Leeds United 1973-4

I’m still silent, but this isn’t: a fantastic multiparter on Leeds at their Revie height. Thanks due to Leeds4EvEr1992 for posting. I think Part Two might be the same as Part One, but patience will be rewarded:

Page 123

T. Gracchi has just tagged me with this meme. Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book
2. Turn to p.123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Unfortunately, the nearest book to me at that moment happened to be this, and p.123 doesn’t actually have five sentences on it. But I keep 6-8 books on the go at any given moment, and went for the most physically proximate of those.

You don’t know how lucky you are - the next nearest was a bloodsoaked tech thriller about a anthropological pathologist..

Page 123.. (props it open with a First Capital Connect booklet).. fifth sentence… post the next three… here you go..

In 1922, the special spa trains to Scotland that had run during the War were discontinued, now that “it is cheaper to visit a French or Swiss spa than to make the journey to Scotland,” as a medical journal noted. “Let there be no mistake about it,” said one London society doctor, Continental spas were superior. “At the best of these establishments [on the Continent] treatment is carried to the nth degree.”

Given the calibre of my readership, I know I don’t have to bother giving you title and author.

Tag five people.. no point in tagging people who consistently ignore this kind of thing, and in all honesty my blog-reading of late has become confined to (1) people who are good enough to comment here (2) tech, science and money group blogs, most of them based Stateside. So I’m going to tag former bloggers - writers and thinkers from British blogging’s early golden age before the whole thing split down party lines. It’s highly unlikely any of these listed will see this, let alone reply in the comments, but stranger things. Naming the Dead, then:

1. Tom Hamilton
2. Scott Burgess
3. Marcus (from Harry’s Place)
4. “Junius”
5. Blimpish

Now to lapse back into silence.

Youtube Blowout Finale: Kimjjj

Youtuber Kimjjj has posted the following COMPLETE MATCHES (and there are highlight reels too!). I know I don’t know where to start - there are many, many more after the jump:

Brazil v England 1970
Brazil v Italy 1970
Brazil v Romania 1970
Holland v Bulgaria 1974
Holland v Argentina 1974
Holland v Germany 1974
Liverpool v Gladbach 1977
Argentina v Italy 1978
Argentina v Brazil 1978
Argentina v Holland 1978
Italy v Germany 1982
Italy v Brazil 1982
Italy v Argentina 1982
France v Germany 1982
Brazil v Argentina 1982

Another Fog Story…

..and from a proper country this time. Alex Massie’s right: it’s better than Sam Bartram’s from yesterday. Read and enjoy.

Welcome To The New MTMG Home, and, “blushes”…

Many thanks to the inimitable Mr Eugenides for this, and sorry for making his link out of date almost immediately!

For G.S.

The Solemn - or the Not So Solemn - Eye:

(Improved image courtesy of m@m)

That Word “Soccer”

There have been a lot of - mostly - young - mostly - men on the web lately, all making the same point very loudly: it’s called “football”, in this country, yanks, not “soccer” (the real wastes of time will spell it “sawker” or some such at this point).

Even sensible people can fall into the trap, it seems:

And then there was his use of the “s” word: “soccer” this, “soccer” that. David, pet: we both know that’s not proper English, ain’ it? We both know you only said “soccer” to please the Yanks.

(Incidentally, I’m cherrypicking - the rest of Dave’s article is excellent).

There are plenty more examples where those came from should you really want to see some.

Two assumptions run through all of this, often at the same time.

1. It is in some way annoying or insulting that “soccer” is the coinage in the US, so much so that that annoyance or insult demands expression.
2. Those who will admit that “soccer” is a word of English origin will usually get around that by claiming that a group of people who can be written off as “toffs” came up with it, and that it fell into disuse before the World Wars.

In actual fact, the word has fallen into relative disuse in England, but only very recently. And the evidence is that it was, until recently, a “down-to-earth” “working class” word (I’m grinding my teeth here: can you tell?).

