I don’t usually sleep with a Nutella jar. One of my sons added that prop.
I call this photo “Living High & Letting Die.”
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Our new pastor invited me out for coffee and asked what I’d been reading (besides the Bible). To his dismay, I told him I’d been making a special effort this season to get through various Gothic and horror classics.
What do you like about them, he asked.
The weather, I said.
It’s the truth!
Then I said something about “sins of the past.” That’s true, too.
Here are some items, a few of which I’ve already mentioned in this blog:
(1) Julia (Peter Straub; very Iris Murdochian)
(2) If You Could See Me Now (Straub)
(3) Ghost Story (Straub)
They’ve just been re-issued by the Library of America, although I’ve been reading them in other editions. Straub is the editor of the LOA’s two volumes of “American Fantastic Tales.”
(1)–(3) aren’t bad, but I wouldn’t have canonized them.
(4) The Greater Trumps (Charles Williams; introduced by William Lindsay Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley I might read, too)
We recently acquired a globe, courtesy of the abuelos (tireless Goodwill shoppers).
Samuel: “Every flat-earth person needs a globe.”
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There are very few living writers whose every new book I look out for. One is Michael Lewis. I have added his name to my St. Joe County Public Library “author alerts” list.
The library did not alert me that Lewis had just published Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, his third book showcasing the invaluable contributions of unheralded civil servants (its predecessors are The Fifth Risk and Who Is Government?; other books – The Big Short, The Premonition, and Going Infinite – touch on similar issues).
All ten hard copies of Blockers are checked out.
Well, I thought, I can at least find out the body-text font.
I could not. Only e-versions are previewable online, and they use other fonts.
On Faustian impulse, I turned to A.I. Would this demon supply the desired knowledge?
No.
Too Small; Didn’t Enlarge:
AI Overview:
The exact body text typeface for the hardcover edition of Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis (published by W. W. Norton & Company) is not publicly specified or documented in available records.
While W. W. Norton books typically include a colophon page at the very back of the hardcover detailing the typeface and composition history, this specific typographical information hasn’t been indexed online.
Uh, huh.
Might someone have uploaded some pages’ images to eBay? I checked. The closest specimen I could find was of the UK edition (Allen Lane). It appears to have been set in Dante.
This copy is being sold as a “signed”:
Were I the buyer, I’d ask for a little more John Hancock for my buck (quid, whatever).
Día de la Raza, i.e. Race Day (Latin America, superannuated)
Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural, i.e. Respect for Cultural Diversity Day (Argentina)
Día del Encuentro de Dos Mundos, i.e. Two Worlds’ Meeting Day (Chile)
Día de la Nación Pluricultural, i.e. Multicultural Nation’s Day (Mexico)
Día de la Descolonización, i.e. Decolonization Day (Bolivia)
Día de la Resistencia Indígena, i.e. Indians’ Resistance Day (Venezuela)
Día de la Resistencia Indígena, Negra y Popular, i.e. Indians’, Blacks’, and Proles’ Resistance Day (Nicaragua)
Día de los Pueblos Originarios y del Diálogo Intercultural, i.e. First Peoples’ and Intercultural Dialog Day (Peru)
Día de la Interculturalidad y la Plurinacionalidad, i.e. D.E.I. Bandwagon Day (Ecuador)
Fiesta Nacional de España, i.e. Spain Nation Fest, and Día de la Hispanidad, Spanishness Day (Spain)
Discovery Day (Bahamas)
Columbus Day (USA)
Thanksgiving Day (Canada)
Etc.
I’d prefer “Race Day,” “Discovery Day,” “Two Worlds’ Meeting Day,” or “Columbus Day.” (Columbus was a flawed man, but some flaws are worth remembering.) “Thanksgiving” is a nice sentiment, but giving thanks on this day is unseemly.
She is the second Icelandic laureate. (Halldór Laxness was first.)
I like to think the Nobel judges viewed, or couldn’t avoid hearing about, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey; read Emily Wilson’s grousing about that movie; and decided, Let’s reward a more elliptical classicist.
The writer I know best who writes like Carson is Maggie Nelson.
Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Samuel:
He’s interested in, of all things, its physics – e.g., why a person (or an Oompa-Loompa), having drunk a “fizzy lifting drink,” should rise in the air.
Why does an ice-cube rise in a glass of water?, Samuel asks. It’s the right sort question. I’m impressed.
What blows Samuel’s mind is that, in Charlie, chewing a stick of gum produces the same sensory/nutritive effect as eating a three-course meal. I’m not sure he realizes it isn’t possible.
And the detail that really gets him is that, at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should impress Samuel so much, I don’t know.
That the gum turns Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry interests him less.
That she could be de-juiced back to near-normalcy interests him somewhat more.
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I once knew a college student who was very interested in The Lord of the Rings – for its metaphysics (her word).
Like, why Elves and Men differ as to mortality?, I asked.
Yes, she said.
That strikes me as the wrong approach.
Could this be one way to distinguish fantasy from science fiction? I.e., is physical or metaphysical inquiry appropriate for science fiction but not for fantasy?
