Sweet teeth

For the longest time, Abel had just two teeth, and then this week four more broke through the top gum. How long he’ll keep them is anyone’s guess. We trunk-or-treated last night at the school where my brother Stephen teaches, and I was amazed that so many of the teachers tried to give Abel candy. (He’s only ten months old.) Afterward, as we waited in the McDonald’s drive-thru, Samuel told us that children eat McDonald’s at school on their birthdays. I’m skeptical, but it’s within the realm of possibility. (For his upcoming birthday, he’s asked for McDonald’s, chocolate cake with icing, and a piñata.) Daniel ate sweet toast for breakfast today, like most days, and then asked for ice-cream. I held him off fairly comfortably by pointing out that he’d only eaten half of his toast.

Abel’s pediatrician told me that children’ll eat anything until they start eating sugar, and then that’s all they’ll want.

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Karin uses Duolingo (an app, if you didn’t know) to practice Spanish, Welsh, math, chess, and sometimes piano. The sentences for practicing Spanish are like a high school/​Almodóvar melodrama.

No saldré con él si usa ropa anticuada (I won’t go out with him if his clothes are out of date).

Todas mis amigas son lesbianas (all of my woman friends are lesbians).

Some Welsh sentences, translated:

Owen is eating parsnips in the rain.

After the dragon had eaten Owen, it went to Cardiff.

See this compilation. A literature grad student ought to publish a paper about national stereotyping in Duolingo. But isn’t that what the app is for? When, really, will we have occasion to meaningfully use Icelandic or Korean? Isn’t mental tourism the point?

Body-text fonts, pt. 41: Aldus

If you’re an Irish novelist publishing a masterpiece, c. 2017–2018, chances are, it’ll be typeset with Hermann Zapf’s Aldus.

Exhibit A (Sally Rooney):

Exhibit B (Anna Burns):

Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Dublin, Aberdeen, and Shetland (where Edoarda took grant-funded knitting lessons). I told Stephen I wanted a tree from Shetland; failing that, a jar of jellied eels, although that’s more of a Londoners’ food; failing that, a tabloid. Stephen found no trees, eels, or tabloids on Shetland. He did bring the July 4 issue of the Shetland Times. Front-page news: “Ponies Draw Crowds from Afar”; “Council Spends £2.4m on Agency Staff for Ferries.” The body text (Miller) is the smallest I’ve seen in any newspaper.

Celtic 4, Chelsea 1

I’m sunburnt because yesterday I attended the pre-season “friendly” between these clubs, at Notre Dame Stadium. Chelsea’s fans came in droves; Celtic’s, who were fewer, cheered better. The Chelsea faithful commenced their exodus after Celtic’s fourth goal.

Martin watched Cameron Carter-Vickers, his compatriot, perform flawlessly for Celtic.

David’s aunt- and uncle-in-law, who’ve been visiting from Honduras, saw their compatriot, Luis Palma, score Celtic’s third goal.

Kasper Schmeichel was Celtic’s best performer. As for Chelsea, Raheem Stirling, of all people, was the brightest spark. He fizzled out ten minutes after coming on.

David, Stephen, and I had hoped to see Moisés Caicedo, but he was absent. So were Cucurella, Fernández, Palmer, and others. Trevoh Chalobah, whom I consider the club’s best defender, is in the doghouse and didn’t make the trip.

I know it’s the preseason and teams aren’t giving it their all, but this was the first time I’d seen players look worse live than on TV.

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I also have terrible heartburn today. I ate serving after serving of chili at my niece Belladonna’s birthday party. She is two. She is a winsome little thing.

Leverkusen

Congrats to Leverkusen for securing the club’s first Bundesliga title, in the sixth-to-last round of matches, with a five-zero rout of Bremen. After the fourth and fifth goals the fans stormed the field and had to be shooed back to the stands. My brothers and I are especially pleased for the starting left-back, the esmeraldeño Piero Hincapié. He almost scored what would have been the title-clinching goal, but Bremen’s goalie made a heroic and ultimately pointless save.

