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Just to point out a few articles I found quite interesting in the last week or so:

* F365’s John Nicolson puts forth a passionate defense of US soccer fans

* Landon Donovan slags Beckham in a new book by Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl called The Beckham Experiment, which they’ve also been talking about on World Soccer Daily

* F365’s Peter Gill makes a strong case for Spain having a stronger league than England based on the star power it attracts

The transfer season has only just begun but already things look quite interesting for the future in England and Spain. Conventional wisdom says that reigning Spanish league, Spanish Cup and Champions League champions Barcelona don’t need to change a thing considering they have a balanced, motivated squad that ended the season firing on all cylinders under a young, hip manager. The only big name rumored to be on the way out is striker Samuel Eto’o, and even that’s questionable. Even if he does go, plenty of strikers would pine to play with Barca’s midfield so a strong replacement wouldn’t be far behind.

Yet WTF is happening in Madrid? The Kaka’ deal wasn’t so surprising, nor the Ronaldo deal. Their move for Albiol didn’t make the big headlines but is a smart move, since the back line needs work. But now it looks like they’ve got Benzema, and perhaps Ribery not far behind? As many critics have pointed out, this flash approach wasn’t a huge success last go-round for Madrid, but I am reserving comment. If Madrid can latch onto another (perhaps unheralded) decent defender and a midfield enforcer, look out. Barcelona might still have the edge based solely on team cohesion, but this Madrid squad could push them. And they might make a dent in European competition to boot.

The other side of the Madrid shopping spree is that other clubs are now denied these players. Man Ure and the Ars* both had their sights set on one or two of the aforementioned, who are now off the shelves. It’s still early days but you’d have to say Man Ure are smarting. No more Ronaldo or Tevez, and Ribery and Benzema apparently spoken for. While I’m sure they’ll pry some decent players away here and there, can they possibly make the same kind of impact?

Chelski and Liverpool will be interesting birds this upcoming season too, depending on who moves where. If Liverpool loses Mascherano and Alonso, they’re screwed. You can’t gut the team of that kind of midfield talent and expect to push for the title. Besides the fact they’re not the most stable of clubs at the moment, so who wants to move there? The same goes for Chelski. The shine has gone off the club and they’re no longer the hot spot for big league transfers. The same goes for the Arse and Man City, both of which would have problems attracting a prostitute at the moment.

There’s a lot of shaking and baking to happen before September, but it’s fascinating stuff.

Current Mood: Good |

Over the past week or so I’ve read From Hell, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and V for Vendetta. Between Alan Moore and Frank Miller, I find Moore’s work to be far more nuanced and compelling. In undergrad I took a course on comics where we read Miller’s Give Me Liberty and, while I liked the graphic novel’s premise, I didn’t like the execution. I would also say that I had high expectations for Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and felt a little let down. In Miller’s stories, he does a better job with his characters than the worlds he builds, which far too black and white. Media coverage is one-sided and absurd, politicians are narrow-minded and crooked. I also felt TDKR moved at a breakneck speed and could have easily been longer by two or three episodes. I loved the artwork though.

Moore in contrast understands the need for subtlety. The media in V for Vendetta, for example, simply broadcasts the state-scripted news without any hint of the absurd, which makes it more realistic and chilling than the cartoony reporters in Miller’s work. And From Hell is a brilliant and intricate work that places a lot of demands on the reader. Sunday morning funnies this is not. Good stuff.

The silly season began with a bang when Real Madrid made the double swoop for Kaka and Ronaldo. Why do I feel like I’m one of the few people on the planet who were not surprised at all with the Ronaldo transfer? Of all the news reports flying around over the past year, here are the two things that (for whatever reason) I seemed to home in on as being key:

1) Ronaldo wanted to go Real Madrid last year but Fergie, who was resigned to losing him, convinced him to stay for one more year to try and win the Champions League, World Club Championship, and Premier League before he starts blooding a new crop of players.

