Iran at the World Cup?

“Trump to POLITICO: ‘I Really Don’t Care’ if Iran Plays in World Cup”

Again, I wish FIFA would choose a host that did care.

Iran’s non-participation seems likeliest. Maybe we’ll know more after the U.S. completes the expected four-to-five weeks of bombardment. Because then the war’ll be done-and-dusted, won’t it? Because, as Trump himself believes, Iran already “is a very badly defeated country.”

If Iran does participate, this eye-popping scenario will be possible:

Iran is currently scheduled to play New Zealand in Los Angeles on June 15, Belgium in Los Angeles on June 21 and Egypt in Seattle on June 26. If both the U.S. and Iran finish second in their respective groups, the two countries could face off in a July 3 elimination match in Dallas.

The two countries played what were, in effect, elimination matches (in the group stage) in 1998 and 2022. Iran won the first meeting; the U.S. won the second.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 96: Wag the dog

What with the ongoing sex scandal and, now, a war, Wag the Dog (1997) is the obvious choice for this month. (Well, either it or Canadian Bacon [1995].)

Actors:

• De Niro
• Dunst
• Harrelson
• Heche
• Hoffman
• Macy
  

and

• Willie Nelson (who, in scenes reminiscent of Nashville, directs a studio choir that records patriotic music)

Wag the Dog is funny. It ticks a lot of boxes, satire-wise.

Trouble is, it’s not cynical enough.

Nowadays, this is a quaint, almost feel-good movie.

The country, nowadays, is that much worse.

The nineties were a gentler time.

More trouble for the World Cup

Some dozens of recent killings in Mexico have stirred up anxiety about that country’s ability to safely co-host the World Cup.

The U.S. has safety worries, too. E.g., who will pay for the extra stadium guards and police in little Foxborough, Mass.? Not the 18,000 townspeople, who are threatening to deny FIFA the use of their locality.

Good for them.

See this New York Times article.

“We may get a little more [than usual] in meals tax and hotel tax,” a local official explains:

But this is not a moneymaker for this town. In fact, it’s probably more of a headache than it’s worth.

This is nothing more than seven events up there. If [the] World Cup wasn’t coming, we’d probably have seven concerts in that time. We’re not gaining much of anything by hosting this event.

So it goes when a country that doesn’t really care about soccer – or about, you know, the world – is awarded World Cup hosting rights. You run up against locals who refuse to sacrifice. Which is what hosting these games is. FIFA always has made money for the rich and compensated the masses with an experiential high. But these particular masses don’t care about soccer or foreign visitors, so they aren’t going to get that high.

FIFA should give more games – or all of the games – to Canada. I’m curious what the people of, e.g., Edmonton or Regina would say. Those cities have pretty stadiums; I’ve looked at them on Wikipedia.

Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):

Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:

If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins over to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next one, and so on.

Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)