The piano (cont.); World Cup notes

The piano has been moved to the kitchen, its likely resting-place for as long as we live in this house.

Now we must learn to play the thing.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What follows is highly selective.

Ivory Coast 1, Ecuador 0: An even, chaotic contest decided by an 89th-minute goal. Chaos doesn’t favor Ecuador. Our strength is tidy defending.

Piero Hincapié had trouble marking 19-year-old Yan Diomande. The goal came from an attack down that flank.

Thrice we hit woodwork. Our attacking woes continue. I will say, it’s hard when foulers aren’t penalized. The Ivorians were spared a couple of second yellow cards.

Brazil 1, Morocco 1: Has-been vs. emerging superpower. The same is true of their respective continents. The Moroccans were breathtaking in the first half; having established their superiority, they ceded the initiative. Brazil had a single brilliant moment.

Australia 2, Türkiye 0: The most entertaining game so far.

(Some would choose the Netherlands vs. Japan [2–2].)

I love watching the Turks. They attack at breakneck pace, slickly, all game long. But the Australians defended stoutly and landed two counter-punches.

USA 4, Paraguay 1; Germany 7, Curaçao 1; and Sweden 5, Tunisia 1: Three blowouts that tell little about the winners (and not much more about the Tunisians, who fell apart late but weren’t consistently bad).

Mid-half hydration breaks, twice per game: I am sick of them.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 88: Insomnia

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

(John 3:19)

I should admit, I fell asleep a few times while watching Insomnia. Not that it’s ever boring; I was just tired. Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of an even wearier sinner is very entertaining. (The story was transplanted to Alaska five years later, in 2002, by Christopher Nolan, with Al Pacino in Skarsgård’s role; I prefer the Nordic version.)

Skarsgård is Engström, an accomplished Swedish homicide cop banished to Norway because of “improprieties” done with/to witnesses. He travels north of the Arctic Circle to investigate a young woman’s killing. He’s chronically sleepless, and the sun-pierced evenings don’t help; even so, he quickly figures out how to lure the killer into a trap. But during the “sting” the killer wounds a policeman and escapes into a dense fog. Engström pursues and shoots, killing a colleague by mistake.

He tells the other police that the killer fired the shot. Now the killer knows that he’s a killer.

He’s forced to truce with the killer, deceive his colleagues, and pin the blame on someone else.

Forced? Why not just tell his colleagues what really happened? It was an accident, after all. But Engström can no longer think of himself as not guilty. He knows his own depravity. In the Arctic, he continues – compulsively – to engage in the kind of “impropriety” that landed him in exile. And he habitually lies to cover his tracks.

All of this takes its toll. There’s a remarkable scene in which Engström waits near a busy sidewalk. Folk stare accusatorily as they pass by. Engström withers under their view. They’re all judging him. The judgment probably is all in his head. You’d think he was the crim, not the cop. When he meets the real crim, he can’t help looking away, can’t help shrinking, as if he were the guilty party.

It’s like a Poe story. The doubling. The paranoia. The sinning rushed into, to relieve the misery of previous sinning.

Decent people surround Engström. Vik, his southern colleague – the man he accidentally kills – offers wry, bleak comfort, even a sort of affection, while alive; in death, he appears in Engström’s daydreams, alarming but not unfriendly. Less disturbing, almost angelic, is a friendly and pretty hotel clerk; Engström makes a hash of that relationship, too. The local police conduct themselves with sympathy and professionalism. One of them, tasked with looking into Vik’s shooting, treats Engström curteously even as she notes inconsistencies in his statement. Engström can’t look her in the eye.

This isn’t a subtle movie. That’s all right. Sometimes, a glaring metaphor – in this case, harsh, inescapable daylight – is what’s required.

One more metaphor: a highway tunnel, the only truly dark place in the movie. This image is more enigmatic. What does it mean when Engström sees the light at the end of this tunnel? Significance aside, is he fit to drive?

A few small victories and defeats

We bought a new digital scale. As soon as we’d removed it from the package, inserted the batteries, and weighed ourselves on it once, Samuel threw it down the stairs, and it broke.

