Henry Handball

Thierry Henry has a special place in the affections of all Arsenal Fans. Because of his connection with Arsenal, i have been asked several times over the few past days what i thought of his handball against the Irish. My simple answer is i'm not French or Irish so its no concern of mine what he did. England's through and that's all i'm worried about.
Why, what a Frenchman did against Ireland has become such big news here that it dominates the front pages of the tabloids is beyond me. I listened to the game on the radio and the commentators never mentioned handball until minutes later and the benefit of a few replays where they changed their mind and spent the remainder of the game saying how awful it was that the referee and linesman missed it.
If he did it against England then the Irish would be laughing their heads off so my view is tough luck Ireland. Get over it.
What is more of a concern is the even louder call for technology to play a part in football matches and that is something i am not much of a fan of.
I like the idea of such decisions coming down to what the referee or linesman's see. It makes it unpredictable and exciting. Many times my team and country have been the benefactor and the victim of some awful decisions by the referees. I have said 'phew, we got away with that one' just as many times as i have questioned the referees eyesight when a decision hasn't gone our way. It's part of the game and as much as i screamed at Wayne Rooney for his blatant dive to earn Manchester United a penalty against Arsenal earlier in the season, i was laughing like a drain when Michael Owen went down like he had been shot by a cannon when a bootlace breezed past his shin pad against Argentina in a previous World Cup.
What Thierry did was not nice if you are Irish, bloody great if you happen to be French and if Frank Lampard does the same thing in South Africa next summer we will be using words like cheeky and clever rather than labelling him a cheat or a shyster.
After all this support, we can now expect the Irish nation to be decking out their homes in the flag of St George and cheering on Capello's boys.

Bolon Yokte Is Coming Xmas 2012

There has been many end of the World prophecies. Most famous is probably Nostradamus who divided his time between growing rich inventing fake plague prevention pills and predicting the end of the World.
Ironically, his wife and children all died from the Plague later but although nobody would take his medicinal advice very seriously, many do take heed of his 'The End is Nigh' prophecies even if they have to rewrite them every time we wake up the morning after and find ourselves still here.
Now thanks to the film, 2012, we can prepare ourselves for the end because as the trailer's voice over solemnly instructs 'mankind's earliest civilisation warned us this day would come'.
The theory that we may as well cancel any plans for Christmas 2012 comes from the discovery that according to a partially deciphered, and half missing, hieroglyohic, Mayan calendars come to an abrupt end in 2012.
The bit of the inscription left foretells the descent to earth of the God Bolon Yokte on the Long Count date of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u which is interpreted as December 21st or 23rd, 2012.
The next part which describes what this Yokte fellow will do when he gets here has been destroyed, but since this is a deity associated with war, who plays a key role in the ending of one world and the beginning of the next, most analysts have assumed it didn't outline a plan for the handing out of cuddly toys.
Coupling the story of Maya with its intriguing sudden collapse and strange prophecies written in an ancient language is guaranteed to catch our imagination but don't worry if the 2012 date for the end of the world by the headless poultry waving Deity pictured above isn't convenient for you because Pope Leo XI in 1514 predicted it will end in 2014 and he was a Pope so he must have had inside information so you still have plenty of time to buy up tins of beans, torch batteries and anti-plague pills for that underground shelter.

The Irish Or The French?

Being English, i of course want England to qualify for things like the World Cup and as deluded as it makes me, i want us to win them. Can't see it happening but it won't stop me cheering us on until we get knocked out the first time we meet a halfway decent team as usually happens.
Usual practise is to then half heartedly switch my allegiance to whatever European teams are left in it with the exception of any of the other British teams who i want to see not just beaten but sent home as early as possible broken and battered.
Luckily, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are what are technically known in footballing parlance as shite so they never bother the finals of many tournaments but this weekend the Republic of Ireland took on France in a World Cup Qualifier.
I'm not sure when Ireland became part of Britain but because of the high number of British based players in the Ireland team, we were urged to get behind 'our boys'.
Because of the high number of current and former Arsenal based players in the French team, us Gooners found ourselves cheering for Les Bleus.
Whether Ireland manage to still qualify or the French make it through on Wednesday, i'm not really all that bothered but i would prefer the French if i had to choose just because of the shallow reason i gave above.
The British have a strange sense of patriotism when it comes to the countries that make up the British Isles.
It's a weird 'if we can't win, we don't want our closest neighbours to win it either' which is the sentiment that got Andy Murray into problems a few years back when he claimed support for any team that were playing against England.
By a strange quirk of geography, France is actually closer to England than Ireland and the majority of French actually speak more understandable English than the Irish so trade in those pints of Guinness and grab yourself a Stella Artois and let's cheer on Thierry Henry's boys to South Africa.

