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2004-08-27 13:53

No way, BA!

I mean, really:

For travellers heading abroad, British Airways - which had to cancel six domestic flights on Friday - said it was impossible to predict what would happen over the weekend.

Has Easyjet infiltrated the board of BA and set in motion a plan to discredit the idea that non-budget carriers actually have a legitimate business model?

We hereby introduce, in BA's honour, Desbladet Mystery Theatre:

Q: Any chance of a flight somewhere, BA, would you think?
A: Not a Scooby*, mate, sorry.
Q: Splendid! Do have some money. Have lots of money - I don't like to skimp!

FIN

* Scooby (n.) Clue, rhyming slang from "Scooby Doo", a cartoon dog.

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2004-08-27 morning (utc+1)

Agenda

  1. Pick up drying laundry from launderette
  2. Arrange to move flat
  3. Get work done
  4. Meet friend at station, with which fly to Berlin tomorrow
  5. Meet other friend, back on flying visit from Japan, in pub
  6. Trinke viel bier
  7. Pack
  8. Sort out accommodation in Dresden
  9. Home->Bristle Slightly International Aerodrome->Berlin!
  10. Trinke viel bier

Travelbloguing as circumstances permit, starting now, GO!

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2004-08-26 16:00

Love in a cold stadium

Are stadiums cold for the icestickfoopball? We assume so. Anyway:

Kronprinsessan Victoria lurade pappa kungen.
Inf�r 10 316 personer i Globen visade hon officiellt f�r f�rsta g�ngen upp pojkv�nnen Daniel Westling.
- Det h�r var en demonstration fr�n hennes sida. Hon har best�mt sig f�r Daniel, ber�ttar en i hennes v�nkrets.

Kronprinsess Victoria fooled her daddy - who is the king!
In front of 10,316 persons in the Globe she showed herself officially for the forst time with boyfriend Daniel Westling.
"She was making a statement with this. She's set her heart on Daniel," said a person in her circle of friends.

Even foopball spectatorship is semiotically overdetermined for those who happen to be prinsessor. Which can't be easy.

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2004-08-26 12:36

D'you ever get the feeling you missed a memo?

I know I do:

Gr�ce au baron Pierre de Coubertin, le fran�ais est une langue olympique depuis 1896. Le retour des Jeux sur leur terre de renaissance est donc l'occasion r�v�e pour la Gr�ce d'int�grer l'alliance des pays francophones. Les r�actions de la presse sont mitig�es.

Thanks to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, French has been an official language of the Olympics since 1896. The games's return to the land of their rebirth is thus a dream opportunity for the Greece to join the alliance of Francophone countries.

It is? Well, the Greek press seem less baffled than me, for sure:

"Pourquoi est-ce l'anglais qui domine ?" s'interroge Ta Nea, qui reprend l'interrogation du grand t�moin francophone, Herv� Bourges. Apr�s tout, "entre le grec et le fran�ais, c'est une longue histoire d'amiti�", souligne le quotidien, pour qui "il est naturel que la Gr�ce entre dans la Francophonie. Tous les artistes et hommes politiques Grecs ma�trisent le fran�ais et les Grecs sont francophiles".

"Why should the [silly] English dominate?" Ta Nea asks or enquires of itself, taking up the question of the stalwart francophone Herv� Bourges. After all, "there's a long history of friendship between the Greek and French," insists the paper, for whom "it is natural that Greece should enter La Francophonie. All Greek artistes and politicians speak French and the Greeks are Francophiles."

Enough! You are making no sense whatever, persons, and I can take no more!

Meanwhile, I am on holiday from Saturday, and in order to get a full five day's paid leave I included next Monday, since this Monday is a Bank ("Public") Holiday. I failed, however, to account for the university's own (quite gratuitous) extension of that holiday to include also Tuesday. I now feel vaguely thwarted...

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2004-08-26 morning (utc+1)

Sm�rg�spost

�1. The zeit has got his geist on,

Hip hip hip hooray!
The zeit has got his geist on
And he's coming out to play!

The link will age, but frustrum will not veil its income disparity, for sure, and we note that as of now on today the umptieth of Umptember, Umpty-umpty-ump A.D. (amen), that three (3) of the top five (5) "popular athletes" on Mr Google's are foopballers (Ronaldo, Beckham and Ronaldinho), and the other two (2) are a lady tennis player and Anna Kournikova. (Note if you must, but note quietly, that if they'd classified Lance Armstrong under "athlete" he'd 've walked it. Since the Tour de France is obviously far beyond what humans are capable of, we firmly approve of his admittedly anthropocentrique exclusion.)

Where's your hegemony now, "America"?

�2. Oh.

If you want coverage of the League of Champions that makes an early commitment to the Internation in its work product, your best bet is ESPN (despite its web designers, of course). Its compiled from the news wires, but it is even-handed in its treatment.

�3. A quandary resolved

Q: Who would win if Noam "Chomp Chomp" Chomsky got stuck in a lift ("elevator") with Christopher "Hatchet" Hitchens?

A: Everyone else!

