October 22, 2009

Torch bearers?

The 1974 World Cup.   One Germany lines up to face another.

22 men in shorts. Or “the triumphal march of GDR sport and the certainty of victory in the class struggle with West German imperialism.”

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October 21, 2009
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October 11, 2009
“

First Mexican fans began chanting at us. Something like, Gringos Go Home, or, Gringos, You Stole Half Our Country.

A lone beer rained down on our heads from the mezzanine above. Then came another.

Before I knew what was happening, the Mexicans were bombarding us with cups and napkins and food and more beer. It was literally raining garbage on our heads as an estimated 110,000 of our neighbors vented 500 years of pent up frustration against us.

I didn’t really start to feel scared until the first bag of urine fell. It hit a U.S. fan on the back, rupturing and soaking him and several others. The crowd roared with malicious delight. Suddenly more bags of urine — and feces — began cascading down on us, exploding like water balloons on the Fourth of July.

I remember thinking at one point, “What an ingenious weapon — so easy to smuggle in past the security guards!” Sure, you have to suffer the embarrassment of going to the bathroom in the bleachers. But the reward — a direct hit on an American below — must have more than made up for it.

The intrepid U.S. fans, many of them laughing, took cover under a giant U.S. flag. A couple of burning phosphorous flairs landed atop it and burned right through, but it held. I was under that flag. I was not smiling.
PBS Frontline journalist Gerry Hadden recalls a trip down to Mexico DF to watch the US team play Mexico at the Azteca.
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August 20, 2009
Birria — goat stew. With goat stew model.

Birria — goat stew.

With goat stew model.

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August 13, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

My Love — Windy and Carl

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August 12, 2009

“Just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois can go and play golf”

“Let’s leave this clear,” Mr. Chávez said during a live broadcast of his Sunday television program. “Golf is a bourgeois sport,” he said, repeating the word “bourgeois” as if he were swallowing castor oil. Then he went on, mocking the use of golf carts as a practice illustrating the sport’s laziness.

The government’s broad nationalizations and asset seizures have gone far beyond the oil industry to include coffee roasters, cattle ranches and tomato-processing plants.

If the golf course closings go forward, the number of courses shut down in the last three years will be about nine, said Julio L. Torres, director of the Venezuelan Golf Federation. A project on Margarita Island, designed by the American architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. and intended to be South America’s top course, was halted because of financial problems.

Most of the closed courses are in oil regions, near Maracaibo in western Venezuela and in Monagas State, in the east, and were initially built for Americans working in the oil industry. Mr. Chávez’s purge of dissidents from the national oil company focused suspicion on the golf courses, which were seen as bastions of the old elite.

A housing shortage has also pushed the government’s hand, Mr. Chávez said last month, when he questioned why Maracay had so many slums while the golf course and the grounds of the state-owned Hotel Maracay, a decaying modernist gem built in the 1950s, stretch over about 74 acres of coveted real estate.

“Just so some little group of the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois can go and play golf,” he said during his television program.

NYTimes

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August 11, 2009

José Francisco “Gringo” Torres is the current object of my affections.  Here he channels Nadia Comăneci.

He’s listed by the U.S. Soccer Federation as 5-foot-7 (that’s generous), 135 pounds (probably accurate). With that wispy frame, soft-spoken José Francisco Torres doesn’t look like a guy who might symbolize the future of the U.S. national team…

“He gives the U.S. a different look when he comes on the field,” one source close to U.S. Soccer said. “He looks for the ball in most positions, he wants it at his feet. He can start an attack from a deeper position with shorter passing and combo plays. To be honest, I’m not sure [Coach Bob Bradley] knows how to use him.”

And that’s the problem. He might be too good, at least for what the U.S. does. Torres hasn’t seen action for the Americans since the 3-1 debacle in Costa Rica in June, and didn’t take the field in South Africa despite being named to the Confederations Cup roster. Some of that is due to his inexperience. Probably more of it is due to the fact that there’s no natural place for him.

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August 9, 2009
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A spectacle that comes only once every four years: This Wednesday at 4PM Eastern time.  All 105,000 seats in Mexico DF’s Estadio Azteca are sold out.

A spectacle that comes only once every four years: This Wednesday at 4PM Eastern time.  All 105,000 seats in Mexico DF’s Estadio Azteca are sold out.

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July 24, 2009
“Shock and disbelief — my cellphone, my office phone, they’re ringing off the hook…People do not believe it.” — Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn.

“Shock and disbelief — my cellphone, my office phone, they’re ringing off the hook…People do not believe it.”

— Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn.