What’s worse for my army of young men is that the word is in common international use, and not just in the US.

Let’s start with some football annuals. All of the following are entirely British:

Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book 1955-6:

Oh, Charlie: how could you use such non-English English? Surely lovely, plummy Ken Wolstenholme will put you right, ten years later? Or perhaps not…

“The Sun”’s a patriotic, working class paper. They’ll sort it out, come the ’70s. Won’t they? Oh…

Well, the England captain will show Becks up for what Dave Hill took him for (or, to be fair, didn’t). Or else he won’t.

Didn’t it all die out in the ’80s, though?

But those are just annuals. Proper soccer mags used “football” didn’t they?

It’s actually harder to find one with “football” in the title, to tell you the truth. They must have all been closet yanks; it’s the only plausible explanation:

I hate to tell you this, but even the FA are at it:

And the leading scholarly historical football journal? Say it ain’t so, to coin a phrase..

And we haven’t even got to abroad yet!

The French guard their language with an intensity we can only wonder at, but what’s this? Quelle horreur, army of young men.

But I’m sure my army of young men will want to raise an arm for the Germans, who are going through an insanely-anti-American phase at present.

But you can always join the neckless skinhead crowds in Spain and call it football there if you want to.

But, failing that, surely there’s Italy, unless you are going to be insulted by their calling it “Calcio”, which you really ought to be just for the sake of consistency.

Of course, the ancient rumour is that an Oxford student, Charles Wreford Brown, coined “soccer” from a contraction of “Association Football” to mimic the contraction of “Rugger” from “Rugby Football”, but in the eyes of my army of young men, Oxford students are untermensch, so perhaps they’d prefer Duncan Edwards:

Donna e mobile

Completely OT, but George linked to this video, and I’d like to raise him:

That’s all. Back to your pints and red-tops, gentlemen.

Hitchens on Smoking

There is something repellant about the idea of Christopher Hitchens, of all people, having to waste his time in the company of “stop smoking” companies and the rest of the self-improvement industry. Waste your time on his account here and here.

I spent a year of my life researching the smoking problem, and I was a smoker when I started. When I mean “research”, incidentally, I mean that I read every peer-reviewed article I could lay hands on, and interviewed something in the order of one thousand smokers and ex-smokers. I’ve worked with smokers for almost a decade now.

So I can say right away now why Hitchens came away still a smoker.

Because he was right, and his “helpers” were wrong. Cigarette smoking went around the world in forty years, not because it reduces its users to the status of sad addicts, but because the psychological advantages to smoking are real and considerable. But for the unfortunate (and only partial, and only relative) threat to health cigarettes pose, smokers, living as they do in the same vale of tears as the rest of us, have the advantage over non-smokers.

The hardest smokers to help are the ones who’ve lost sight of what they were getting out of smoking - the ones who insist on berating themselves as weak fools.

What I learned from all those interviews was that smoking cessation tends to happen when stopping becomes of greater psychological value than smoking, and that it is very much a personal matter. The reason techniques that I disagree with often work - especially the Allen Carr route, which has a genuine track record - is, I suspect, because they succeed in tapping into this.

On rare occasions, I even meet someone who succeeded in stopping permanently whilst using Nicotine Replacement Therapy. (The idea here, of course, is that nicotine is “addictive” and that the way to proceed is to slowly wean the user off it. It’s rare to come across a proper study - try a BMJ search and see what I mean - which doesn’t point up a failure rate in the 85-90% band over one year, more in seven. But then, I think the whole “addiction” idea is due a major rethink. There are only so many such studies you can read without realizing that it is only assumed that we know what we mean by “addiction,” that there are quite a few ill-thought-through definitions of it, and how badly in need we are of a working definition of the term that is agreed across the board AND evidence-based. But that’s a big subject, and this is scarcely the place.)

Admin

I’ve altered the permalink structure to the blog so that post titles are used in urls, not post numbers. Ergo, every single link to the blog is now broken, but the requirements of omelettes etc., and there it is.