Mercifully, Karin was able to fix it. Today I am several lbs. lighter.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This morning the toilet overflowed, due, in no small part, to Samuel’s supremely inefficient use of it. (It was my fault, too; in the chaos of aiding Samuel, I flushed too many times.) While I was wiping down the bathroom floor, Daniel sneaked off with the shaving cream and slathered it upon himself.

I grabbed the shaving cream can, put it on the kitchen counter, and tossed Daniel into the shower.

When I’d finished cleaning and dressing Daniel, I returned to the kitchen. There was Samuel, covering that room – and himself – with the shaving cream.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I was holding Daniel on my lap, and Ziva climbed into the armchair with us – quite a nice thing to do, given that the children often terrorize the kitties. Daniel responded by speaking two new words: “Ziva” (Zee-ah) and “cat.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I took Samuel and Daniel to the library for a couple of hours. They mostly played with the toys. (They have toys at home, but the library’s are different.) I pulled Harry Potter off the shelf and read bits of it while keeping an eye on the boys.

As we were leaving, Samuel discovered that one of the library’s touchscreens has a language setting. He touched a couple of icons and changed the language to Swedish.

The rest of the day, he’s been talking about “the libraries in Sweden.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Argentina and Ecuador will play in Buenos Aires tomorrow night: our first World Cup qualifier.

Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751

I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.

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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:

Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1

Platte County is the outlier.

“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)

Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.

Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.

Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s body-text font is Primer.

This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)

A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.

That which is hidden in snow

I guess you could say we’ve been conducting our own little dig here in Mishawaka.

It snowed all weekend, and this morning it was almost thirty (Fahrenheit) degrees below freezing. We’ve tried shoveling the driveway and sidewalks – Karin, especially, is an impressive digger – but 2–3 inches of snow and ice remain stuck to the ground.

The good news is that we ordered an electric “snow blaster,” which UPS just delivered.

It doesn’t store its power, so we’ll have to use an extension cord. Ours is long enough for all but ten feet of the sidewalk. Perhaps the cord on the “snow blaster” will make up the difference.

Last night, Karin couldn’t bring her car all the way up the driveway and into the garage. We shifted as much snow as we could, and we scattered salt to melt the snow and cat litter to improve the traction. I pushed the car; Karin drove it several feet; but, inevitably, it’d hit some thick patch, and the tires would spin in place.

In the end, we decided to leave the car in a section of the driveway we knew Karin could maneuver out of.

All of this took an hour. I would periodically return to the house to check on Samuel, who had gone to sleep eating his supper.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

After we went inside, we heated some food, crawled under our blankets, and watched four episodes of Det som göms i snö – The Truth Will Out, or, literally, “That Which Is Hidden in Snow” – an excellent Swedish crime series. It seemed appropriate.

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The polar vortex reaches down to Texas, where many are without electricity, including Ana, David, and little Ada. Until recently, they were sleeping all bundled up inside their cold house and spending waking hours in their heated car. (The hotels were full.) Then someone lent them a cottage. It is unpowered – but it is heated.

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)

Sjöwall & Wahlöö

In spare moments, I’ve been reading The Terrorists (1975), the last book of Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s crime series.

It begins with a scene of grotesquely comical political violence in South America.

My favorite policeman in the series, Gunvald Larsson, is on hand for the occasion. A fastidious dresser, he’s delighted to find that the banana republic he’s visiting has excellent tailors. (Apparently, tailoring is no longer practiced as a skilled craft in Sweden.) He commissions a new suit to be made for him.

This suit is, of course, ruined during the political upheaval.

A little later, in Stockholm, a young woman is brought to trial for robbing a bank. It’s proven that the “robbery” was a misunderstanding. All the young woman had done was to ask for money and to place a bag on the teller’s counter for the money to be put in. The teller had interpreted these actions as extremely threatening.

These facts are drawn out through the testimony of two other recurring characters, the bumbling patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvastmo.

Next, a famous pornographer is fatally coshed in his mistress’s house. The now very high-ranking detective Martin Beck is assigned to the case. He and a junior detective, Benny Skacke, spend a morning watching one of the pornographer’s movies, Love in the Midnight Sun.

At first, the junior detective winces uncomfortably at all the nudity. Then he yawns. The movie is very boring and unerotic.