Xabi Alonso is the sport’s managerial celebrity du jour. Indeed, this team reminded me of the 2010 Spaniards who, in game after game, would keep opponents pinned back and then eke out a winning goal in the dying minutes (although this match was more like the blowout final of the 2012 Euros).

Better than Arlington

Stephen shared these photos of the Estadio Municipal, in amazing El Alto, Bolivia (which has rapidly become the country’s second-largest city, with just under a million people).

The stadium’s elevation is 4095 meters or 13,435 feet. More or less. (I’ve seen slightly different figures on different websites.) La Paz’s feared Hernando Siles Stadium is more than a thousand feet lower. The Azteca in Mexico City – itself renowned for altitude – is only fifty-four percent as high.

The stadium’s chief tenant is Club Always Ready, which has enjoyed success in recent years.

The capacity is 20,000 to 25,000 spectators. The grass is fake.

Some people dream of viewing a match in the Bernabéu, the Bombonera, or Wembley. I dream of going places like El Alto.

Have I mentioned that I once rather seriously contemplated working in sports journalism, traveling to Ciudad del Este, Cusco, and Manaus to report on CONMEBOL tournaments for dedicated English-language readers? The demand for that service would have been approximately the same as the demand for what I do now.

Ascension Island

Congrats to Liga de Quito for winning the Copa Sudamericana, and especially to Alexander Domínguez for blocking three of Fortaleza’s penalty kicks. Domínguez also tended goal when Liga previously won this tournament, in 2009.

Stephen says this is Domínguez’s finest hour, but I still prefer the epic time-wasting of 2021.

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I have nothing much to relate – the weekend has been low-key (the best kind of weekend) – so here is an oldish video by Un mundo inmenso that I’d somehow never viewed until tonight. It’s about Ascension Island, an out-of-the-way, volcanic, Guernsey-sized British territory in the South Atlantic.

Plenty of weirdness here. Best thing – or worst, according to one point of view: Charles Darwin had the idea of importing non-native plants to moisten the air a bit. One of the mountains ended up turning green, but its ecosystem isn’t up to the ecological purists’ standards.

The U.S. has a military base on the island. Apparently, quite a few of the Britons are getting edged out. Which they resent. They’re only temporary residents, but some have been on Ascension for many years, and like their Northern Atlantic counterparts they feel connected to “their” land.

I looked up the island’s job board to see about moving my family there, but only one job was posted, in waste management, and it wasn’t ideal, requiring various special driver’s liscences as well as unmarriedness. Besides, the vacancy was closed.

I guess we’ll stay in South Bend.

Vexillologists

I missed Flag Day – June 14 is the date – and, anyway, I’m not an admirer of “Old Glory.” But like Stephen when he was a child, and Samuel now, I do appreciate a good flag, and a bad one.

These are some noteworthy flags you may not have seen:

(1) The flag of Åland (an autonomous region of Finland). Good.

(2) The flag of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations. Good.

(3) Indeed, vexillological groups generally create good flags.

(4) The North American Vexillological Association, in keeping with its mission, has an elegant flag (and a hideous official seal – it’s a specialist group, for sure). The organization designs a different host-city-themed flag for each annual meeting. Some highlights: Salem, Mass. (1979); Indianapolis (2004); Charleston, S.C. (2009); Salt Lake City (2013); New Orleans (2014); Ottawa (2015); San Antonio (2019); and Zoom (2021).

(5) I went down this rabbit trail because I was reading about Pocatello, which has a very good flag but used to have an absolutely terrible one, rightly excoriated by vexillologists.

(4) Milwaukee’s flag is notorious enough to have its own Wikipedia page, but I kinda like it. The golden wheat stem and golden, vertically-written founding date on opposing edges of the flag confer a nice symmetry, and the whole is reminiscent of artwork for the Asociación Uruguaya de Fútbol. As for the other stuff on the flag, well, busy ain’t always bad (cf. Pieter Bruegel the Elder).

