Month: June 2010

Friday Bullets For World Cup Starts Today!

It’s now been a few years since I played soccer. Last World Cup I was all still in the, you know, idea that me and – like – slide tackling was… errr… not stupid. I thought that it was very healthy to have rolled ankles, sprained kneed, black and blue shins not to mention aches and pains. Not just aches. Aches and pains. Fortunately, I have embraced non-fitba member me since then. I’ve found a life after exhaustion, hot baths and aspirins all weekend. And looking like a bee. It’s a great game, though.

  • France and Uruguay this afternoon. I have always liked Uruguay and not just because of the abundance of the letter “u” in the name. Blues v. Blues. Hope the blue team wins.
  • “6 Ways To Overcome Social Media Burnout“? Doesn’t it start with not being a nerd when you are six?
  • Nigel Barley?
  • Canada Posts bans dog treats. Bite, doggie, bite… but aim for management.
  • Someone doesn’t like “food bloggers with their wankerish little digicameras”! And it’s that most useless of creatures – a newspaper food critic. Remember: those who cant’ complain a lot and do their best to keep available funds to themselves.
  • New UK PM apparently is having a hard look at Jean Chretien’s masterful decision to take a stand eighteen or so against deficits. Will he seek Steve’s advice as to how Jean did it?

Wish good luck for South Africa. I have cousins there, grew up in a boycott house, have a great pal who was in the Army and then got away before the changes, lived in towns with Boer War monuments. We should be closer.

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Illinois: IPA, Goose Island Beer Co., Chicago

On a Monday night when elementary school children are melting down all around you, it is hard to imagine Friday. Friday is that tiny light at the end of a long tunnel. A legend you hear about only in whispers in that place between waking and sleeping. And, worse, it’s four days away.

But at least I booked the afternoon off as well as the next Monday to watch some World Cup soccer over a long weekend. Apparently, the USA is one of the teams playing and this might be the beer I save for this Saturday game against Engerlant. It pours a swell orange amber with a swell clingy white head and the smell of freesias and marigold. It has a great mouth feel with a good bit of body, a bit cream, a bit of heat from the hop acids and plenty of white grapefruit pine sour, too. The brewer has a pretty full spec sheet but suffice it to say it’s yum without being like aiming a can of aerosol furniture polish at the back of your throat like so many of the big bomb IPAs these days. You won’t need a Rolaid mid-bottle, either. Great BAer respect – and if England pulls into the lead, well, I can switch to Honkers just to be safe.

So, if this is the beer for USA… what does one have with Uruguay?

Sign of The Endtimes #2658: Helpful Clothes

Again with the failing cause of the right to idleness illustrated by the lengths that scientists will go to keep us from the benefits of idleness:

Smart clothes could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses of modern life. The prototype garments monitor physiological states including temperature and heart rate. The clothes are connected to a database that analyses the data to work out a person’s emotional state. Media, including songs, words and images, are then piped to the display and speakers in the clothes to calm a wearer or offer support.

Will the cause of the stress be analyzed, too? Maybe there is a very good, even pleasurable reason for being hot and bothered? Maybe the person needs to handle such tensions by themselves? By sitting in a chair or having tea. In fact, isn’t tea – cold or hot, sweet or not – the entire low-fi answer to the problem… if there is a problem at all. Are the stresses of modern life beyond coping? Coping at least without an intervention by one’s socks offering support? Have a tea. Have a nap.

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Yutes Today Less Empaffetick

I don’t know why this is so silly but maybe it’s because I was a thoughtless college yute in the 1980s:

Today’s college students are 40-per-cent less empathetic than those of the 1980s and 1990s, says a University of Michigan study that analyzed the personality tests of 13,737 students over 30 years. The influx of callous reality TV shows and the astronomical growth of social networking and texting – technologies that allow people to tune others out when they don’t feel like engaging – may be to blame, the authors hypothesize…The researchers found a 48-per-cent decrease in empathic concern and a 34-per-cent decrease in perspective-taking between 1979 and 2009. In particular, post-millennial students were far less likely to agree with statements such as, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”

Forty-eight percent! Who knew? Weren’t we the “me generation” or is every group at that age lumbered with that label? I recall college years being based upon the need to get beer, find money to get beer and to consume that beer. I can think of one or two guys who were involved with ding something good for others and the hundreds of others I met were just getting by and/or getting it on one way or another. Tender concerned feelings were demonstrated by that guy who kept the collection of empty rye whisky bottles in his dorm room. Now, to be fair, there were more dudley do right Earth Day organizing sorts after my degrees were obtained by 1991 but even that would not qualify so much as perspective as a amateur junior lobbyism practice. Then was the time of the rise of the “anti-s” and should nots.

What is being such rose coloured revisionism? Must be today’s parents. Trained as they were in a pool of ale and shooters, I feel for them.