I also can’t believe what I’ll call “the Chelski effect” that has bloated the price of transfers. £30 million for Adebayor? At that rate, £17 million for a player like Barry seems like a steal. That’s also in the neighborhood of Luca Modric, Spurs’ biggest signing to date, and I would take those two over one Adebayor any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The rumor I like the most is David Villa to Liverpool to reunite with Fernando Torres, although that’s never going to happen. If by some chance it does, then suddenly I’m much bigger Liverpool fan.

I have to say Riders of the Purple Sage is pretty good, especially on audio. There’s ample opportunity to zone out for a minute or so only to come back and realize you haven’t missed anything plot-wise. And this is much more what I expected from a Western, what with the murderin’, and rustlin’, and stampedin’, and seekin’ of vengeance. It’s not the best book in the world, but it’s pretty entertaining.

But very few books can hold a candle to Blood Meridian, which I am rereading and have decided goes into my “All-Time Favorite” book list. I was switching off between this and The Orchard Keeper, which I haven’t read previously, but I’ve been reading way more of Blood Meridian because it’s just so undeniably awesome. Check out this sentence when the Americans filibustering in Mexico stumble across an Indian war party:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or bilblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bulls or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Oh my god, said the sergeant.

Things don’t go well from here…

Current Mood: Good |

/ /
We leave for Madrid on Wednesday morning and I came down with a bad cold on Friday. Lots of wheezing, hacking, sore throatiness and stiffness. Nothing a nine-hour flight won’t cure, I’m sure.

I’m bringing four books on my trip: Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich, and Child of God and The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy. Four books sounds like a lot but all but the first one are relatively short, and I have the better part of two days in airports waiting for connections. I don’t like running out of things to read while traveling so I figure better safe than sorry. I also have an e-verision of John Kessel’s Baum Plan for Financial Independence on my Blackberry just in case. (You should go download it from Creative Commons now—Kessel is awesome.)

There were some games happening in England yesterday. Man Ure won the league with the lowest point total since 2002, Fulham stayed up, Reading and Birmingham went down. All in all, a very entertaining year in the Premier League. Normally I would say I don’t know how I am going to survive the summer without any football to watch, but happily it’s the year of the European Championship, and all the games are on ESPN/ESPN2. We’re lucky. We really are. Did I mention it kicks off about two days after we get home? Lovely.

Current Mood: Sick |
Currently Listening To – Eddie Vedder – “Into the Wild Soundtrack”

The World Cup I remember the most vividly is Italia 90, and I remember it for all the wrong reasons. Negative play. Time wasting. Lots of 0-0 draws and 1-0 victories. As a direct result of the dire nature of the tournament, FIFA updated some of the rules. They liberalized offsides and made it so goalkeepers couldn’t handle the ball on backpasses. This helped speed up the game and 1994 was a much better tournament for it.

In the wake of this year’s tournament FIFA needs to listen to Franz Beckenbauer and crack down on the play-acting and time wasting. What will I remember about this tournament? A few moments of wonder: Spain’s fourth against the Ukraine; the wondergoal Argentina scored against S&M; Maxi Rodriguez’s left-footed volley against Mexico; Beckham’s free kick against Ecuador. And a few moments of madness: the red cards of Mastroeni, Pope, Rooney, and Zidane; the farce passing as refereeing in the group stage; the card flurry fiasco of Holland vs. Portugal. But perhaps what I’ll remember most is the Oscar-worthy performances of Portugal and Italy, fourth-place and champion respectively. They raised play-acting to a whole new level.

Sad, really, that diving, lying, cheating, and whining reaped such rich rewards. Let’s hope FIFA sorts it by 2010.

As I mentioned, I finished reading Jeff Ford’s Empire of Ice Cream yesterday and thought it was terrific. I’ll come back to these stories again and again. The ones I find the most fetching are the semi-autobiographical ones where you can’t quite tell where the fantasy creeps in, or if it does at all. The detail Jeff brings is one of first-hand experience and there’s no point in giving the old “the resemblance of any personages herein to any persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental” disclaimer because we know his characters are real, if perhaps composites. And while it’s a mistake to think the narrator is Jeff himself, it’s hard to imagine it being someone very different.

Stories that I think belong in what I’m calling, with tongue firmly in cheek, The Fordia Cycle:
* Creation (Fantasy Writer’s Assistant & Other Stories)
* The Woman Who Counts Her Breath (FWA)
* The Honeyed Knot (FWA)
* Bright Morning (FWA)
* Present from the Past (Silver Gryphon)
* A Night in the Tropics (Empire of Ice Cream)
* Botch Town (EIC)
* The Trentino Kid (EIC)

When reading Jeff’s larger body of work there’s also a great deal of overlap. For instance, Jeff relates a story from his youth on his blog that has its twin in “Night in the Tropics”. In “Botch Town,” the narrator mentions his mother’s unfinished story “Something By the Sea,” a title of one of the stories contained in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant. And the narrator’s gruff-but-loving, machine-oil-smelling father and eccentric, artistic mother have a great deal of carryover from “Creation,” to “Present from the Past,” to “Botch Town.” And I noticed a lot of the sentiment of “Botch Town” spilled over into Jeff’s excellent novel The Girl in the Glass. But I’m sure the resemblance is purely coincidental…

In conclusion, if you don’t read Jeff Ford, you should. Happily, I have yet to read several of his novels but it’s a deficiency I’m sure to make up soon.