2) Ronaldo’s petulance at being subbed against Man City felt contrived. In fact, I suspect that his hilarious histrionics over the past year have been intentional in order to further alienate him from Man Ure fans and ease the pain of him leaving.

Will Real’s mad spending spree result in them challenging Barcelona’s throne? I kind of doubt it. It seems to me that they need to be buying the highest quality defenders available rather than buying purely offensive talent. And now David Villa and Franck Ribery are allegedly next? Not a lot of fellows there who enjoy tracking back to get a tackle in.

And let’s spare a moment for poor Valencia, who look to offload their best players in order to stay afloat. Villa, Silva, Juan Mata and Albiol seem pretty certain to leave in order to pay back the club’s debts. Valencia have unearthed some of the most exciting talents in the modern game, and I used to love to watch them play with the likes of Gaizka Mendieta and Joaquín in their heyday.

The US plays Italy today at 1:30. I predict a loss. I watched Brazil and Egypt play an absolute barn burner this morning. The US plays Brazil on Thursday and Egypt on Sunday. I predict… erm… um… a loss and a loss. I would certainly love to be wrong, but the order of the day at the Confederations Cup has been slick, quick passing on the carpet. The US’ long ball schtick will not work. Will. Not. Work. And if Egypt and Brazil play like they did today, they will both shred the US defense.

Spain? OMG. So frigging good it’s sick. Easily the most fun team to watch on the planet. They made the Kiwis look absolutely clueless. Gotta love it.

I scored again last Saturday. That makes it five goals in five games. Mad City United topped the tables with a record of 13-0-3 and will steam into the play-offs as the number one seed this upcoming weekend. If we win that, I will regrettably be out of town for the final the next weekend.

My end of the regular season stats? Six goals in the twelve games I played. Once again, I have to toot my own horn: a goal every other game from the defensive midfield? I’ll take it!

Current Mood: Fine |

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A few years ago I started tracking the champions of European soccer leagues in a database to see if I could see any definite trend in competitiveness after the introduction of major advertising revenues via television rights deals, which exploded in the early nineties. I also wanted to compare them against the major US sports to compare turnover, meaning how many times new champions were crowned. I dropped them into a grid going back to 1984 (twenty-six years) and the results surprised me. (full tables below the cut)

First off, from looking at a list of champions alone, you can’t say that things changed dramatically for European soccer. In each of the big five leagues, the champions have always come from a very select few teams. In England, they’ve had 3 different teams win the title in 6 years; not so bad considering that the number only increases to 7 if you go all the way back to 1984. Also, I was surprised to see that the other European leagues had been just as static over that time period. Italy leads the pack with 9 different champs since 1984. The numbers look even worse if you toss out the teams that have only won one championship; Spain’s the worst offender as it really just boils down to two teams in Real Madrid and Barcelona, with Valencia winning twice and Atletico Madrid, Deportivo La Coruna, and Atletico Bilbao only topping the table once.

This stands in stark contrast with US sports, whose leagues have tried to maintain a higher level of parity. Even though it seems like dynasties are fairly common in US sports, the table shows quite a bit of turnover: fourteen and fifteen different champs for NFL and NHL, a whopping nineteen for MLB, leaving only the NBA as having numbers similar to the European leagues with 9. Only the Champions League (formerly European Cup) comes close to those numbers with fourteen different winners. Of course, there are a couple important variables: it’s cup competition not a league, and it runs concurrently with a domestic league season.

This data also discounts the fact that many of these title races go right down to the wire, but it also reveals the fact that certain teams always seem to win out in the end. Still, it’s hard to see how an eighteen-team, single-table European league wouldn’t be significantly more competitive and perhaps more interesting. I also can’t see a salary cap being put in place anytime soon, considering the clout these major European teams have, and there’s also no denying that the rich have become richer and that vying for these domestic league titles is a very, very expensive proposition.

Draw what conclusions you will.

(more…)

The TOC for The Best Horror of the Year #1 has been announced, and can be seen here along with the cover art. Still pretty damn pleased with my inclusion in this volume.