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the FBI said the rabbis used their congregations’ charitable organizations to launder about $3 million — passing what they were told was a donor’s ill-gotten gains through their charities’ bank accounts, and then returning the money to the donor in exchange for a cut of 5 to 10 percent. — NY Times.

the FBI said the rabbis used their congregations’ charitable organizations to launder about $3 million — passing what they were told was a donor’s ill-gotten gains through their charities’ bank accounts, and then returning the money to the donor in exchange for a cut of 5 to 10 percent.

— NY Times.

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July 15, 2009
For those with a deep suspicion of cats and their motivations, this may well be the scientific proof they have been waiting for. New research has finally laid bare the degree to which cats exploit humans. Instead of loud miaowing when they want food, behaviour likely to have them ejected from the bedroom, some cats disguise their cries for attention within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result, according to a study published tonight in the journal Current Biology, is a complex “solicitation” purr with a high-frequency element that triggers a sense of urgency in the human brain. Owners find it irritating, but not irritating enough to kick the cat out, and feel driven to respond. Dr Karen McComb, a specialist in mammal vocal communication at the University of Sussex, said that by employing an embedded cry, cats appear to be exploiting innate tendencies that humans have for nurturing offspring. “The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response – and solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing,” she said. McComb, whose usual subjects include African elephants and lions in the wild, began the research into domestic cats after noticing the “manipulative” purring of her own cat, Pepo. “I wondered why this purring sounded so annoying and was so difficult to ignore,” she said. “Talking with other cat owners, I found that some of them also had cats which showed similar behaviour.” After testing human responses to different purring types, McComb and her team found that even those with no experience of cats judged the “solicitation” purr to be more urgent and less pleasant. On examining the frequency of the special purr, she found a peak similar to that of a baby’s cry, which gave it a “noisy, slightly whiny quality”. However, not all cats have the cry; the researchers, who examined 10 cats, found it only in those living in single-person households. “We found that cats learn to dramatically emphasise the peak when dealing with human owners that have a one-on-one relationship,” McComb said. Cat purrs recorded by University of Sussex researchers. The article.

For those with a deep suspicion of cats and their motivations, this may well be the scientific proof they have been waiting for. New research has finally laid bare the degree to which cats exploit humans.

Instead of loud miaowing when they want food, behaviour likely to have them ejected from the bedroom, some cats disguise their cries for attention within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result, according to a study published tonight in the journal Current Biology, is a complex “solicitation” purr with a high-frequency element that triggers a sense of urgency in the human brain. Owners find it irritating, but not irritating enough to kick the cat out, and feel driven to respond.

Dr Karen McComb, a specialist in mammal vocal communication at the University of Sussex, said that by employing an embedded cry, cats appear to be exploiting innate tendencies that humans have for nurturing offspring.

“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response – and solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing,” she said.

McComb, whose usual subjects include African elephants and lions in the wild, began the research into domestic cats after noticing the “manipulative” purring of her own cat, Pepo. “I wondered why this purring sounded so annoying and was so difficult to ignore,” she said. “Talking with other cat owners, I found that some of them also had cats which showed similar behaviour.”

After testing human responses to different purring types, McComb and her team found that even those with no experience of cats judged the “solicitation” purr to be more urgent and less pleasant.

On examining the frequency of the special purr, she found a peak similar to that of a baby’s cry, which gave it a “noisy, slightly whiny quality”.

However, not all cats have the cry; the researchers, who examined 10 cats, found it only in those living in single-person households. “We found that cats learn to dramatically emphasise the peak when dealing with human owners that have a one-on-one relationship,” McComb said.

Cat purrs recorded by University of Sussex researchers.

The article.

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July 13, 2009

Yugoslavia: Self-Managing Market Socialism

In 1991, Saul Estrin wrote in the Journal of Economic Perspectives:

For many years the Yugoslav economic system appeared to offer a middle way between capitalism and Soviet central planning. The Yugoslavs’ brand of market socialism placed reliance on markets to guide both domestic and international production and exchange, with the socialist element coming from the “social ownership” and workers’ self-management of enterprises. The system seemed successful until the late 1970s. However, in recent years, many of the problems besetting other socialist economies like Poland and Hungary — like stagnation, international debt, enterprise inefficiency and inflation — have emerged to bring the whole experiment into question.

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A remarkable , unnerving document of socialism in the former Yugoslavia.

And still:  A partisan leader, ex-communicated by the Catholic church and the Soviets.

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A signature scene.

From Kusturica’s sly invocation of Deng Xiaoping on socialism, markets, mice, and the color of cats.

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