(5) Simple ain’t always good. I don’t like Provo’s awful old flag.

I could go on and on. Most of my readers could, I suspect. What topic is easier to opine on than flags? So far as I know, the late philosopher Josh Parsons was no trained vexillologist, but that didn’t stop him from grading the world’s flags. I must constantly battle the urge to do the same.

Some old, old, old favorites

For the boys, we put on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – overlong but not devoid of charm. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were responsible for twenty-five to fifty percent of my anglophilia. Daniel is transfixed, and Samuel jumps up and down: he loves the old automobiles. One of the best gifts I ever bought him was a huge volume called The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars ($1 at a library sale). It is too heavy for him to gently carry around, and so, over the years, he has wrecked its spine. (Lately, Daniel has been tearing out its pages; he also ripped the front cover off a paperback that I received in the mail today.)

I once read Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang during a long car ride. The novel was disappointing. At least it is slim. The movie is 2½ hours long. Some of its musical numbers seem that long, all by themselves.

Tonight we don’t watch the whole movie. Instead, I put on Bugs Bunny: Superstar and we watch the first two cartoons. Samuel doesn’t know what to make of it. He’s a shrewder child than I was. Bugs Bunny may have unduly influenced my personality.

Edoarda & Stephen have acquired a puppy: Rembrandt (Remi). Last night we all went over to Mishawaka to meet him. He is still an excitable young beast.

The blizzard; a lean Christmas; a border crossing

So far, this hasn’t been such a formidable blizzard, although, surely, someone is suffering from it, and for all I know someone has died or will die; and it’s costing us a chunk of change because two nights ago Karin was in a minor crash in a snowy intersection. She had to pay the other driver; her own car’s headlight was smashed; and yesterday, she found out that her car was leaking steering fluid. This is one of those mishaps that it’s dismayingly hard to budget for. (This, and Jasper’s veterinary needs, which never fail to astound.) I have called this blog entry “A Lean Christmas,” although that isn’t really true: we already have bought our goodies, and our needs are met. It might be a lean-ish winter, though.

Edoarda & Stephen have traveled to Nicaragua, as they usually do at Christmastime; on this occasion, they flew to Costa Rica first. I understand that they walked across the border with their suitcases. It’s easier than having Edoarda’s family drive across from Nicaragua and then across again.

The U.S. snowstorm wreaked havoc upon their air travel. They spent a night in an airport terminal.

John-Paul: “Have you arrived in Nicaragua?”

Stephen: “Yes.”

Stephen: “After 30 hours of planes, (sky)trains, and automobiles.”

Stephen: “We left right before the storm got too bad in South Bend. The flight almost didn’t leave.”

John-Paul: “Mom & Dad told me about most of it. How was the Costa Rica-to-Nicaragua border crossing?”

Stephen: “Not bad. Took about 30 minutes total.”

Stephen: “But then … we left behind my carry-on.”

Stephen: “Here’s what I told Mom about it:”

Stephen: “‘I have some bad news. When we crossed the border, someone in the family took my carry-on. I heard people discuss where to acomodar it as I went in the truck, but it somehow got descuidado and left at the border. I lost most of my clothes that I brought, Edo’s Christmas present, and your copy of Shantung Compound. 🙁 I’m sorry.’”

John-Paul: “I’m sorry. It sounds like the border crossing in No Country for Old Men.”

Stephen: “Ha, not that bad.”

Stephen: “Just got back from getting some new clothes. I’ll survive.”

John-Paul: “I’m sure you are as well turned out as ever.”

Stephen: “T shirts and shorts.”

Stephen: “Some underwear.”

John-Paul: “Yes, go on.”

Stephen: “Socks.”

Stephen: “That’s it.”

Stephen: “I forgot to get some zapatillas.”

(Lightly edited.)

