Barney on that opening ceremony

Herewith the comments of Barney Ronay, when asked about the World Cup opening ceremony – a few lines that made me laugh on the Guardian football podcast this morning:

These things are always atrocious, aren’t they? They’re a complete waste of time.
They featured the largest tarpaulin I’ve ever seen; the entire pitch covered in this thing that’s just going to be rolled up and thrown away. And of course, the wretched Pitbull. He was predictably terrible and pointless. Which was a bit of a shame because I quite liked the other bits, the walking trees and things, because Brazil’s quite a weird country and that was quite weird.

Quite.

And here, because I know you want my considered opinions on those three key refereeing decisions in the game that followed, are my considered opinions on those three key refereeing decisions in the game that followed:

  1. Neymar’s elbow: Deliberate (check how he looked at Modric before they clashed). An “orange card”: worse than yellow, could have easily been red. Referee bottled it.
  2. The Brazil penalty: If that was a penalty, everything else over the next month is also going to be a penalty. Player trips over tuft of grass on dodgy Manaus pitch: penalty. Captains shake hands before the game: penalty. I just tapped the space bar: penalty. Pathetic. Decision looked as dodgy as a Nigerian own-goal.
  3. The disallowed Croatian goal. Fair enough, I thought. The striker had his arm over the keeper’s shoulder as they jumped for the ball. It was a foul.

So, some flair, some controversy, some goals and a completely crap opening ceremony. Given that there won’t be any more opening ceremonies, I think we could be in for a cracker of a World Cup.

Google Calendar for 2014 World Cup Fixtures

Here’s a really easy way of getting all the fixtures for Brazil 2014 into your Google Calendar – get someone else to do it for you! Fortunately, there are nice people out there who have put the whole tournament into Google Calendar format and so all you have to do is to go to the site in question and click one little button.

As per TheAtlantic.com:

  • If you use Google, go to this site, then hit the little button in the lower right hand corner. It shows up on your calendar, but you can toggle it on and off in the left pane of Google Calendar.
  • If you use the iPhone Calendar app, download this .ics file, then click on it. It’ll bring up a dialog box asking where you want to put all the events. You probably want to add the games to their own new calendar.

DON’T WORRY if the times seem wrong (for example, that top link initially displays them in BST (London) time).
When you import them into your calendar, they will magically transmogrify into your local time zone (or whatever time zone you choose to have your calendar set for).

If you’re on Android, can I once again recommend FotMob for all your World Cup and further football enjoyment? It’s getting better and better and better.

Happy footballing!

Remember 2010…?

With the World Cup “kicking off” in Brazil this evening, everyone is going all misty-eyed over those Halcyon days in 2010 when we enjoyed Philip’s visit here. I’ve chosen to mark my memories with a photo of a free kick from the worst game I think I’ve seen since moving to South Africa – England’s bore draw with Algeria at Cape Town Stadium.

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England’s chances this year seem slim (not like in 2010, when they had a superb qualifying campaign), but perhaps because of that, they find themselves free of the weight of expectation. Or rather they did.
Up until about two weeks ago, everyone back in Blighty had completely accepted that this wasn’t a tournament in which England were going to go far; expectation – traditionally an albatross around the teams’ collective necks – was at an all time low and that was a Good Thing.
Sadly, about a fortnight back, someone in the papers noticed this and remarked on it, probably saying something along the lines of:

Without the fans’ expectations on their minds, England could actually do quite well in Brazil.

This in itself, raised expectations and thus was a self-defeating prophecy. But then again, maybe if people see that the low expectations of success have raised the expectations of success, and that that approach will, in turn, increase the pressure on the team and thus lower the expectation that they will do well, maybe they will do well.

Not that I want to raise expectations of that.

The other thing that has made the British press is the state of some of the stadiums going into the tournament, most specifically Manaus, where England play Italy on Saturday. Now, we saw some scare stories from hysterical journalists all over South Africa 2010, but it does seem that we were a whole lot better prepared than Brazil is:

Carlos Botella, head groundsman for the Royal Verd company which is responsible for the turf at Manaus and six other World Cup stadiums, has conceded that the game on Saturday, which will take place in severe heat and humidity, will be played out on a desperately inadequate surface.
“Frankly, Manaus is in bad shape,” Botella told the Associated Press. “We’ve started to implement an emergency plan to try to save the field and improve it as much as possible, but I don’t think it’ll be in good condition by the weekend.”

No worries, Carlos. You’ve only had several years to prepare, so yes, get that emergency plan into operation 72 hours ahead of the first game. We’d been playing football and rugby in our stadiums 4 months before the 2010 World Cup got started.

Worryingly, while I’m looking forward to having some footy back on the TV, I’m rather unexcited about the whole World Cup. Maybe it’s the time difference. Maybe it’s the fact that last time around was Just So Good.
I just hope that I can get into it soon. I’d hate to not enjoy the whole 4 weeks.

Cape Town Loadshedding Schedules

CAPE TOWN’S NEW LOADSHEDDING SCHEDULES CAME INTO EFFECT FROM 1ST FEBRUARY 2015. CLICK HERE.

(For other cities/Eskom supplied areas – click here)

Loadshedding is back and once people realise this, the official City page will be inundated, will crash again and you, the information-hungry public, will be left in the dark, both literally and metaphorically.
Never fear: we’re here to help. Simply find your area’s number on this handy map – and then check out the images below to see when you can expect to be powerless.

To find out what stage loadshedding we’re on: check the red box on this page.

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Hopefully, if we all do our bit, we can avoid the obvious nastiness of Stage 3, in which there’s almost as much darkness as light, although of course, it needs to be noted that if we didn’t have a mountain named after Lucifer overlooking our city, none of this would ever have happened.

EDIT: If you’re not on that map (like Table View), you’re supplied directly by Eskom, not the City and you need to go here to find your schedules.

Swiftkey now free

SwiftKey is a fast, intuitive way to input text onto your smartphone and, for me, just pips Swype when learning what I want to say and how I want to say it.
However, the one issue with SwiftKey has always been that while it’s good, it’s also not free. Sure, it’s only $4, but given that there are decent alternatives out there, gratis, it’s some indication of its power and usability that people go out (or stay home – this is online stuff, after all) and choose buy it.

But from now on, SwiftKey is going to be free.
Why? Because (according to its inventors):

We’ve come an incredibly long way these past six years, from two university friends with an ambitious idea, to becoming the global best-selling app on Google Play the past two years running. We founded SwiftKey to make it easier for everyone to create and communicate on their mobile devices, and as a company we’re working hard to reach that goal.

This is why today we are making SwiftKey free. We believe this change is the best way to achieve our global vision for SwiftKey, as we can now reach many more people around the world without price as a barrier.

Alternatively, of course, it could be that:

…in SwiftKey’s case, it [could] help it in going head-to-head with similar, free technology that Apple will soon offer to iPhone users.

But I think it’s more likely that they just want the people of the world to talk to one another, right?

All of us who have previously paid for the app got this email:

To say thanks for your support as a paid SwiftKey user, we’re giving you a ‘Premier Pack’ of 10 new premium themes worth $4.99 for free! 

Yeah, whatevs, themes-schmemes, but it’s a decent gesture, I guess. Note that I was happy to pay $4 just to be able to use the app, so I’m not really put out by this.

SwiftKey is cool, and now it’s free, so go and get it on Play Store.