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!
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…
This is brilliant: a historical archive of interviews between ropemakers, dry stone wall-builders, football fans, pig slaughterers and some folk from London with very strange accents indeed. Via the Telegraph, which also includes a good interview with the curator. There’s some gorgeous stuff in the other collections, including this 1890 Bovril ad. It seems that…
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.