Quotable

Man: Well, you’re right, she is a good cook! (in reference to other woman)
Wife: Honey? Remember that sex we talked about having ever again?

The pilgrimage

Tomorrow, I will go to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox play the Yankees. I will go with a friend of mine, if she gets back to me in time, but if not, I will go by myself. I will drink in the atmosphere, and be glad. I will let the roar of the crowd caress my ears. I may or may not inform the Yankees that they suck. It depends on a number of factors, such as distance, the crowd around me, and whether I think said Yankees are sufficiently cognizant of their suckitude at the time.

For what I am about to recieve, may the Sox make me truly thankful. Wicked Amen.

Phil Brown is a (bad) loser

Put yourself in the shoes of a Premiership manager for a moment. I know, they don’t fit, but I’m not asking you to walk around in them. Here’s what just happened: Your team, up against superior opposition, goes one goal up early in the game, but then begins to break down, and, with 15 minutes to go, concedes an equalizer. Oh, and along the way, your keeper got booked for wasting time. The superior opposition then pulls ahead with a scrappy goal scored by a player who may have been offside. You lose.

What do you do? Do you A.) Act like a professional and forbear from complaint? B.) Tell the press, with some justification, that you’re not sure that the opponent’s second goal should have stood, but admit that these decisions will happen in football? Or do you C.) Say that your team got robbed, and that you’re going to go to the FA.

If you’re Hull City manager Phil Brown, you D: Go completely and utterly toddler-without-toy.

Not only did Arsenal cheat him out of at least a replay, according to Brown, they spat on his assistant manager, kicked his dog, and dented his car without leaving a note. Also, they probably insulted his wife, gave his kid a wedgie, stepped on his toes, and tee-peed his house, those treacherous Francophone dogs.

A manager whining about referee’s decisions is of no interest to me anymore. It’s there, but I can’t really see it, as though it’s football’s normal background radiation. After all, as an Arsenal supporter, I can’t really pretend that Arsene doesn’t have his say about the officiating with some frequency.

What continues to draw fire from me, however, is managers bitching piteously and childishly to the press and then pretending they didn’t. Anytime somebody says that he’s “not going to go tittle-tattling to the FA” after howling at every press-accredited moon that he can find, he is revealing himself to be a none-too-bright hypocrite. And when that same guy says that he’s “not crying over spilt milk,” after insisting that either the home crowd or Arsene Wenger got his player booked – he seems confused as to which it was – well, there are a lot of adjectives that spring to mind. Childish. Hysterical. Relegation-bound.

I don’t know if Cesc Fabregas spat at the feet of Hull City assistant manager Brian Horton, and, frankly, I don’t care. I would care a little bit more if Cesc had actually spat on somebody, as, in fairness, it kind of looks like he did to Michael Ballack a few years ago. (Hehehehe…*ahem.*) But, as it stands, it looks a lot like Phil Brown has publicly declared his panties to be in a bunch in order to move the conversation away from the fact that, after a bright start, he seems to be managing Hull City towards the drop.

From Poland with pale, gothy love — The Witcher, reviewed

Yes, I realize how late I am on this game, but I don’t care and this was a fun review to write. So, without any introduction at all, here we go.

Translation is a notorious stumbling block for foreign-made games, but The Witcher does a refreshingly good job of making the change. Longer conversations don’t seem to flow all that well, especially when you’re given a dialogue option, and there are a couple of head-scratching moments of simple mistranslation, but the dialogue and voice acting are well above average, with a couple of moments that I thought were pretty funny. (Other character: “I can’t believe you outdrank me!” Geralt, sounding utterly miserable: “It wasn’t easy.”)

The character-building was, well, pretty good. It’s a point system, but it’s dolled up with various grades of points (bronze, silver, and gold talents, to be precise) and a more harmonious, well-thought-out system in which to spend them. You can upgrade Geralt’s base attributes, his knowledge of magic “signs”, and his sword skills.

The only drawback is that there are still a few blah skills in there. The group styles of swordplay seemed unnecessary to me, because any foe that you could actually kill with it wasn’t really worth bothering about anyway, and the game never really requires you to use it at all, by, say, swamping you with a bunch of tough monsters that you have to keep at bay all at once. Don’t get me wrong, killing off six and seven drowners – the game’s basic enemy peon – at a stroke was pretty cool, but there really isn’t any need for it; you could just pump points into the fast and strong styles and be able to handle anything that comes your way, which is what I did very early on.

