Recently in soccer Category
road tripped with suz this past weekend
up to toronto
why
why not
not like i wanted to catch up on sleep or anything
even though we started at 0430 on saturday we were still
late [traffic]
for the beating the sox took that afternoon
but in time to take a great deal of
shit
from people who were die hard blue jay fans
at least that day
since they won
here's a hint kids
if you're going to harangue folks that made a nine-hour trip to your city
to see their team
you ought to at least be somewhat well-informed about the sport in question
happily since i was wearing my revs jersey we could at least greet
the subset of the subset
around the ballpark with high fives and impromptu singing
also met lots of nice toronto fc fans around the city
it's telling that you can walk around town and people will ask if you're
going to the game
it's an event and people know about it
and if they aren't going they seem like they'd like to be
amusingly we ran into another group on the subway
figured we'd follow them to their stadium rather than interpret directions we got earlier
bad idea
they nearly wound up following us instead
but they were friendly and knowledgeable
bmo field is cool
not much to the stadium itself
but the view is spectacular
the moreso with the carnival rides around it
and it's full and plainly the place to be on match night
they have 28oz sippy cups of carlsberg
the revs kept the home fans relatively quiet for most of the match
but they went uniformly apeshit when they finally took advantage of
a bad five minutes and
scored
later we repaired to a pub down the street
[didn't find the supporters' pub until the drive out of the city]
and continued to take good natured shit from the locals
walked must of the long way back to the hotel
then hopped the turnstile in a deserted subway to catch the last train
i don't think we ate inside once the whole weekend
the next day was a better one for the sox
got to watch the roof of the skydome open
and a variety of players flash their occasional power for the win
didn't take any crap from toronto fans that day
the extra innings were ill-timed however
meant that at 8pm we were staring at niagara falls
pretty
but a bad sign
the little dude doesn't much care for the crappy roads of the
thruway or ontario but other than that
he's game for road trips
although mileage appears to peak somewhere short of the 75mph
i'm accustomed to
got in at 3am
photos are here
really
i think you should
check this out
kicked booty on the harpoon five-miler yesterday even
recovering from a cold
or allergies or something
lovely morning to sit outside and drink
lots of beer afterwards
spent the rest of the day eating
friday night was entertaining
i own a grill now
purchased in preparation to tailgate at gillette
of course we pulled in five minutes before kickoff
and i did not get to cook anything
but i will be better prepared for the next
world's smallest tailgate [tm]
great first half from the revs
second half was frightful
brazil was a huge disappointment
their fans
while boisterous
seemed as attentive than the worst pink-clad
bleacher citizens at fenway
and the team's play
while very occasionally transcendent
was disjointed and uninspired
i think the revs could have taken 'em
[in the first half at least] [maybe] [okay maybe not]
work is complicated these days
i'm juggling four projects
yet what i lose sleep over is
wholly non-technical
it's so wonderful to play full-field soccer again
not that indoor isn't great in its way
particularly when you play without boards
but the real thing is so much better
i didn't even play in my wing-back happy place
yet still had a good game
slept on the couch last night
it's too goddamned hot
football has its ugly side
from time to time
space shuttle processing and assembly, via boing boing. looking at those, it’s no wonder that it’ll cost thousands of jobs to retire it. but it’s still amazing, and i still hate the idea that we don’t have anything better than it ready now, the idea that it’s not that important to put humans in space, on other planets. maybe if we are facing recession, or even depression, it’ll be a pretty inexpensive excuse to create jobs that can’t be outsourced, in an area where american expertise is still preeminent. compared with the cost of running a war, it’s a bargain, and leaves plenty of money to fight the disease of the month.
it pains me to say it, but pro/e’s sketcher is just plain broken, and not as good as solidworks’. i can make something more quickly in the sketcher in pro/engineer, but when i click done, it generally ain’t done. in solidworks, after i’ve finished it, i have much more confidence that what i see on the screen is representative of my design intent. in pro/e, basically since early builds of 2001, the sketcher’s use edge and trim functions have grown increasingly more broken. in far too many cases, if you pick a use-edge of say, a circular body, and draw a line across it, then trim it down to a ‘d’ shape, after you click the done button, it will reveal that the trimmed corners are not in fact aligned to each other, and that what you have is not a closed section of two entities, but two wholly separate and floating entities that only look like they’re touching. this was not always so. at this point, the routine is to take use-edged entities after trimming them, and drag them so they’re short of touching, then manually apply a constraint to stitch them up. this is unspeakably annoying.
office 2008 has left me scratching my head so far. i rely on it at work a fair bit considering my ‘new’ computer is only partially functional. it can do CAD or it can print things, for instance, but one has to log in as two different people to have that work. so as with so many other things, i just do it on my lappy. i’ve come to rely on word’s notebook view as a replacement for my physical notebook, in the past few months. basically, i realized that though i might be better or worse at writing things down (this, like so many other things, varied inversely with how busy i was, guess what today is), i didn’t always go back to look for stuff, and seldom found it anyway. maybe those were linked. so far, this is better. a problem, however, is that of how poorly word 2008 plays with leopard. spaces confuses the shit out of it, and this is terrible. i’ve had to chase the document across the screen way too many times, and this causes it to get confused about its window focus as well, like when it’s the frontmost application, and can’t be made the frontmost window until you switch back and forth to another. or when the act of saving puts it behind a safari window or something. seems to me they should have ironed it out by now. it’s also slow to start, slow to switch to, and a memory hog. i want to embrace it, i really do, but it’s not up to snuff right now. maybe evernote (email me for a beta invite) will displace it (voodoopad, yojimbo, and omnioutliner all have tried).
i’ll go to hell for saying this, especially since the month has just started, but between the magnetic ribbons, ubiquitous puzzle pieces, and overcooked news coverage, i’m frankly a little sick of hearing about autism. there are lots of bad things that happen to people. that’s one of them. but at this point, the overexposure has made me feel like, if two people came knocking on my door for a donation, i’d give my money to the other guy, who probably needs the help more. i’m a bad person who likes to kick puppies.
although when i do kick puppies, i would probably toeball them. look the fuck out, bssc, the dreaded toeball is dialed in and i’m dropping it on people’s heads at will. it’s only a matter of time before my erratic aim returns and i shank the ball at obtuse angles again, but for now, people are actually deferring to me on free kicks. which is frightening.
i played soccer again tonight as a sub for a friend’s team, at the last minute. indoor, with boards, on unforgiving vct flooring (don’t ask me why i know about flooring products). it’s been a year since i played half an hour of goal with boards, which constitutes the whole of my previous experience. i gifted the opposition two or three goals through misplaying bounces off the boards and misunderstanding the rather bizarre ground rules, and gave up five goals in the first fifteen minutes, no doubt leading the team for whom i was making a guest appearance to wonder if bad help was better than no help at all. and then only two in the last thirty-five, neither of which were my bad. i’m still not sure i’m a goalie. but i’m not not a goalie, either. i also took a ball in the junk and smashed up my heel on said flooring. worst of it all, we lost by one goal, so it’s rather obviously my fault. which sucks.
i’ve spent most of the past week in a car careening down the wrong side of the road across central england, on a train, walking block after block of neighborhoods from nice to scummy, in a pub, or at a soccer match. i’m exhausted. fortunately, work seems rather quiet, so i may as well tell my solitary reader about it.
the highways in england utilize large signs with hugely impressive forks and circles and arrows to tell you exactly what the road is going to do. it’s superfluous in many places, but useful once you’re accustomed to it, in the same way that it’s nice to see on google maps not just that there’s an interchange, but what those onramps are going to do to you.
speaking of google maps, it let us down big time, particularly on the drive to reading. near as i could tell, it omitted a whole street and a rotary, which was enough to put us way off-course.
reading is a spectacularly good drinking town. it’s a college town, for one, but beyond that, there were numerous truly unique pubs there, some old, some ancient, serving excellent varieties of cask ales and bitters. one claimed to have had in excess of 5,000 guest ales in the past few years, and to prove it, took the placards from the front of the tap, and pasted them to the walls. and the ceilings. and basically every surface of its cozy, meandering hallways and alcoves.
finding a pub to eat dinner at was all but impossible for us outside of london; but the lunch was practically drinking nirvana. pint after pint of ale, a yummy steak pie, a comfy wooden bench, and football highlights in the background.
liverpool is an eerily quiet city; you can tell that a bunch of people live there, but they move about like ghosts when outside; they’re there, but there’s no commotion, no bustle. plenty of cars on the street, but a lack of real traffic. row after row of houses that are occupied, but don’t look terribly lived-in. and plenty of bombed out, boarded, or even bricked-up neighborhoods. don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly lovely place, with plenty of stuff to do; the pubs are mellow, and the few people we did talk to (a lot of bartenders, go figure) were fairly friendly. but in retrospect, something about it just seemed somewhat off.
the exception to that, of course, is around goodison park, which was roaring with life on wednesday night for the everton-tottenham hotspur match. skinny entrances (every soccer stadium i’ve been to has a very narrow entry passage and turnstile, less than half the width of a normal doorway) directly upon the sidewalk and street, with the stands rising vertically, with tens of thousands crammed into an ancient structure that has the same kind of load-bearing paint that fenway park does, only it’s blue and white. the corridors are crammed with people before the match (you can’t drink beer in the stands) drinking their beer, eating their meat pies, and placing their bets. walking up the ramp into the seats is every bit as electric as you’d expect, the more so since our seats were in the second row. their side was depleted, but the everton fans gave a pretty good show, with ample singing, shouting, swearing, and a really brilliant flipping off of a spurs player readying for a corner kick.
dmitar berbatov is amazing to watch in person.
the night before, we’d seen fulham at bolton wanderers; it was probably a letdown, for my dad’s first premiership match. i was all in favor of trekking up to bolton to see a top-flight match rather than seeing charlton play stoke down in london, but neither of those two teams played like they really deserved or cared to escape relegation. we did have great seats, and talk to some really friendly bolton supporters, though. they’re a really nice bunch, even if they’re not terribly boisterous. one thing that was cool was to see a match wherein an american (our boy clint dempsey, whose notoriously elbow-y behavior i jokingly apologized for to our new friends) was far and away the best player on the pitch. bolton’s stadium is new and nice, but much smaller than it looks on television, and stranger still, is in the middle of what is basically a big-box store mall. on the other hand, so is gillette, now.
interestingly, the premiership does not permit cameras into stadiums. nobody searches you, but you wouldn’t be able to hide an slr. so i didn’t try. my old casio is mostly dead, leaving me with my iphone. which actually did an okay job with some of them. amusingly enough, while using it as a camera, i got a useless voicemail from my landlord and an interesting text message. i wonder what the charge for that’ll be.
instead of basketball courts or tennis courts, public parks have 6-on-6 soccer courts. awesome.
we didn’t spend a lot of time in manchester, but it seemed to live up to its reputation, in that people were seen lined up outside of clubs at midnight on a tuesday, and that the residential areas outside the downtown were not terribly appealing. it was smaller than i expected, but the architecture was kinda cool.
reading’s madjeski stadium is 2 miles outside of the city in an industrial park. it’s small, modern, and comfortable, insofar as any english soccer stadiums are comfortable (the seats appear to all be of the same manufacture, of thin, cheap plastic that i suspect wouldn’t support your stereotypical fan of american football, much less fit them); it’s a very suburban experience. we saw a bunch of american flags draped over the stands at the end of the game (some with the reading logo superimposed—the english love to write their football team across the flag, something which we don’t do so much here), saluting their longtime keeper, marcus hahnemann, who had a good match in a losing effort.
when we arrived at craven cottage on sunday, we knew that we’d be in for a treat, given the number of aston villa supporters we saw on the way in. we were sitting near the away stand, at the end of the field. filled with probably 5000 singing, stomping, shouting villa fans in great voice. somewhere in the middle of the match came a hissing noise, as they ceased their singing and said shhhhhhhh. the stadium was strangely silent, and it was damned obvious that fulham’s support was fucking shit, at least on that day.
second best moment of that game was when fulham’s mascot had to get shoved off the field by the referee. the english don’t stage that sort of thing, it actually happened.
unexpectedly enough, fulham actually pulled out a win. it’s important for american soccer for them to do well, as they have five americans on their roster, and right now they’re fighting to climb out of the drop zone. they’re not a good team (and it’s the supporting cast that’s the problem, say i, quite biased), but they might survive.
people kept trying to get us to sign up for credit cards and cell phone service everywhere, for some reason.
i did not try prawn-flavored potato chips, but they have many other innovative flavors there that we enjoyed while watching the day’s highlights after being shooed out of the pubs at closing.
watching the super bowl in england is weird. i can’t tell whether the english care about american football or not; goodness knows i didn’t stay up for the end of it.
suz and i took a field trip to islington to go stop and see emirates stadium so she could pick up some arsenal stuff. after that she indulged me a trip out to floyd road to go pick up a new charlton jersey.
two hours after landing, i was playing soccer. had a good game, actually. perhaps i was literally full of piss and vinegar, given my diet over the previous week.
more than a few words have been spent lamenting the extent to which fenway park has gotten quieter, less rowdy, and more corporate over the past ten years. the best example i can think of is this year’s alcs against cleveland, where there was this sinking feeling during game two (even before eric gagne came into the game), and a palpable malaise, none of the ability to rise to a roar with two strikes or three balls, or with a man on, threatening to steal. it was easier to notice in retrospect after the sox survived the trip to cleveland, and returned for game six with the old ballyard in a full-throated roar.
the causes are obvious. tickets are scarcer, more expensive, or both, and different people are at the games. so it was really interesting to read this bbc article about how the same kind of thing is happening to premiership soccer. since i’m planning a trip to see some games, i note how hard it is to get tickets, how you have to have a membership to even have a chance to buy tickets for some clubs, and i can see the red sox becoming the same way.
it’s almost as if we’re loving them to death.
it doesn’t matter how shitty today was, and trust me, i billed thirteen hours of shitty. it doesn’t matter that it’s nearly 1 in the morning, and it doesn’t matter that i’m tired as heck, because i fucking scored a fucking goal.
fuckin’ a.
and it was a nice one, too. and we won. i’m not saying i’m stepping into the steven gerrard role a former captain recommended for me, necessarily (it is, after all, my second. ever.), but it was a nice one, a great cross, wide open, and a semi-pirouetting full volley to the far side. and but for a few inches i might’ve had another earlier on a header. so even if i’m back to being grouchy tomorrow, i’m going to bed happy tonight.
random linkage from the past few days for good little girls and boys, and my two readers, too.
romney, you better fucking talk about magic underpants, says wonkette. it’s all fun and games to poke fun at mormonism, but what i found more disturbing about the substance of the speech was the emphasis on freedom of religion—so long as you have one. i take issue with this: “Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.” suggesting that absence of religion as an influence on government is the same as a ‘religion of secularism’ is disingenuous at best; he’s equating neutrality with opposition. just because the government should want nothing to do with religion does not in any way, shape, or form serve to impinge upon one’s own enjoyment of it. not that i find this surprising, and neither is he the first to imply this, but i still find it repellent. i’d still like a pair of magic underpants, though.
in other news, here’s a cogent explanation of why the revs are so easily perceived as being cheap (oh, and they are, don’t get me wrong), and at the same time why rumors of them signing someone like shevchenko are that and nothing more. not that i wouldn’t like to be surprised, but at the same time, it’s worthwhile perspective to bear in mind next time i get frustrated at the lack of quality players on the bench or uncle bob’s refusal to build us a soccer stadium.
