Das Ist MEIN On-Line Schwermut-Tagebuch!!

This is MY online sadness diary!!

 

A local politician asked me the other day about the writing here. He had been under the impression for quite sometime that perhaps I was grabbing or aggregating it from somewhere else. He had been skipping over the writing without realizing it was mine, every last word, typed out by my own hand on my Adler J5. Or if you prefer an more technological conceit….every word and image on this bloog was created and appears here through the miracle of FORTRAN punchcards.

“No, Mr. A440,” I said. “Unfortunately for you, and for everyone else, every last one of these words are mine all mine. Whether you like it or not.”

I’ve been writing this online sadness diary since 2001. And a few years and posts ago I recalled those early days when I was writing this more out of cynicism and a sullen rage against things that are all of sudden trendy as blogging was stating to become.

The imagery here is a different matter….similar, yet different. As I’ve always disclaimed, all images here are for review, homage or information purposes only and should never form the basis of any cash wager. All rights are retained by their creator. Words to that effect. The imagery resonates (hopefully) with the concepts of the words….or they create a counterpoint, and sometimes a dissonance as though the writing is being played in the key of G in 5/4 time and the imagery is tootling the same tune in the key of F# in 7/8 time. Many of the images are from anime shows that I’ve watched and highly recommend. I like using screencaps since the sub-titles can add another level of harmony to what I’m writing. The images from this opening sequence are from Kill La Kill (the first one) and the rest are from the new Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica movie. The Kill La Kill one was a straight screencap, and all I did was resize it to fit my stardard 500 px width format. The Madoka screencaps are from a stream that was recorded at the freaking theatre on someone’s cellphone…..very lo-res….so what I did was use some colour manipulations with all of them ((from top to bottom: Threshold Reduction; Value Invert; Posterize – 4 colour; Posterize – 8 colour)).

As for the music at the end….I’m quite sure I stole the idea for doing that from somewhere. But…to be honest, over the last 12 years I’ve always has some sort music outro in my blog posts, along with a mention of whatever beer (or wine) I happened to be fueled with at the time with a description of how sullen I was, in no uncertain terms. For example, back on January 8th, 2005, I wrote a post entitled I Hate Music, a diatribe about….well just go read it yerself. My mood after that one was Sullen & HaHaHaHateful, I was drinking a Darling Cellars Black Granite Shiraz 2002, listening (or pretending to listen) to “White & Lazy” by the Replacements.

So evidently nothing has changed much over the years.

And while we’re on about music, there’s a cool band from Calgary that wrote a song about my blog:

 

 

Well…that a little bit of what’s behind the Hello Kitty bead curtain here. Great and terrible is the word for it. And yes, Mr. A440, I wrote them myself, all in the key of C flat.

 

 

England 0      Chile 2

 

And now we’ve come the part where I savage the England nation team in all it’s wishful pomp and pretense. Of course, it was “just” a friendly, and Roy was putting out an “experimental” team—that is, some of the big shooters are injured so he had to call up the young guns of the future.

On the face of it, not a bad scheme. The problems of course come back to the ghosts of 1966, marching across as the realm  frighting remembrances of what once and suffocating reminders of what is now and what will be. England can not let go of that past, and that past can not let go either. And thus, all the hubris and bravado gets inflated, and then just as quickly deflated.

I was among the 3.9% of people on ESPN’s Streak For The Cash who picked Chile to win or draw at Wembley last Friday. All I asked of England was to do well, get their squad in order for the World Cup. I wanted the youngsters like Barkley, Lallana, & Townsend to do well. But really had no expectation of them beating Chile.

And yes, as y’all know by now, there’s a devil in me that hopes for the worst for England in these games. But there is also an angel in me as well that hopes that someday English throws off the horrible weight its past and all the crushing expectations that go along with it.

But if Andros Townsend expects England to bounce back again Germany next Tuesday, I wish he would hold that thought to himself and keep it between the lads on the squad. The less said about England and the hopes and expectations thereof, the better.

 

 

Scotland 0      USA 0

 

Like Roy Hodgson, Jurgen Klinnsman had a lot of youngsters on his squad for Friday’s friendly with Scotland up in Glasgow. And unlike England v Chile, there’s no wishful thinking bullshit involved when I say that Team USA was realistically expected to win this match.

With Michael Bradley back and a host of young players that give the USA a lot of depth heading towards Brazil, a 2-0 win was not an outlandish prospect.

So what happened here then?

Well….nothing much happened. And that was the problem. “If you’re going to be killed, kill.” And despite having better weapons overall, Team USA didn’t get any killing done.

They were too slow, too sluggish, stuck in third gear ((add you own favourite cliche for that here)). There was no killer mentality and no sense of urgency. And THAT is the biggest problem Klinnsman must solve before we get to Brazil next year.