This is clearly a lampooning of those Swedish “masterpieces” of the late 1960s, I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), which are now in the Criterion Collection. (No, I haven’t watched them.)

As I’ve read through its ten books, Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s series has reminded me of something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Something with lots of recurring, cartoon-like characters and scenes of wry screwball comedy.

Now I know what it is.

It’s Tintin.

The locked room

It’s the middle of my spring break.

The pace at which I’ve been writing isn’t bad.

But, oh! To keep up this pace through the end of March! And, if necessary, the beginning of April!

[Sigh.]

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m also nearing the end of The Locked Room by Sjöwall & Wahlöö, which is about a “locked room” murder and a bank robbery. (I already finished The Locked Room by Paul Auster. How different Auster’s solitary existentialists from the social pawns of Sjöwall & Wahlöö!)

Sjöwall & Wahlöö are laying out their hippie credentials even more nakedly than before. Their protagonist, Chief Detective Inspector Martin Beck, is about to have a love affair with a hippie woman.

Their Sweden, meanwhile, continues to be a capitalist hell-hole with a socialist veneer. Landlords and factory owners ascend ever higher upon the backs of laborers. Bureaucrats run the social services so as to inflate unimportant statistics, while their rank-and-file workers, ill-treated and underpaid, quit the service professions and are replaced by nitwits – the only people that those professions have become able to recruit. (This is in the early 1970s.)

The series is getting a little preachy. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong.

It’s all grimly humorous. And there’s a great little joke about how a group of police, armed with guns, tear gas, and an attack dog, burst into an unlocked room.

Karin’s bible reading

“Genesis offers many interesting tidbits,” says Karin.

She has begun a new reading cycle, using a one-year bible (New Living Translation, 1996).

She reads to me:

“The valley was filled with tar pits. And as the army of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some slipped into the tar pits, while the rest escaped into the mountains” (Genesis 14:10).

You could place your finger onto the text at random and, more often than not, end up with some such tidbit.

Why tar pits?

Their precise spiritual significance is not clear to us. We can only speculate what this passage meant to early readers.

Or, maybe, there is no spiritual significance: the tar pits are mere literary props, included for the sake of drawing the reader into the story, in the way that certain Swedish mystery novelists mention their detectives’ every cup of coffee.

Or, maybe, the tar pits really existed at that location, some people’s slipping into them was a plain fact, and Genesis records it for that reason alone.

Karin then reads a psalm. She comments: “You know, Sweetie, King David was kind of a weird dude, weeping almost every night.”

Not so weird, I think.

The man on the roof

Karin & I rested all of yesterday while Brianna and her friends roamed the streets. We’re still sick – Karin is sicker than I am – but not so sick that we can’t go to work or that Brianna can’t go to school.

I finished reading two other novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (seven down, three to go). Afterward, I learned that in 1976, one of those novels, The Abominable Man, was cinematically adapted as Mannen på taket (The Man on the Roof). This movie is something of a classic. It’s said to have been stylistically influenced by The French Connection. And it’s got Sweden’s “signature” action sequence, in which a rifleman shoots at police helicopters from a rooftop.

Here’s a poster:

And here’s another:

The second poster shows my favorite policeman in the book series, the obnoxious Gunvald Larsson. He has a towel on his head because his scalp has been grazed by a bullet.

I’d very much like to see this movie, but I don’t know where to find a version with English subtitles.

Reading report

For the third time, I’m trying to read Rebecca. Some passages are very good. Some could have been trimmed down a bit. In general, the book emits a nice, festering scent of dread.

I was inspired to try out Rebecca again because I’d just finished a du Maurier-like James Bond novel: The Spy Who Loved Me. What a weird little book. Its narrator, a young woman, juxtaposes her sordid past with her terrifying present, in which two monstrous goons pursue her through a nightmarish landscape. Toward the end, James Bond becomes the narrator’s life-saver and lover. (I haven’t spoiled the plot, most of which can be discerned by reading the table of contents.) Bond behaves like a douchebag.

