Go Tiger

Congratulations to Tiger badboy woods. 3 Open championships and 11 majors in all.

I felt for him when he started crying at the end and i was surprised. He didnt at all look like he was going to cry a minute before and was really pleased when the ball went in for the win. A few seconds later and he is in tears. Good for him i suppose. Losing a parent is hard and if his dad was watching, i'm sure he'd be really pleased for him.

Before the championship started, my knowledge of golf was quite poor. I knew that having a -score was good and +score was bad and obviously that the whole point is to putt the ball. I watched the open from Thursday to Yesterday although not solidly and still couldnt get it.
Well after watching it for 4 hours solid after Tiger teed off, i now know what Eagle, Birdie, Parr and Bogey shots are. Its quite simple once you get the hang of it but then i suppose everything is. Golf has got a bad reputation IMO, a lot of people make out like its a posh game played by the privileged. They especially say its boring. I didnt think it was boring. I watched it 4 hours solid and that in itself says it isnt boring. So a tick next to golf in the list of sports that i understand and can now actively watch.

Its quite an impressive list.
Golf
Cricket
Formula 1,
Basketball (i dont have sky so i dont get to watch it a lot)
Tennis
Athletics.
All good sports and butt kickers in their own right.

The daddy of course is Football. And no my american cousins its not called soccer its football.
Unfortunately for me, the season doesnt start for another 4 weeks. aarrrgghhh. Luckily there is the Charity shield in 3wks.


Back to tiger, i think if he plays for the next decade then he will most certainly break Nicklaus all time major championship wins. All he has to do is win one a year for the next decade and voila. Easily said obviously. Still congrats Tiger and commiserations.

...

1.42 am.

Listening to Method man Ft. D'angelo. Break ups 2 make ups.

I hideously like this song and it is one of those songs that takes me back to a particular time. The human brain is cool like that. A particular song, scent or even sound can take us back to a moment in time.

One of the songs that does this pretty much every time i hear it is Jon Secada's just another day. I can still remember exactly where i was when i first heard that song. I almost hate the song because of this fact. It reminds me of a different time, a different place and almost a different world.

I was on the steps at the back of the house, there were about 8 flights of steps to the ground. There was a party in the distance somewhere. I could hear the chorus loud and clear, the sounds flowed through the night carried by the soft night breeze. I was still quite young, probably not more than 12. I was in a village, an african villlage. A most beautiful place, with an entirely different way of life. I loved the night times in the village, cool breeze, ridiculously clear skies, people having conversations over a distance of hundreds of yards. And the stars. Stars like you wouldnt believe.
I remember one time there didnt seem to be many stars in the night sky and so i thought i'd count them. I started out well but then i got confused as i wasnt sure which ones i'd counted and new stars seemed to be popping up all the time. I can categorically state that it is impossible to count the stars in the sky.

My father was still alive back then.

It is true. You dont know what you have till its gone.

Divorce happens. I am a child of my time.

If you are/were married, please ensure that your child sees the non custodial parent. I am not talking about once a month or some meaningless crap like that. In todays world, it seems de rigueur to try to prevent the child from seeing the non custodial parent. Barring evidence of abuse or something like that, there is no reason let alone excuses for not doing so.

I saw my dad adequately enough. I didnt realise it at the time but he taught me a lot of things and only now that i am older do i realise this. He taught me that you could get through to someone by talking to them, he never smacked any of us kids, he seemed to have a ridiculous amount of patience with us. Within reason, he let us do as we pleased and was rarely on our case.

I wish to the heavens he was still alive. I would like to know what he would make of me now that i am older.

I will never know, at least not in this lifetime.




This post was meant to be about something else but has somehow evolved into this.

Of mice and men

It has been over a year since the attacks on london. I didnt post anything about it at the time cos there was just too much stuff about it on the news and everywhere.

I thought of not posting altogether and as can be seen, i decided against that.

52 people died and many more were injured. I wasnt anywhere near the attacks and no one i know was in great danger from the attacks.

There was a two minutes silence across london in honour of the dead - i think. Just like last year, word went out to observe the 2 minutes outside in some sort of defiance to the terrorists groups. I didnt go outside to observe the 2 minutes silence. I stayed at my desk while pretty much everyone else went outside. Two things:

1) The prayers i said would have been no more effective if i had been outside.

2) It is easy to appear defiant when you really have no idea what it means.

Tony Blair recently said that the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with future terrorist attacks.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the same Tony Blair said "we are willing to pay the blood price". He was said to be a strong leader showing strength in the face of the tyrant saddam. Once again, it is easy to appear strong when all you have to do is say words, when none of your sons is going to be dodging bullets, when you have MI-5 and other secret organisations protecting you.

