_Update_: Argh. Sick as a parrot. Topic for discussion: How can the country which gave the world Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo DaVinci, Caravaggio, etc, produce such a supremely cynical, grind-it-out national football team?
_Update_: This is now the Italy vs Australia thread. Come on Australia!
Because the world cries out: WTF?? I count _fourteen_ yellow cards so far. This is looking pretty good for England.
Seems “the Brights”:http://www.the-brights.net/ is are back in the blogs. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/Majikthise?m=51 provides an unconvincing defense. One of my first posts on CT was about The Brights and I’ve reproduced it below the fold. I don’t find it plausible that the “Bright” label should be offensive to religious believers, nor am I “uptight” (in Lindsay’s words) about it. Rather, while the term denotes a set of beliefs I’d broadly subscribe to, it connotes a bunch of dweebs in anoraks.
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!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/octopus.jpg!
All I can say is wow. “David Brooks”:http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html?hp channels “Jeff Minter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels in the _New York Times_ today.
bq. The Keyboard Kingpin, aka Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.
Squadrons of rabid, venom-spitting command-lambs. As I said. Wow.
(thanks to bad jim for alerting me to this in “comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/24/blogofascism/#comment-160958).
The English pundits are split between those who think the main enemy is Sven-Goran Eriksson and those who think it is the weather. Ecuador not so much. Counting references to the “searing heat” and “fierce humidity” could make for a drinking game of some kind. On the “BBC page”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4991536.stm for the game we see the following already, an hour before kickoff:
bq. “”It can’t be ruled out that Sunday in Stuttgart could be the hottest day of the World Cup – it’s going to be a scorcher,” said ARD television weatherman Joerg Kachelmann. … captain David Beckham citing the heat as one of the factors behind their poor second-half performance … worrying news for England, with temperatures in Stuttgart potentially climbing to 35C during the game. … The weather forecast is proving worryingly accurate. … The sun is beating down relentlessly as the temperatures soar. … It’s unbelievably hot in Stuttgart as England fans arrive in their droves. … They have already been forced to endure fierce heat with the temperature already 32C and expected to get hotter by kick-off time. … *A glimmer of hope for England*: a few patches of cloud – *cirrocumulus if I’m not mistaken* – have suddenly appeared. England will pray they grow in number, and quickly.”
Cirrocumulus to the rescue! Sven, in fairness, isn’t making that excuse: “With concerns mounting over the impact the climbing temperatures could have on England’s prospects, coach Sven-Goran Erikson insists his side will not be preoccupied by the weather.” None of the pundits seem to have bothered to check how hot it gets in Ecuador. Obviously, pretty hot in places (the coast) seeing as its at the equator. But as every fule kno lots of Ecudaor is high up in the mountains. According to “this page”:http://www.climate-zone.com/climate/ecuador/fahrenheit/quito.htm (and also “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quito) the climate in Quito is pleasant, with high temperatures getting up to a not-very-scorching average maximum of 70F/19C. So I imagine the Ecuadorean counterpart to Gary Lineker is also saying “Phew, what a scorcher!”
Several commenters on this post about the asymmetry of the case for and against war made the suggestion that, if I applied similar reasoning to domestic policy I would come out with libertarian conclusions. So can I be a libertarian social democrat?