Authors/works you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):
Homer
Hamlet
Gulliver
M. R. James
Jekyll & Hyde (but see this paper, which I don’t disparage)
Alice
The Curdie books
Narnia (I haven’t read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia)
Harry Potter (too many ad hoc creatures and spells)
The Borrowers
Charlotte’s Web
And, I’d say – despite all the “world-building” – The Lord of the Rings.
By contrast, Lewis’s “space” books more readily invite physical/metaphysical scrutiny. So does Slaughterhouse-Five. So does A Wrinkle in Time. So too, perhaps, might Watership Down, which I haven’t read.
So does Dante; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed.
And it’s possible to go further down this path with H. P. Lovecraft than one might expect.
The Charlie books are an interesting case. There are physical explanations for some of the phenomena. These explanations don’t hold up for very long, and they’re articulated with the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out the underlying laws – if you’re a child. Not so much if you’re grown up.
It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.
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The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”
Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.
The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who has permitted his yearning for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s essentially a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.
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The movie has three acts:
One: Early misdeeds
Two: Confinement
Three: Release
In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.
Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.
Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)
Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.
Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.
Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.
Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.
It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.
Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)
The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.
In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.
What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects couldn’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.
Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.
The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In their new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.
It’s an interesting question whether The Young Poisoner’s Handbook “wants to dig it.” Certainly, it presents the victims as “dupes and phonies and weaklings.” What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, he’s not a tough person; he wouldn’t instigate a physical fight. His choice of weapon betrays his cowardice. Nor does he dress or speak boldly. He’s essentially an overly formal, petulant little boy brandishing a chemistry set that has all the awesomeness of a model train.
Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.
There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everything is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.
What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a contemptible whole world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself – should we choose to do so.
I’ve been enjoying Part One (“Ancient Philosophy”) of Anthony Kenny’s four-part New History of Philosophy. The selection and arrangement of themes is pretty tidy, and in one passage – the conclusion of the epistemological chapter – it’s almost breathtaking how the dominoes topple over.
The study of ancient epistemology can teach us much about the nature of knowledge and the limits of scepticism. Several insights became part of the patrimony of all future philosophy: knowledge can only be of what is true; knowledge is only knowledge if it can appeal implicitly or explicitly to some kind of support, whether from experience, reasoning, or some other source; and one who claims knowledge must be resolute, excluding the possibility of being rightly converted, at a later stage, to a different view.
However, ancient epistemology is bedevilled by two different but related fallacies. Both of them are generated by a misunderstanding of the truth that whatever is knowledge must be true. One of the fallacies haunts classical epistemology, up to the time of Aristotle; the other fallacy haunts Hellenistic and imperial epistemology.
The first fallacy is this. “Whatever is knowledge must be true” may be interpreted in two ways:
(1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true
or
(2) If p is known, p is necessarily true.
(1) is true but (2) is false. It is a necessary truth that if I know you are sitting down, then you are sitting down; but if I know you are sitting down it is not a necessary truth that you are sitting down; you may get up at any moment. Plato and Aristotle, over and over again, seem to regard (2) as indistinguishable from (1). Given the necessary connection between knowledge and truth, they seem to think, only what is necessary can be known. From the acceptance of (2) there flows the construction of the theory of eternal and immutable Ideas, and there flows the impossible ideal of Aristotelian science.
If whatever is knowledge must be true, then it may seem that knowledge must be the exercise of a faculty that cannot err. This is the form that the fallacy takes in Hellenistic times. The Epicureans and Stoics, unlike Plato and Aristotle, are prepared to countenance knowledge not just of eternal truths, but of mundane contingencies such as that Dion is now walking. But this, they claim, is possible only if we have faculties – whether sense or reason – that are capable of infallible operation. The Hellenistic fallacy is just the mirror image of the classical fallacy. Let F stand for some faculty. Then it is true that
It is impossible, if F knows that p, that F has gone wrong.
But that is not the same as, nor is it true that,
If F knows that p, then it was impossible for F to go wrong.
The epistemological fallacy, both in its classical and in its Hellenistic form, would cast long shadows through philosophy’s history.
If Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and (presumably, for centuries) their descendents all really were confused on this point, then: Oof.
Little Abel has been feverish; his napping has been so fitful, he hasn’t remained asleep when I’ve tried to separate my body from his. Today he was less ill but just as unwilling to be parted from me. The household chores have suffered; my reading and writing “projects” have suffered; Abel’s napping “schedule,” insofar as one exists, has suffered. In the afternoons, I’ve had to haul him, at his groggiest, down the block to retrieve Samuel from the bus.
Samuel has brought home a workbook of optional math exercises. Most days, I force him to complete a few pages. He screams bloody murder but then settles down and does them easily enough.
Daniel, the middle child, finds ways to claim attention. He and I discuss the English and Spanish alphabets. He firmly believes in che, elle, and erre, although the Real Academia Española disavowed those letters in the mid-1990s. Alas, Daniel follows YouTube, not his father. His Spanish is therefore overcomplicated. His approach to reading in either language is downright glacial. He can sound out syllables but has to pause to lecture me about every letter. I tell him it’s no way to form words, let alone whole sentences. What really would suit him is a language of pictographs and ideographs. His calligraphy is rather good; he might learn to design type before he can read it.