I have returned Stephen’s copy of Faceless Killers and am reading The Dogs of Riga, which is shaping up to have more snow in it.

Ecuador 2, Qatar 0; England 6, Iran 2; tornadoes

I had to wait twenty years to see Ecuador play for the first time in a World Cup. I lived through five World Cups before Ecuador ever qualified for one. Oh, the shame and helplessness of those years.

Samuel and Daniel saw their very first World Cup game yesterday, and Ecuador played in it.

Ecuador scored the first goal after three minutes. Stephen and I jumped up and yelled and celebrated. Samuel and Daniel were startled. They cried.

Then the goal was disallowed because a player was offside.

Stephen and I couldn’t see the infraction – not even after the replay was shown. I gather that 99% of the world couldn’t see it, either. That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Offside is decreed by technology now. Good thing, because if a human referee had decided that we were offside on that play, FIFA and the host nation would have lost all credibility.

In any case, fútbol-wise, Qatar was doomed. Ecuador was better by about ten miles. The only question, at that point, was whether the referee would permit Ecuador to win.

Then, after twelve minutes, he awarded Ecuador a penalty kick. (He couldn’t have done otherwise, really.) He should have shown Qatar’s goalie a red card, but, understandably, he let the host nation off the hook.

Enner Valencia, who had been missing his penalty kicks in recent games, calmly scored. Stephen and I were quiet this time.

The rest of the game was a walk-through for Ecuador. The Qataris were rattled and simply awful. The Ecuadorians were more cautious than I should have liked. Valencia scored again later in the half, and then Ecuador rested. Or tried to; Qatar kept on fouling.

The Ecuadorian supporters could be heard cheering. Many Qatari supporters left at halftime.

In this video, one of the soberer analysts on U.S. television describes the Qatari exodus. Some of the numbers he cites seem off, but the lesson is clear enough.

How valuable was this victory? We got the points. We regained some confidence after a series of lackluster practice games. Our main scorer regained his form. Were we good? Impossible to say. Qatar was so, so bad. We could have tried harder to score more goals, but it was crucial to rest and calm down. The games against the Netherlands and Senegal will be very hard.

This analysis is fair.

For one day, we led the whole world in the standings – something which also happened during the 2006 World Cup. Then, this morning, England beat Iran 6 goals to 2. Iran looked miles and miles better than Qatar.

Here is Un mundo inmenso’s take on this World Cup.

Now, something different. Samuel asked to watch more tornado videos, so I put on Netflix’s series Earthstorm. It has the best tornado footage I’ve seen. I highly recommend it.

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.

Quino

Happy birthday, yesterday, to my dad. I spent a couple of hours at his house, along with Karin, Samuel, and Daniel. Stephen dropped by, too.

It turns out that my dad shares a birthday with Quino, the famous Argentinian cartoonist who died two years ago. If I had to rank newspaper comics in terms of, I dunno, some combination of intrinsic merit and life-impact, Peanuts would tower above all the others; and then would come Condorito, and then the gag comics of Quino. (I also grew up reading Quino’s daily strip, Mafalda, but was less taken with it.)

No niche-occupiers for me. I like my cartoonists to have hugely universal appeal.

Quino was just featured in a Google Doodle, throughout Latin America and in parts of Europe. I guess his appeal isn’t universal enough for the United States.

He isn’t a good caption writer. His best work is mostly wordless. Or it uses gibberish, as in this famous strip.

A few themes:

Owners.

Workers. (Uber, anyone?)

Politicians.

Law and order.

Reading/dreaming. (He is very good at drawing dreams.)

More reading.

Loneliness (one).

Loneliness (two).

Death (one).

Death (two).

The closest thing in this country is The Far Side. But Quino draws better, and with a certain grandeur.

We are sued, pt. 2

FIFA has judged in favor of Ecuador and Byron Castillo, and against Chile.