Current Mood: Monday |
Currently Listening To – Mississippi Fred McDowell – “Blues Masters”

Top five finishers are:
1. Paul Thompson – 88 pts
2. Will Ching – 82 pts
3. Trent Hergenrader – 81 pts
4. Matt Garner & Jed von Heimburg- 73 pts

However, I have to say I felt ESPN’s pool weighed the latter stages too heavily and spread the top of the table unevenly. If you just go by sheer number of games guessed correctly, the results look like this:
1. Matt Garner, Trent Hergenrader, Troy Hergenrader – 43 games
4. Will Ching, Paul Thompson – 42 games
6. Grace Dugan, Ellen Stenard – 40 games
8. Jed von Heimburg – 37 games

Out of 64 games, that’s not too shabby—68%, 66%, 63%, and 58% correct respectively, including draws for those first round games. Folks know their footie. Or guessed well.

Rules are rules though, so all hail PT!

It’s over in something not terrible but certainly not resembling a classic and left me wondering what possible ethnic slur prompted Zidane’s madness.

Finished Empire of Ice Cream and enjoyed it more than The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, which is saying something.

Please explain to me again, slowly, why they didn’t renew Deadwood, obviously the world’s best show ever.

Current Mood: Pensive |

Unfortunately, I can’t do it all over again and I’m stuck with what I’ve got. I got another round of pick-up in and experienced another ride on the rollercoaster that is my post-30 ability. I wasn’t categorically awful but I was a long way from good—maybe within touching distance of competent. I had two flashes of brilliance—a goal on a full volley and a left-footed strike from distance at an acute angle—and the rest was mostly crap. The ball appeared to be negatively charged with my foot.

It wasn’t a great experience for anyone, really. The teams were too unbalanced in terms of skill and my team was far less fit to boot. The worst part was that my boots finally gave up the ghost, the leather tearing away from the sole on the right foot and splitting on the instep on the left. I thought in this day and age a fellow could pick up a pair of adidas Copa Mundials, the best soccer shoe on the planet, for $50. I am wrong. They’re $90 almost everywhere.

Don Quixote‘s capacity to reason reminds me of our country’s recent logic regarding foreign policy. Which is frightening.

I am now almost half-way done (300 pages) with the first volume of The Thousand Nights and the One Night, or about 1/8th through the full set. I’ve realized that the longer stories tend to be less entertaining than the ones broken into smaller segments. Right now I’m working my way through the tale of Ali-Nur and Sweet Friend and it’s not one of my favs.

I’m almost done with Jeff Ford’s Empire of Ice Cream and I’ll be sad when I’m done. I’m part of the way through “The Trentino Kid” and I skipped the longest story “Botch Town” but all the stories here are fabulous. Like all masters of their craft, Jeff makes it look deceptively easy.

And not that I need anything else phone book-length to read, but on a whim I picked up The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm last night while waiting for the computer to boot up and read the story Bearskin. It rocked. I’ve read very few Grimm stories and none of Hans Christian Andersen. Too much to read, too much to read…

Did I mention I’ve got Titus Groan and The Well at the End of the World on deck once I’m done listening to the Quixote?

Right, so it’s time to buckle down. Free time has been hard to come by in the last month but that’s changing with the World Cup ending on Sunday. One good sit-down should enable me to hammer out the rest of “Sleeping Weather” and I’ve gotten some good feedback on “Five African Beers.” I’ve gotten a few rejections in the past few weeks (all very positive) and should be getting a few more soon, so I need to insert these two in the queue somewhere.

I’ve mentioned this before (I think) but I’m strongly considering expanding “Castleneff” into a novel. It’s only been out once (rejected with compliments by Gordon at F&SF, primarily because this episode deals with a trip to the afterlife and he’d seen too many of those lately) and I need to make a few changes to it before it goes out again. But I think once I arrange the other episodes into the framework I’m imagining, the story will almost write itself. Each chapter stands alone but as a connected part of the whole. Write about 10 of those and you’ve got a novel. So what am I waiting for?

Got my contract from Weird Tales on Monday for “Working Out Our Salvation.” Contracts are nice.

Current Mood: So So |
Currently Listening To – Wilco – “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”

Oh, and just for kicks, let’s take another look at the FIFA Coca-Cola World Rankings:
01. Brazil
02. Czech Republic
03. Netherlands
04. Mexico
05. USA
06. Spain
07. Portugal
08. France
09. Argentina
10. England
13. Italy
19. Germany

Right, as always.

