Limping

I stepped on a fancy Hot Wheels ambulance. It had sharp tail fins. It made a dime-sized crater in the arch of my foot.

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A few recent club transfers involving Ecuadorians:

• Pervis Estupiñán from Brighton to Milan (permanent transfer)
• Piero Hincapié from Leverkusen to Arsenal (loan with purchase option)
• Kendry Páez from Chelsea to Strasbourg (temporary loan)
• Jeremy Sarmiento, Brighton’s last remaining Ecuadorian, to Cremonese (another loan)

It was expected that Joel Ordóñez and Kevin Rodríguez would be swooped up from Club Brugge and Union Saint-Gilloise, respectively; but they weren’t. So, they’ll have to spend another season lighting up the Belgian league.

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Ecuador’ll play in Paraguay tomorrow night. We’ve qualified for the World Cup. Paraguay is on the World Cup’s doorstep.

So, our motivation is low, Paraguay’s is high, and Paraguay is playing better than usual (if nowhere near as well as from 1996 to 2011).

And we’ve only ever lost in Asunción.

Still, I’d wager, we’ll earn our first point there. Our defense just doesn’t let in goals.

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Current mini-book: Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (1956), the inspiration for the novels of Sjöwall & Wahlöö. Inspired by the show Dragnet, which every other cop procedural is indebted to, e.g. the one that goes:

In the criminal justice system

Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous

In New York City

The dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies

Are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit

These are their stories

(Dun, dun)

Cop Hater is set in New York, but the place names have been changed.

Wikipedia says the first edition has 166 pp. and the revised edition has 236. I must be reading the text of the first edition. In my omnibus, the novel’s page count is 116.

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Current late-night viewing: Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005), starring Canadians who haven’t crossed over to Hollywood. That, in itself, is refreshing. I’m also enjoying the lingo. Royal Canadian Mounted Police = RCMP = The Horsemen. I keep expecting a guy on horseback to show up and harangue the cops at the precinct in Downtown Vancouver, but no, it’s always a twerp in a suit.

Lots of autopsies are performed. The nude bits are blurred out (unlike on Britain’s Silent Witness, which uses famous guest actors to play the corpses).

Da Vinci streams, free, via various apps.

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I think the weather has started cooling for good this summer. We’re getting a nice rain tonight. The back lawn is about nine inches tall. I would’ve mowed on Saturday, but my foot had a painful gash in it.

“The __ and the __”

“Book titles, great,” file under.

(Source.)

In the same league as:

“The Beautiful and the Damned” (Fitzgerald)

“The Power and the Glory” (Greene)

“The Drowned and the Saved” (Levi)

“The Naked and the Dead” (Mailer)

“The Gutter and the Grave” (McBain)

“The Nice and the Good” (Murdoch)

This template deserves a revival. How about:

The TRUSTY
and the
SUS

Yesterday was one of reiterated puking by little Daniel. He has my sympathy, but he’d have more if he’d used his bucket instead of, you know, our best furniture.

The BUCKET
and the
COUCH

My compatriot, Pervis Estupiñán, scored a nice goal for Brighton today.

The breaking of the fellowship

It has come to pass. 😢

These were (most of) Brighton & Hove Albion’s South American players during the 2022–2023 season:

Left to right:

Moisés Caicedo (Ecuador).

Jeremy Sarmiento (Ecuador).

Julio Enciso (Paraguay).

Alexis Mac Allister (Argentina).

Pervis Estupiñán (Ecuador).

This season, Sarmiento was lent out to West Brom; Mac Allister moved to Liverpool; and, yesterday, Caicedo signed an eight-year contract with Chelsea. His transfer fee is said to be £100–115 million; the British record is £106 million.

I’m proud of and happy for Caicedo, I guess, but I really liked seeing all these guys play together at Brighton.

An ode to Brighton

Hardly anyone read my latest movie review. I can only infer that the opus in question, Dalziel & Pascoe, series 1, episode 3, “An Autumn Shroud,” already is so well known that my commentary on it is superfluous.

Karin vomited many times today and stayed home from the office.

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One of the luckiest things for me this last year was that Brighton & Hove Albion F.C. employed three Ecuadorians, spurring me to watch most of Brighton’s games and affording me a view of what surely has been one of the most breathtaking teams in the history of sport: a team all the more remarkable for bossing games while languishing mid-table.

Brighton’s manager, Graham Potter, was poached by Chelsea several games into the campaign. But then his successor, Roberto De Zerbi, actually made Brighton better. (There is a YouTube cottage industry about this.) Chelsea ended up sacking Potter.

All game long – in game after game – the broadcasters would sing Brighton’s praises. But the roster isn’t deep enough to lift the club very high up the table. Mind, I say this after a game in which key starters were rested and their substitutes propelled Brighton to a 6–0 victory.

The roster, such as it is, might well be gutted before the next season, as the clubs with deep pockets come swooping down.

How about this season, then? There have been high hopes, but things look bleak. Brighton will play six of the final seven matches against the league’s top four and bottom two clubs. The top four will be tough because they’re good. The bottom two will be tough since they’ll be fighting to avoid relegation.

The good times might already be over.

I like seeing Moisés Caicedo and Pervis Estupiñán on the field together, featuring for a team that plays how Ecuadorians like to play. I don’t want them to be snatched up by bigger clubs next year. But that’ll probably happen. The most enjoyable club season of my life will have been a flash in the pan.