Also, I was working on my CV yesterday and searched for my name in Amazon so I could get the dates of a couple publications, and was quite surprised to see that my story “From the Mouths of Babes” that appeared in F&SF awhile back is mentioned a number of times in a book on feminist science fiction entitled Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Quite cool.

I also saw that the YA book Stories from Songs: Ballads as Literary Fictions for Young Adults is also out, which features a detailed recap of my story “Black Jack Davy” along with some notes I wrote on how the various versions of the folk song helped inspire my writing of the story. Also cool.

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I watched chunks of the Champions League final yesterday and was more than a little pleased to see Man Ure flail against Barcelona. Remember the Man Ure team that was supposed to win everything? Yeah, well they ended up winning the World Club Cup (dubious), the League Cup (yawn), and the Premier League. Not to say they aren’t a great team but they’re also not even close to being the greatest of all time.

On the flip side, apropos of my post a few days ago, why isn’t the media going apeshit over Barcelona? They ripped through La Liga and did a treble of their own, winning the Copa del Rey and now the Champions League? For some reason, I sense a good many people feeling that Barcelona were the better team “on the night” as the saying goes. This would completely ignore the fact that Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi completely bamboozled the Man Ure midfield for at least an hour of the match, and Carlos Puyol devoured most of the attacks coming down the flank.

To underscore the stupidity of it all, Soccern*t’s main story today was Rio Ferdinand saying Man Ure will recover. If Man Ure had lost, do you really think the main story would be Carlos Puyol saying the same thing about Barcelona? No, it would be more fawning over SAF and commemorating Man Ure as the best team to ever play the game, ever ever.

Makes me want to puke.

Current Mood: Fine |

So Man Ure (yawn) wins another English Premier League title. The top six remain unchanged with some shuffling of places—and all of this decided some weeks ago. Are we having fun yet?

Per usual, the relegation scrap ended up being more interesting than the race at the top. The last several weeks set up an interesting finale that never really lived up to the billing. There were exactly two twists—the Man Ure goal that temporarily raised Newcastle from the drop zone, and the Aston Villa goal that put them back down—and that was it. Even the dying moments weren’t that interesting as Newcastle looked pathetic and defeated for most of the second half. A goal would have been a miracle and it would have cruel on Hull, who at least played well for about half the season—which is a half more than Newcastle.

I think what puts me off the most is the sycophantic coverage of the Premier League in the American media, most notably from Soccern*t and Fox Soccer Channel. On Saturday, Wolfsburg won their first Bundesliga title ever with a convincing 5-1 rout on a day where three teams had a shot at winning the league. The main story on Soccern*t? Whether Mark Hughes had the backing of the Man City board. And the French league gets even less coverage despite the fact that they will be crowning a new champion for the first time in forever, as it’s mathematically impossible for Lyon to be champs again. Sad, really. For FSC it’s somewhat understandable as they focus on England and Italy, the two leagues for which they own the broadcasting rights. For Soccern*t, it’s pretty inexcusable.

What I find remarkable is that F365 is fairly critical of these developments as well considering that they, as an English website, have more right than anyone to tout Premier League dominance. But as I read their final Premier League Winners and Losers, they’re less than happy at the rather predictable shape of the table, and how it doesn’t look like things will change anytime soon.

Thought F365 doesn’t go this far, I place a lot of blame on American bandwagon-jumping fans who buy the Big Four jerseys and splash cash on Pay-Per-View games that make the richest more rich. You can’t tell me that it’s the French and Germans who are splashing cash, and from what I’ve seen in Latin American countries, there’s at least equal interest in the Spanish and Italian leagues. The finger is pointing directly at the US and (probably moreso) Southeast Asia. Ironic then that these are the markets FIFA has so desperately wanted to involve in order to bust up the power of European football.