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Most days, Abel and Daniel are good friends. They play and bathe together. Daniel has given them superhero bathing names: “Soap Man” and “Bubble Man.” Abel likes to pour water out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor.
When Abel is old enough, I’ll take them all outside and force them to run around the track that belongs to the school down the street. The two younger boys, especially Daniel, already like to run around the shed in our yard. They didn’t like to before, but I persuaded them with reverse psychology or some such trick.
Every day this week, Samuel has come home from school expecting to have received the latest issue of his (free) Lego magazine. No luck. I share in his disappointment.
Today, then, we were happy to find a magazine in our mailbox.
But it wasn’t the Lego magazine. It was an unexpected, free issue of Harper’s.
Eveloping the regular cover was an outer cover, on which was printed this enticement:
Dear Former Subscriber:
Remember the story of the prodigal son? How his father put on a feast and welcomed him back with open arms?
Well, that’s what we at Harper’s want to do for you.
Instead of setting a sumptuous table, we’ve come up with something far more satisfying: a money-saving opportunity to subscribe to Harper’s at the lowest available rate!
Restart your subscription today and get a full year of Harper’s (12 issues) for only $14.97 – that’s 86% off the annual newsstand price. You save $92.91 just by saying YES!
And so on.
I have to say, I’m put off. Harper’s Magazine is not my Heavenly Father.
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P.S. Even so: In the pretentious field of long-form journalism, Harper’s achieves a kind of modesty by going out of the way to pose as what, in Peppa Pig, is referred to as a “clever-clogs.” (The “clever-clogs” in Peppa Pig is Edmund Elephant.) The Harper’s style is to dress up serious reportage or reflection in snark.
“Revolt in the Heartland: Can Old-Time Populism Save the Country?”
“Ghost Towns of the Darién Gap”
“On the Front Lines of Canada’s Ostrich War” (didn’t the Australians have an ostrich war? No, they fought the emus)
That I’ve been a more faithful subscriber of Harper’s than of, say, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books surely reflects my own penchant for off-the-wall self-effacement.
Or that I’m a cheapskate. Those other mags are pricey.
About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral and political philosophy, delivered to university students in the (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems naïvely optimistic. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.
The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian “ought to love the past.” This is a dubius injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from “the dead hand of the past.” The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
Now that I’m an old man of forty-four, not hopeful for the (this-worldly) future or much enjoying or understanding the present – at least as it exists outside my household – the past does seem more lovely. The picturesque past, that is. If this makes me an unfit historian, so be it.
A.I. could kill everyone before the decade ends, tech experts believe (or so a whistleblower claims). We all lose: not just this or that way of life, but life itself.
Of all the stupid ways to go.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals,
and fashioneth it with hammers,
and worketh it with the strength of his arms:
yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth:
he drinketh no water, and is faint.
The carpenter stretcheth out his rule:
he marketh it out with a line:
he fitteth it with planes,
and he marketh it out with the compass,
and maketh it after the figure of a man,
according to the beauty of a man;
that it may remain in the house.
He heweth him down cedars,
and taketh the cypress and the oak,
which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest:
he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it.
Then shall it be for a man to burn:
for he will take thereof, and warm himself;
yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread;
yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it:
he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto.
He burneth part thereof in the fire:
with part thereof he eateth flesh:
he roasteth roast, and is satisfied:
yea, he warmeth himself, and saith,
‘Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire’.
And the residue thereof he maketh a god,
even his graven image:
he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it,
and prayeth unto it, and saith,
‘Deliver me; for thou art my god’.
They have not known nor understood:
for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see;
and their hearts, that they cannot understand.
And none considereth in his heart,
neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say,
‘I have burned part of it in the fire,
yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof:
I have roasted flesh, and eaten it:
and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination?
shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?’
He feedeth of ashes:
a deceived heart hath turned him aside,
that he cannot deliver his soul,
nor say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’
‘Remember these, O Jacob and Israel,
for thou art my servant:
I have formed thee: thou art my servant,
O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me.
I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions,
“And the residue thereof he maketh a god, / even his graven image: / he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, / and prayeth unto it, and saith, / ‘Deliver me; for thou art my god’.”
Shockingly, this is my first exhibition of the great Adrian Frutiger’s work. Behold.
Very nice, but one must tolerate long descenders. Observe the lowercase ps, qs, ys, and, especially, js (“jolly good job”). (The specimen is from a story by Francis Wyndham.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The household is watching Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) in installments: our attention spans are not long. The movie is faux-British. Barry Levinson, Chris Columbus, and Steven Spielberg are named in the opening credits.
Holmes and Watson are schoolmates. The school is proto-Hogwarts. There is a very picturesque scene with all the boys dressed for dinner in the Great Hall. The camera lingers over the table at which the Masters are seated. It cherishes their extreme decrepitude.
In other scenes, old men are injected with poisoned darts that cause them to hallucinate and kill themselves. The hallucinations involve the coming to life of chicken dinners, hatstands, and stained-glass windows.
Little Daniel excuses himself during these scenes.
The politicians of New Mexico have responded to Trump’s latest proposal.
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Samuel has been complaining about the wasting of his time. E.g., when someone else chooses a video to watch, that person is “wasting my [Samuel’s] time.”
He can be rather sweet about it, however.
