Every week from now until the World Cup I’m going to analyze a group and give my predictions, moving from the least interesting groups to the most interesting, ending with what I consider the Group of Death. This week it’s Group C.

Group C
1	Argentina
2	Ivory Coast
3	Serbia & Montenegro
4	Netherlands

My Prediction
Group Winner: Argentina
Runner-Up: Netherlands

I think Argentina has a good shot of making the final this year. There was too much hype surrounding them in 2002 and they cracked under the pressure, failing to get out of their tough group. They’ve got another tough group this time but I think it will be the launching pad for their success this go ’round, mostly because of the outrageously talented Lionel Messi. Frankly, I’m surprised this kid isn’t getting the same press as Wayne Rooney because I think he’s possibly more dangerous than the English ugnaut. I’m no fan of Argentina—I think they’re the consumate cheats, whiners, and poor sports—but I think this team has balance and confidence and being in the shadows of Brazil will serve them well this World Cup.

Like I’ve said time and time again, the African teams are unpredictable and it’s too bad for the Ivory Coast that they’re in this group because they’re probably just overmatched, but it will be close. Chelski’s Didier Drogba is the big name on this team but I don’t think he’s got the personality to lead the Ivory Coast out of the group stage. Their physical style doesn’t match up well with the two European teams and if Argentina is on song, they can beat anybody. That being said, three solid performances from the Ivory Coast could be enough to eek out that second spot, especially if Argentina loses the plot (which they have a tendency to do) and Holland starts slowly (which they have a tendency to do.) Of course, there’s the distinct possibility the World Cup first-timers will be overwhelmed with the event and lose three close games.

There’s a queer tendency for people to overlook Eastern European teams like Serbia & Montenegro. This is the team’s first World Cup so it doesn’t help them that they’re up against traditionally successful teams in Argentina and Holland and a strong African team. They’ve got some world-class players like Mateja Kezman and Savo Milosevic and won their group that included both Spain and Bosnia-Herzegovina without losing and only letting in one goal, but I can’t help but feel that they’ll be found wanting on the big stage. Can they deal with Argentina’s skill and Holland’s technical excellence? S&M won’t go home shamed, but I do think they’ll be home early.

And finally the Netherlands. The Dutch are one of those teams that can play like world beaters if they can just be arsed to do it. They tend to sleepwalk through early games and this has cost them in the past. Brazil vs. Holland in the semifinal was one of the best games of the ‘98 cup where the South Americans won on penalties. I’m not sure if this Dutch team has the same character as the ‘98 group but they have some stellar players. Can manager Marco Van Basten keep them smoothly working as well-oiled machine or will the team break down? That’s not only a question for this group but for the whole cup because I think the Netherlands, when in full flight, is one of the teams with enough talent to beat Brazil. I predict a win and two quiet draws will see them emerge from the group, probably second on goal differential.

A lot of pundits consider Group C the Group of Death and it’s easy to see why. It’s not unthinkable that Argentina or Holland could lift the trophy but frankly, I can’t see the two first-timer teams doing enough to advance. Argentina tends towards irrationality and desperation if things start going south and the Netherlands sometimes only play as well as they think they have to, so there is hope for the Ivory Coast and Serbia & Montenegro should either of the favorites stutter. But I think the two favorites will be marginally better in every department on the pitch and that’ll be good enough to see them through in first and second place.

Previous weeks: Group A,Group B, Group D, Group F, Group G, Group H

Next week, the last group, my choice for the Group of Death, Group E: Italy, Ghana, United States, Czech Republic

I just got a piece of terrific news. My story “Working Out Our Salvation” was picked up by Weird Tales!

Which is interesting because I didn’t send it to Weird Tales, I sent it to Fantasy Magazine. I submitted it right before they switched to e-subs and I think it got misfiled in the shift. They asked me to resend via email, which I did. They read it, liked it, but editor Sean Wallace said it might be better suited for Weird Tales, which is also published by Wildside. The editors for WT apparently liked it too, and the rest is history.

This is a special sale for me. When I first decided I wanted to get serious about writing, I went to Borders and bought some magazines to looking at markets. The two mags I liked the most were F&SF and Weird Tales. I told myself that I would feel like I’d finally “made it” when (or if) I ever broke into those markets. Here it is, just about three years later and I’ve broken into both. Today I still feel lightyears away from having “made it” (whatever that actually means) but goddamn, it feels good to having achieved something I thought seemed nearly impossible three years ago. It makes other goals—like selling a novel—seem not so impossible.