And though very few on these shores care to listen, I have to say once again that La Liga from top to bottom is a more entertaining league than the England. The Premier League obviously boasts the best top four teams, and arguably the best top six. But my God, have you ever actually tried to watch Wigan vs. Blackburn? Boro vs Sunderland? I would rather watch relegation-teetering Osasuna or mid-table plodders Mallorca a hundred times over rather than the bottom half of the Premier League. The speed and physicality of the league are only beautiful to watch when they’re balanced out by grace, and only the top few teams have that in abundance. All too often the games on Saturday resemble two blindfolded boxers duking it out, but I wonder how many Americans even notice, choosing to pay the additional fee to watch the big games on Setanta instead…

Maybe I’m just crabby, or maybe I just remember a time when it used to be different. All I know is that ten years ago the big talk was about a breakaway European super league, a single table of 18 of the best teams across Europe. Back then it seemed ludicrous, a plot devised by money men with no respect for tradition; now, it might at least make things more interesting. And the fact that I’m bored enough to entertain the idea depresses me.

Current Mood: Ho Hum |

Mad City Utd lost 3-1 in our first game of the year three weeks back. We played listlessly, lethargically, without any energy. Our passing was bad, our movement was bad—we were bad. I played out on the wing and wasn’t too involved. The other team played quite well and deserved their win. Last weekend, our game got canceled on account of lightning.

This weekend we arrived at the pitch to find a triple-whammy—high wind, a horribly slanted field, and muddy turf. We had our full lineup this time and reverted to our traditional 4-5-1 rather than the 4-4-2 we messed with during the opener. The result? A 4-1 win. We had about a dozen other good chances and the only reason they scored is because our keeper literally threw the ball to one of their forwards inside the box. I played in the defensive midfield role and I was happy with the performance, busting up play and getting the attack started. I was rewarded with cleat marks on my thigh and my calves. Onward.

The last thing Chelski wanted to see ahead of their semifinal clash with Barcelona was the Catalan club pasting Real Madrid 6-2 away from home. I haven’t seen the replays, but reports suggest it could have been 16-2. Chelski beware. Hopefully they’ll actually try to come out and play at home…

Things have gone a bit flat as this stage of the Premier League season. Man Ure would have to lose at least two of their last four? Not gonna happen. Villa has faded badly and the race for fourth was over a month ago. Blackburn, Pompey, Stoke, and Bolton have picked up enough points to steer them to virtual safety.

West Brom is down. But who will join them? Newcastle and Boro occupy the last two spots and three points from safety and Hull, who sits on 34 points, has won exactly once in 2009. What must be maddening for these clubs is that the tiniest amount of quality is all it takes to raise them from the mire, but all three of these teams have been as dire as the day is long. Sunderland (playing Everton as I type) is not out of the woods either, but they at least show flashes of competence. It’s almost a shame all of them can’t go down.

Current Mood: Okay |

Since Amy’s due on Sunday, May 10th, I’m trying to get all of my final papers done by the Friday before, May 8th. Normally they wouldn’t be due until the 18th or so, so effectively I’m shaving about a week-and-a-half off my semester. If that doesn’t happen I can always ask for an extension, but I’d rather have things totally done and dusted before life goes wonky.

It feels like I’m reading about three hundred different things right now and trying to keep them all separated in my head. I have classes where I’m reading social and political philosophy in one and business and technical writing teaching theory in the other; on the side, I’m reading chapters out of Magical Realism: Theory, History, and Community, finishing Borges’ Ficciones, and I’m listening to Octavia Butler’s Kindred. And then there’s the small matter of reading the essays from English 101 along with the material I’ve assigned…

Oddly enough, I kind of like it. It’s strange how I find myself making connections between all of them, including the business writing stuff. And then it all comes around when I’m thinking about what information I privilege when I teach.

I had a dream last night that I got to hang out with Fernando Torres in a hospitality tent at the FA Cup, after Liverpool lost to Newcastle. He was telling me that if Liverpool kept playing like they were, he thought they would still win the Premier League title. I wondered aloud if Newcastle was going to do the dubious double of winning the FA Cup and getting relegated.