This worked well: In fact, the combat got startlingly easy, barring the odd total brainfart like drawing the wrong kind of sword for my opponent. (Geralt uses a silver sword on paranormal or magical beasties, and, less frequently, a steel one to hew limbs from ordinary beasts or humans.) Once I killed a tough-looking boss without getting hit once, I realized that I completely outclassed any possible opposition, which took a little of the excitement out of combat, though, to be fair, I haven’t played through the game on its harder mode. The upshot of the character building and combat: It’s fun, and it looks pretty good, but about as hard as a chocolate anvil.

But that’s a minor quibble. The point is that the fighting is a bit easy, and pumping up the difficulty – which eliminates the visual cue for when to click again – doesn’t really solve the core issue. (Especially once you’ve played through it once: “Yay! Beating these low-level enemies is now much harder!”) But, hey, the fighting looks cool, and it’s not a large enough problem to turn me off of the game.

That aside, the game gets fairly involved in other respects. Part of this is due to the actual role-playing that you get to do on Geralt’s behalf. Nine times out of ten, action RPGs have some kind of morality meter, in deference to which many interactions have clear-cut “good” and “bad” choices. Not so in The Witcher. You can be as good or as bad as you want to be, and while it won’t be tracked on anything available to you, there will certainly be consequences. Characters won’t deal with you if you screw them over. Others will take advantage of you if you’re nice to them. Piquing the player’s sense of injustice or guilt is a much better way to suck people into the experience than having them help granny across the street to gain actual brownie points.

Unless they were an alchemical ingredient. Then you’d be hustling old ladies across the street in tour groups. The alchemy system, whereby Geralt can brew potions, create oils for his blades, and even make bombs, is a terrific addition that will draw you still further into the Witcherverse. It’s one of a few mini-games in The Witcher. The others are things like rudimentary bar brawling and drinking contests, neither of which are particularly notable. But the alchemy is one of those perfect mini-games, like chocobo breeding in FF7, that is just complicated enough to be engaging and not too complicated to detract from the rest of the game. Plus, like all good minigames, it has direct effects on the game world. The documentation warns you that, on harder difficulties, alchemy is “required” to survive many fights. The potions and such that Geralt creates are mightily handy, ranging from standard healing stuff to powerful draughts that give you permanent ability boosts.

Also, Geralt, unlike almost every other video game character ever, has sex. A lot of sex, if you like. There are a lot of swelling virtual bosoms in the Witcherverse, and Geralt of Rivia is not indifferent to them. Thankfully, we’re still well on the left side of the Uncanny Valley here, and there’s nothing particularly explicit, but it’s still relatively edgy for a video game to be clearly indicating that characters have sex. Maybe this is why Geralt keeps saying that he’s immune to infectious disease: He’s trying to reassure potential mates that he doesn’t have the gothic clap or anything.

And the game really does have a goth feel to it. Nothing outrageous – Geralt is not introspective enough to get all whiny and emo, except for a couple of groan-inducing occasions – but there’s a certain “dark night of the soul” gothery about the setting. It’s dark, it’s atmospheric and it certainly beats the hell out of the standard faeries-and-dragons crapola, but those with a low tolerance for brooding loners struggling with their violent nature – and getting called (cringe, brace for lawsuit) “white wolf” from time to time – should be warned.

But my most serious issue with The Witcher is that the storyline is a massive disappointment. It starts out so promisingly: Ok, amnesia, give us a break, but the characters around Geralt are interesting, and, at least at first, it manages to insert a little self-directed side-questing into a mysterious, multifaceted plot. We learn a little more, we get more of the themes of moral choice and deceit that are supposed to be central to the game, and meet a couple more memorable characters. Right about at the beginning of Chapter III, however, the writers seem to have wandered off somewhere and never returned. Possibly they were on one of the numerous fetch quests that the game inflicts on you with increasing frequency as you progress. You have to choose sides in a completely uninteresting conflict that has made maybe one actual appearance in the game so far, and the main plot becomes somehow predictable and disjointed at the same time. We then spiral farther down into the hackish recesses of the video game writer’s standard bag of tricks: predictable treachery, a frankly idiotic father-son subplot, and enough deus ex machina to power Big Ben. It all culminates in, I’m not kidding, a secret supersoldier plot, of which you were a prototype. I actually went, “Oh, for f**k’s sake,” out loud, when this massive twist was revealed.

