If only . . .

. . . this was the front cover of tomorrow's Guardian:

Sadly, they've gone for the much more sedate:

Thankfully, Steve Bell is on form:

John Terry Watch (2)

Ye. he's still bawling his eyes out, but I don't remember the painting of the Crying Boy that hung at the bottom of our stairs looking like this.

More from the Guardian's gallery here.

Pringle sweaters for goalposts

I can see where Barry Glendenning is coming from:

"I don't buy this stuff about players being tired. When I was a kid I used to play football from after breakfast in the morning until it got dark at night every day during the school holidays, taking occasional breaks only to eat, or play tennis and/or golf. What's more, the standard of football we were playing was a lot higher than that of most SPL games." [From his minute-by-minute report of Celtic's victory against R*ngers in today's Guardian.]

It's an old joke and it's fitting that he got it out of the mothballs for this special occasion.

Tennis, golf and breakfast. I think Mr Glendenning was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Still too dazed, heady and in a dreamlike state to cough up a few comments about the game - now would be the perfect time for me to try and get my head around dialectical materialism - but I thought I would post a link to the Guardian's minute-by-minute report as part of my ongoing blog project of constructing a shrine to my once fading memory. No I don't know what that means either, and I just transferred the words from my head to the keyboard to the screen.

Press publish.

You Shall Know Our Volleys

Via the Guardian Footie's You Tube round up, the best goals that never were:

That overhead screamer from Keegan when he was at the Dell.

A not so majestic overhead kick from Robbie Fowler

Six memorable non-goals from World Cups past. How come no one ever put a contract out on Clive Thomas? Bryan Hamilton had more reason than most

Hat tip to 'paulhs' for the clips.

Still can't find Charlie Nicholas wonder goal for Scotland against Switzerland on YouTube. Probably never will. However, this goal from Dario Rodriguez for Uruguay against Denmark will always be easy on the eye. It's as much for his mate's keepie uppie to set him up as it is for Rodriguez's wonder strike. It's up there with Negrete's goal against Bulgaria at the '86 World Cup in Mexico.

There's no higher praise on this blog.

A Massacre On Farringdon Road

I hate bullying. I'm never a great fan of uneven contests, and 50,000 against 1 does strike me as it a tad unbalanced but, lets be honest, Martin Jacques was asking for it when he suggested - amongst other daft stuff - that Ian Wright was a victim of racism from the BBC.

Read the comments to Jacques risible piece as, one by one, the Guardian's readership lines up to shout 'bollocks, you're spouting shite' at increasingly loud volume.

And, Mr Jacques, there's a reason Garth Crooks is ". . . rarely given frontline exposure" as a football pundit on TV. The bloke's patter is mince.

Seven Against Phoebes

Quick reprise of the life ambitions list. Not so much a mid-life crisis, as a mid-morning tea break:

Learn to drive. Only so it can afford me the opportunity to lean out of a car window and shout 'FUCK YOU, YOU HUMP' at the top of my voice. Then, and only then, will I be able to say that I'm a proper New Yorker.

Sarah Silverman throws herself at me. Still not happening. Maybe if she lifted the restraining order on me, that might help.

For someone other than myself to laugh at my Aufheben/Mike Leigh joke before I die. It doesn't help that the bastards have yet to release 'High Hopes' on DVD in the States. You can get a copy of 'Career Girls' in the States but you can't get hold of one of Mike Leigh's best ever films. You fucking kidding me?

Abolition of the Wages System. It might help if St Marks Bookshop stocked the Socialist Standard. I must get back to them on that. If they can stock Direct Action, they can stock the Socialist Standard. Who reads Direct Action in New York? Who reads Direct Action full stop?

Stop being so judgemental about anarchists that I meet on my travels. It can't be helped that 9/10 7/10 of them come across as smug, sanctimonious middle-class wankers. (Yep, I attended the NYC Anarchist Bookfair.) Want to cut off the American anarchist movement at the knees? Cut off funding for PhD programmes. It doesn't do me any favours anyway. I come across as the living personification of the SPGB's hostility clause, and I'll get an ulcer before they get any integrity.

