No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been…
Metrosexual. The Americans blame French cissies and Brit hacks, but the honours go to Galician AZ Alkmaar footballer, José Fortes Rodriguez: Some women just don’t get it. They’re not used to being turned down. They say: Go on, you want me don’t you! I say: Am I talking Chinese? I don’t find you attractive. And…
I don’t think that John McWhorter’s “YO!” has really “floated to the ends of sentences and lost its shouting intonation, and … become what linguists would call a pragmatic marker.” It’s just like football: there are always a few pragmatic markers hanging around on the margins of matches, and then there are Dutch defenders who…
Condescending southerner David Green (he’s Manchester-based) has a piece on the Beeb listing the delights that await Rivaldo when he finally signs for Bolton Wanderers. What many people this morning find difficult to understand is why Rivaldo can’t be arsed to travel those extra 10 miles up the A666 to the Anchor Ground, home of…
Here‘s something even idiots like me can understand: Branko Milanovic, World Bank economist and Carnegie bobo, explaining with reference to football why unfettered global markets will inevitably increase quality and increase and entrench inequality. The solution: regulation, with the UN as FIFA writ large. Hmm… Thank you, Geoffrey!
Tom Shields in his excellent sports column in the Sunday Herald makes the interesting claim that: Camp Nou was turned into a concentration camp by police… The fans sporting green and white, even those with ingeniously secured tickets for expensive seats at the Camp Nou, were herded through a gauntlet of riot police into a…
Ronaldinho was following a venerable tradition when he broke a window in Santiago de Compostela’s cathedral while attempting a fancy kick for a TV spot. Bryan Griffiths tells us that back in 1330 the priest of Winkfield, William Pagula, wrote a Latin poem proposing an end to churchyard games: Bat & bares and suche play…
The sports stars interviewed here by Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News confirm what every Dutch child knows already: watch television in your target tongue and you can skip those expensive and boring language classes. Different alphabets are another kettle of fish, however: “I was reading a book that Artukhin had on the bus,” Richardson said. “It was Russian.…
David Beckham and Andalusian chanteur David Bisbal are the public figures most admired by Madrilenian schoolchildren aged 6-12, according to a new survey. While the missus is admired elsewhere for the form, if not the functioning, of her aural receptors, I suspect that Becks the voice artist may eventually revolutionise English teaching in Spain. Says…
Reports the Chicago Tribune: New Lenox’s newest cop barks, or at least understands, only a foreign tongue. So when canine officer Bear joined the force five months ago, his partner, Officer John Conroy, learned to give commands to the Czech born and bred German shepherd in his native language. “It is a bit of a…