July 7 2005 was the blood price Tony Blair was talking about. I and a lot of people i know werent ready to pay the blood price. As a matter of fact i was in full support of the march and protest in Hyde park before the war. The biggest demonstrations london had ever seen and Tony Blair ignored it.

His ignorance of the people was portrayed as him being a strong leader willing to make difficult decisions. After the attacks we were to go outside to show our defiance. So easy to speak of things when you have no concept of it.

I grew up in another part of the world. In what some refer to as a third world country. At the time there was nothing third world about it and there still isn't. It's a beautiful country with a lot of weird and wonderful things as well as some crap things.

However life there was and still is different from what it is here in the west. There defiance isnt standing outside a building for 2 minutes.

Growing up, sometimes i literally had to fight to eat, to protect what was mine, to get a drink of water when things were really bad. If you really want water to wash or drink, then you know where the stream is. The only problem was the crocodiles thought of it as their domain so one had to be careful.
The point is i have lived a very different life to that which i live right now. There are millions of people living like i did and worse. These people know all about defiance and strength. And it most ceratinly is not standing outside for a few minutes nor is it talking tough while riding around in bulletproof cars and protected by MI-5.

There is nothing wrong with honouring the dead, there is everything wrong with the media circus it turned into.

My condolences to the families of those affected and the victims themselves. Sincerely.

Tony Blair got it wrong bigtime. The foreign policies of western powers have a direct effect on people in other parts of the world. A lot of the time, these effects aren't positive. A lot of the people in those countries are very angry and dont see things the way we see them. For us in the west not to realise them or pretend that this isnt the case is immensely foolish.

Regardless of Tony Blair's actions, blowing innocent people up is wrong. It was ever thus and forever shall be so. Blowing people up is not likely to solve anything. It will merely ensure both sides remain entrenched in their own little camps and seek death and destruction as a solution.
If the aim is to resolve issues brought about by our goverenments foreign policies then bombing london, new york, spain wont achieve that. If the aim is to blow us all up cos we are infidels (last time i checked i didnt classify as an infidel and if someone feels i do i'd like them to explain to me just how it is that i have managed to qualify as one) then i would recommend reading the quran again.
Islam is supposed to be a peaceful religion and does not approve of the killing of innocents.

Those who died were innocents. That is one thing we are guaranteed in all this. The death of innocents.


In the end it seems we humans wont stop till we have wiped ourselves off the face of the earth. If that should happen then the irony will be too ridiculous. Evolved over many many years just to destroy ourselves. Should that happen we all know what species will inherit the earth.

Rats.

I am listening to Smooth Fm (formerly known as Jazz Fm) online. The song playing right now is "California dreaming" but not the version by the mamas and the papas (if thats not a cool name then what is). I do not know which version came first but this guys version sucks ass big time. No disrespect to the dude as an artist but he is trying to do a soul/funky rendition of the song and it just doesnt go. Maybe i have heard the other version too many times but it just doesnt seem to go but hey, who am i to stop the dude singing his stuff.

On the subject of remakes or whatever one chooses to call them, i find that the best option is just to leave the damn original alone. People keep trying to do their own version of a classic and 9.5 times out of 10, they end up looking very silly. It is a classic because it kicks butt on a whole new level, is not meant to be copied and should only be sung by the original artist.

One of the remakes that i really do not like is "eternal flame" by Atomic Kitten - A british pop group. The version by the bangles kicks ass as far as i am concerned. Sure the video looks silly now but it was the 80s and besides most music videos now look silly and as such will look even worse 10 years from now. I digress. The Atomic Kitten remake was awful, i do have a soft spot for them and stuff but what the hell were they thinking. They should have punched whoever suggested that to them.

Another is "freak like me" by the sugababes. Now sugababes i dont mind even though only one of the original trio remains, they were different to other pop groups when they came on the scene a few years back. Their remake of freak like me however was some pop/rock kind of thingy - which as someone who very very clearly remembers adina howard's original - and was nothing short of a complete annihilation of the original. Why, why, why did they have to do it. I was listening to Adina's version a few days ago and that shit still kicks so much ass even a decade later. Brought back memories from back in the day and stuff.

The moral of the story is very simple. If you are an artist, stay the fuck away from covers, remakes or whatever you may wish to call them. Do your own thing and if it sucks at least you'll get credit for being original as opposed to being more dissed cos you murdered a classic.

As stated previously, the view from my flat is quite awesome and is one of the best features of my flat. Every now and then i can see a fire going on somewhere in the distance and usually it is put out in a couple of hours. Well the record has been surpassed now.
The fire that i saw on wednesday night before i went to sleep is still burning as i type this. It looked quite impressive on wednesday night, and created a really cool glow in the east London skyline. I have spent the last few days wondering what building it was that was burning and for one reason or the other haven't bothered to look it up. The news programme that i mainly watch focuses on world events and obviously a fire in east london doesnt quite register on the scale of world events.