These are the reasons: (1) FIFA doesn’t oppose nations’ citizenship rulings, and Castillo had obtained the relevant documents from the Ecuadorian government; (2) Ecuador had previously consulted FIFA about including Castillo in its roster; and (3) Castillo had played for Ecuador’s youth teams, affiliating himself with Ecuador in FIFA tournaments.

I take it that each of these reasons establishes a strong presumption in Ecuador’s favor. (1) or (2) might even be regarded as conclusive.

Case closed.

Well, not quite. Chile could ask FIFA’s board of appeals to review the case. Or Chile could appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, more commonly known by its French initialism, TAS. It was the TAS that ruled for Chile and against Bolivia during the 2018 World Cup qualification cycle.

But it seems likely that Ecuador, not Chile, will play in this year’s World Cup.

As will Iran.

(Stephen shared most of these links and memes with me.)

Castillo intends to counter-sue the Chilean soccer federation.

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R.I.P. Vangelis (d. May 17) and Julee Cruise (d. June 9). Two musicians of whom I’m fond, not least because they’ve so often lulled my sons to sleep.

Mexico 0, Ecuador 0

It was a good night in Chicago, but this morning I worry about COVID.

Martin took this photo of Stephen, my dad, and me.

You can see many more green shirts, but there were plenty of Ecuadorians: twenty or thirty percent of the crowd, I’d guess.

We took our masks into the stadium and then didn’t think to put them on. No one was near us at first. The stadium didn’t fill up until the game was well underway. (Final headcount: about 61,000.)

And I didn’t notice any mask-wearers until people began to leave. I’m not referring to the Mexicans with lucha libre masks.

My dad and I weren’t allowed to bring our drawstring bags into the stadium. “Go hide them in the trees,” advised the guard. After the game, quite a few people were creeping among the trees, in the dark, like perverts, searching for their belongings. Maybe this happens after every game at Soldier Field.

The fans behaved beautifully. No one fought, that I saw. Everyone just seemed happy to be there. We had Mexicans to our left and lively, friendly cuencanos to our right. The Mexicans sang Cielito lindo. Near the end of the game, they did their infamous taunt of Puto. Alexander Domínguez complained; the ref temporarily halted play.

This notice appeared on the scoreboard:

The Ecuadorians all laughed.

It was a good move by Domínguez, that savvy game-freezer, because the Mexicans had been been playing their best soccer; afterward, they did nothing. Ecuador was the much better team throughout the match.

The naming of cats

“Sammy, what is Jasper?”

“Jasper is a cat.”

“Sammy, what is Ziva?”

“Ziva is a cat.”

“Sammy, what is Sammy?”

“Sammy is a cat.”

We correct him. We repeat our questions. He says: “Sammy is a little boy.”

We’ve long been telling him about his little brother, Baby Danny. It’s not clear what he understands; although, one day, he did greet Karin: “Hi Mommy. Hi Baby.”

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Daniel James was born this afternoon.

“Daniel,” for the OT prophet. I’ve known quite a few Daniels; each, in his own way, has been rather good. Also, “Daniel” is spelled the same in English and in Spanish.

“James,” for the NT epistle writer, and for my brother Stephen James. “Stephen” isn’t spelled the same in English and in Spanish, but “James” is; or, put it this way, there are many Spanish variants of “James” – “Jaime,” “Diego,” “Tiago,” “Santiago,” “Iago” (corruptions of Ya’akov or “Jacob”) … but also there is “James,” i.e. HAH-mess, as in “James Rodríguez” (the footballer). A Latin American name, by way of English.

It counts. It’s passable.

I have photos of Daniel but can’t upload them because the hospital’s Internet signal is weak.

When Samuel was born, I was wracked with dread. This time, the journey has seemed familiar, and I’ve enjoyed some of it. I couldn’t help but grin when Daniel was being wrenched out. Afterward, Karin was very hungry, and she ate a footlong Subway sandwich. Having viewed her exertions – and sensing that much iron had been lost – I ate even more than Karin did, and I opted for the steak rather than the chicken. Daniel also ate and ate. What with his tongue-tie, though, it isn’t clear how much food he’s been swallowing.

