I suppose we already know that they like to play fast and loose with our personal data, so it’s not surprising that a few people have been noticing something like this recently…
Er, no I haven’t!
It’s hardly worth getting worked up about such an insignificant thing, but really… are they so desperate to get us to make more friends? Or is this somehow to do with the fact that Friend Finder requires you to hand over your email address(es)…?
I’ve tweaked my Posterous blogs slightly, mostly because I’ve an idea for another one in the near future and wanted to reserve one of the existing usernames for it.
So, in case you need more of my bilge than can currently be consumed here and on Twitter, there’s also…
adrianclark.posterous.com – Cool bits of music I find online, music by friends or even (hah!) myself.
sforzo.posterous.com – SFORZO… the Spaghetti Factory Outdoor Recreation Zone. Basically just snaps uploaded from my phonecam, and not “proper” enough for Flickr.
The government has decided it’s quite happy to keep using Internet Explorer 6 as its official web browser of choice. A nine-year-old piece of software that never adhered to commonly agreed standards of usability even back in 2001.
So when they start legislating about how they think we should be using our computers I think we can safely ignore them, can’t we?
Some scary abuse-of-power stuff here…
Nope, it’s nothing to do with protesting in Parliament Square or marching through Westminster or taking photos of police snipers. It’s about transgressing the arbitrary social code of a bunch of third-party train ticket inspectors.
I hadn’t been aware of Rail Enforcement Officers until a couple of days before reading Sir Olly’s post. A gang of them (A gaggle of REOs? A superfluity of REOs?) got on my train en route from Epsom to Wimbledon.
I remember RPOs (Revenue Protection Officers) who used to do regular anti-fare-dodger campaigns at Sutton station during the school holidays, usually in tandem with the police, who would have their x-ray scanner to check for knives. However, the RPOs were always polite and stuck to their allotted task. This doesn’t appear to be the case with the REOs, who seem to revel in the same wildly random interpretation of their rights and duties as the PCSOs. No doubt we’ll be hearing more of them pretty soon.
As ever with this sort of thing, do please quote Olly’s article or retweet him on Twitter.
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This all seems pretty simple to me… you can’t start banning items of clothing. The burqa and niqab are clearly far more controversial and symbolically loaded than the average pair of socks or woolly sweater, but the wholesale ban of any garment would set a scary precedent.
It would also completely miss the point. The only reasonable objection to burqas involves the issue of oppression and female inequality. Fine, deal with that… question the values, not the symptoms. A total ban on the garments would just blur the distinctions between women’s reasons for wearing them, and mostly satisfies the sort of people who hate being confronted by difference of any kind.
The issue of banks and security-sensitive situations is something of a red herring. Just forbid ALL face coverings… motorbike helmets, balaklavas, whatever. Again, address the real issue, rather than hiding behind the simplistic prejudice.
→ No CommentsTags:burqa·niqab
Despite the potentially damaging nature of the bad refereeing decisions (suffered by England and Mexico) in the second round, the controversy was fairly short-lived. There’s always another controversy round the corner, and the hot issue is now Luis Suarez’s deliberate handball in the dying seconds of the Uruguay-Ghana match.
However, I just can’t understand why this is controversial at all.
FIFA’s Laws of the Game are clear on this. From page 32…
And then, on page 35…
And that covers every aspect of Suarez’s offence. The deliberate handball, normally punishable by a direct free kick, was in the penalty area, so Ghana were given a penalty. In addition, Suarez prevented a goalscoring attempt, so he was sent off.
The controversy in the press has involved frequent use of the word “cheating”, and that’s where I think it all starts to get a bit hysterical. Cheating is a tricky concept in football, because just about every in-game transgression we can conceive is already covered by the Laws of the Game. To me, “cheating” implies activities outside of play… doctoring urine samples for drug tests, poisoning the opposition’s drinking water, taking a bribe to lose a game. It’s also a very emotive word to use, whereas Suarez simply committed a foul and received the appropriate punishment.
Admittedly, Suarez hasn’t exactly helped his country’s PR efforts by comparing his handball to Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal in 1986. But again, that’s another situation where emotion (and as an Englishman, I assure you I’ve debated this incident from every possible angle!) has taken precedence over the Laws of the Game.
If Maradona hadn’t scored, he would still have been guilty of the same offence… deliberate handball, outside his own penalty area, for which he should have received a yellow card. Of course, he did score, but the fact that the goal stands, and the fact that he didn’t receive a yellow card, are first and foremost errors in REFEREEING. Of course, he could have owned up to his illegally scored goal, but that’s an issue with fair play, not the rules of the game. The same goes for Thierry Henry’s “Hand of Frog” against Ireland. Don’t blame football, blame the player’s attitude, something that can’t be governed by the rules of a game.
In comparison, the Suarez incident is far simpler. There was no issue of good grace… Suarez was caught and his transgression was punished accordingly. Uruguay had to complete the game with ten men and will have to play the semi-final without Suarez’s help. Ghana were given the penalty; it seems cruel that Asamoah Gyan then failed to score, but that’s no fault of Suarez. Perhaps the combined offences should result in a penalty taken without a goalkeeper, or an automatic goal?
I know I said that the football world is getting smaller and less mysterious, but if you gain all your knowledge from TV pundits, you’d probably disagree. Judging by the pre- and post-match studio discussions, you’d think we were still in the days of grainy monochrome footage from lands we’d barely heard of.
With the exception of World’s Nicest Man (and one of its best football managers to boot) Roy Hodgson, the quality of punditry on both BBC and ITV has been piss poor. As Tom English points out in an excellent article in the Scotsman (thanks to Anton Vowl for the link), there’s no longer any excuse for such ignorance. Wikipedia can provide career statistics and essential facts about every player in this tournament; in all honesty, they’d do better even if they’d only read the football pages in the tabloids that morning.