The DVR that comes with Dish Network is nice but it ain’t nearly as smart as TiVO. For instance, the Korean Broadcasting Network (KBN) started the games ten minutes earlier than either ESPN/ESPN2 that broadcast the same match simultaneously. The DVR would pick up the first instance of the game and skip the second as a duplicate event so I ended up watching about half the games of the first round in Korean. As it turns out, I enjoy watching games in Korean rather than English, where I have to suffer the idiotic announcers.

The other major problem is that the DVR doesn’t know when a show has run past the programming length. That means games that end in a draw get about one half of extra time recorded and then it shuts down. Any guesses as to where I’m going with this?

So I figured (correctly) that I could leave town and miss the Saturday games of England vs. Portugal and Brazil vs. France and watch them on Sunday, just as long as I made everyone know that I did not want to know any scores should they know them. That part of the plan worked fine.

Upon coming home last night, I watched England vs. Portugal with great interest. My interest grew greater and greater and greater still until about the 75th minute when I realized with utter certainty that the game was going into extra-time. Extra-time that I would miss. And sure enough, that’s what happened. No penalty drama for me. It was a good game and I got to see the turning point in Rooney’s mad stomp but still, I felt a bit let down.

But not as half as let down as when I pulled up Brazil vs. France (on the KBN no less) and saw…England vs. Portugal. Wait a minute, I wanted Brazil vs. France. When I checked the programming guide it said Brazil vs. France and, come to think of it, the program’s title that the DVR recorded? “Brazil vs. France” Yet there’s no mistaking that the game I was watching was indeed a replay of England vs. Portugal. Not sure how that happened but I do know I didn’t get to see the upset of the World Cup and that displeases me.

So, it’s Germany vs. Italy and France vs. Portugal. Ironic then that this World Cup touting fair play would feature two teams in the semis who have brought diving and whining to a whole new level in Italy and Portugal.

In a marathon of television viewing, I also caught last night’s episode of Deadwood. It’s tragic that the show wasn’t renewed for a fourth season because it makes HBO’s darling The Sopranos look silly. Silly, I tell you.

Sopranos nose-dived in season three and never recovered. Deadwood, on the other hand, just seems to be hitting stride. Whereas Sopranos introduced new characters only to kill them off, Deadwood introduces new characters that add a new dimension to the story. The addition of Gerald McRaney as George Hearst has been a stroke of genius. And once again I can’t wait to see what happens next Sunday.

Current Mood: Why Don’t They Just Give Us Monday Off? |
Currently Listening To – Wilco – “Summer Teeth”

Odd then that the Argies would score from a corner and the Germans from a nice move from the run of play. The big gamble for Argentina was taking off Riquelme, who didn’t appear to be as gassed as say, Tevez or Crespo. The other odd decision was to throw on Cruz instead of Messi, as Cruz is a tall lad and Messi is small and quick. Which do you think the giant Germans would have a harder time defending? The only thing I can think is that the Argies planned to play long ball to kill the last ten minutes with Cruz knocking balls down for Tevez. Still, that plan seems to play to Germany’s defensive strength. We’ll never know because Germany scored before Pekerman’s plan—whatever it was—could be put into place. With his subs all used up, there wasn’t much left to do.

Italy vs. Ukraine went the way I guess one might expect. Pre-tournament I thought the Ukrainians could be semifinalists but they didn’t look as convincing as their qualifying results might suggest. Does this Italy team really deserve to be in the semifinals? I don’t think so.

As of this writing, Portugal is the only team still in the competition that’s never raised the trophy. Considering their injuries and suspensions it’s going to be tough to get past England, much less Germany and Brazil. I think it’ll be a Germany vs. Brazil final with the South Americans victorious. Admitttedly not a bold prediction at this stage of the game.

The US’ success in 2002 did wonders for soccer’s profile in this country and as time has passed, more writers and editors who grew up playing the game now have some say in how the sport is covered in the American media. Thank God.

It’s an absolute pleasure to live in a time where the US media runs intelligent essays regarding the beautiful game. I’ve read several of the below Slate authors’ stories linked below and, while I don’t always agree with the content, it’s a breath of fresh air to read anything that doesn’t try to explain the rules, share the tidbit that it’s called “football” everyone else on the globe, or belabor the point that fans all over the world really, truly love the game.

• Luke O’Brien, Tommy Craggs, Charles Duhigg, and William Saletan have filed Dispatches From the World Cup.
• Dave Eggers told the true story of American soccer
• Bryan Curtis revealed why intellectuals love the game
• Nick Schulz discovered why Brazilian soccer players have names like Ronaldinho, Cafu, and Fred
• Daniel Engber found out what’s in that magical World Cup spray and asked whether the World Cup has a lingua franca
• Robert Weintraub blamed U.S. Soccer and Nike for the Americans’ early departure from the tournament.
• Austin Kelley defends divers and has a World Cup blog here.

Oh, did you know it’s 30 minutes to Germany vs. Argentina at the time of writing? Just thought I’d mention it…

Current Mood: Good |
Currently Listening To – Leadbelly – “The Titanic”