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…
This is for the whistle-playing smack addict who nearly broke my eggs this morning: King Jaume II … forbade pimps, prostitutes, the crippled and lame, the blind, those with foul diseases, and those who lacked a hand, arm, or foot to enter and loiter around the plaza of Santa Ana in Barcelona. In 1322, furthermore,…
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…
The cat has learnt how to play football. She can do sideways passes and penalty shootouts with a pencil stub and we’re now working on basic cocaine technique.
So there I was, dear reader, saying the nicest things about Margaret Marks. And now I discover, to my dismay, just the vaguest trace of irreverence in her posts (1/2) re John Cage’s 4’33”, implying that she secretly possesses seven heads, ten horns, various crowns, and upon her heads the name of heresy. For what better than a piece that can be performed by anyone, that provides automatic free updates reflecting changing soundscapes, and that reminds one of Thoreau when he writes: