Results tagged “worldcup”

Is it just me, or does Nick Clegg completely miss the point during his statement to the FIFA inspection team?

Apart from the fact he nearly called them the infection team, he spent well over half of his statement talking about himself and the coalition rather than how England is the best country for hosting the 2018 World Cup.

And if I was part of FIFA and heard a chap saying that England's World Cup was "unbeatable", I'd be thinking to myself: "Well, matey, that's for me to decide".

(I know sport and politics doesn't mix very well. It's just Clegg's smugness in the power he holds that gets my goat and makes me post this stuff. #nickcleggsfault, and all that.)

In honour of the Dutch playing in their third World Cup final this evening, and revealing my preference for who I hope will win (even if I don't think they will), here's a nice little video (via kottke:

Argument by analogy is not a good technique at the best of times. Any attempt to draw an extended analogy between the England football team and the coalition government is horrible in principle and in practice, and receives an automatic entry to this series.

With an opening line like this:

There are remarkable similarities between Team Cleggeron and Team England

... I don't even have to read the rest of the letter to know this is entry number 7.

I've not been able to write as many entries in this series as I'd have liked or as there is material for. Nevertheless, I'm soldiering on with this one from that intellectual powerhouse, Prospect magazine:

In the post mortems that are to come, whether we are talking about football or about the state of the nation, we are going to have ask ourselves how and why or free-market, high-wage, globalised industries are so phenomenally successful at enriching themselves, but cannot seem to be mobilised to deliver public goods.

That's exactly the question we're going to ask.

(Previous entries in this series can be found here.)

For the first time in over 2 months, there was no post on arbitrary constant yesterday. Thus the title of today's Friday Puzzle.

First, the answer to last week's puzzle:

I've been quite poorly lately and the doctor has prescribed me a two courses of tablets (Anvilite and Bigoxy) to solve my problem and I must take one of each at the same time, once every day. These tablets are rather expensive so I've been very careful with them. Last night I'd just got my Anvilite tablet. I was about to get my Bigoxy tablet when two tablets fell out of the bottle into my hand and joined the Anvilite tablet. This was a major problem for me as all three tablets were identical, the same size, the same weight, and neither had any markings on it. I had to take one of each but I couldn't tell them apart, and they were far too expensive to throw these three tablets away and start again. What did I do?

The answer is as follows: (1) Cut each of the pills in half, (2) Separate each half into two separate piles, (3) Cut another anvilite in half, and add to each pile, (4) Bingo. Each pile now contains one dose.

Now for this week's puzzle:

A farmer was asked how many chickens he had sold at market that day. His reply was: "I've had four customers today, and each bought half of my remaining chickens, plus a half chicken." The farmer sold all of his chickens at market that day. How many chickens did the farmer sell?

Other links:

• Photos of a Mexican Drug Lord’s Home After a Police Raid
• Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic
• Short Imagined Monologues - "I'm Comic Sans, Asshole."
• Clients From Hell
• Preparing for takeoff
• 3... 2... 1... Liftoff!
• The Ten Most Obnoxious Limo Conversions
• I had a tour of the Olympic Park last weekend

World Cup appeasement corner [I'm sensing the Friday Puzzle's compiler, Wrighty, doesn't have his heart in this - ed]:

• Vuvuzela: The sound of the summer
• Goal Celebration
• More here (NSFW)

I actually liked this little paean to goalkeepers. Having been a keeper myself, I fully recognise how weird you need to be to fulfil the duties of that role.

Nevertheless, I couldn't let the article pass my intellectualising series (the previous entry, with links to other entries therein, is here) with a line like this in it:

I assume he has never compared his role between the sticks with that of the versifier, but his apparent solitude and contemplative demeanour after his fumble on Saturday night was nothing short of poetic.

This series continues (previous entries: 1, 2 and 3) with an entry which only needs the title of the blogpost to which it links to make its point:

The thinking blog's guide to the World Cup pointy-heads

Good work, Next Left!

Following numbers 1 and 2 in this series come the Who Should I Cheer For? website:

WhoshouldIcheerfor.com is a site from the World Development Movement that ranks all the teams playing in the World Cup to find the most supportable on the basis of their efforts to eradicate poverty and social injustice.

The basis used is stats relating to issues such as life expectancy, inequality, women in government and maternal mortality.

Even though it sort of misses the point, and there are some indicators in there which hint at a slightly different agenda (e.g. country stance on North Korea, spending on military), I'm happy to promote the site via its admission to my "Intellectualising" series.