Dreams often have a grain of truth in them, and both Liverpool and Newcastle are out of the FA Cup. That leaves Liverpool winning the title or Newcastle going down. I know which one my money is on.

Oh, one last snitty “I was here way before you” comment directed to FSC’s Mark Rogondino. This past weekend, he said that Newcastle had been in the Premier League since the year it started back in 1992. “Before then,” he said, “They were playing in the Championship.”

Wrong. In 1992, the old First Division became the Premier League. To make things confusing, the old second division renamed itself the First Division, even though it was the second-tier league. This continued until 2004 when the First Division decided to brand itself the Championship and the second division (which was formerly the third division) changed its name to Football League One. So to correct Rogondino’s statement, he should have said, “Before then, Newcastle were playing in the Second Division.” Which wouldn’t have made sense to most viewers but would have been factually true.

The sobering thing is that I remember reading about the proposed name change to the Premier League in Soccer America, which I read during study hall in high school. The claim back then was that the marketing ploy would help brand English football and would help it get a foothold on a global audience. (Back in those days, the Italian Serie A was the place to be with AC Milan winning everything in sight.) So, how’d that work out for them?

Current Mood: Tired |

Last “Confident Homecoming” class last night. We determined that the misery was all down to the instructor because the last few weeks haven’t been bad. We’re confident about coming home now. It’s just coming home with a baby that complicates things.

Also, on the car ride over Amy insisted on telling me the longest story ever about how she first waffled, and then ultimately decided to go for the five-year warranty on our newest big purchase, the Power Miser 900. It’s a hot water heater. She kept getting mad when I interrupted her to say that this conversation was what all non-married couples feared most.

Federations is now available for pre-order from Amazon. Buy it! I assume it must be some kind of accident or oversight, but my name appears nowhere amidst the promotional hyperbole.

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Man Ure vs. Villa on Sunday was a remarkable spectacle, wasn’t it? Heartbreaking for Villa but what an ending. Happily, I don’t have Man Ure enough for this to upset me too much, although I do think their fingers are touching trophy now. It’s that game in hand that spoils things.

Porto, Chelski, Barca, and Ars*nal in the semifinals of the Champs League? Who would’ve thunk it? ‘Pool are well and truly out as are Bayern, but I’m not writing off Man Ure. Remember ‘89? They did things like this every round. And my heart would love see Villareal bounce back in London, but my head says Spanish teams just don’t do that.

Geek admission: I love writing long, properly formatted bibliographies. I compiled a 30-item list yesterday, the fruits of some good research. Now I just have to read the articles and write the 15-page paper.

“This was a wonderful paper,” I said dreamily the other night. Amy looked over and asked if it was a student’s. I said no, I was talking about mine. She rolled her eyes and I quickly added, “Oh, I’m not reading my own paper, I’m just reading the bibliography. It’s like a narrative in itself, you know.”

Finally, I am always trying to bring in texts from outside the class in an effort to convince my 101 students that the course is applicable to just about everything in their lives, if they pay attention. The goal is to alert them to the rhetoric that always surrounds us, to decipher the possible purpose behind the rhetoric, and to pay close attention to both the language and design of texts that help reinforce this purpose. To demonstrate this, on Monday we’ll be looking at this article from Madison Magazine on how menus are put together. A quote:

A menu seems so simple, but in truth it is part business plan, part efficiency expertise, part artistry, part culture vulture and part psychological tug-of-war….A restaurant menu announces its intentions in a variety of ways, balancing practicality and desire right down to the paper. A higher-end restaurant menu may be literally more substantial: heavier paper and broader dimensions seem to prepare the eye for double-digit prices. Capitol ChopHouse, for instance, presents its guests with a simple two-color printout at lunch but an oversize cardstock version at dinner.

When I find things like this I think, “What a great example!” This is quickly followed by the thought, “God, I must be insufferable to listen to.”

Current Mood: Pretty Good |

I also want to quickly mention how much I hate Ars*nal.