The story itself has gone through more changes than Proteus. It started as third-person/past tense, switched to first person told from five different viewpoints, and ended as third-person/present tense. It’s also expanded and contracted in word count during this time, but it ended up on the shorter side—2200 words. This also marks the first story I’ve sold that was written 100% after Clarion.

Current Mood: Ecstatic |

We took around 500 pictures on our trip but you’ll be happy to hear I’m not posting them all. We took two cameras, a point-and-shoot digital and our SLR. We’ve got in the neighborhood of 300 digital photos and we burned six rolls of film that were either 24 or 36 exposures. We need to get those rolls developed and put on CD before I want to choose the winners and post them in some semblance of order.

My guess is that the SLR took the better pictures. We’ve got a great wide-angle that gets so much more in than the p-and-s, although in tight quarters the wide-angle does tend to round the corners a bit. The major drawback to the digital is that the viewfinder doesn’t match with the eyepiece, meaning you’re never 100% sure what the framed shot will end up looking like as the viewfinder is virtually worthless in bright conditions. Yes, the end pics can be cropped accordingly in Photoshop, but the SLR is so much more versatile. I really had fun taking pictures this trip so I hope some of them turn out well.

Here are five pics out of the initial batch of digitals that caught my eye as having turned out nicely. Click on the images below to get a bigger picture. I’ll keep you guessing on their context…

We made it home safe and sound—albeit after two delayed flights—and got into Milwaukee around 8:00 pm last night. It wasn’t bad but I’m sure glad it’s over. We flew Air France over (lovely) and Northwest back. The Northworst flight had a rather clueless team of flight attendants who were mildly rude and mostly obnoxious. For example, the Asian couple sitting next to us ordered pasta for the in-flight “food,” to which the cheery flight attendant says, “You people sure love noodles.” Um.

I won’t go on at length about going through security and customs. Let’s just say that despite the creation of more paperwork, slower lines, and general confusion, I don’t feel any safer than I did five years ago. Did you know non-residents entering the US have to have both of their index fingers scanned and a digital picture taken? I didn’t either. They showed a very 1984 movie after take off showing the auslanders entering the US what they’d be subjected to upon entry and departure. It was kind of creepy.

More later when I get home (we’re at the Mueller’s now) and some pictures too. I’m not going to blog the specifics of the trip too much—I’ll put trip details in the text that will accopmany the photos, which I plan on doing this week. We took probably 300-400 pictures and I’ll need to do some culling but I’d like to do it sooner than later so I don’t forget anything. Love to everyone, and happy to be home.

Ahoy there. Writing this last post from gay Paris and I`m keeping it short because of the goofy French keyboard that has the q where the a belongs, amongst other oddities. You need to shift to use the period? There`s no apostrophe? Huh?

I have lots to blab about per usual but it`ll have to wait. Paris has been very nice but very touristy this time of year and full of Americans. We saw five times as many Americans today in Paris than we did in two weeks in Portugal and that`s not an exaggeration; in fact, that`s probably an understatement.

Tonight France faces Mexico in a friendly and we`re going to watch in a pub. A few Mexican tourists here as well. I told Amy that I was going to try and start a fight with Mexican fans but pretending to be a Frenchman. Wish me luck. Viva la France! Home sometime Sunday and pictures should soon follow…

We’ve moved again—this time we’re in Evora, which is about ninety minutes east of Lisbon. It sounds like we’ll stay in Evora for two or maybe even three days as the drive to the Algarve won’t be happening, which is almost a relief. Everything we’ve heard is that the Algarve is like Spain’s Costa del Sol, which means tourist central, criminally tiny bathing suits, and high-rise resorts. No thanks.

The last 48 hours have been spent struggling with a fundamental human need—laundry. Apparently, Portugal has no coin-op laundromats. You know, the ones that cost $1 for a wash, $1 for a dry and you end up spending more time than money. Yeah, they don’t have those here. They have dry cleaners and “self-service” laundromats, where self-service apparently means dropping your clothes off for someone to wash and return to you six hours later. For much more than $1 a wash, $1 a dry.

This threw a serious kink into the plan. We landed in Coimbra on Saturday afternoon and as well all know the continent closes for Sunday, which meant yesterday was spent strolling and lounging, since the “self-service” place was closed up too. No problem, we think. We’ll crank it out in a couple hours and be out of town by 10:00 Monday morning.