In the Bond novel, the haunted past is, for the most part, linearly recounted – not woven in along with the present terror, a technique that du Maurier skillfully employs in Rebecca. Ian Fleming should’ve written a second draft. But, apparently, he never did that with his novels. Not surprisingly, The Spy Who Loved Me was poorly received: none of the book’s plot was incorporated into the movie of that title, and Fleming made the book unavailable as a paperback for as long as he could.

These two fantastical novels have been something of a break from the realism of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals, of which I’ve read five in the last two months. I’m halfway through that series. I now have no trouble identifying the funny parts. When certain characters appear – especially the unrefined inspector Gunvald Larsson and the lazy patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant – it’s a signal that humor is forthcoming. It’s the despairing kind of humor that says, “On such pillars as these, society rests.” The Swedish welfare state is criticized for allowing the lower orders to distract themselves with drugs, drink, and sex while the upper orders squirrel away the crucial assets. It’s a criticism from the Left: it explains why the workers of the world aren’t uniting.

A fallow season

These are the semifinalists:

France
Belgium
England
Croatia

As you can see, three of them are located within a stone’s throw of one another. Coincidence? Geographic determinism?

The latter probably has a lot to do with it. But this isn’t the occasion for explaining why.

Coincidence probably has a lot to do with it, too. It’s coincidental that Belgium has so many talented players just at this time. Also, if geography determined everything, the Netherlands would’ve qualified for the World Cup; but, as it happens, this is a fallow season for the Dutch.

Actually, this is a fallow season for just about everyone. In my view, the quality of international soccer in the last four years has been pretty low, and we’re witnessing the denouement of this state of affairs.

As one of Telemundo’s announcers said during the quarterfinal between England and Sweden: “One of these teams will be a World Cup semifinalist.”

He paused. “Is my meaning clear?”

“As clear as the day,” said his partner.

As Clint Eastwood has said: Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.

The first knockout stage

… has been played out.

I just finished watching England defeat Colombia in a penalty shootout. This game had a villain: U.S. referee Mark Geiger. He called a very dubious penalty against Colombia, forfeited his credibility with the players, and was generally incompetent. In fact, he was a jackass. Given his history, he shouldn’t have been assigned to the World Cup in the first place.

With Colombia’s disqualification, one half of the playoff bracket looks utterly dismal. One of these sorry teams will reach the final game:

• Russia (KO’d Spain in a penalty shootout after playing bunker defense)
• Croatia (KO’d Denmark in a shootout after an utter snoozefest)
• Sweden (KO’d Switzerland with a goal from a deflected shot, mercifully ending an utter snoozefest so that extra time wouldn’t have to be played)
• England (toothless)

So far, all knockout games between two European teams have been deadly dull. We can expect more of the same for the quarterfinal and semifinal games in this half of the bracket.

The other half is much better. These are its surviving teams:

• France (scored four goals against Argentina)
• Uruguay (scored twice, and at will, against Portugal – seven minutes after beginning to play, and seven minutes after having been scored upon – and with breathtaking technique; dominated play without possessing the ball)
• Brazil (broke down Mexican resistance with two well-crafted goals)
• Belgium (showed attacking prowess by surmounting a two-goal deficit vs. Japan)

Even if France and Belgium should defeat the South Americans in the quarterfinals, we can expect them to give us a rousing semifinal game.

In Group F, South Korea flogs Germany, two goals to zero

… KO’ing Die Mannschaft from the World Cup.

This is a happy day, except in Germany.

The one sad thing is that the Germans were KO’d while wearing their classic green “away” uniforms. I’d waited well over a decade for the Germans to bring back those uniforms. I hope that the color doesn’t fall out of favor with them again.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The result developed as follows:

Sweden and Mexico weren’t scoring (their game was being played at the same time as Germany vs. South Korea).

Germany and South Korea weren’t scoring.

Up until that point, the Germans were on course to qualify for the second round at Sweden’s expense.

Then, the Swedes scored, leapfrogging the Germans and Mexicans in Group F and obliging the Germans to defeat South Korea.

Then, the Swedes scored again, for insurance, with a penalty kick.

Then, the Mexicans scored against themselves.

The Germans needed just one goal to go ahead of the Mexicans (they still would’ve trailed the Swedes).

The Koreans defended tenaciously.

The Germans became desperate.

The Koreans scored.