Well i have finally bothered to look it up and the building concerned is a 6-storey paper warehouse.

A paper warehouse.

That explains the length and ferocity of the fire. If ever there was a building that you didnt want a fire started in, this would probably be it. The fire service say that there isn't much they can do apart from stop it spreading and they are just going to let it burn itelf out. They expect it to go on for 2-3 days. As i type this it has been going for 2 and a half days. I suppose we'll see just how long it continues for.


The fire has got me thinking about other buildings that a fire would really damage. I mean not just in terms ot the building itself but also with regards to the contents of the building. One would imagine the British Library to be on the list due to the contents. However having worked there for a few weeks i can safely say that if there was a fire, it would most likely not spread to other floors in the building. The building seems quite sturdy and it didnt seem to me like a fire would sweep through the entire building in a flash. One would hope it didnt as there are some really old documents, books and such like especially in the basement.

Football's not coming home

For the third major tournament in a row, England got kicked out at the Quarter Finals.

Almost predictably, it was on penalties.

The defeat also means the end of Sven Goran Eriksson's reign as England manager.

This was England's supposedly golden generation of footballers. The best squad according to some that England have had for decades.

The apparent talking point has been Wayne Rooney's sending off around the 60th minute and Ronaldo's apparent part in getting him sent off.

For me, Ronaldo had fuck all to do with him getting sent off. The fact is that Rooney stamped on Carvalho - granted he was fouled beforehand and the ref didnt give it - and every man and his dog knows you aren't supposed to do that. To make it worse, he then followed the stamp with a push on Ronaldo right in front of the referee. Two very stupid things within seconds of each other.

In truth England never looked like winning the world cup. They were terribly lacklustre throughout the entire tournament and only showed a glimpse of their potential in parts of the 1st half against sweden. They then made amends for this by being crap in the second half and should have conceded at least 4 goals.

Some have argued that the team wasnt as good as it was made out to be. This argument is based in part on the fact that some players had a mare. Lampard being the main target but overall the team didnt get up to much. I disagree with this assessment. England do have world class players in the starting eleven.

Ashley cole, Terry, Rio, Gerrard, Lampard, Joe Cole and arguably Rooney and Beckham are World Class players IMO (their league form proves this).

The lack of success lies with the manager IMO. Sven is a good manager contrary to popular myth. The problem lies in the fact that if you want to win the world cup, you need more than a good manager. You need a very good manager or a world class manager and it was obvious to me from his days at Lazio that Sven wasnt a very good manager. He gets the minimum out of the teams that he manages and given England's squad and the easy teams they played, the Quarter final was the least that he could achieve. If they had gone out at the group stages or the second round then i suspect they'd have brought back the gallows at Marble Arch just for him.

Still, he did okay and gave a lot of players a chance to play for their country. Some think this was wrong but i think this brought happiness to those players and they got to play for their country at least once.

Onwards and upwards i hope, time to see what Steve McLaren can do now he has taken over. At least we know he is not afraid to take risks.

6 down, 19 to go

First the good news: Schumi won the race at Indianapolis.

The bad news: Alonso finished 5th which means he still has a sizeable 19pt lead over Schumi.

The boo-hoo about last year's race was unfounded IMO. I thought it stupid at the time that people tried to blame anyone but michelin for the debacle that took place. I still do. If Michelin couldnt make tyres that could cope with the circuit, then that is their fault and no other person's. Stupidly some people carped on about F1 being dealt a body blow and how the fans had not been given the entertainment they wanted.

What a load of bollocks.

F1 existed before i was born and to think that one of the most popular sports in the world will just die out cos of one silly race is ridiculous beyond compare. After all the doomsday talk, what happened over the weekend? The fans turned out in their thousands to watch the race, so much for the death knell for the Indianapolis circuit. I quite like the circuit as it allows overtaking which it seems the FIA are working very hard - albeit unknowlingly - to stop.

It was quite obvious from the qualifying on Saturday that the Ferrari's were much quicker than anyone else on the track. In that light, the Ferrari one-two on Sunday wasnt that much of a surprise. What was a surprise to me was how poor Alonso's car was, unfortunately for Schumi, most of the cars that could have punished Alonso - McLarens, Ralf Schumacher - retired.

Still, it gives hope to Ferrari fans like myself that perhaps it can still happen for Schumi. I remember in 98 when Hakkinen had a 22point lead and Schumi caught up with him. Of course this is slightly different but hey.

One more plus for me as a Schumi fan is that when he wins they play the Italian National anthem. Quite simply, it rocks and is for me what a National anthem should be, Vibrant, dynamic and rousing.