I don’t mind that the game makes you do some irritating fetch quests, I don’t mind that the combat is pretty easy, and I don’t mind that the character-leveling system isn’t perfect. But to build my expectations with the first bit of the plot and then shit all over me at the end; it’s like going to your favorite deli, having the nice old lady behind the counter smile at you and say, “I bet you want your favorite today, don’t you dearie?” and then when you nod enthusiastically, she hands you a bologna sandwich with Kraft singles on Wonderbread, instead of pastrami on pumpernickel with hot pepper cheese and stone-ground mustard. There’s nothing terribly wrong with bologna with American cheese on Wonderbread; but it’s boring and bog-standard and utterly unremarkable, and if you were all revved up to eat a really good sandwich, it’ll make you want to fucking kill people with a pickle spear!

That being said, I could nitpick this game for another – good lord – 1500-odd words, but even though I sound like I hate every line of code this game contains, it’s actually quite the opposite. I think that it’s sufficiently engrossing that its numerous flaws – some of which are probably inherent to the action RPG genre and therefore not entirely CDProjekt’s fault – are outweighed and can be overlooked. On balance, then, the Witcher is a good game that provides more frustratingly blurry glimpses into how good the action RPG can be, and why we’re so frustrated when it’s not.

Stephen A Smith is a horrible asshole

Well, he is. I was listening to ESPN radio on my way to pick up lunch, and he was on Scott Van Pelt’s show, angrily and incoherently attacking people who had the gall to complain about outlandish salaries for college coaches.

Yeah! How dare they! Just because the UConn coach makes $12 million and is the highest paid Connecticut state employee! That’s not out of whack at all! What a bunch of whiners!

Like a woman pregnant with the devil’s child, he screeched and moaned and eventually gave birth to the frequently heard lie that, well, college athletics makes tons of money for its parent institutions and “that coach gets paid because he gits it done! He wins ballgames!” and further testosterone-fueled gibberish.

Also, he bitched and moaned about how Nebraska star and college player of the year contender (favorite?) Blake Griffin left a big game against Texas with what Stephen A, as tough as his cheez-doodle eatin’ ass no doubt is, considered to be a minor injury. Griffin had a concussion. “Yeah, but I wanted to see him play!” whined Smith.

Hey, Stephen A: Get a grip. College basketball and football are unpaid farm squads for the NBA and the NFL. Yeah, they do make warehouses full of money, but they make it for their athletic departments, not for the rest of the school. I think most reasonable people, whether or not they agree, could at least understand why a lot of people get miffed that the highest paid employee in their state is the coach of the basketball team.

And athletes at all levels have been expected for too long to play while concussed, with the result that some of them either A) suffered permanent disability or B) died. It’s happily ignorant dunces like you that keep this kind of idiotic masochism alive and hurting players. You’d like a 19-year-old to risk this serious injury or death because Texas versus Nebraska just isn’t exciting enough for you otherwise? Quite frankly, go to hell.

But that’s just Stephen A, whom you don’t see all that much of on ESPN anymore. I wonder why.

Bobby and Barack

I feel a bit better about myself these days, because I have avoided glorying in the collective suicide of the Republican party, for the most part. I’m uncomfortable flinging partisan barbs around the place because the economy is so much…more…import…

Wait a minute. I’m never uncomfortable talking smack. The economy has always been important. Partisan politics is part and parcel of the real problems that Americans face, and neither God nor Barack Obama will stop me from gleefully engaging in them.

I really have been trying to be a bit more restrained, but I’m coming to realize that that’s just silly. Serious issues demand serious debate. So to charge my spiritual batteries, I am going to glory in the collective suicide of the Republican party. I just can’t resist!

Bobby Jindal’s “rebuttal” the other night, nervously delivered after President Obama’s stirring, clear-eyed address to Congress, was the perfect example of the sheer irrelevance to which the Republicans have been reduced. Of course, these post-state of the union rebuttals are always pretty painful, and I think opposition parties should resist the urge to do them. I really can’t think of a better way to make yourself look like a total loser than to follow a speech delivered with all of the gravitas of the executive branch and the ringing applause of most of the legislative one with a diffident little infomercial, delivered from a little wood-paneled room, direct to camera, with no applause from anybody. I remember Pelosi and Reid doing it after one of Bush’s states of the union, and feeling monumentally depressed that the leaders of my party looked so thoroughly wimpy.