The Germans sent all their players, including their goalkeeper, Manuel Neuer, down the field to chase the victory they needed. The Koreans stole the ball from Neuer and launched it into the space he’d vacated. South Korea’s star forward, Son Heung-min, reached the ball first and tapped it in.

This lifted South Korea above Germany in Group F. Germany finished butt-naked last.

The Mexicans wept all over the field, grateful that the Koreans’ defeat of Germany had allowed them to qualify for the next round (in which they surely will be KO’d by Brazil).

The Germans tried hard not to weep, but some of them did.

The Swedes looked about the same as ever.

The Koreans celebrated as if they’d won the World Cup, even though Mexico’s failure to defeat Sweden ensured that they, too, were eliminated.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At the beginning of the tournament, it was understood that Son Heung-min, who plays for Tottenham Hotspur, would have to leave that club to complete his military service – unless the Korean team performed especially well, in which case he would be granted an exemption.

Well, the Koreans are now disqualified. But they’ve performed a service to their country – and to the globe – by KO’ing the Germans.

I hope that the Korean government recognizes Son’s contribution and lets him off the hook.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Germans may have been KO’d, but the Argentinians raised themselves from the dead against Nigeria. Messi scored a wondergoal. Then, when the game had nearly expired, Argentina scored again to stave off elimination. (In the stands, Maradona celebrated both goals very strangely.)

When Argentina shows more grit than Germany, you know there’s something in the water.

Some frightening teams

Leave it to Alejandro Moreno, the worst commentator I’ve ever listened to, to defend Neymar for weeping out on the field … like a spoiled child … after scoring a tap-in against Costa Rica.

If the Brazilians win this World Cup – and, with all of their talent, they’re poised to do so – I hope they win with Neymar on the bench.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Colombians may have lost their first game, but yesterday they showed that they’re one of the planet’s scariest teams. They turned on the style in their rout of Poland.

The Colombians also have enough talent to win this World Cup.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Uruguayans have enough talent and more than enough grit. They won’t fear anyone. They’re used to grinding out results, which bodes well for their fate in the later rounds.

They ground out results against Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Then, this morning, they decided not only to clinch the first place in Group A, but to emphasize how dangerous they are. And so they casually routed the host nation.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Another frightening team is Germany – not for having played well, but for having come back from the dead against the Swedes.

Before Toni Kroos scored his last-minute goal, the citizens of all the other countries had been licking their chops. The Mexicans, especially: their team would’ve qualified for the next round if Sweden had held Germany to a draw.

Instead, Group F remains unsettled. Germany, Mexico, and Sweden all will be excellently positioned if they win their respective upcoming games. Theoretically, even the Koreans could advance.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Also frightening – but still unproven – are the Croatians, the Belgians, and the English, all of whom have easily qualified for the knockout stage. They all looked quite good against their group opponents, but I wonder how they’d fare against Colombia or Germany, or even Mexico.

A prank; a vote; a forthcoming event; a new tutee; Zlatan

We’re well into June. The high schools have had their graduations.

At the school where I used to work, the seniors did an especially good prank. They put LimeBikes everywhere inside the building.

It was effective because whenever a janitor would try to remove a bike from the school, the bike would play a recorded message, threatening to call the police.

Eventually, though, the bikes were brought out into the parking lot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, FIFA’s members voted to select the hosts of the 2026 World Cup.

They chose Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Morocco was the losing candidate.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

David will arrive in South Bend tomorrow night. He plans to watch the first week or so of this year’s World Cup with his family.

The first game, Russia vs. Saudi Arabia, will be played tomorrow morning.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At IUSB, my newest tutee is a middle-aged woman from Mexico. We held our first session today. Afterward, we tried to schedule our next appointment.

“Let me view my calendar,” I said, and I brought out the schedule of World Cup games.

My tutee immediately understood.

“Such-and-such hour is no good,” she said. “Two of Mexico’s group opponents play at that time.”

We agreed to meet at 10:00am, the hour of inactivity between the 8:00am–10:00am game and the 11:00am–1:00pm game.

She told me that two years ago, during the Euros, she’d been in the stadium when Zlatan played his last official match for his national team.