“Mom is working [napping, etc.]. She is wasting my time.” He clarifies: “I wish I could to talk to her instead.”
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop:
He had published eight books … beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.
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Daniel: “Mommy, I am going to bed, and [the letter] A is going to spend the night with me. Can you carry me and A to bed?”
(2) Pablo of Texcoco, How to Be Grateful: An Aztec Guide to the Art of Gratitude (2025), reviewed at NDPR.
It was jarring to come across both reviews in the same week. It was like reading about Nazis and then learning that a collection of mid-20th-century Germanic homespun “wisdom” had just been issued by a major university press.
The “Nazi” remark isn’t a cheap exaggeration. Clendinnen’s work unavoidably brings the Holocaust to mind.
Still, the analogy isn’t perfect, especially when it’s applied to the other book. Pablo’s “wisdom” was written down quite a few years after the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. Would we demand that every postwar Germanic writer address the sorrowful legacy of the Nazi period? If not, then perhaps we shouldn’t object when Pablo and his 21st-century expositors choose not to dwell on the same Aztec qualities that Clendinnen describes.
Perhaps the introduction of Christianity into Nahua culture accounts for the surprising gentleness of the “Pablo” book.
Or perhaps not. It’s not unheard of for the same people to manifest brutality and exquisite etiquettical sensitivity.
How does Clendinnen’s work go down these days? Her scholarship is impossible to ignore. I fear that she is becoming unfashionable, however. I see that in the second (2022) edition of The Mexico Reader, the selection from Clendinnen has been considerably shortened.
Her drunk, laughing mother climbs into the tiny bed with her after a night out. For 18-year-old Sarah (Lena Headey), it’s the last straw. She resolves to leave home. A younger sister is left to contend for herself.
What could have been a depressing first scene is oddly bouyant. It’s lightened by notes from Leftfield’s song “Melt.” Rave music sounds throughout the whirlwind opening third of this 70-minute BBC drama for teens, as Sarah meets, takes ecstasy from, and moves in with Tom (Ian Hart). There are tracks by Orbital, the Prodigy, and similar musicians.
Trainspotting, the more famous drugs-and-techno movie, was released around the same time. Loved Up is much gentler. It’s basically an earlier version of The Spectacular Now, treating of an unsettled but ultimately tethered girl and her rootless boyfriend.
Tom lives in the Now. He pretends not to – he takes pride in his regular employment and considers his after-hours partying to be well-earned – but the truth is, he parties all day long. He plays with the merchandise in the toy shop where he works. He can’t relax at home: his pals are always dropping in, and he hankers for the club.
The movie’s final two thirds are a gradual come-down from the initial high. But what a high!
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
As soon as Tom has given Sarah the ecstasy, he takes her to his pals. They all go clubbing and joyriding, and when a postal truck loses a sack of mail, the revelers open the letters and drive around the neighborhood, delivering the happy-sounding items. Bills and such, they throw away because, what use is unhappy news?
Then, at the flat, Tom and Sarah consummate their new love. The movie may have been broadcast to teens, but its U.S. rating would have been a solid “R.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Hart and Headey would go on to become famous for, respectively, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. Headey also would hold her own as Stellan Skarsgård’s co-star in Aberdeen, playing a more grown-up version of Sarah. (Hart re-appears there, too.)
I guess Loved Up is a cautionary tale, but Hart’s and Headey’s heedless glee is what makes it worthwhile. Hart and, especially, Headey are infectious early on – Headey for Sarah’s wide-eyed innocence as she enters Tom’s funhouse scene, Hart for Tom’s pose of worldly assurance. The eventual undermining of these stances is a poignant, if minor, tragedy.
That’s not to put down the rest of the movie. There are some fine later sequences. Sarah invites Tom to meet her alcoholic mother, and Tom obtusely brings along a pal – and a bottle of sherry. Later, when, in an emergency, Sarah summons Tom, he loses the address and tells the cab driver to just follow after other cars.
Meanwhile, Sarah makes her own blunders, losing her job, trying too hard to compensate for forgetting her sister’s birthday, and allowing herself to grow too close to Tom’s dealer (a charming, snaky Jason Isaacs).
None of this is irreparable. There’s little of Trainspotting’s fatalism. One realizes, of course, that Tom will have to wake up, or else. The movie isn’t quite an argument for shortsighted revelry, but it doesn’t come down hard against it, either. What it does argue against is the permanency of this state.
I don’t think any viewer – teen-aged or otherwise – would wish to end up like Sarah’s mother.
… whose music I don’t know well – I confidently recall only her songs “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream” – but whose generosity I appreciate. My children have received dozens of free books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
Speaking of libraries: Abel has become almost impossible to supervise in actual ones. He climbs on tables, ravages displays, chews tips off markers, and dumps toy bins upside-down. I follow in his wake, cleaning his messes. Today, while I was picking up toys, he moved through the Spanish-language book section like a tornado, pulling several shelves’ worth of volumes onto the floor.
The library’s rules, unfortunately (or fortunately), do not permit me to reshelve books.
My two least favorite librarians were on duty – the ones who sternly call me “Sir.” They were kind this time.
Yes, it’s good that we receive plenty of books at home, thanks to Dolly Parton.