David Haye Thrills The 1%

I never really took to Lennox Lewis as a Brit. One reason was the boxing gold medal he won for Canada at the 1988 Olympic Games but mainly it was the strange halfway across the Atlantic accent he had. Canadian at heart and a Brit for convenience was the much used term thrown at him.
Now, Britain has a proper Heavyweight Champion of the World in David Haye as he beat Nikolay Valuev at the weekend. How he won and if he deserved the verdict i have no idea because i, along with most of the country, didn't see it.
Haye is on a Sky TV contract and was on 5% of the sales from the £15 pay to view fee so he undoubtedly made a stack of money from it although only 700,000, or just over 1%, of the country saw him do it.
Good luck to him i say, if he wants to put money before the acclaim of the nation then that is up to him but i didn't meet anyone today who watched the fight and there was no excitement over his achievement.
This must be a consideration as the Government reviews the major sporting events which must be broadcast on free to air television.
The English Cricket Board have already commented that while they may be reaping a huge financial benefit from its deal with Sky, cricket has been deprived of a vast audience that potentially includes a future generation of players. Advertisers can't be best pleased either that the millions they spend is shown to such a tiny audience.
Every sport has the right to sell their 'product' to whomsoever they wish, but don't then complain that no-one watches and there pot of emerging talent dries up.
I expect David Haye to go on and make more money than he can count but to 99% of the country he will always be a poor second to boxers who may have a quarter of his talent and never win any belts but are household names whose fights people talk about the next day.

Now That's Not What I Call Music

If America was to throw a concert for its 234th birthday next year, it could call upon a sparkling array of musicians and as long as they didn't invite any Country & Western singers, it would be well worth watching.
If the United Kingdom were to celebrate it's 303rd birthday next year, again, we could have a fine line up. Other places like Canada, Australia and Ireland could rummage around and find enough decent musicians to put on a decent Birthday bash but some places couldn't.
France for example. Great artists but god awful musicians but to be fair to them, they know that they suck so they don't even try which is what someone should have whispered into the ear of the Israeli who decided they would have a concert for Israels 60th Birthday celebrations last year. I saw bits of it on one of the Arts Channels tonight and even the musicians seemed embarrassed to be there.
This got me thinking, why are all the best musicians from only a handful of countries?
If you were to go back to the classical era, Austria and Germany ruled the musical roost but you would rather remove your ears with a butter knife than listen to a concert of the best Austria or Germany has to offer now.
One of the reasons would be that the places where the main group of bands and singers emerge from sing in the English language. Abba would have sunk without trace if they had sung all their songs in Swedish.
So today the top places for musicians would be America, Britain, Canada, Australia and Ireland and then it hit me. All these places are countries us Brits had turned over at some point as part of our Commonwealth land grab. It was the long lost silver lining that i had long sought for our brutal regime.
Okay, so being indirectly responsible for the emergence of Guns N Roses almost 250 years later doesn't make up for hacking our way through hundreds of thousands of the indigenous population globally, but its the silver lining that smarmy British bloggers can arrogantly point to in an attempt to say to seven eights of the globe that thanks to us and our colonies, musically, we are the best and you all suck. Phil Collins excepted of course.

Arsenal Fans And Colorado Rapids Fans

It seems that my team Arsenal are the next club to be hauling up the Star Spangled banner above their Stadium as Stan Kroenke positions himself to make a grab for power. As Kroenke is named as number 164 in the Forbes 400 list of richest people in the World, us Arsenal fans can only say a big Howdy to the yank and wonder if Fernando Torres would prefer to move to the Emirates in the January or summer transfer window.

What it does mean is that Arsenal and its fans will now move in with the rest of the Kroenke family so what other team fans will we be joining. Hello St Louis Rams supporters, we call your sport American Football here which may become confusing.
Is that you i see hiding over there fans of the baseball team Denver Nuggets. I see you have already met the Colorado Avalanche Hockey fans. I expect we will be seeing much more of each other in the near future Colorado Rapids Football team. Pre-season friendlies and i imagine we will find our way to lend you a few of our lesser players. What's that? Do we have a striker that's not really cutting it and wouldn't be missed by the team that we could lend you? Nicklas Bendtner, these guys want a word with you.

Another of the English teams that have already joined up with American owners is Aston Villa who have taken Randy Lerner's money and actually made quite a decent fist of things if you ignore Emile Heskey. Their fans are now linked with the American Football Team the Cleveland Browns.

Liverpool fans have been campaigning to oust the American duo of George Gillett and Tom Hicks ever since they took over and now with them out of the Premier League Title race, the League Cup and as good as out of the European Champions League before the first weekend of November, things will only get warmer for the Americans. For now though they are in with the supporters of the baseball team Texas Rangers, and ice hockey's Dallas Stars.

Finally Manchester United fans and Tampa Bay Buccaneers supporters shared common ground when Malcom Glazer strode into Old Trafford and plonked his amusingly ginger facial hair behind the owners desk. What with the Man Utds managers purple nose it can be quite a colour clash when these two get together.
Anyway, Manchester United fans are easily the most despised in the country so by association we are legally obliged to boo loudly at you Buccaneer fans also. Sorry, its the law.

Hard Things Made Easy #2

Do you remember sitting in French lessons at school reciting the days of the week and how to count from one to ten. Of course this would come in handy if you needed to meet someone at the Eiffel Tower at 6 on a Wednesday but otherwise it was pretty useless.
I would expect that, like me, you spent the best part of a year saying things in a weird accent and then forgot them. How about if i said to you that by the time it takes you to read this post, about 3 mins approximately, i could teach you to speak thousands of French words? Sacre Bleu as they say.
The thing to remember is that a good majority of the words that make up the English language are taken from the French, with the endings subtly changed.