what can be helped, however, is how the mls is marketed. going to a dozen or more matches over the summer, one can see this in action, as i’ve no doubt mentioned; my dad and i have nearly ideal seats, but are surrounded by as many parents wrangling hyperactive kids as we are by soccer fans. it certainly doesn’t have to be this way, and while it is improving, there’s still more that can be done.
since this was written, the santana-to-the-sox action has calmed down, but i thought eric wilbur had a really interesting take on the divide between the haves and the have-nots. on the other hand, maybe this is what yankee fans say to themselves too, in justifying their own juggernaut. some have noted that prospects are a renewable resource, that of course you give them up, even in mass quantities for a santana. i’m not saying that i don’t make that deal, but let’s be fair here. these aren’t the prospects that you acquire a dozen of every year, these are the best of that bunch, culled, ripened, aged; the wheat, not the chaff. their value mustn’t be underestimated, particularly given the emerging culture in the red sox’ farm system, wherein these kids are groomed to understand exactly what’s going to happen when they get to the big leagues in boston, things that free-agent signings and traded players don’t always have.
finally, a big fuck you to people who eschew sidewalks to walk or run in the street. this becomes extremely evident when the snow piles up. sidewalks can be unevenly shoveled or icy, the roads, less so. it’s tempting, and let’s be fair, i do my share of it, too. but the big difference is, when i’m walking or running on the street, and a car comes, i hop up onto the curb. because unlike everyone else, i’m making it my responsibility to keep myself safe, not the oncoming car’s. and frankly, beyond being an obnoxious thing to do (especially when one brazenly claims several feet of the road), it’s just fucking stupid to put your life in someone else’s hands like that. listen, i’m tall enough that overhanging branches are a constant obstacle even in the summer, i don’t like running on ice or uneven snowpack, or up and down ramps and curbs, but the road ain’t mine to use. it’s mine to borrow if no one else is using it. others would do well to remember that.
i first moved to the boston area in 1986, and got hooked on the red sox on one warm october day. i’d been to see them at fenway once, my first game being the one where they clinched the division title. on this day, we’d walked up over the hill to the beach in the early afternoon, then came back to watch the rest of the game; the dave henderson home run game. ridiculous. not so long later came game 6, and a sizable number of brain cells were from then on devoted to something that generally made me dumber, but has always been a lot of fun.
so too has it gone with the revolution. now i’m stuck with ‘em. last year sucked. this year’s mls cup match felt even worse, even though it was, i suppose, a more deserved loss. they played a lousy second half, mostly. sure, the officiating seemed one-sided, and they had a great many near misses. hell, it was probably a great game to watch if you had no stake in it. but they weren’t the better side for a crucial portion of yesterday’s match. and that was that. and it doesn’t make any sense, but damn if i ain’t a little pissed off and just plain disappointed.
it wasn’t ‘cause we drove down there; you know that going into a road trip on this kind of pretense. your team might lose. the concert you’re going to see might suck. it’s the stuff that happens around it. we still had a good time. drove a while, saw strange and amusing things, had a few beers. suz says i have monkey arms. nevertheless, there was a reason for being there.
it was really great, for one, sitting in a big crowd of supporters, standing for the whole match. the organizers handed out song sheets; it was hilarious to see them handed out to school-age children, who eagerly read them, profanities and all (some with lyrics like “…shit on the bastards below!”). i was hoarse by the end of the game, and a little shell-shocked, just like the rest, but regardless, you had to yell on, just to show that the rest of the crowd wasn’t going to get you down.
and it’s really priceless to have the players (and the owner) come over and applaud their fans for the support; it’s such a rare gesture in other sports, but de rigeur in soccer.
of course it wasn’t fun to take shit from the houston and dc fans on the way out. it definitely was not cool for the jackass to run over with his orange flag to interrupt the aformentioned salute from the players.
but there you go. like i said, now i’m stuck with ‘em. and another formerly useful part of my brain has been tasked to follow the exploits of people being paid well (okay, somewhat well) to play a game.
i’m fine with that, really.