Sometimes, my CPAP machine pumps my stomach so full of air that just before I wake up, I have dreams like this one:
I’d just had a large breakfast when Martin showed up at my house and said, Come with me, I’m taking you out for pancakes. There was no refusing him. (Cut to the diner.) The pancakes were impressive – one was actually a huge, flattened cinnamon roll – but afterward, goodness gracious, did my belly hurt. (Usually, in dreams with food, I don’t get to eat the food.)
The dream also may have been prompted by my having gotten back on the dieting horse. In three weeks, I’ve lost eight pounds.
If there’s anything more tedious than having to listen to other people talk about their dreams, it’s having to listen to dieters tell about their new regimes and food hacks.
Our new food hack is the George Foreman grill that Karin found at Goodwill.
I also just learned a great way to fry an egg. Pre-heat the pan; put in a little fat; put in a tablespoon of water, and then the egg. Cover the pan.
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Why do Karin & I keep going on dates to Niles, Michigan? What is the town’s allure? Is it the riverwalk? Is it the pleasant drive from Granger, Indiana, where we deposit our children with Karin’s mother? Is it Casperson Books? Is it Pizza Transit, with its series of outlandish “pizzas of the month” (e.g., Mexican street corn pizza)?
Is it the knowledge that Ring Lardner walked Niles’s streets?
IT’S ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Today’s excursion was to eat hot dogs and popcorn and watch The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell’s movie about time-warped dinosaurs preying on suburban Michiganders. Another of Mitchell’s wry commentaries on the inevitability of death.
I used to mistake Poliphilus for Bembo. “Old Bembo” is how I thought of it. Of course both are derived from the work of Francesco Griffo.
Poliphilus lacks its own italic but usually is paired with Blado.
This specimen is from Aesop, whose fables I like to read to Samuel on those nights when he’s too tired to stay awake for anything longer.
“A lion and an ass made a partnership and went out to hunt.” (Sometimes a fox joins them.) It’s surprising how many fables begin that way.
It’s surprising, also, how often the lion is not just the strongest but also the wisest character. Aesop has something of a “might makes right” streak in him.
We have been immersing ourselves in intermittently glorious, surprisingly mostly dreary Oxford drama: begun in Inspector Morse (1987–2000); continued in Inspector Lewis (2006–2015), which features Morse’s former Detective Sergeant; and retraced in “origin story” form in Endeavour (2012–2023), which is titled after Morse’s Christian name. It’s Endeavour that we’ve started with. Long ago we saw some of “Morse Proper,” and knowledge of it gives Endeavour a foreboding air: this young 1960s constable will turn into a first-rank curmudgeon, an object of near-horror. There are some explicit portents – Endeavour Morse is solitary, has a savior complex, relishes crosswords and classical music perhaps too much – yet the dread is inchoate. There is unease even as this hero, with each new success, rises in his profession. There is gravitas even as the genre’s tropes are trundled out. The classic “Morse” theme music, equally suited to a mountaineering documentary, has been retained for the prequel. As Young Endeavour, Shaun Evans is brusque, skinny, and sallow, with a deer-in-headlights expression. The show’s real human treasure, however, is Endeavour’s mentor, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) – surely one of the genre’s wisest men. Had he been higher-born, he could have been a don; as it is, he holds his own against the silly college men he questions, who consider him beneath them. Rank is all in Thursday’s world (and at Oxford). And yet, unlike his own superior, Thursday doesn’t lord it over Morse. The show’s other great virtue is its artifact selection. I’ve not seen anything else in which beer mugs and wallpaper were so lovingly exhibited. The story could be nonsense, the historic University could be ignored, and I’d still watch just for those props.
Ziva (cat no. 2) and Dory (no. 3) used to fight several times each day, really brutally; but since we’ve begun using air fresheners to pump feline pheromones into our house, they’ve gotten along much better. This gives me hope for the harmony of our household, and for that of humankind.
Seriously, things are more peaceful now.
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We attended a quite lovely wedding after-party this evening, in someone’s back yard. There were many children. There were dogs of very different breeds and sizes, to warm the heart. The music was from the nineties and early aughts; the catering was local Mexican. There also was much uninhibited vaping. I was amused to see the bride and groom puffing away together at their special table. But they weren’t the only ones. Everyone was at it. Perhaps the vaping was what made everything harmonious. Halfway through the party, it started raining, and no one really minded.
The children played in a sandbox and got filthy. They had a precious time; afterward, we had to drag Daniel, kicking and screaming, to the car.
Warm congrats to my cousin, Matthew, and his wife, Megan, on the birth of their second daughter.
Most of my paternal grandparents’ grandchildren began having children rather late in life. So, although perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me, it always does – pleasantly – when another little niece, nephew, or once-removed first cousin comes along.
What a world to come into, though.
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Then again, things arguably were worse in Genesis-time. I have a couple of colorful t-shirts with the caption, “Need an Ark? I Noah Guy.” There’s a picture of the ark on the shirts. (Alas, I can’t find the picture online – just other shirts with the same caption but different artwork.) I obtained these shirts after a children’s program at my church. They were spares.
I wear them around because I’m edgy like that. And because they fit.