How many words can you think of that end in -ible? Possible, incredible, visible. Knock off the -ible at the end and replace it with -ebe and you are speaking French. Possebe, incredebe, visebe.

Same with words ending in -able. Table, acceptable, debatable. Knock off the -able and say -arb instead so its becomes tarb, acceptarb, debatarb.

Easy isn't it, and here's some more. Words ending in -ent and -ant. Arrogant, assistant, independent, transparent all have the -ant or -ent knocked off and replaced with -unt so its pronounced arrogunt, assistunt, independunt and transparunt.

The way to pronounce words ending in -ary is -aire so stationary, necessary and secretary become stationaire, necessaire, secretaire.

Know many words ending in -tion and -sion? Pronounce it -seeon so position become posiseeon and condition becomes condiseeon.

To round off your thousands of words, find words ending in -ical and say -eek instead. So political is politeek and economical is economeek.

Remember, this is only a very rough guide and isn't the spelling and it only works with the spoken word. It is also important to get the emphasis in the right place which is generally where the change is made so it is independ-UNT, condi-SEEON, deba-TARB or econom-EEK.

There, as promised, you have just added thousands of words of a foreign language to your vocabulary (vocabul-AIRE) in less than 3 minutes.

Dr Nutt

I've always found it a quirk of the British political system that a Government has to pick its ministers for Government posts from the members that have been elected. What we end up with is the man controlling the Health Department for example, with no background in Health and was previously a lawyer.
Obviously the Prime Minister cannot find a perfect fit for each position from among his elected members so to this end, the Government bring in 'experts' to give advice to the Minister and to help steer policy and to stop any monumental mistakes.
The problem is that experts, with all their experience and background, sometimes say things that the Ministers don't want to hear and why Dr David Nutt today finds himself sacked as the Governments chief drug adviser.
The Scientist made the judgement in a research paper that "Alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth. Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively."
As the Government are in the middle of an attempt to reclassify cannabis, LSD and ecstasy as Class B drugs, and as they make billions from the alcohol and tobacco industry, Dr Nutt's comments were always going to be deemed less than helpful.
Experts do sometimes get it wrong as was shown with last weeks 'we are coming out of recession, oops, no we're not' debacle by the economy experts but I'd still take the view of an expert over that of a minister every time.
What Dr Nutt was actually saying was that although cannabis, LSD and ecstasy are undoubtedly dangerous drugs, there are actually some legal ones that are even more dangerous and damaging that need to be addressed as well.
We can disagree with him but personally i would assume that he knows more about it than the man who sacked him, Home Secretary Alan Johnson, whose background is in banking.
He was sacked, and was not the first expert to have been, for telling the truth as he saw it and means that the government is prepared to dismiss expert advice on the drug issue.
These scientists and scholars are not politicians and not supposed to tow the government line but the ministers should not take on independent advisers and then whinge and remove them when the advice comes back and it isn't what they want to hear.

Hell Of A Band

"You know that scene at the very beginning of Nightmare Before Christmas" said The Dark Prince to me last month, "the one where Pumpkin Jack comes back to his Halloween World after a successful nights Halloweening and they have a concert". I replied that i was aware of it.
"That's what we need here" he stated, leaning forward from his throne and handing me an order to round up the best musicians presently residing in Hell for a Halloween Night Concert.
Never one to turn down a man armed with a pitchfork and horns, i set about getting together the best band from not so nice dead musicians.
Bass guitar was easy, girlfriend murderer Sid Vicious. Luckily he was on his way to Michael Jackson's house and the paedophile was more than happy to join the band as lead singer.
Finding a drummer was proving difficult, especially as hammer wielding mother killer Jim Gordon was still alive but there was only one man to hand the lead guitar to, Lead Belly. Never a man to talk to his relatives when he could shove a knife in them instead.
Still leaves me struggling to find a drummer so i guess i will have to fit a drum machine until a notorious drummer turns up down there.
First song up, Knocking on Heavens Door. Beelzebub will love that.

Experts Wrong Shocker

Not one to make wild claims, at the start of the recession Gordon Brown said that Britain was best placed both to withstand a global downturn and to lead the world out of its slump. Being the Chancellor for a decade and having a good idea what state the countries finances were, most of us had no reason to disbelieve him. Us fools.
The United States has become the fourth G7 country after Germany, Japan and France to emerge from recession while we enter an unprecedented six straight quarter of falling output.
The majority of economists, financial experts and the Chancellor all predicted a GDP rise last week only to see a -0.4% fall turning instead.
The economy is now almost six per cent smaller than it was before the start of the downturn, meaning Britain is creating £90bn less per year than 18 months ago.
The same economists, financial experts and Chancellor who were upbeat about everything days ago, were said to be amazed and shocked by these figures.
The simple translation must be that haven't had a clue what's been going on since the start and they don't have any idea how to fix it. And these guys are the experts!
They shouldn't be trusted with a weather forecast, let alone an economic one.