Word on the street is that the old swagger is back. And who have they toppled in this end-of-season revival? None other than the mighty West Brom (20th place -29 GD), Blackburn (16th place -16 GD), and Newcastle (18th place -13 GD), and enjoyed FA Cup success with a last-minute come-from-behind victory thanks to a dodgy, clearly offside goal against Hull City (who have won exactly once in their last 14 matches against Premier League teams).

Stirring stuff indeed.

Current Mood: Ten Points Off the Title Race… |

Well, this weekend we put a lot of work into converting my old office (the smaller bedroom in our two-bedroom house) into a nursery, and brought my desk and bookshelves into our master bedroom (and now office). I like the new arrangement quite a bit, except one minor problem…

Actually, it’s a major problem insofar as it’s driving me nuts. I don’t want to go into a long explanation but we have a lot of devices hooked up to our household network. The problem is that we did not put an Ethernet jack on the wall where we now have the desk. For whatever reason, I thought I had a simple solution in the form of a wireless network card. Cue the insanity.

I plugged in my formerly decommissioned Netgear wireless router, purchased back when these things used to be quite difficult to set up. It should have been setup previously but it was collecting dust for about five years, so I wasn’t too surprised when my computer could “see” it but couldn’t connect. And it was frustrating but not surprising when the thing kept refusing the username and password for setup, even though I reset it to the factory settings. Apparently, this is a common occurrence with this model of old router—when it gives up the ghost, it permanently locks you out. Terrific.

So I bought a new router, planning on returning it before the 30-day return policy runs out. The new one sets up in about five minutes and both laptop and computer connect. Perfect! Until I try to secure the network. The wireless cards I have are also five years old and they don’t want to play nice with the new security features. Except they don’t want to play nice with the old security features either.

Today, the first day I’m really working on this computer, I realize that there are a number of random sites that timeout for no apparent reason—Hotmail, Facebook, and some of the live score broadcasts from footie websites. Not good. It isn’t a browser problem and Googling reveals this is one of the wonderful issues that’s posted about in a million places but never resolved. All I know is that Friday when it was a wired connection, everything was peachy; today, on a wireless connection, everything is not. You be the computer tech and try to isolate the problem…

I have a suspicion that it’s the old, crappy adapter that’s somehow causing sites to hang. Amy suggested I just use the computer downstairs to check those sites but I used to do tech support stuff and I knew—quite rightly—that these are the only problems we’ve found so far. Sure enough, I can’t get into my class records online and I can’t update my website using Dreamweaver. It will, however, connect long enough to corrupt the file on the server and render a page useless. It shoots down Dreamweaver, FireFTP, and even logging into the server and either manually editing the files or uploading new ones. Unbelievable…

This is the kind of crap that will drive you crazy. The problem is difficult to isolate and working through the steps to eliminate problems takes time I don’t have. (sigh)

Unsurprisingly, Spurs lost the Carling Cup to Man Ure. As many fans pointed out on F365’s mailbox, there doesn’t seem to be much point in winning the thing and qualifying for Europe if you then field a C team in the later stages, which Spurs of course did last week and were eliminated (like Aston Villa) by some Eastern European team badly in need of some vowels in their name. But the problem of European competition won’t vex Spurs next year regardless.

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I watched a good chunk of Villa vs. Stoke and was heartily disappointed at them conceding two goals in the last two minutes after Stoke had hardly managed a shot on goal. The only good news was Ars*nal’s inability to beat Fulham on Saturday, leaving the gap between them at five points.

And the best part about La Liga is that the potential for meltdown is always on the cards. Four months ago, Barcelona were (arguably) head and shoulders the best team in Europe, never mind Spain. Now they haven’t won in ages and Real Madrid are a mere four points behind them. If normal business resumes, Barcelona will right the ship and Madrid will go flat and the title race will threaten to be interesting but, in reality, will peter out. Still, I would have loved to see the cracking 4-3 loss to Atletico Madrid. Damn Dish network for dropping GolTv…

Current Mood: Pretty Tired and Displeased |