Spurs lost to Man Ure yesterday, 2-1. Either side could have scored more, but two for Man Ure settled the deal. This upcoming weekend the Spurs play the Arse on their pitch. I don’t know if I can bear to watch. If Tottenham can get a point with a draw, that would be enormous. If they lose, they probably lose fourth place for the season.

Spurs have been in 4th place for twenty weeks now. No ups or down. Steady at 4th. Don’t believe me? How about a graph? (courtesy of stats.football365.com)

The other end of the table will likely go to the last day of the season. My money is on Portsmouth to escape the drop even though they blew a lead yesterday and went on to lose. Birmingham and West Brom look worse than Pompey, who at least have a bit of fight about them.

Read a good chunk of “The Thousand Nights and the One Night” last night. Some of the stories are so so, but some of them absolutely rock. If you’re not familiar with how the book works, it’s story layered on top of story layered on top of story. For example.

Last night I read the story of the Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad, which itself wasn’t that great. One of the recurring motifs is a person is told explicitly not to do something, which means it’s only a matter of time until they do it. In this case, the young porter finds three hot ladies and shacks up with them, on the condition that he never asks about any of the goings-on in the house. So they all get naked and party—a good section is one long dirty joke feature euphemisms for male and female genitalia, which is mildly amusing but a little long. Three other dudes (all with one eye missing) crash the party and later, the women excuse themselves to carry out some weird ritual involving whipping dogs and tearing off their robes. Of course, the men have sworn that they won’t ask about the goings-on in the house…but this activity is too odd, so they have to ask why the women do this.

The women are pissed and call in negroes with swords (it’s always negroes with swords) to put the men to death who, predictably, beg for their lives by telling incredible stories of how they each lost an eye. Their stories are the highlight of this whole episode, although I think the second beggar’s story was best.

There are lots of freaky elements that make these stories memorable: a man sews himself up in a bladder of an animal, so a gigantic bird of prey will pick him up and transport him to a remote mountain kingdom; another man is transformed into an ape and must write poetry and play chess to prove his humanity to kindly king; a sorceress duels with a djinni where they rapidly change into a dozen different shapes until finally the djinn turns himself into a pomegranate and explodes on the floor, and the sorceress must turn into a hen and peck up all the seeds before the djinn escapes.

This kind of stuff gets the imagination firing in a million different directions. It can be a real jump start when my brain feels exhausted.

You can read it on Bartleby.com here. The section described above is Nights 9-18, the best of which is the two-part story of the second mendicant.

Current Mood – Sure |
Currently Listening To – The Sex Pistols – “Never Mind the Bollocks”