Author: 6000

Football reading – with a warning

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First off, Oliver Holt in the Mirror, describing Afcon as “the perfect demonstration of South Africa’s World Cup legacy”:

Here’s a funny thing about the African Cup of Nations.
There are no Europeans trying to tell the organisers what to do.
Nobody signing petitions to try to ban fans from blowing vuvuzelas.
Nobody telling the mamas who sell pap and fried chicken outside games they can’t come within five miles of the stadium.
Nobody telling supporters who earn £1 or £2 a day they have to pay £40 a pop for a ticket.
Nobody saying: “Our culture is better than your culture.” Nobody saying: “Why can’t you just be a little bit more like us?”

AFCON 2013 is way better for it, too. It’s like the World Cup in 2010 would have been before Fifa de-Africanised it.

It’s full of life, vigour and colour, the slow drum sway of Nigeria fans, the choreographed vuvuzela-moves of Burkina Faso fans, the delirious joy of the Ethiopians.
It is a celebration of football, of course, and the match between holders Zambia and minnows Ethiopia in Nelspruit on Monday was full of exquisite skill and great drama. But it is also a celebration of South Africa, a showcase for the legacy of hosting the World Cup.

Anyone who read this blog during that World Cup may recall that I argued the same thing while exposing the excuses behind the pathetic French performance against Uruguay:

The vuvuzela is part of the African football experience. I’m sorry you don’t like it. But what you like is not of interest to me right now – you want a World Cup in Africa, then have an African World Cup.

But Holt tonks the nail squarely on the bonce when he notes the real problem with the World Cup legacy is people’s perception:

The legacy of the 2010 World Cup is everywhere in South Africa.
It just depends whether you want to see it or not.

Indeed.

Secondly, a rather (too?) glowing piece on the other side of “football’s bad boy”, Craig Bellamy:

The Manchester City forward is often regarded as being one of football’s bad boys, but off the pitch there is a very different side to him.

Few know… that Bellamy has put hundreds of thousands of pounds into his West African academy, has spent two weeks in Sierra Leone during the past three summers and is well versed in the continent’s history and politics.

There has always been far more to this Welsh firebrand, who physically and verbally confronted a Manchester United supporter on the pitch at the end of last Sunday’s Old Trafford derby, than his ‘Mr Angry’ caricature suggests. His apparent compulsion to venture where others fear to tread is not always misplaced.

It’s an enlightening and thought-provoking article, indicating that there is something to be said for looking beyond first impressions.  And while the writer describes scenes from Freetown, one wonders whether she has ever actually met Bellamy or is just relying on hearsay. That’s because the “she” is Louise Taylor and my first impression of her, which I’m struggling to look beyond, was this:

Why going to South Africa for the World Cup terrifies me:
Statistics, anecdotes and research suggest that touring the Rainbow nation as a fan next summer could be a dangerous option.
In fact, the 2010 World Cup should have gone to Egypt.

And lest we forget, when she wrote that back in July 2009, Louise had never been to South Africa. I’m not sure if she’d ever been to Egypt, but her rationale for awarding them the World Cup at South Africa’s expense was:

surely if the Egyptians could build the pyramids they could host a World Cup.

oh, and:

Moreover, staging football’s biggest and best event in a key centre of the Arab world might just have helped ease tensions between the international Muslim community and the west while simultaneously weakening the Islamic fundamentalists growing hold over hearts and minds.

*cough* Quality predictive journalism, right there.

So Louise, I hope that based on your track record you’ll excuse my reluctance to take your ramblings seriously. I’d love it if Craig Bellamy and his Academy was doing wonderful work in Sierra Leone, but I’ll wait until I see some evidence of it elsewhere before I actually believe it.

Still, if we’re looking for alternative precariously-positioned and potentially risky nations for Craig to further pursue his altruism, perhaps I might be so brave as to suggest… er… Egypt?

NORWAY CHEESE FIRE!

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Yes, it needed CAPS LOCK. This is important!

According to the Huffington Post:

A truckload of burning cheese has closed a road tunnel in Arctic Norway for the last six days.
Some 27 metric tons of flaming brown cheese (brunost), a Norwegian delicacy, blocked off a three-km (1.9 mile) tunnel near the northern coastal town of Narvik when it caught fire last Thursday. The fire was finally put out on Monday.

Yes, apparently the high fat content of brunost means that it loves to burn. But despite the fact that the cheese is a popular dish in Norway, it seems that it doesn’t ignite on a regular basis:

“I didn’t know that brown cheese burns so well,” said Kjell Bjoern Vinje at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
He added that in his 15 years in the administration, this was the first time cheese had caught fire on Norwegian roads.

And when someone with as much experience in Norwegian Public Roads Administration as Kjell Bjoern Vinje has never seen cheese catch fire, you know that this is far from an everyday occurrence.

Thankfully.

Glass bugs

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Ah. Microbiology. Dontcha just love it?

Yeah – me too. And so does artist Luke Jerram – he’s made some amazing glass sculptures of protozoa, bacteria and viruses:

Made to contemplate the global impact of each disease, the artworks were created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially coloured imagery we receive through the media. In fact, viruses have no colour as they are smaller than the wavelength of light. By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.

Personally, I couldn’t see the “complex tension” – that sounds a bit unnecessarily arty-farty to me. But they are pretty special to look at:

T4Phage-Phage_artwork

Ecoli_sculptureThat’s a T4 Bacteriophage at the top, and my old friend E.coli on the bottom – check out those flagellae – hello big boy! But of course, they’re (thankfully) not actual size. The real things are far smaller then this, hence “micro”biology. I know you knew that.

There are a whole lot more images to look at on Luke’s website too: SARS, HIV, Smallpox, Malaria etc etc.

The beautifully detailed collection has now been bought for permanent exhibition at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

I Beg Your Pardon…

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Monday’s mantra:

Smile for a while and let’s be jolly,
Love shouldn’t be so melancholy,
Come along and share the good times while we can.

I’m not quite sure what invoked this earlier today, but something did and so I’m sharing it here.

This is Canadian one-hit wonder Kon Kan – a parody of the Canadian content regulation (often referred to as “Can Con”), which mandates that thirty-five percent of songs played on commercial radio stations in Canada must be Canadian in origin – with their 1988 song I Beg Your Pardon.

The singular success of the song (it got to number 5 in the UK) and the derivation of the band’s name make this Pub Quiz gold. The over the shoulder keyboard, the dodgy fashion and the black and white video set in a payphone (remember them?) make it 80’s perfection.

Musically, Canada has a lot to answer for: Sicky Dion, Justin Bieber, Shania Twain, Michael Bublé and Drake. But here is proof that – at least back in 1988 – some talent did briefly exist in those Northern climes.