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Saturday, July 8, 2006
World Cup overflow 
| | After the the game was tied at 90 minutes, we went down to Dargan's, a large Irish pub in the heart of Santa Barbara, where we were sure there would be plenty of partisans on each side. And there were. So I got my Guinness, my wife got her bloody mary, and the kid got some orange juice, and we cheered the game. I was slightly tilted toward France, because they were sort-of the underdog; but I kinda got turned off after Zidane got red-carded and sent away after making a stupid head-butt into the chest of Marco Materazzi after the latter had clearly said something, um, provocative. (Was it in Italian or French or... what?) So "the best striker in the world", as one Italian partisan at Dargan's called Zidane, sat out while his team went down on penalty kicks, 5-4. Ouch. Talk about using your head butt in the wrong way... Afterwards we had a late lunch at Pacific Crepes, a French place downtown. Cars went by for the next hour flapping Italian flags and yelling Italia! |
| | Is the relative lack of professional soccer popularity in the U.S. perhaps due to the absence of advertising opportunities, since the game goes on for 45 minute periods with no time outs? |
| | If Guinness made beer the way they make ads, nobody would drink it. Fortunately, it's still the benchmark. For me, anyway. It's the espresso of beers. |
| | Looking for Thinking from my nephew Robert, who knows more about soccer than 99.99% of America, I find he's trekking around Europe. Among his observations: |
| | by now we've been in europe for four days, and the first thing alex wants to take a picture of is the royale burger or whatever its called. not the badass cathedral across the street. a fucking mcdonalds burger. we tease him for this, but he looks at us like we just dont get it. |
| | amsterdam has outdoor urinals. no, not port-a-potties. fucking outdoor urinals. other amazing european innovations: motion-detecting escalators (took me like five times to figure out they weren't broken), stepless escalators (just an incline!), BEER AT MCDONALDS, and castles. oh, you can get jack and coke in a in a can too. |
| | amsterdam itself is a fascinating, terrible place. more of an amusement park for restless 18-25 men than an actual city. complete lost generation redux. north carolina kids telling me about how they came to see europe a few weeks ago and just hadn't left the city. its just that kind of place. personally, i checked out when i saw some kid buy a gram of coke in the red light district, and then proceed to empty the powder into his hand and just smear his palm across his nose, before offering his hand to his ladyfriend. "okay amsterdam," i says to myself. "we're done." |
Right behind Steve Jobs, at #96
Checking inn
The saga continues
| | Matt's c.v. is beyond qualified. He is Assistant Editorial Page Editor of the Los Angeles Times, former Associate Editor of Reason, columnist for the National Post, and much more. He is also an alumnus of UC Santa Barbara, of roughly the same vintage as Tony PIerce (now editor of LAist) Ken Layne*, Sean Hannity and Jim Rome, among others I'm forgetting now. |
| | The piece is long on opinion, longer on facts, and Required Reading for all who wring hands over The State of Newspapers Today. Especially local ones like the SB News-Press. |
| | Meanwhile, some good and/or beloved journalists are gone from the paper, which could be much improved just by becoming Net-native, rather than Net-hostile. They still lock nearly all their editorial behind a paywall, while their all-news-and-info radio station, KZSB/1290, is the only station in town with no website. Although about half of their programs would make great podcasts, they don't do that. Nor do they streams in .mp3. (Though you can get a Windows Media stream off the paper's own lame website). I could go on, but I've done that already. |
| | Thanks to Jay Rosen for pointage to Matt's piece. |
| | By the way, it's Summer again in Santa Barbara. Meaning that it's foggy and gloomy in the early morning. Over the last week or two it's been clear enough to see the Channel Islands, all day. We'll probably get back to that this afternoon. |
| | * I have since learned from Tony that Ken might be married to a Gaucho, but that does not make him one. Okay. So I'm wondering... can a Visiting Fellow at UCSB be a Gaucho? If so, I'd better buy the schwag to go with it. |
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