fair enough, and familiar enough, except that this lady's theory about what the government were doing wrong was that they are apparently inviting in all the criminals from the rest of the world, who clean up off our generous social security system while the people whose families have been in England (oh yes, she kept saying England, not Britain. This is a subtle but important bad sign about where the rhetoric is going) for 500 years get nothing.

At this point I should briefly interrupt myself to explain what asylum seekers (as opposed to other sorts of immigrants, who are treated the same as British people and as far as I could tell were not who she really meant to slander) actually get in this country. They get slapped in detention (oops. Sorry. The official word is reception) centres in the middle of nowhere, to which they are essentially confined. They are given vouchers, giving them no choice of which shops to use, and a similar diet to that of the whole country during wartime rationing. They aren't allowed to work, but they are accused constantly of being work-shy. The government does nothing to help the adults learn English, while criticising immigrants for failing to learn the language. At the moment the kids get to go to local schools (which at least gives them a chance of integrating, another thing the adults are chastised for failing to do), but Blunkett is trying to change that and keep them in special confined schools, where they will meet no British kids, and the teachers will be the only native English speakers they hear. Meanwhile a dole-scrounger who has the good fortune of holding an EU passport gets their rent paid (housing benefit - a noble scheme, but extremely open to fraud), and has a fortnightly cash income. It's not much, and it's no longer easy to get, but it's still better than what asylum seekers have to put up with.

As the anti-immigrant rant became more rabid, and I found it increasingly hard to hold my temper with her (bear in mind that this isn't just an issue I care about for unselfish reasons, but also that the implication that all immigrants are criminals is a personal slur against me and my family), I decided I had to say something. Managing to hold my temper, I decided that rather than argue with her, it would be better to confront her slightly less directly with the hypocrisy of her view, so I pointed out that I was born in Turkey. The response:

But you're not Turkish

I said: I was born in Turkey, that makes me a Turk, though if you really have the patience for the whole story it's much more complicated.
I should have said: Who the fuck are you, after 10 minutes' conversation, to tell me what I am or am not?

She said: But you don't sound Turkish

I said: (beginning to lose patience now) As I already said I moved over here when I was 2. That means I learned English among local schoolkids, so I sound like one of them.
I should have said: I am beginning to suspect that I speak your mother tongue a damn sight better than you do. This is a mark of my intelligence, not my ethnicity or nationality.

She said: But you don't look Turkish

I said: Well if you have all day I could explain my ethnic background, which isn't actually Turkish, but is really quite a long story.
I should have said (but didn't want to bring up Jewishness with someone so obviously both ignorant and prejudiced): Well actually I'm a Jew, and thank goodness that Turkey accepted my ancestors when no Christian country would, because otherwise my ancestral line would have been snuffed out by the Spanish Inquisition. Oh yes, and by the way I actually know where my ancestors lived 500 years ago, whereas I highly doubt that you do, whatever you may claim about being English going back centuries.

Anyway, after a frustrating diversion I managed to get back to the point I was originally trying to drive at, which is that my family and I are immigrants, but far from sponging off the system we have worked hard, earned money and paid taxes. I should have also raised the fact that in a few years of teaching computing I noticed a disproportionate number of immigrants among my students, because they are the ones who are actually interested in making something of themselves, unlike the apathetic Brits, but I really wasn't in enough control of where the conversation went.

She responded to this in the typical way that racists justify themselves when I decide it's not too risky to point out that I am part of the group they hate: ah but you are civilised, you're not like these asylum seekers. Hmmm.... Brits judging how civilised the rest of the world is.... When did any African nation invade huge segments of another continent, try to stamp out its traditional religions and social structures, capture people in the thousands and trade them as commodities, and rape the land for natural resources? And British people feel they can judge how civilised the rest of the world are?!?

Needless to say I didn't actually make that point (though I did stress how few opportunities are actually open to asylum seekers, and she had no answer to that), and I didn't really want to argue, because I knew I'd be stuck with her for another hour so, so I steered the conversation back to Mr. Blair's many shortcomings, which wasn't exactly hard. Meanwhile the train was approaching the first stop, and a woman who looked to be about my age had come out to our section and was waiting for the doors to open, but the train stood outside the station for a few minutes. Xenophobe bitch pointed out that Blair used to be lawyer (I'm not even sure that's correct - I thought he had been a career politician - but she could be right) and that lawyers are all backbiting scum. As chance would have it our newcomer was also a lawyer, and decided that she couldn't just ignore that slur against her entire profession:

Lawyer: I'm a lawyer and I find what you just said very offensive

...repetitive stupid argument cut, but the gist was that both people became more and more agitated, and I became more and more embarrassed, and annoyed that I couldn't even get up and go to another carriage until the train reached the station and the people waiting could get out...

Stupid, blinkered, xenophobic woman who has no concept of how to argue or think rationally: But you don't look like a lawyer

Lawyer: Don't you think that's a little superficial? Just because I'm young and dressed in casual clothes (on a Sunday) doesn't make me not a lawyer. As it happens I work for the Environment Agency's legal department

Dumb bitch: How dare you call me superficial when you hardly know me?

Lawyer: I didn't call you superficial, I just said that judging me by my appearance was superficial

Dumb bitch: I suppose you think you're clever? Well I'm much cleverer than you [obviously.]

Lawyer: I never said anything about that. I just said that I was offended that you had judged me wrongly by my appearance, and wrongly again by my profession

Dumb bitch: Who asked you anyway? I was having a conversation with this chap [points to me, while I'm alternating between trying to look interested in my book and looking sympathetically at the lawyer] and you just interrupted

Lawyer: Well I'm sorry but you had just made a sweeping generalisation that was an insult to me

Dumb bitch: It's a democracy [oh how close I was at this moment to pointing out that what she meant to say was "free country" and if she thought they were one and the same thing then she really didn't have the first clue what she was talking about] and I can say what I like

Lawyer: And I wouldn't want to stop you, but I am also free to answer

Dumb bitch: No you're not. You interrupted a private conversation [with a complete stranger who was rather tired of it]

This pretty much repeated itself three times, until finally the train pulled in at the station. Then the stupid one tried to somehow win with a truly absurd parting shot:

You think you're so clever but I didn't know you were a lawyer because I've never heard of you [there are an awful lot of lawyers in this country. Are you claiming to have memorised the faces of the entire membership of the Law Society?] and besides if you were a real lawyer you'd have given me your name and told me who you worked for [never mind that she had said who she worked for] and anyway I'm much more famous than you, I am ... [sadly I forgot her name rather quickly, but she wasn't someone I had heard of]

For the next hour I was very grateful for my personal stereo, which often proves more useful as an isolation booth than an actual entertainment machine. Then as she left, at the stop before mine, I had the last word (one which I must admit I had rehearsed far too many times before I returned to my normal zen-like state of beign a passenger):

Victoria Beckham is much more famous than you. Does that mean you are less clever than her?

Of course, she had no answer.

posted @ 9:20 PM -

Now on display at Blather: the tragic end of Ronald McDonald

posted @ 8:32 PM -

new look

what do you think?

Having seen this page on many different computer set-ups lately I had come to realise that it was too wide, and took too long to download. The new look improves on both of those things, but have I done enough, or is it still too wide / too slow on your machine? And does it look good?

posted @ 7:49 PM -