We did a video call to introduce the brothers to one another (Samuel has been staying with his abuelos). Samuel was mostly indifferent, except that he wanted to play with my Mom’s phone. Daniel was annoyed to have had his feeding interrupted.

The birthday boy

Happy birthday (yesterday) to Samuel, who is two. Here he flaunts his new German trainers, which his Aunt Edoarda & Uncle Stephen gave him.

He also got a set of wooden coasters from his Aunt Mary & Uncle Martin (when he visits their house, he plays with their coasters). … Dear me, if I try to list who has given what, I’ll leave someone out. I’d better just declare my all-extensive gratitude.

Other gifts: cleaning supplies (broom, mop, etc.); tools (hammer, power drill, etc.); clothes; greeting cards; books; pumpkins; candy; and cold hard cash.

We took him to two “trunk or treat” gatherings. Until this year, I was barely aware that people did this. Samuel wasn’t interested in collecting candy, but he did enjoy drawing with chalk in the parking lot.

For the record, he was dressed as a lion – not as a bear, as some 40% of his fellow “trunk-or-treaters” thought. Karin’s friend Nora brought her little daughter, Charlotte, dressed as Madeline. In that series’s fourth book, Madeline and the Gypsies, Madeline and her friend Pepito are forced to wear an old lionskin. Therefore, Samuel also was in Madeline costume. (I can almost feel the collective eye-roll. Well, this is parenting: one’s activities and cultural references become more childish. Before long, I’ll be finding meaning in Chuck E. Cheese.)

Or maybe he was Sam the Lion from The Last Picture Show.

Tonight the rain is heavy. Karin & I were in our basement, watching TV, when we saw one of our window-wells fill up with water (like the episode of Get Smart in which a flooded telephone booth almost drowns Max and Ninety-nine). Underneath the window-well, water seeped out from the wood panelling and onto the floor. We moved some boxes away from the deluge and resolved to seal up that window-well ASAP.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 41: Normal life

Look who visited! Our high school teacher, Mr. Quiring – all the way from his new home in Nebraska. Here he poses with Mary, Stephen, and me.

Mrs. Quiring visited, too. We learned that she used to grade our reading journals (with terrific speed, as I recall). Credit to her.

Mr. Quiring was a good teacher when I was in school; ten years later, when I visited his class – Stephen was his student then – I thought he was even better. Afterward, he must have improved even more (although, now, he hasn’t been a classroom teacher for several years).

Yesterday he was brimming with pedagogical ideas – perhaps because he was in a room of teachers.

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Normal Life

This sad movie is in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Deep Crimson (also released in 1996), and, later, Monster. The criminal twosomes seem less glamorous and more pitiful with each passing movie. (I am not including The Honeymoon Killers, which I haven’t seen.) The distinctive feature of Normal Life is how mismatched and disconnected from one another the two criminals are. They quarrel their way through a pretty appalling marriage before they begin robbing banks. At first, they don’t even rob together; it’s the straitlaced husband, the ex-cop (Luke Perry), who does it by himself to make up for the spending of his unstable wife (Ashley Judd). But it’s the chilling, heartless wife who’s the adrenaline junkie. Once she learns what her husband is doing, she wants in on the fun, and it’s only a matter of time until each of them goes out in a (separate) blaze of glory. Another good movie that Normal Life reminds me of is At Close Range, with a criminal father-son duo played by Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Both of these movies evoke a brutal U.S. ordinariness – in At Close Range it’s rural Pennsylvania, and in Normal Life it’s the blander Chicago suburbs. No poetry here – this isn’t Badlands. Normal Life opens with a long drive past suburban housing developments and strip malls. It’s almost painful how similar they are to the housing developments and strip malls of today. The movie was filmed on streets and in parking lots and banks where the real-life robbers operated; the locations couldn’t have been more generic if they’d been scouted.

