Three things need to be said:
- Folarin Balogun wanted to play. He’s devoted his young life to the pursuit of excellence in his sport, and shouldn’t be blamed for the corruption of those who govern the tournaments he and the national team participate in.
- The foul was serious, but did not appear to have been intentional. He probably shouldn’t have been shown a red card. For better or worse, though, the referee is the referee. That should have been the end of it.
- FIFA is, at best, a rickety institution, and Donald Trump could fuck up an anvil. We may not be able to stop him from wrecking things he doesn’t understand, but not even a comic book patriotism requires us to endorse his desecrations.
You captured my thoughts on this incident quite succinctly.
We shall see if the Trump WC Curse stays in play during the final. The evidence thus far:
1. Trump interferes with Balogun red card –> US loses
2. Harry Kane admits to golfing with Trump –> England loses
3. Messi gives Trump pink soccer ball – I admit this one disappointed me the most –> Argentina at risk of smiting during the WC Final.
It would be the perfect trifecta we have, thus far, been denied in the Senate (McConnell/Graham/???).
You’ve nailed it. Ultra-rationalist though I am, I’ve definitely considered seeking the services of a voodoo priest after this past week. Inexplicable weirdness aside, the games themselves have been truly inspirational, right up until I found myself blinking and asking “Whatever in the world is wrong with France?” It’s almost as though someone sprinkled pixie dust on Spain. Good as they’ve been throughout, their play in that game was like something out of a fever dream. England clearly lost to a better team—and Messi is still one with the angels—but France should have done better. Much better….
It hurts me to admit that this has been the most entertaining WCs I’ve ever watched, setting aside the ones I’ve actually been privileged to see in person. Nothing quite like a WC game crowd for entertainment.
It’s been a great tourney and I will miss having games to turn on while waiting out the heat/smoke.
Yeah, you have my sympathies about the bad air. Hope you folks have kept your N95s left over from COVID. My daughter and her family live in the Bay Area—San Jose to be precise—and I still remember marveling at the photos of the orange air they sent me a few years back when the smoke from the California wildfires was at its peak. Hadn’t seen anything like that since I lived in LA in the mid-Sixties. Take care, stay safe. There’ll be more World Cups to come after all. (The World Cups are one of humanity’s most exemplary achievements, the moreso by virtue of being closer to the people than even the Olympics.)
Oh, we never stopped masking indoors in public spaces so plenty of N95s in this house. I have an aneurysm in a particularly nasty inaccessible spot in my brain so my training as an HIV researcher and my reading of the research on COVID’s affects on the vascular system – among many others – lead me to conclude that, even vaccinated, I just can’t take the chance of repeated infections.
The air is better now, we’ve had some light rain that has helped to clear it out. It still feels humid and heavy but the burning eyes effect is no longer in play.
I’ve kept current on vaccinations and pretty much stopped going to restaurants, but I’ve also drifted away from masking in stores or medical waiting rooms. Probably not smart given my age, but age also makes it more difficult to breathe through an N95. It’s convenience measured against risk, I guess, as with any security protocol. I do understand the risk, though, and can’t fault anyone who takes a different path through the labyrinth. In any case here’s hoping the air quallity where you are continues to improve.
I completely understand, especially folks with extenuating circumstances. We do restaurants with patios and are fortunate Columbus has so many.
I do think a lot of places put effort into improving ventilation in the last few years, I just wish they’d be more proactive in sharing that information where/when they have. Hospitals have mandated air handling standards, but I have been in office waiting rooms that are packed, with really high CO2 readings – a good proxy for estimating possible exposure to nasties – and there’s always someone sneezing/coughing. And, swear to doG, they cover their damn mouths LESS than they did before.
Labyrinth is a very good term for it. Given the Odyssey hype these days, it might be amusing to sit in the next such place making up names for the ‘monsters’ surrounding me a la Monty Python. Lots of Snoticus proboscises running around out there.
The air is much better this morning. A bit of rain overnight has helped to clear the lingering trail. We’re down to 59 from nearly 400 at peak yesterday and it can be felt. We have dodged the miasma for the now and it feels like relief. I hope everyone else much closer can get some soon too.
Amen. The fear of course is that with the global warming hoax, etc., etc. now in full cry everywhere, forests will be burning somewhere in the world from now until we run out of them, and that by the time the smoke reaches the fat white men with their oil stocks and their American flag lapel pins, it’ll have been over for the rest of us for decades. (Did I get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? Yeah, probably. I blame the humidity. The monsoon has finally started here in AZ, and for the next month at least, we can’t claim, as we usually do, that “it’s a dry heat.”)
The first time I heard the words “Arizona” and “monsoon” in the same sentence I laughed because I had no idea!
Now I know about your haboobs (autocorrect, in its infinite wisdom, wanted to fix that to “baboon”, but unless I miss my mark those are not yet falling from your skies). I learned that you folks must be truly hardy to sustain yourself in an environment working toward nothing short of hurling mud at you in vast quantities.
Nature is truly something else.
I’m still laughing about the baboons, Politically speaking, they’ve been falling from the sky around here for 20 years now. The haboobs are south of here, from Phoenix southwest down to Yuma on the border with Mexico and to Tucson in south central AZ. South of Tucson the mountains block them. I’m north of Phoenix, and about 3K feet higher in elevation, so I’m safe from the mud, but, sadly, not from the baboons. 🙂
One housekeeping note needs inserting here: My WP template permits a comment-nesting maximum of 10 levels, and we’re right at that now. So…if we continue this thread, we’ll have to back out to the 1st level, which will drop our next comments to the bottom of the main thread. I hate it that something always sticks its nose in just as we’re starting to have fun. On the other hand, a thread that winds up being only one word wide wouln’t be no fun at all.