But if you had to do this, and you got to pick the president that you followed onto the air, you’d pick Bush. I think if somebody like Barack Obama had been minority leader (not that kind of minority) at the time, it might have worked. If the rebutter (rebuttor?) is orders of magnitude more fluent and charismatic than the president, then it’s maybe worth a shot. But not at any other time.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, frequently touted as a rising star among the GOP’s ranks, looked absolutely pathetic that night. And he may have hurt not only his own prospects for a national candidacy, but the conservative movement as a whole. He reminded me strongly of a kid I knew in high school: An earnest guy who always wore button-up shirts tucked into his jeans, he was also, you noticed once you’d talked to him for a few minutes, as unhinged as a screen door in a tornado. A nice enough fellow, but hardly somebody you’d elect to student government, let alone real government.

Note as well that Bobby is not Gov. Jindal’s real first name. If I were him, I’d be musing on the fact that, to achieve statewide office under the auspices of the Republican Party, he had to pretend to be a good old boy. Barack Obama got elected President of the United States, and his middle name, for god’s sake, is Hussein! Not that this means much in and of itself, but it certainly does make for a striking comparison in the way that the two parties understand the issue of race in America.

Yeah, yeah, I know they’ve played another one since….

Oh, hell. Another day, another confusing result for Arsenal. Following this club is like being awake and sober, yet somehow stoned at the same time.

Thank heavens, though, that we actually won that home fixture against AS Roma. All the signs were there – Arsenal were at home and looking confident against an opposition side that was clunking around the field like primitive robots. The North London club kept the ball, and passed nicely, and weren’t scoring. Exactly the kind of game we usually lose.

Except this time we won. But for van Persie’s clear-cut penalty and cool conversion made it 1-0 Arsenal after less than half an hour, the rest of the game was exactly the kind of somnambulant 0-0 draw that I’ve been getting all too used to.

It’s really getting ridiculous: The defense keeps playing surprisingly well, Bendtner keeps missing easy chances, and I keep thinking, “well, at least we didn’t lose.” It’s the cookie-cutter Arsenal game.

I do think, however, that it’s all about to turn. Not in a magnificent, season-redeeming way, but with the imminent return of about half the first team, I think Arsenal have three targets to shoot at. In decreasing order of likelihood, they are: Staying in the Champions League, winning the FA Cup, and winning the Champions League.

The main reason I’ve got any hope left at all is the return of a lot of great players. Fabregas, Walcott, Rosicky (god, Tommy, it’s been awhile), Eduardo (again), and Adebayor are all due back pretty soon, and with van Persie in the form of his life, I think it’ll be difficult for Arsenal to avoid scoring a lot of goals.

The Champions League is, as I indicate, a long shot. Arsenal don’t look like they have the match-day firepower necessary to take on teams like Manchester United or Barcelona. The one reason I think that there’s even an outside chance of them pulling this off is that, through all the embarrassing struggles against inferior opposition, they’ve done a lot of giant-killing this season. Much of this Arsenal team’s problem is one of mentality, and they really seem to pick themselves up for big games against big teams. So if everybody comes back healthy and Arsenal lucks into some of their rivals beating each other senseless, the potential is there for a good run in Europe.

The FA Cup is the silverware that Arsenal are most likely to win this season, and so deserves most of the attention. No teams of kids, no trying out some of those sparkling youngsters, these are games that must be won. Four – nil against Cardiff was the right idea. The two biggest names left besides Arsenal – Chelsea and Manchester United – are teams that Arsenal have already beaten this year. (Granted, they’ve also lost to Fulham and Burnley, who are both still in it, but I think that Wenger and the gang would rather gargle battery acid than have that happen again.) Again, it depends on who comes back when and what kind of form they come back in, but if they play like they’ve got nothing to lose, Arsenal could win the FA Cup.

Finally, the league. I hate to sound like a broken record, but it once again all comes down to how many players come back from injury when, and how good they are once they’re back in the side. A broad swathe of stunning returns to form is less necessary here – the team seem to have figured out how to keep a clean sheet, if nothing else – but I think Villa and/or Chelsea will probably slip again at some point, and I see Arsenal’s results heading in the opposite direction. One little bit of luck, and Arsenal are the cat amongst the pigeons in the lower half of the Champions League places.

It’s been a rough season. Actually, let’s be honest, it’s been a frustrating, awful season. And it could still turn out to have been a huge disaster if some of those terrifying rumors about Cesc and van Persie leaving turn out to be true and they do leave without silverware. But more and more, I think that the Gunners might pick themselves up and find a silver lining to the 2008/2009 campaign.

Anti-anime

I’ll admit that my distaste for Japanese pop culture began with anime, and that anime is still the fecal jewel in the crown; the irritator primus inter pares. I don’t know whether it’s the fact that every single show is drawn according to exactly the same set of conventions, the constantly bizarre mix of childish fantasy and breathtakingly explicit sex or violence (or, not infrequently, both), or the invariable absurdity of absolutely every character and event, but, my goodness, I hate anime.

I’ve often expressed this general sentiment to my friends, some of whom are big fans, nay, enthusiasts of the genre. In their defense, my anime-enjoying friends are otherwise sane and decent people and, with the odd blind spot, very intelligent. But I have never, ever heard any of them defend anime with enough eloquence to change my mind about it.

They’ll say that “of course all the shows look alike, it’s stylized for a reason, like the movements in a sonata, or the lines in a sestina.” Even once I’d looked up what a sestina was, I still thought that argument was crap. Usually, if you deploy such formidable phalanxes of artistic terminology, I’ll take one look and run away, whining pitiably and leaving a trail of urine behind. But I had not yet begun to fight.

Anyway, those are basic frameworks, around which an artist arranges his or her creative matter. Anime is much, much more regimented, which is why nobody has a mouth until they’re talking, or you’re looking at them up close in profile. It’s not that it’s difficult to see, it’s simply not there.

Except, god help us all, when somebody yells, in which case a mouth suddenly yawns into existence like a fleshy volcanic crater – an oral caldera, if you will – and the character’s head is instantaneously from one-third to one-half mouth. This is in every show.

Visually, then – and if it’s not clear by now I don’t know much about visual art, you should re-read this – I find that most anime looks exactly the same as the rest.

Creepier than the strict conformity in the look of the shows is the obsession with sex. Wait, that’s not creepy. That’s commonplace. Tons of great art is obsessed with sex, it’s just that anime seems to be obsessed with – how do I put this? – characters under 18 years of age. The schoolgirl fetish common to a startling amount of anime is mildly disturbing, and though this is but one cultural thread, one can’t help but wonder about the sexual undercurrents in Japanese society that cause this kind of thing to bob to the surface with such frequency. (Nothing like that in Western culture, no siree! Er, *ahem.*)

Ok, you might think, but it’s a cartoon, and what’s wrong with indulging in a little harmless fantasy about sixteen year olds? Remember how heady and all-encompassing teenage sexuality was? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, per se. Some measure of sexual fantasy is probably good for your mental health, in fact. It’s just the concurrent phenomenon that many of these sexual encounters do not appear to be fully consensual that push a lot of animated sexuality into the aberrant zone.

But anime sexuality gets much, much worse than even that, including an entire subgenre that seems to be given over to graphic depictions of what is referred to as “tentacle rape,” which is exactly what it sounds like. And since even I have heard about this stuff, I firmly believe that there is still worse out there, known only to devoted aficionados, whose visages I shudder to contemplate. Some of this, I imagine, must need to be kept in lead-lined vaults, and viewed only through heavily smoked glass. (Though why most people would want to watch any of this trash is beyond me.) Obviously, I can’t speak for women, but it wouldn’t take Andrea Dworkin to find this kind of cel-shaded garbage breathtakingly offensive and demeaning.

I should insert a caveat here, actually a couple of them. First, I’d like to make clear that the majority of anime does not contain any explicit sexuality, being more concerned with, ah, swords and romantic misunderstandings and other random crap. While I find most of it a little Oedipal, there’s nothing that’s out-and-out offensive in most anime. Second, and more important, I am not advocating for any banning or censorship whatsoever, even of the most awesomely filthy of these cartoons. That I find many of these animated snuff films utterly unredeemed by any artistic merit whatsoever is artistic criticism and not an argument for their annihilation. It’s the right of the artists and perverts of the world to create and watch this crap, just as it’s my right not to. (And to call them perverts.)

Cut the sexuality (implicit or explicit) out of anime and what have you got left? Robots and ninjas and not much else. I feel bad being this non-specific, but the last prong in this trident I’m sticking into anime is this: It’s infantile and it doesn’t make sense. All the characters seem to have about three emotions, one or two distinguishing characteristics, and all the depth and complexity of tinsel. They’re like walking personal ads.