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2004-08-25 mornin' (utc+1)

Hamball

Hamball, as everyone knows, was invented at the stupifyingly posh public school Hamble in Hampshire ("Hamball" being a hilarious pun) when the unusually recessive Wichard Won Wallis picked up the ball and flung it into the net during a game against arch-rivals Fleet.

"Hamball!" Fleet's finest yelled in unison, "Hamball, ref!" But the referee also was from Hamble and allowed the goal to stand, and the name stuck. The headmaster, being made of sterner stuff, subsequently had the games master dismissed and Won Wallis flogged to death, and the game of Hamball has not been played in Eng-er-lund since that day.

Not so on the Continent, however:

Anf�rt af Kronprinsparret og assisteret af masser af de mange danskere, som har fundet vej til h�ndboldhallen i Faliro i Athen, fik de danske h�ndboldkvinder en st�tte, som kan vise sig at blive guld v�rd.

The lead of the Kronprinscouple and the assistence of masses of Danishes, who found their way to the hamball in Faliro in Athens in Greece in Southern Yoorp in the World, c/o The Sun in the Outer Edge of an Unfashionable Spiral of the Milky Way in the Universe, gave the Danish hamball wimmins a support which may turn out to be worth gold.

Did you know, by the way, that there is wimmin's wrestling for the first time at this Olympics? Even if they aren't as nekkid or as covered in oil as we Olympic puristes might prefer, my question is not why there has not been more coverage of this but rather why there has been so much coverage of anything else.

Irini Merleni, winner of the first ever gold, was too overcome to comment:

So it fell upon Merleni's masseuse, a friendly, strapping lass, to make a point in broken English that brooked no argument. "Wrestling now for woman. Ukraine women. Ukraine women very beautiful."

Life finally gets around to imitating Love and Rockets, and not a moment too soon.

(Needless to say the headlines in the FDRUSA read "The first medal ever awarded in women's Olympic wrestling was claimed Monday night by American Patricia Miranda." Technically the bronze is decided first, yes.)

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2004-08-25 morning (utc+1)

For which reason, indeed

Jos� "His Way" Mourinho, manager of Челсий, has been piqued by the English media's complaints about his new teams stodgy play.

"I think you football people in England should stop and ask yourselves, for which reason is English football not successful abroad?" he said.

"For which reason are Spanish teams, Italian teams, Portuguese teams winning the Uefa competitions? Why is the English national team, with a top manager and top players, going to European championships and World Cups and not winning them?" he added ahead of tonight's game at Crystal Palace.

(The Portuguese team FC Porto won everything there was to win under Mourinho's management, including the Champions League, Yoorp's top prize. He is exceptionally fond of pointing this out, and it only makes it the more irritating, to many of the sillier Engleesh, that it is simply true.)

A brief overview, then, for our silly Engleesh readers and any others struggling with the many admittedly subtle issues of foopball tactiques.

  • Foopball games are won by scoring more "goals" than the other team.
  • This divides into two (2) parts:
    1. Scoring "goals"
    2. Stopping the other team scoring "goals"
  • Running up and down is not, in itself, a winning tactique

(This last part is the most controversial in Eng-er-lund, which tends to see the running up and down as the main event and the scoring of goals as a Frenchified affectation, and likewise treats preventing the other team from scoring goals as essentially a by-product of the noble and manly art of assaulting any of their players who come within range.)

Mourinho is already certainly the most widely hated manager in Engleesh foopball, but this is nothing - nothing! - compared to the loathing he will inspire if his arrogance is vindicated by success.

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2004-08-24 tea (utc+1)

It's a scream!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!
Rah! Rah! Rah!
Tuesdays, Mondays, we all scream for sundaes,
Sis-boom-bah!
Boola-boola, sarsaparoolla,
If you got chocolate, we'll take vanoola!
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!
Rah! Rah! Rah!

[src]

Mr Munch's psychedelic hissy fit may have been somewhat swiped, but VG's readership is more than ready to take up the slack:

Munch var som kjent veldig glad i Giraffen, Verdens Vakreste Dyr, skriver Bolleh.

"Munch was, as everyone knows, very fond of giraffes, the world's most beautiful animal," writes Bolleh.

Us too!

[via Margaret von Transblawg, private communication]

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2004-08-24 samwidge (utc+1)

Beware of Greeks talking bollocks

Sci.lang has lately been hosting some cross-posting ultra-nationaliste nutjobs from the heart of the Hellenic h�las. Specifically, they maintain that the country everyone but them calls "Macedonia" is infringing on their Glorious History and Cultual. This is a documented issue, for sure:

The collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the creation of the state of Macedonia (dubbed FYROM or Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in deference to acute Greek sensitivities) triggered a major upsurge in Greek nationalism. This nationalism was underpinned by a fear that separatist movements might develop in northern Greece, a nervousness that was strongly exploited by Greek conservative forces, primarily in the case of Macedonia, but also in the case of its Aromanian/Vlach minority.

The question duly arises: is Greek nationalisme is really the most toxique of more-or-less stable Western democracies? My gut feeling is that it is, but to be sure I would probably need to Learn Greek, and even this excellent audio/net course isn't carrotty enough for that.

I did, however, enter the BBC languages' site's Olympic-themed quizz, which is trivial once you learn to decode the URLs that each link goes to next, and if I win (as I invariably don't) the language-learning goodies on offer, I will put them to the intended use, for sure.

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2004-08-24 morning (utc+1)

Sm�rg�spost

�1. A world of their own

"World lobster eating contest", snarast ett amerikanskt m�sterskap, �gde rum i staden Kennebunk i hummerdelstaten Maine i g�r.

The "World Lobster-Eating Contest", or rather an American championship, took place in the town of Kennebunk in the lobster-fishing region of Maine yesterday.

Gluttony and parochialisme? In the FDRUSA? Say it ain't so!

�2. They say the funniest things!

Who do? Law-yers do, in the good old FDR:

Before turning in a draft, check your work carefully. "It is important to make an early commitment to excellence in the technical aspects of your work product," says John (Sean) Coffey, a partner at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann.

John (Sean) Coffey, this bladet salutes you and the language by means of which we are blissfully divided from you.

[via]

�3. Bulgarian batting debacles

Played five, won none in the European Representation Championship of glorious cricket in sunny Ljubljana, hurrah!

Against the Switzyland they scored fewer runs all out than they conceded in extras, which has got to hurt. Croatia won the event with a clean sweep, and well done them.

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2004-08-23 16:49

Why I am so very correct but unintelligible

We'll get to the Olympics, for sure, but first some belated Euro hilarity:

In its babel of languages, the Olympics are Euro 2004 cubed. What made the Euro so interesting was that it was the European Union at play. And it strongly suggested that the European nations will never be able to talk clearly to each other (and that most do not care). The agreed common language of press conferences was English, as it is in Athens. The French, of course, turned up without an interpreter and were fined. They borrowed a UEFA official who bewildered journalists by translating the word d�chets correctly but unintelligibly. So Jacques Santini, the coach, reportedly said his team's bad passing was "leftovers." He meant that it was a waste.

There are quite many languages at the Olympics, but you'd think someone should have anticipated that a bit, really:

[T]he press was told Japanese judoka Masato Uchishiba had fought his last bout after winning gold on Sunday.

"I wanted this so badly I wouldn't have cared if it was my last fight ever," the 26-year-old actually said, though his comments were officially translated as: "It is probably my last Olympics, that is why I am proud of my medal."

Oh, and how's yer patrimony, Zelmir Obradovic?

Frustration boiled over for the coach of the Serbia and Montenegro basketball team at the weekend when he stormed out of a news conference in protest at the quality of interpreting.

"The translation is ridiculous," fumed Zelmir Obradovic. "It's my right to speak in my native language at the Olympics."

Pretty glorious, huh?

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2004-08-23 samwidge (utc+1)

Sm�rg�spost

�1. Basketfoopball

Basketfoopball is the big sport in Lithuania, of course, and since I am, of course, taking a cosmopolitan approach to the Olympic Foopball, I am certainly cheering them on to an extent limited only by the non-existence of coverage of any sport in which Blighty is not competitive.

So hurrah!

The US men's basketball team lost for the second time in Athens when European champions Lithuania came from behind in the last quarter to beat them 94-90.

Lithania qualify unbeaten, the FDRUSA qualifies with two (2) losses.

�2. Cheap city breaks, Norwegish style

That's 'Wegish touristes, not 'Wegish cities.

�3. Pointing and laughing

More than slightly necessary:

Speaking of a unified world, one of my American students confided in me after a trip abroad "they don't seem to have a cafe culture in Italy, do they?" 'What?," I stammered. 'Well, I didn't see a single Starbucks all the time I was there."

[via]

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2004-08-23 09:50

The loneliness of the long-distance loser

First, a vanity link.

4.12pm Many of you have written in to explain why the Great Britain team is so called rather than the United Kingdom. Des Vonbladet's response was the most eloquent and straightforward: "Athletes from Northern Ireland are eligible to compete for either Great Britain or the Republic of Ireland at their own discretion. This is a historically established skirting of the political minefield; it can't therefore be Team UK, since some competitors may well be UK citizens and not be in it." Makes sense I suppose.

Can I list this as a publication on my r�sum� as a scholar of nationalismes? As of now, our blurb definitely reads, "Eloquent and straightforward" - The Guardian.

Anyway, like the rest of the Proud Island Race I tuned in to listen to Paula "Sadcliffe" Radcliffe attempt a record third consecutive non-medal finish in an Olympic race - the ultra-long distance foopball-free foopball, this time - she had been hotly tipped to win, and was duly gutted when her dream was cruelly shattered by an unfortunately-timed attack of unwillingness to be bothered anymore.

Special bonus bigotry points to the indefatigably tiresome Alison Kirbishly of Radio Foopball for advancing the theory before the race that the Japanese runners revere Sadcliffe like unto a godess and would not be able to conceive of beating her. Needless to say, a Japanese wimmin won it, and quite right too.

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