Yeah, no. Still refusing to believe that coin-op washers don’t exist in the country, we press on hoping to find one on our travels. No such luck. We ended up rolling into Evora at 6:45 and having to run on cobbled streets (harder than it sounds, especially in sandals) with backpacks and a plastic bag full of dirty clothes to get to their laundromat before it closed, only to find out it’s going to cost us about $30 to get our stuff washed. Perfect!

We’re no strangers to doing laundry in the sink, as we did that for six weeks on our last trip—I think I went with three t-shirts and three pairs of undies, so I am very familiar with doing laundry in the sink, thank you very much. It’s just that we decided that we’d do laundry at a laundromat at the end of the first week. Finding out that laundromats don’t exist in the country necessarily complicated the matter. And no mention of it in the guide books? Rick Steves, WTF?

Coimbra was a nice little town although almost everything was closed. It’s a college town but school’s out of session and we hit it on a Sunday, which means it was pretty sleepy. We drove down the coast for awhile before heading inland to Evora, which I think I’m going to like. It’s an old, walled city and I jones for all things medieval. One of my favorite stops so far has been today’s afternoon excursion to Obidous, which looks like a tourist trap but is really a medieval city. So I had fun running the narrow ramparts, shooting phantom arrows into the countryside and pouring imaginary boiling oil on ghost attackers. Amy met me by the car.

So it’s a couple days in Evora and environs (lots of Roman and Moorish ruins in this part of the country—too bad no ruins of a Moorish laundromat…) and then another day around Lisbon. We might try to hit a bullfight just for the spectacle, or head out to the suburb of Sintra. Then it’s about 36 hours in Paris, and then home.

And what’s up with getting no love in the comments? Where are my peeps? It’s Monday and you’re at work, or maybe you’re retired and have even less of an excuse. Get on it, people.

I saw in the paper today only 18 days until the World Cup. The rest of the paper was, of course, written in gibberish. Locals here seem to think their boys have a shot at being world champions, but I can’t tell how many are serious…

Love to all, even the ones who don’t leave comments.

Finally, we found an Internet cafe’ that has high-speed access. I’ve been posting using dial-up on connections that log out your session, so I’ve had to be brief. Now I’ve got freedom to blab. Lucky you.

We’re now a week deep and really enjoying ourselves. We haven’t yet done anything we wouldn’t recommend although there’s not a lot we would do twice, either. After Porto we rented a car—an Ibiza, fittingly enough—and drove up the coast and inland a bit to a town called Barcelos. From Barcelos, we headed northeast to Geres and spent the last couple days exploring the mountains up there, eventually working our way down to the Douro River, which is directly east of Porto. It’s where they have their vineyards for Portugal’s famous port wines. Then we drove and drove and drove and drove some more until we got to Coimbra, which is about half-way between Porto and Lisbon. We’re going to kick our heels here for a day or two and catch our breath before we make the final push to the Algarve later this week.

The driving has been worthwhile but nerve-wracking. We heard before the trip that northern Portugal is like Washington State—green and prone to rain. The description is fitting enough and the dry, beach-like climate of Porto was quickly replaced by lush greenery and…rain. Not big rain, misty, sorta half-rain…like you find in Seattle. This isn’t a bad thing but it makes the driving a bit more tricky.

The only thing hard about driving here are the one-and-a-half lane winding roads in the mountains that are usually wet, and the other drivers, of which there are plenty. Besides that, it’s a breeze. Portugeuse drivers aren’t shy about tailgaiting and do it with reckless abandon.

Portugal marks the fifth European country I’ve driven in, and this one takes the cake for sheer recklessness. We’ve seen at least a half-dozen accidents and have almost been participants in two. One was in a tiny town near the Spanish border where we were at a stop sign. The cobblestones were wet with a mist that had just started to come down when this dude comes flying around a corner going way too fast and turning way too tightly. He skidded out around the corner a la Mario Kart, then his tires caught traction and he missed us by maybe a foot. Great! The other was less close but more serious. A truck decided it didn’t like being close to the edge up in the mountains (no railing, of course) so he decided half our lane would do nicely. The only problem being that we were occupying our lane. A little jerk on the wheel, a few moments of stunned silence, followed by some choice phrases as we caught our collective breath.

Ironically, our car has been damaged, but by yours truly. We were driving in a town up in the mountains looking for the medieval city center and we found it. Hurrah! But the roads are all one-way so we kept going further and further and the stone walls keep getting closer and closer on each side. It was the driving equivalent of the cartoon where every door you open leads to a slightly smaller door, which leads to a slightly smaller door, etc. Only by the time we had reached the point of no return, we probably had three inches of clearance on either side. I tried to make a corner and didn’t, putting about a foot-long scrape in the passenger-side rear door. (If you look, you can see such scratches in cars all over Europe.) Suddenly, the decision to pay ten more bucks a day in insurance for total coverage (which even covers driver stupidity) seems like a masterstroke of planning.