No one ever has commented on them – the occasional raised eyebrow is as far as things have gone – until today, when I wore an ark shirt to the to the Salvation Army Kroc Center. (The boys have been taking swim lessons there.)
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
One of the best poems. Kipling thought it too popular for its own good. No doubt the parodies irked him. Some are clever indeed: see Elizabeth Lincoln Otis’s “An ‘If’ for Girls” (but her last couplet is nothing as fine as Kipling’s; it’s his “my son” that makes the difference).
[Turritopsis dohrnii] “is unique,” [says marine biologist Maria Pia Miglietta,] “because when faced with unfavourable conditions – and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it – when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”
Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.
But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again.
The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then – like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar – it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says. …
In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live for ever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.
Perhaps at the moment of each man’s death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps He removes for “safekeeping” only the “core” person – the brain and central nervous system – or even some special part of it.
(Of course, Ehrhardt already is good enough for most uses. Perhaps Equity is superfluous.)
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Equity is this month’s featured font because private equity is in the soccer news. Infantino is trying to make room for investors – Trump associates! – to buy a substantial share in FIFA’s tournaments.
Some FIFA member nations expect to benefit from the deal. Others – those that have no trouble paying for their soccer operations – staunchly oppose ceding business control to outsiders.
The European nations have resolved, unanimously, to boycott all FIFA competitions unless Infantino’s proposal is withdrawn or voted down.
I hope they get their way – without the boycott. I am not taken with Europe’s “principles.” Europe has a long history of thinking itself too good to play with anybody else.
Tim Vickery, in this video, explains:
Vickery’s diagnosis and proposal are very nearly my own, and so I’ll leave the matter there. But this is not to treat it lightly. The World Cup’s continuance is in danger.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
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P.S. Tens of thousands of Moroccans illegally crossed into the tiny Spanish semi-exclave of Ceuta yesterday. Spain and Morocco, along with four other countries, are slated to host the 2030 World Cup together.
I try not to review bad movies. If I watch a movie and don’t admire or enjoy it, I don’t review it. The Big Green (1995) is an exception.
I chose it because I have just finished watching the World Cup.
(Alas, I’d forgotten that the conclusion of Captain Tsubasa, a.k.a. Supercampeones, was broadcast in 1995.)
Having written the review, though, I wonder if The Big Green might not be as bad as all that.
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Roger Ebert didn’t care for The Big Green. His review bemoans its triteness.
A team of small-town misfits are inspired by their offbeat coach to master a sport. They start out incredibly bad. They are humiliated by the ace team from the big city, with the expensive black uniforms and the obsessive coach. Then they start getting better. No prizes for who wins their big rematch. … Why soccer? Because their teacher is from England, and is visiting tiny Elma, Texas, on an exchange program. … Under the influence of this inspirational teacher and the discipline of the sport, [the youngsters] transform themselves. This will come as a shock to anyone who has not seen Dangerous Minds, The Dead Poets Society, and the countless other homages to the same idea.
Of course, some such “homages” – Hoosiers, notably – are not bad movies. It helps when the story is traceable to something that actually happened. This imposes constraints of accuracy – or, at least, of plausibility.
Plausibility is not the aim of The Big Green. Many of its elements are unabashedly fanciful. For example, racial groups from every major landmass but Australia and Antarctica are represented in the little Texas town, although the population is low enough that the schoolhouse has just one room.
But let us grant that diversity and inclusion, no matter how unlikely in a given location, befit an idealized tale of the global game.
It’s still important that characters be compelling individuals.
Alas, the individual children in The Big Green are stock figures with particularly unappealing traits. These range from cloying cuteness to frightening psychosis to clichéd hardbittenness.
The runtiest boy is recognizable as Alfalfa from the previous year’s Little Rascals movie. (The Big Green has improved his hairdo.) This lad shows no aptitude for soccer but nonetheless is chosen to take the decisive penalty kick.
Meanwhile, the boy who tends goal – Patrick Renna, reprising his “fat kid” role from The Sandlot – hallucinates that the opponents are ninjas, pirates, knights on horseback, etc.
He copes by redirecting his hallucinations into a productive channel.
Finally, the “tough” girl’s father is a drunkard. (Recall, from Hoosiers, the Dennis Hopper character.) This is the movie’s sole attempt to provide background detail about any of the children.
No, that’s not quite right. A new boy’s reason for coming to the town is withheld during most of the movie; then, near the end, it is revealed. This gets the plot over the hump.
The grownup characters fare better.
The most conspicuous local grownup is a none-too-zealous sheriff’s deputy (Steve Guttenberg). He is serviceably obnoxious as the love interest of the new teacher-coach.
About that teacher-coach, then – the genre’s central figure. This particular coach is an odd duck. It’s traditional for these movies to mention the coach’s personal demons. Happily, Miss Montgomery appears to have none.
She’s played by the fresh-faced Olivia d’Abo, the 1980s and ’90s equivalent of Felicity Jones.
It is Miss Montgomery’s mission to bring British jollity to disaffected U.S. youth.
MISS MONTGOMERY
I believe that you’re all special because you live here in America, and America is a place where you can be anything you want to be.
THE FAT KID
I think that was before Reaganomics, Ma’am.
(Not bad, kid.)