To each his own

The chicken-and-beer diet: lose 15 lbs. in 40 days.

I’m not surprised. A half-chicken + Pit-Tatoes® (from Nelson’s) < 400 kcals.

Do you know what else is good? Pollo Gus.

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I read another great little Sciascia novel: To Each His Own (1966), which is as Chronicle-of-a-Death-Foretold-ish as The Day of the Owl. On the evidence of these two shrimpy works I’d say this guy should have been given the Nobel Prize.

“To each his own” is unicuique suum in Latin and a ciascuno il suo in Italian. Reading the book, it helps to know these phrases.

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These volumes aren’t supposed to rest on the same shelf, but Samuel decided to line them up together. They do belong to the same series. (He must not have been able to reach the Locke book.)

I wish he’d organize his books.

Feliz cumple to Pervis Estupiñán who twice assisted Brighton & Hove Albion’s goalscorers today.

Web bots, pt. 2; a birthday weekend

Quickly, a follow-up to the previous entry. A reader tells me about this announcement on the Canon Press website:

(To enlarge the image, click on it.)

No wonder the Web bots led me to The Case for Christian Nationalism.

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Thank you, well-wishers and gift givers. I turned forty-one upon a day of classic “John-Paul” weather, as gloomy as all get-out (and windy). For my birthday supper, we drove to my in-laws’ house in Granger. The traffic was dense – Notre Dame was about to host a game – and, along much of the route, the power was extinguished; intersections had to be negotiated in the manner of four-way stops. We passed some accidents. We arrived safely.

“Meat loaf and cheesecake,” Karin’s mom said, afterward, when we were stuffed. “What good choices, John-Paul.”

“Karin chose them,” I disclosed.

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Stephen visited today; we watched the first leg of Barcelona’s championship series against Aucas. Barcelona lost 0–1 and didn’t deserve better. The concluding leg will be played next week. I can truly say, I’ll be glad for Aucas to join the list of title winners.

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In this photo, Moisés Caicedo celebrates his birthday with the other Spanish speakers of Brighton & Hove Albion FC. There are three Ecuadorians, an Argentinian, a Paraguayan, and a Spaniard.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all but the young Paraguayan were chosen for the World Cup.

Yahoo! trolls the world

There’s a tradition in U.S. soccer journalism of importing awful British pundits. Several of these donkeys have worked for Yahoo! Sports.

When I first moved to this country, I was delighted with Yahoo! for re-publishing other news agencies’ reports from all over the world. Every day, I’d read of the domestic leagues in Botswana or Thailand or wherever. Coverage of South America was especially good.

All of that fine reporting is long gone. Now, Yahoo!’s content is much narrower in scope, and the site employs its own journalists. These pundits have tended to sing the praises of (a) the English Premier League, (b) the U.S. men’s team, (c) the English men’s team, (d) Cristiano Ronaldo, (e) the other powerful European leagues and teams (France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s, and Spain’s), and (f) U.S. Major League Soccer – more or less in that order. Presumably, these are the topics that U.S. readers care about.

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For years, the especial jackass at Yahoo! was one Martin Rogers, who’s moved on to USA Today. How I loathed that “bloke.” … But now, I wonder if Ryan Bailey, the “wanker” du jour, is even worse.

First, Bailey doesn’t write. He makes videos. (Rogers would at least write his columns.)

Second, the videos are obnoxious, due to Bailey’s relentless cheerfulness.

Third, Bailey doesn’t just wish to preserve the status quo; he favors giving dramatically more power to the most mercenary entities.

See, for example, his recent video, “Making the Case to Scrap International Soccer.”

This is his case:

(1) International soccer sometimes conflicts with the Premier League.

(2) And the Premier League is obviously what everyone wants to view.

(3) Besides, we don’t have to scrap international soccer completely. If we were to keep soccer as an Olympic event, that would be good enough.

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This cannot be a serious argument. No one who isn’t already on Bailey’s side would be convinced. Bailey must be trolling.

But if Bailey is serious, he obviously hasn’t watched the South American World Cup qualifiers. If his idea of a good game is Brighton vs. Newcastle or Arsenal vs. Chelsea, he should try watching Uruguay vs. Chile, or Chile vs. Paraguay, or, least glamorous of all, Paraguay vs. Venezuela. (In the 2018 World Cup cycle, each of those South American fixtures turned out to be a matter of life and death.)

As for moving soccer’s main event to the Olympics: either the Olympics would have to be greatly expanded to accommodate a soccer tourney with the magnitude of the World Cup, or else the world’s main soccer tourney would have to be shrunk. The first option would leave in place all of what Bailey dislikes about the current system (including, I presume, the massive qualification phase). And the second option would fail to placate those who like having a big tourney and its attendant qualification games.

One suspects that the real motive for incorporating the world’s main soccer tourney into the Olympics would be to allow U.S. fans to feel better about themselves, since their country would likely excel in many other events. (“We didn’t reach the podium in soccer? Well, at least we earned the gold in beach volleyball.”)

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Bailey also states that players prefer to focus on their clubs and not their national teams.

To which every South American replies: You must be from England.

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Even so, I probably am more disillusioned with international soccer than I ever have been. This latest World Cup left me especially discouraged. I worry that international soccer will always be unjust – and not only contingently so; I worry that people’s valuation of it is conceptually confused.

I may discuss these issues further during the next several months.