The pictures of the north will do more justice than words (and we’re taking tons of pics.) Coimbra is a low-key college town that was the capitol of Portugal when the Moors held Lisbon, so there’s some cool medieval stuff to see here. We need day out of the car after putting on some 600-700 km in the past few days, and it’s time to do some laundry. We’ve made friends with a couple friendly dogs and cats and that makes us miss our kiddies, Athena and Heiner. We keep saying we can’t believe we did a six-week trip last time! Maybe we’re just getting old, but we’re homesick for a comfortable bed already and it’s only been a week.

Anyway, hope things are going well stateside. English is definitely not well-understood in the northern region of the country so we’ve been out of the news loop. Although we did get to watch Eurosong the other night which is sort of a European version of American Idol, only much worse.

That’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll check back in a few days. I replied to the last couple comments but the Internet connection must have killed it before it posted. Amy’s done with email so I’m going to go because her eyes are boring holes in the back of my head, but I didn’t get a chance to blog about the market at Barcelos or watching the Arse LOSE the Champions League final in the most satisfactory of ways, while eating pig intenstines at a local bar. More on that later. Love and hugs and kisses to all.

I’m posting this message from a small town in northern Portugal called Geres, which is a good distance northeast of Braga which is north of Porto which is way, way north of Lisbon. Or to put it another way, we’re in the middle of the country up by the border with Spain. There’s a national park here and Geres is a little town not unlike West Glacier or some of the other tiny places that serve our national parks. We’ve been here for about twenty minutes and I’m already in love. It reminds me a lot of the North Cascades near the Washington and Canadian border but the mountains aren’t quite so high.

We strolled Porto a bit and found it to be nice but nothing extraordinary. The people were exceptionally friendly and would go out of their way to answer questions, even if they didn’t have the same grip on English as their brethren in the south. Definitely worth a night, but not two. We picked up the car and headed north up the coast.

Q: Why does Portugal have the highest rate of car accidents in Europe?
A: Because they all drive like complete idiots.

Oops, the library is closing so I have to go. More to tell, though, so maybe tomrrow. Ciao!

Finally, a night in to catch up on blogging. Unfortunately, we’re afforded the time because Porto apparently closes down at 9:00 pm.

We’re on day three of our trip and have already done most of what there is to do in both Lisbon and Porto, Portugal’s two largest cities. They’re quite different. Lisbon reminded us a lot of other European cities we like as it has some medieval ruins (although much of the city has fallen over after serious earthquakes in the last thousand years), lots of pretty public squares, and narrow winding alleys. It has cable cars a la San Francisco to help haul you up the extremely steep streets and the three old neighborhoods (Baixa, Barrio Alto, and Chiado) have a lot of charm. Still, we managed to crank out some miles and do most of what Lisbon had to offer over a day and a half then jumped a train to Porto after both giving Lisbon a strong “A” grade.

Porto is much more blue collar than Lisbon and has less to do. The neighborhoods are fairly dilapitated and the whole city just seems exhausted. Most of the downtown area is under construction as they build a new subway system which doesn’t help matters. The main attraction is the number of port wine distilleries on the river. We toured two (Taylor and Sandeman) and found them to be much like Napa or Sonoma wine tasting tours, although Amy doesn’t like port very much. We had dinner and strolled around as we watched store after store close, leaving us dessert-less until we stumbled onto a place that served up two tiny scoops of gelato for a whopping 8 euros, which is almost twelve bucks. Sheesh.

We leave Porto tomorrow to head into the hinterlands of the Douro river valley. It may be a couple days before I post again. Nice to see your comments! We’re having a blast!

We made it! No problems whatsoever except not being able to sleep on the flight over. And the fact that each seat has its own personal tv unit and I ended up playing computer chess instead of reading.

We got into Paris and had a five hour layover so we jumped a train to Notre Dame and walked around for a few hours. Then we got back to the airport and slept most of the flight to Lisbon. We strolled around for a few hours, got some food, in us and crashed. Lisbon is a very pretty city. It reminds me of a medieval San Francisco as its very hilly and right on the water. Today we´re exploring the city on foot.

Not much to report, but two things quickly became clear upon arrival:
1. I love Europe.
2. I love Iberia.

That’s it for now. More to report once we actually do something. Feel free to post comments.