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I’ve been treating The Big Green as a genre piece, transposed, awkwardly, into a comedic and fantastical key. But I believe that despite its perfunctoriness about the sport itself – the gameplay is wholly unbelievable – the movie does capture various Hoosiers-style social truths.
Children and youths in mid-’90s U.S. prairie towns really were this jaded (or worse). I know because, in 1996, I went to school in rural Missouri.
Soccer really was viewed as a curiosity there. My classmates knew more about The Big Green than about the 1994 U.S. World Cup.
The movie is correct that pickup soccer didn’t exist in such places, and that the only way to play was to join an urban or suburban league. This still is the case. Millions of U.S. children have no access to the world’s game. The harvest is ready but there are too few Miss Montgomeries; and, if there were more, their efforts would be appropriated by the pay-to-play industry. Indeed, this is what appears to happen in The Big Green.
The movie is correct, or nearly so, that ultra-competitive coaches of the city youth leagues pace the sidelines shouting through bullhorns, brandishing swords, and leching after any Miss Montgomeries who cross paths with them.
COACH HUFFER [Jay O. Sanders]
You know, we have a little tradition down here among the coaches. Before the final game, we always make a little wager.
MISS MONTGOMERY
Really? What are we betting?
COACH HUFFER
Well, now, I couldn’t take your money from you, but, you know, I’m divorced. I wouldn’t say no to a kiss.
MISS MONTGOMERY
Deal. But if you lose, you have to kiss our mascot, Ernie. He’s that lovely little green goat over there. He’s divorced, too.
(My favorite line. All right, the movie has some charm.)
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Perhaps the oddest and, to me, most intriguing thing about The Big Green is that its skies are so dreary. Indeed, all the lighting is rather dim. (The poster misleads.) The story is hokey nonsense. Why not prettify the visuals, then? Would it have been too costly? Or could it be that behind the story lurks a somber attitude? Hoosiers, which takes place during the winter, is awash with radiant color; but then, Hoosiers is uplifting. Nothing about The Big Green is; not really. The cheerful Miss Montgomery is not inspiring so much as freakishly out of place.
J. L. Carr wrote a novel, The Battle of Pollocks Crossing (online here), about an English schoolmaster who accepts a temporary job at a school in rural South Dakota. The Booker judges shortlisted the novel. I doubt anybody reads it nowadays.
It’s supposed to be a quirky story. The schoolmaster involves himself in some sort of campaign, on behalf of the “Have-Nots,” against the “Haves.” Farce ensues. The resolution is perhaps less than triumphant. (Bear in mind, I haven’t actually read the book.)
The sky of the book’s cover looks a lot like the sky of The Big Green.
My own fancy, almost certainly false, is that someone set out to turn this oddity into a movie. The script was fed through different writers’ groups. The profit motive was accorded too much weight. Eventually, only the barest outline of the original tale remained. The U.S. World Cup was approaching, and so soccer was grafted onto the story as an afterthought – or perhaps as a vestige of fidelity to Carr (who also wrote a soccer novel, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup).
If anyone wants to buy Pollocks Crossing for me, I’ll gladly read it and report whether this daydream is true.
Bots must have read my previous entry and decided that I would approve of this Substack post: it has come up a few times in my feed (in Spanish, more often than not). The post is by one Éamann Mac Donnchada, “an Irishman resident in Barcelona, deeply marked by his years in Argentina.”
Indeed, I found it moving.
(See also this post of Mac Donnchada’s, written before the final.)
Mac Donnchada offers a nice counterpoint to what I have been reading and viewing elsewhere. For example, the Guardian – don’t think it doesn’t have an axe to grind! – would have us believe that Argentinians are morally undeserving, as indicated by the fact that some U.S. Blacks and some non-Argentinian Latin Americans prefer not to cheer for Argentina.
(The piece on Latin America begins, amusingly, with a Brazilian – a citizen of Argentina’s chief sporting rival – saying, I *would* cheer for Argentina, *but* … )
Of course, I can’t speak for – or to – everyone belonging to these groups. But the obvious rejoinder to the argument is: Look closely at Spain. Look closely at Europe. Look at their histories and their present attitudes (which are cosmeticized, as Mac Donnchada notes). Are the Argentinians really so much worse?
As Mac Donnchada remarks:
Football has acted as a socially acceptable pretext for saying things that would have been unacceptable in any other context. National sporting rivalry has licensed people to express prejudices that normally remain hidden behind progressive language.
To wit, prejudices against Argentinians.
Which isn’t to say that Argentinians aren’t themselves prejudiced. But it does shed light on the team’s conduct. When the Argentinian players turned their backs on Spain’s post-game celebration, it may not have been entirely a matter of bad sportsmanship. It may also have been a refusal to applaud a country where Argentinians suffer prejudice.
(Argentinians often are bad losers; I’ve seen Ecuador beat them enough times to know that. 😆 Even so, I’ve noticed that Argentinians tend, after the obligatory period of fisticuffs and grousing, to bestow grudging respect.)