Brazil 2, Ecuador 0

The Brazilians labored, but their victory was never in doubt; clearly, they were the better team.

Although the result was just, the second goal was questionable. The VAR officials permitted Neymar to re-take a penalty kick because of a minuscule encroachment by Alexander Domínguez.

This greatly irked the Uruguayan commentators (who are as sober as any commentators I listen to). Throughout the game, they had lots of choice words about Neymar, which I appreciated. Afterward, I watched another hour of Uruguayan TV. What a good little country.

The Brazilians are massively talented, but as long as they continue to run 85–90% of their attacks through Neymar, they are doomed to lose against the best European sides.

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In Mishawaka, temperatures have been in the low nineties (F). We bought a garden hose and a kid-friendly sprinkler. The sprinkler is shaped like a fish; when water spurts out of it, it thrashes in a disturbing fashion. Karin & I showed Samuel how to run back and forth through the spray. At first, he stood just outside of its reach, yelling and waving his arms; eventually, he made a few passes.

Now the lawn is watered, and so it will be longer at the next mowing.

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Edoarda & Stephen are buying a house at the other end of our block. Of course, we also intend to buy a house, and it probably won’t be right here; but it will be nice to live near them for a short time. And when my parents move into the house where we are living now, they’ll be near to Edoarda & Stephen.

In the meantime, Edoarda & Stephen are allowing me to use their new battery-powered mower. It’s quiet; but, on certain terrain, it’s extremely quirky.

“Rawr” means I love you

Things that frighten Samuel:

• The alarm in Karin’s car, which has been sounding without provocation
• Gently saying the word “rawr” (one of Samuel’s shirts has a picture of a t-rex, along with the slogan: “Rawr” means I love you)
• The Geico gecko

Many thanks to Stephen for the birthday gifts of one book and one new rice pot (my old rice pot had stopped stopping; I’d been having to watch it like a hawk so it wouldn’t burn the rice). Stephen’s birthday is this week.

David, whose birthday is tomorrow, also gave me a book.

To them: rawr.

November’s poem

It’s been several days since the temperature descended from glorious heights. Almost all the leaves have died. We’ve had several frosts. The wind howled all of today; it is still howling.

Now that the porch is uninhabitable, Karin & I are making plans to clear out the spare bedroom and turn it into a play room for Samuel.

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Stephen David showed me this video of Brazilian referees discussing whether to award the penalty kick that led to Ecuador’s third goal against Bolivia.

The Bolivian almost surely didn’t handle the ball deliberately, but in this era of the VAR, that hardly matters. You can hear these referees talking about the defender’s having abierto la masa corporal – i.e., he had extended his bodily mass (of course, the operative concept is surface area, not mass). It’s notable that the defender “enlarged his body” before the shot was taken. The video shows the ball striking the arm after a ricochet, but the arm had occupied its “enlarged” position for some time.

If such refereeing were applied consistently, defenders would have to train themselves to keep their arms next to their sides inside the penalty box or else risk conceding a penalty kick for involuntarily handling. This would make it harder for defenders to balance themselves inside the penalty box. This, in turn, would allow attackers to easily dribble or pass around them very near to the goal.

I wonder if it would gradually improve the sport. Teams would have a strong incentive to defend well outside of the box.

Defensive bunkers might be abandoned or at least moved farther away from the goal, toward the middle of the field. There would be less clustering at either end.

Soccer would again become a full-field game – less like basketball, more like itself.

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This month’s poem – from the movie We Are the Best! – is called “Hate the Sport!”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Nature is fully polluted
But you only care about the recruited
Children cry and scream
You only care about your soccer team
The world is a morgue
But you’re watching Björn Borg
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
Your team is winning
Oil companies are sinning
Hate the sport
Time to abort
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
Hate the sport
People die and scream
But all you care about is your high-jump team
Children in Africa are dying
But you’re all about balls flying: hate the sport, yeah!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(English subtitles – translated from the Swedish)