“I don’t have much regard for Zlatan,” she said. “I think Sweden has more success without him.”

I told her I thought Sweden’s success was beside the point.

“Well, my husband likes Zlatan,” she said. “I suppose you like Zlatan?”

“Zlatan is incredible. You should read his book.”

Apart from our disagreement about Zlatan, we had an excellent tutorial. I think she’ll be a very good student to work with.

I am gotten the better of by the Swedes

Last night, we had quite a nice storm, with bright lightning flashes and sheets of rain. Ziva ran to the bedroom, to hide. Later, she poked her little face around the blinds and peered out at the rain. In our neighborhood, there was just a little flooding, and a small section of our street was blocked off.

Today was my last workday of the semester. I’ll be at home for one week, and then Summer Session I will commence.

Today, also, I finished reading Roseanna, the first mystery in the famous series by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö – perhaps the most “procedural” crime novel I’ve ever read. No quirky investigators here. Just meticulous ones. I found it quite gripping.

Reputedly, the book also is humorous, although, to me, that aspect was rather faint. I think I knew which parts were the funny ones. Oh, well: Swedes 1, John-Paul 0.

I’ve owned the first four of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s books for many years, and now it looks as if I’ll be acquiring the other half-dozen.

Qualification, which has nearly ended

Africa completed its World Cup qualification cycle. These are the five successful teams: Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia.

In Europe, the Italians were knocked out by the Swedes. This was notable but not surprising. Since 2006, the Italians have underwhelmed.

The Northern Irish lost heartbreakingly against the Swiss. For analysis, I recommend an excellent video – “This Referee is Terrible. Never a Penalty. 12 Man Switzerland Beat Northern Ireland 1-0” – by YouTube user Themadmistake. (Karin told me not to link to this video. It has filthy language.)

The Greeks also failed to qualify, having lost to the Croatians.

Tomorrow, the Republic of Ireland will host Denmark in the culmination of yet another playoff series. And on Wednesday, Australia will host Honduras. In both these series, the initial matches were goalless.

The same was true of Peru’s first match against New Zealand. This series also will be decided on Wednesday, in Lima.

In the first game, in Wellington, the Peruvians were the vastly superior team. A timid team will bring the ball out of its own half by booting it through the air, and a good team will bring the ball upfield by performing a sequence of short passes. But the Peruvians brought the ball out simply by dribbling. The Kiwis were powerless to prevent this.

And yet the game was scoreless because the Kiwis packed all their players in front of their own goal.

Also, both teams were without their best strikers:

(1) The New Zealander Chris Wood, who was injured. He did make a rather terrifying appearance late in the second period.

(2) The Peruvian Paolo Guerrero, who’d tested positive for illicit drug use. As they say in Peru, Hoja de coca no es droga.

The British situation

Is the UK doing away with council housing?

Farewell, then, to the Britain of my imagination. The UK’d might as well get rid of its fish-and-chips shops and its London fog.

Not all Britons are very keen on council housing. I even happen to agree with those who, in 2008, opposed the inclusion of council flats in luxurious buildings.

Council flats shouldn’t have a hint of luxury about them. They ought to be squarely on the dingy side.

If council flats weren’t dingy, we wouldn’t have such brilliant movies as the Mike Leigh-directed All or Nothing or Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Red Road …

or such brilliant songs as the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” …

(see these reminiscences of the Orb’s two members, Youth and Dr. Alex Paterson, about composing music, together with the KLF, inside a council flat).

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As I type this, Ireland Rep. are outplaying and defeating Sweden in the Euros. Yesterday, Ulster lost narrowly to Poland, and the day before that, Wales beat Slovakia. On the whole it’s been a good showing by the British Isles.

On the whole.

The English continue to disappoint their backers. During their game against the Russians, they were lions in possession but mouses in front of their opponents’ net. They squeaked in just one goal, a free kick, only for the Russians to equalize at the death. Then the Russian supporters chased the English supporters up and down the stadium and beat them up.

The Swedes have just equalized against the Irish.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“I’m looking forward to Belgium’s game against the Italians,” I tell Karin. “The Belgians have been playing wonderfully these last few years.”

“Yes,” says Karin. “It must be because of Poirot.”