What makes it worse is that they then try to make up for the lack of knowledge with lazy pseudo-facts. Adrian Chiles seems to respond to every surprising scoreline by comparing the populations of the two countries involved… “the 5 million people of Slovakia are beating the 60 million of Italy”. We’re not talking about Vanuatu or Grenada here. While the size of a country must have a partial bearing on its sporting prowess, it’s stupidly simplistic to use this to explain results in one sport. How, in Chiles’s system, are India, China and Indonesia doing in this World Cup?
If you’ve had the volume turned down on your TV, you might not have heard for the 371st time that Lionel Messi hasn’t scored yet in this tournament. Again, a cursory glance at easily available data would reveal that his scoring record for Argentina is nothing like his tally for Barcelona. It’s a goal every three games at best. So why have the supposed experts completely failed to understand his different style of play in international football? Similarly, they’re harping on about the SHOCK lack of goals in today’s Portugal-Brazil match. “We expected a goalfest,” says commentator Jonathan Pearce. Really? I was expecting a niggly, spiteful scrap. Brazil’s 6:2 rout in 2008 was not at all representative of past meetings between these two countries. This is bitter “auld enemy” stuff, after all.
I dunno, what’s the answer? I’d hit the “mute” button, but I hate watching football with the sound off. Can we have a Vuvuzela-only soundtrack on the red button, please?
Yes, it’s official. This is the weirdest World Cup ever.
It was always going to be a little different… first one hosted in Africa, the massed Vuvuzela orchestra, the return of Maradona as cheerfully optimistic misfit manager with some odd ideas about defensive tactics, the mystery of the North Koreans. But then it turns out that the actual results aren’t following the usual script either.
As I write this, Italy are 3-2 down against Slovakia, about to finish bottom in arguably the easiest group of the tournament (especially given their high FIFA ranking and status as current champions). France are already out, having continued the boom-bust cycle they started in 1998. Germany have looked drab and uninspired, to match their forthcoming second round opponents… yep, that’s us!
We’ve also seen Spain made to look ordinary by a super-organized Switzerland, the usually strong Nigeria look like being the joint worst African performers, and we’ve had some surprise results from New Zealand, Serbia and North Korea. Press reports have focused on the supposed downfall of various top-eight teams (including England who haven’t done markedly worse than their first-round average) with the usual theories about excessive pay, over-long seasons, media over-expectation and so on.
There’s certainly something drastically wrong in France, Italy are learning the drawback of having a “lame duck president” so to speak, and it’s looking likely that Germany will be changing their head coach pretty soon. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think we’re seeing something a bit like what happened in men’s tennis about 10 years ago. The struggling lower-ranked teams are no longer there to enjoy their time on global TV and make up the numbers. There are no longer any easy games in international football, as the cliché goes.
The globalisation of the game and the rapacious behaviour of top clubs on the international transfer market have led to a more tightly-knit network of football activity reaching ever more countries. As a result, it’s actually unusual to find ourselves in the position of not knowing much about one of the minnows (North Korea) while, at the other end of the spectrum, the top teams have lost some of their mystique in the eyes of those minnows. An Algeria defender plays his club football with the England goalkeeper and a Ghana striker, and faces regular matches against hotshot strikers from Brazil, Spain, Holland and Germany. The football world is getting smaller.
Anyone in close proximity to me (in either a physical or online sense) will probably have been flattened in a tidal wave of schoolboy excitement by now. Yes, the World Cup is underway, and I’m finding it hard not to burble continuously about it. That old lady in the checkout queue? Of COURSE she’s interested in how the Italians’ ability to pass the ball out of defence will be affected by the absence of Grosso and Pirlo.
A decent chunk of posts on this blog are from my match-by-match accounts of Euro 2008 and World Cup 2006, but I’m not one for routines, so I’ll be giving that a miss this time. Instead, let’s all play a game of WORLD CUP I-SPY!
Here are some well-worn football clichés. See how many you can spot during the tournament…
1. Graceful Mexico ultimately lacking firepower
2. 10-man Uruguay
3. “One of football’s gentlemen, it seems somehow worse to see this behaviour from Thierry Henry.”
4. Plucky England
5. Hapless England
6. “As he steps up to the spot, the hopes of England rest on this young man’s shoulders”
7. Brilliant Dutch team falls apart by being too intellectual and having own opinions
8. Italy wins every game 1-0
9. USA win over England in 1950 interpreted to mean anything. At all.
10. North Korea win over Italy in 1966 interpreted to mean anything. At all.
11. Stodgy Switzerland
12. African teams described as “playing with such unbridled joy”.
13. Commentators assuming Brazil is EVERYONE’S default 2nd team.
14. Pundits confusing Slovakia and Slovenia.
15. Cristiano Ronaldo diving.
16. Cristiano Ronaldo crying.
17. Cristiano Ronaldo telling tales to the referee.
18. “You can never write off the Germans…”
19. Commentators sounding surprised that Brazil have a fantastic defence nowadays.
20. Commentators sounding surprised that Argentina don’t have a fantastic defence nowadays.
Any more?
Of course, as I’m writing this after the first day’s play, we can already tick off the first three. Mexico were stunning on the ball, but a 1-1 draw with South Africa is really not impressive. Uruguay are helping me in my prediction that they’ll have the worst disciplinary record in the group stage, and Henry nearly exploded in a ball of pure irony when he screamed indignantly at a supposed handball and then tried to take a (possibly unjustified) free kick from the wrong place.