I can only guess at the reasons behind this near-total lack of dramatic expertise. Maybe anime creators are made to turn out vast quantities of their product by cruel corporate overlords, and simply don’t have the time to put a lot of skull sweat into their creations. It would certainly explain why the plots range from utterly simplistic (Our heroes have to find this one guy and beat him up while shouting) to the hilariously nonsensical. (See, one of our heroes isn’t a hero at all, he’s actually a heroine, and this chick who’s looking for her father, who she thinks destroyed all the killer robots but it was actually a plot to…) This last is especially funny because you can almost hear the writers thinking “Oh, shit. I forgot that that little fucker with the horns is supposed to be a guy. Uh, let’s give him a sex change. Moving on…”

Incidentally, both of those plots would take about 100,000 episodes – many given over completely to characters preparing to hit each other, if it was Dragonball Z – to complete. It’s called pacing, people.

Maybe this same time constraint is why the characterization in anime is similarly slapdash. I don’t think giving somebody a craving for hot dogs counts as fleshing them out, unless hot dogs have some powerful connotation that only Japanese audiences would understand. If this is the case, somebody please let me know. This kind of inch-deep caricature is the most that the vast majority of anime characters get, with things like pasts and feelings reserved only for one or two central characters.

The anime that strives for something higher – though it almost uniformly fails – wields this simplicity like a weapon, driving you away from thinking about the characters themselves and towards an understanding of the world they inhabit. This sort of covert minimalism – for who could call such an beautifully baroque world as that of Cowboy Bebop minimalist? – is one of the factors that makes that series (and movie) the only anime I’ve ever seen and considered worthwhile. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

But the vast majority of anime – again, putting the squirm-inducing sexuality aside for the moment – is kids’ stuff, and should be treated as such. I think adult fanboyism is exoticism, pure and simple. Elevating anime to a form of High Art simply because it’s foreign doesn’t give Japanese artists a fair shake. Putting hyperbolic claptrap like Naruto and utter filth like Bible Black in the same category as Cowboy Bebop shows exactly how bogus the idea of wrapping the idea of “anime” in the flag of high art really is.

So that’s it, really. Like Kurt Vonnegut said, I’ve put on full armor and attacked a banana split. Remember this handy rule of thumb: Leave cartoons to kids.

Arse-shaving

Yeah, we got Owly McRussian. It’s a good deal, because we didn’t pay through the nose and he’s a fucking great attacking midfielder. Almost anybody else would have had to pay at least twenty million pounds for the guy, and I believe we paid about 14. Did I mention that, on his day, he has brilliant, even messianic abilities to create scoring chances?

The problem is, we’ve got a ton of creative talent, but it’s not very big and strong and willing to kick other big strong guys around the midfield. Nor do we have a “type A” center back to, likewise, kick the hell out of other large men in the interest of possession of the ball. I like Wenger’s style, but I can’t help thinking that what we really needed was a center/defensive midfielder who could run a lot and help us keep the ball and an oak-tree sized central defender to stop weak teams scoring header after header against us at set pieces.

Arshavin could help our season anyway — he’ll take over Fabregas’ role as centrally-placed playmaker and link man, even though he’ll play it in a different way — simply by helping us outscore teams. Wenger’s Arsenal has always been an attacking side. The best teams, like the one that went undefeated in 2003/2004, were defensively well-organized and hard-working, in addition to scoring blizzards of goals. For the past few years, the defense has been pretty average, but we’ve still scored plenty. This year, we’re not even doing that.

So that’s what I think Arshavin does for us. Couple his arrival with the imminent returns of Eduardo and Theo Walcott, and the continued excellent form of Robin van Persie, and I’m not too worried about Arsenal’s ability to score goals. But teams can score against us simply by virtue of being big and strong, and that’s no way to stay in the Champions League.

This looks to me, in short, like a team that will win some games 3-2 and 4-3, but lose others by the same score. Who’s nervous?

Free at last

Thank god almighty, we’re free of this guy.

There’s a bit of silliness about, to be sure.  Olbermann’s going on about Bush’s rug and Cheney’s strained back.  But more than that, I AM fired up.  I AM ready to go!  Screw the frippery and pageantry, I want some goddamned government up in this piece!  Let’s start fixing things, for god’s sake!

Words are doubly inadequate to the task of describing either my eagerness to see what the Obama administration is going to do or my exuberance to be out from under the callous, incompetent, corrupt shadow of the Bush administration.  So I’m not going to try.

The challenges that President Obama will face are legion.  Who, for example, is going to clean up my joyous drool every time I type “President Obama?”  But I’m not a Kool-aid drinker.  I want to see some results before I anoint him as the messiah.

But for the first time in a long, long, LONG, time, there is hope.