True.
Trump. Anvil. Conjures images.
DT has a sociopath’s nose for other peoples’ gladnesses, and idiots that we are, we’ve given him the power to trample on them all, even the most innocent of them. If only I could shake the feeling that our delirium will be with us for years yet, no matter what happens to him.
You’re not wrong. It’s always easier to destroy things than the (re)build them. Always.
I learned that lesson watching my husband destroy an old tub during a bathroom renovation that took almost two years for us to complete.
Anybody who’s committed to doing their own bathroom renovations can’t be faulted for taking their pleasures wherever they can find them. Sometimes there’s just nothing like a sledgehammer. 🙂
“there’s just nothing like a sledgehammer.”
Demonstrably true. Emotional outlets are in short supply these days – no spare tubs lying about anymore – so, having moved on, access to weed whackers etc requires supervision. At least (most) plants have the capacity to grow back.
The only reason the bathroom got finished was because I balked at spending another winter taking showers in the basement under a jury-rigged garden hose. And made significant and highly creative threats regarding what would happen should that prove the case. :-}
p.s. How do we use emojis here?
Creative threats? Uh, oh. Those usually bring a quick capitulation from the experienced among us. Living in a house undergoing a slow, steady evolution can be a real pain. Back in the day my wife and I bought a fixer-upper duplex with an eye toward having a rental unit to ease the burden of our California mortgage. It didn’t end well. After two years of after-work and weekend playing at being building contractors, we wound up divorced. The carpentry, plumbing, dry-walling, etc. wasn’t the only reason for that, but it was definitely a contributing factor. Thankfully, you and your hubby seem to have been made of sterner stuff. (On a more upbeat note, we both made out like bandits when she sold the place five years later to move to San Jose.)
Re the emojis, the short answer is that you can’t. The WP comments section doesn’t seem to support the full range of unicode possibilities, not at least in the template I’m using for Canecittà. What it does do, however, is automatically convert the old ASCII colon-dash-closed parenthesis combo into a little smiley face. That’s what you saw in my previous post. Maybe it does the old frowny-face and shrug too, but I haven’t tested them. Maybe I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader….
Thanks for the explanation about how the threading works and how deep it will let you go before insinuating you’re talking too much (which is still much farther than some people and places let me stretch). Looks like it has something to do with page layout and the architecture that supports that.
Re: Political simians – baboons shouldn’t be singled out for castigatory comparisons given the Party of Homo Erectus’ known aspirations – as you know, we’ve had our own over-abundance of them here in OH as well. I am trying to wrap my head around the fact that 2024’s GOP presidential reject Vivek Ramaswamy will likely be our next governor. Amy Acton is no dem firebrand – she has assiduously ignored all requests to address anything to do with data centers and the Epstein files – but she did work hard with DeWine to do the right thing during the early days of the pandemic. That alone gets her my vote but it won’t endear her to the Fox Media consumers in the state and there are too many of those (including members of my own family).
I agree that using our simian cousins as metaphors for the worst tendencies of our Homo sapiens brothers and sisters is something of a cheap shot, but animal stereotypes are so deeply embedded in our linguistic history that it’s hard to avoid reaching for them in extremis. Calling Trump a pig may be an insult to pigs, but calling him a vile or depraved person lacks a certain sting. I suppose we could say in our defense that there are positive stereotypes too—wise as an owl, clever as a fox, brave as a lion—not that they exonerate us completely from our species bigotry.
But I digress. 🙂 The political scene in the US these days seems too chaotic to predict outcomes without feeling awfully queasy about the evidence we’re basing those predictions on. Only Nate Silver still thinks he has his finger on the national pulse, which, given how poorly statistics and chaos mix, sounds more like a claim of clairvoyance than is justified by whatever it is he thinks he’s measuring. His track record is way better than mine, though, so maybe I’m the one who’s gotten out over his skis.
My sense of what’s coming, especially in down-ballot contests, is based largely on what I’m seeing in the more or less purplish states like your OH and my AZ. You’ve put your finger on it here, which is that party isn’t as much an indicator of a candidate’s positions as it used to be. The Democrats can turn out to be Fettermans, Mamdanis, or anything in between, and it’s not always clear during the campaign who will be which. (Side note/confession: I heard Kyrsten Sinema speak many times when she was running for congress here in AZ. My very first YouTube video was of one of her local speeches. I talked to her one-on-one several times, and can testify from personal experience that she had the social democratic playbook down pat. Frankly, she had me totally, completely fooled. I suppose it’s possible that what she became as a US senator was the result of some Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment in her own life, but I doubt it. I think that either she was running a con from day one, or she simply went whichever way she thought the wind was blowing at any given time. To this day I’m amazed at how good she was at disguising her actual intentions. She was the perfect political chameleon—better than any of the old Dixiecrats, better than Fetterman, better even than George Santos.)
I think there’s going to be a lot of this until we figure out whose vision of the future a majority actually prefers, if indeed our preferences are coherent enough and persistent enough to form the basis of a stable future politics at all. As you know, I think it may well take a second civil war to sort all this out, but my assessment is admittedly driven by historical factors that haven’t been so completely explicit in our national campaigns until the emergence of Trump, who in his own demented fantasies of violent transformation is a perfect expression of the final hurrah of our long-suppressed political schizophrenia.
For myself, I’ve given up on electoral politics altogether. I’m too old and too tired to endure the contradictions up close and personal any longer. Much to my surprise and chagrin, I’ve reached the age of pontification, and much to my dismay, I’m basking in it. (O, what a not-so-noble mind is here o’erthrown.)