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Politics aside, the more I think about the final, the less convinced I am that Spain dominated Argentina as thoroughly as it seemed. Yes, the stats – possession, passing, shooting, etc. – favor Spain; but how were those figures achieved? As Hannah Frye explains, in tennis, the scoring system allows the side that returns service just a little better to tally many more games and sets than the opposition. Soccer is thought to exhibit the opposite tendency – goals are not predictable amplifications of modest superiority – but, as every devoted viewer understands, the focus on goals is misleading. It’s other metrics that predictably get amplified. The Spanish were able to record better numbers, and to look vastly superior, by repeatedly exploiting a single weakness that the Argentinians were aware of but almost powerless to correct. The Spanish understood that the Argentinians were too old and tired to effectively press Spain’s back line. (This was evident as early as Argentina’s match against Cape Verde.) This allowed the Spanish to constantly advance their teenaged central defender, Cubarsí, into the midfield; and the resulting numerical advantage in that sector allowed them to control possession. Yes, the Spanish are good at passing and recovering; but are they so much better than these same Argentinians who, four years earlier, overran the French? The answer is: Yes, with more youthfulness and rest and an extra player in the middle. That’s all we really can tell. The Argentinians, of course, knew that they were being made to look inept. And they knew how. Their response was logical. Fernández occasionally would leave his place in the middle and join the front press – not to generate turnovers but to “persuade” Cubarsí to retreat. It was desperate but necessary, and it resulted in Fernández’s expulsion. It was an altogether more proactive gambit than, e.g., England’s total retreat into the box.
Hannah Frye: “The resilience to losing that you have to have [in tennis] is, I think, unlike any other.”
But much the same could be said about Argentina in this final. The team showed more resilience than any other I can think of, despite the humiliating amplification, all over the field, of the failure of the press. The Argentinians were so resilient, they almost won. The Spanish, for all their “dominance,” almost didn’t. This was no 2009 Champions League final, no low-scoring affair with an outcome nonetheless settled early; this was a live contest until the end. The Spanish never did pass all the way through Argentina: they hoofed a ball into the box, where a couple of fresh substitutes got to it first. (And yes, the earlier goal’s disallowal was correct.)
There was, then, a certain reactiveness to Spain’s game, a certain fundamental preoccupation with the opponent rather than with proactive excellence (e.g., the Spanish were in no hurry to obtain a lead). And, I daresay, a certain smugness. I’m reminded of a story of my Uncle John’s. The classical guitarist, Andrés Segovia, once listened to an earnest amateur’s performance. He then took the guitar and played it back, cruelly replicating each mistake. What is an opponent to do in the face of a virtuoso’s calculated meanness? I don’t say that Spain played as cruelly as Segovia. But it was a virtuoso one-trick performance. Spain could have tried different things but didn’t – until the end. Then the ball simply was hoofed into the box. Argentina tried more things. (It’s a mistake to claim the opposite.) None worked. That’s all.
Let me end with a quotation from a different Spanish youngster: Gavi, who took a few knocks after the final whistle.
No, to be honest, I don’t think [the Argentinians] should be suspended. I realize it doesn’t set a good example for the children, but there’s also that side to football that’s a bit more violent.
He’s magnanimous because he’s young, the pundits say. Perhaps. Or perhaps Gavi is wise enough to put himself in the other’s place. Or perhaps he’s not especially proud of how Spain approached the game. That’s not to say he should be ashamed. You play the way you know; you try to win the way you can.
The World Cup has ended. I congratulate the Spanish. They are deserving champions. If I never see another World Cup, I won’t regret having seen Spain win last.
I also hugely admire the Argentinians. Outclassed, they came close to winning through sheer determination. They were the tournament’s most antagonistic team – and, from the competitiveness-prizing point of view, its finest.
After the final, Western European pundits tarred the Argentinians – and, alas, all South Americans – as violent and uncouth. The good guys won, the bad guys lost, was the pundits’ gloat. Football was saved. Even supposing it were true, the self-righteousness astounds. Europeans also misbehave. Harald Schumacher, Zinedine Zidane, and Sergio Ramos all played more despicably, for all the world to see, than any Argentinian did in this tournament. Italian squads have been as defensive as Argentina, and as petulant. The Dutch of the 2010 final, and the Dutch and Portuguese in their notorious match of 2006, were shockingly, comically violent. (The English – poor people – have mostly just harmed themselves.)
I also recall that many pundits – not French ones, of course – worshipped these same “uncouth” Argentinian players when they won in 2022. I suppose that like most people, pundits are knee-jerk home supporters first, rival haters second, victory worshippers third, and objective judges fourth; and, all the while, hypocrites.
A more respectful and realistic European is Tim Vickery; he points out that Argentina’s initial strategy was not just to defend and foul. (Ignore the other pundit.)
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Organization-wise, the tournament is broken. There are too many games. Temperatures are miserable. Players look tired. Distances between host cities are too great. Tickets are too costly. Price-gouging for amenities is unrestrained. Refereeing isn’t credible. Political interference by the hosts, once deemed unacceptable, has become the norm.
Only four years ago, this still was the most watchable event in sports. Say what you will about how Qatar prepared, the spectacle was lovely.
This time, I just wanted it all to end.
The 2030 World Cup will be held in six countries, including Spain and Argentina, and on three continents. The number of teams may be raised.
It is rumored that the USA will bid for the World Cup of 2038.