Read another novel before the end of the year is out. No, not re-read Ian Rankin, Denise Mina or Gordon Legge, but to actually pick up a book I haven't read before and to get past the first thirty pages. Suggestions please.

For the blog to be linked to in a Guardian Sportsblog 'Joy of Six' post. Result. (Look under the sub-heading about Celtic snatching the title from Hearts in 85/86. The link is the mention of the Albert Kidd and Billy Connolly anecdote.) My cheeks are moist; my sitemeter is doing a work out and I'm embarrassed that individuals other than my immediate family, Reidski and someone in Mountain View, California has caught sight of my sawdust prose.

Now, when is Sarah Silverman back in New York again?

" . . . clichés are there for a reason"

I hope the moderator is on time and a half for moderating the cruel but very, very funny comments to this blog post from Guardian Travel.

Hat tip to Ian Bone. The bloke can sniff out nepotism at 400 paces.

Not So Famous Last Lines Revisited

He was out by about two and a half years.

I just want to clarify one thing

According to the Manchester Guardian, there's a 'Brooklyn Scene'.

Not round our way, there isn't

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

And so it goes . . Wait up, that was the other bloke.

Never read Mailer to the best of my knowledge, so I'm heading over to the New York Times and the Guardian to tell me why he was important and why I should read his stuff.

Talk About The Passion*

For the bolded quote alone, an article worth checking out:

"Valdano is equally forthright when he accuses Liverpool fans of being complicit in this vandalism of the game. "Football is made up of subjective feeling, of suggestion - and, in that, Anfield is unbeatable," he continued. "Put a shit hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a shit hanging from a stick."

The Guardian Sportsblog takes up the debate.

*After many years of denial, I'm getting back into R.E.M. Early R.E.M

'I can see dystopia on the map, where the fuck's utopia?

Clicking on the Books section of the Guardian's website, I see that the latest in the regular series of Top Ten book listings is Toby Green's top ten utopias and dystopias.

In the main, I've tended to shy away from this genre of literature, though I would always recommend Marie Louise Berneri's 'Journey Through Utopia' as an excellent primer on utopias and dystopias, from the Ancient Greek world up until the immediate post World War period which is when Berneri's book was written, being posthumously published after her premature death in 1949.

Looking at the list itself, I can only admit that I've only ever read one of the books in the list all the way through, Zamyatin's 'We' and even that - which though undoubtedly a masterly novel - was a bit of a grind to get the whole way through, what with the deliberately dehumanising aspect of Zamyatin not giving his characters names but coded numbers in his dystopian fantasy. I guess I should get round to reading at least another four of the books on the list but I know it is not going to happen between now and me getting a ten stretch in a Prison with a top of the range of library.

Why mention this particular top ten, then? Well, apart from using it as an excuse to post another message to the blog and give the illusion of industry, I guess I have always been fascinated with this genre of literature in connection to the revolutionary politics I support. What's the connection? Well, William Morris's 'News From Nowhere' gets the obligatory mention in the top ten (make it a fifteen year stretch in a Open Prison to get me round to finally ploughing through that particular book.)

What I am in fact waiting to be written is the utopian socialist novel that deals with such fantastic flights of fancy as a quorate Branch meeting; a Party Conference without handbags at ten paces; a public meeting organised by the SPGB that doesn't mention Tony Turner*; and - and this pushes the proposed book into the realms of magic realism - an SPGB candidate retaining his or her deposit at a Parliamentary Election.

I know - all fanciful stuff:

"You may say I'm a dreamer,

but I'm not the only one.

A saved election deposit,

And Peter Snow will exclaim: the SPGB are more than just a bit fun"**

*Tony Turner, a SPGB member who was considered one of the best outdoor speakers - bar none - in his heyday of the thirties and forties, especially at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. Sheila Lahr, in her online memoir, wrote of him: "Tony Turner, the Socialist Party of Great Britain speaker, who always has the highest platform and the biggest and most attentive crowd in the Park. He silences any would-be hecklers with wit. When, during the war, a soldier took exception to some of his remarks and shouted at him "I’m fighting for the likes of you!" Tony replied calmly "I give you my full permission to stop fighting for me this instant!"

** I couldn't get "Peter Snow's swingometer" to rhyme with anything - damn.