By the skin of their teeth

England barely made it through to the 1/4 finals. A tepid game, and really, incredible luck. Beckham did his job, and showed again what a difference a striker like him can make.

But what was that game between Holland and Portugal? Such ugliness at such a level was shameful. We seriously thought they'd be playing 3 vs 4 by the end of it. The Netherlands, instead of focusing their energy on scoring after some frustrating misses, dispersed it in reckless angry moves against Portugal. Portugal spared no low blows, with a referee who was just not looking when he should have, a number of times.

Portugal sails through in tatters, and leaves one more chance for England to move forward.

A few unrelated gripes

1. Why, oh why, can't the French coach get Dhorasoo to start that game against Togo tonight? The voodoo sorcerer in Togo threw some cowrie shells and already forecast that Togo will score first, that France will win 2-1 and that France will still be eliminated because of the insufficient goal difference.

2. Shampoo that claims to eliminate frizz and conditioner that claims to tame the "straw effect" need to be removed from the market. They are blatant liers.

3. Microsoft ought to be ashamed to put out a product such as Word 2003 where it takes TWO hours to format headings and tables for a 100-page document, and get a table of contents going, only for it all to shift and the numbering to go haywire in five minutes. And yes, I'm ashamed we use it.

BUT
Today is Friday.

The War on the Plastic Bag

by Stephen Moss

Plastic bags are used for an average of 20 minutes each, but can then stick around for 1,000 years (presumably this is an estimate, rather than an established fact, as plastic bag production was low in 1006). They get into the sea and kill whales and dolphins, which confuse them with jellyfish, eat them and choke. There are also a large number littering my street. They are clearly a menace, but does anyone know how many there really are - not just in my street, but in Britain as a whole?

- The Guardian, 6 June 2006 -
Read the whole article

The Math of it

Angola managed to withhold elimination last night. A brilliant game against Mexico, even while playing with 10 players after the 79th minute, ensured that Angola is still in the Cup. The details of how it should get through though are not exactly straightforward.

For that to happen, Portugal must beat Iran today. That will ensure Portugal is top of the group with 6 points. Then on Wednesday June 21st, Portugal must beat Mexico with at least a 2-goal difference AND Angola must beat Iran with at least a one goal difference.

If Portugal only wins by a one-goal difference, then Angola will have to ensure it scores 3 goals more than Iran! One thing is clear: Iran had better lose all its games. Africa could still be in the next round :)

It's launched!

Yesterday, you could really tell the World Cup had begun. A disappointing game from France, with the only breath-taking moment being the near miss by Vikash Dhorasoo, a French player born of Mauritian parents. About 400,000 people must have jumped off their seats in Mauritius alone. I favour three teams in this Cup: England, Holland, and Dhorasoo ;)

The Croatian fight against Brazil was remarkable. Instead of simply retreating behind a defensive game, they were there giving it their everything, risking it to the end. A beautiful game, with many missed occasions, and a beautiful goal by the unfortunately named Kaka. Croatia deserves to go far in the Cup if they keep this up. France had better get its act together, and England too, after that poor showing against Paraguay. The surprise so far? Australia. Let's watch the Roos.

Despite my strong prejudice against Brazil, I have to admit the gorgeousness of their game. There's work to be done this time, but the smooth passes, the reckless dribbling, the playfulness of it all is a lesson in itself.

Serbia & Montenegro

This team has made it to the World Cup Final Phase and will never get there again. There is no longer such a country. After the 21 May referendum, these are now two countries. It is of quirky historical interest to note that while a World Cup has been co-hosted by 2 countries, I don't believe it has actually happened before that two countries play as one team. There is only one Montenegrin in the team: the goalkeeper. Knowing that the secession of Montenegro is considered by most Serbians to be an insult to their former grandeur, that player's place is not a very good one to be in. I would have loved to be a (blind) fly on the walls of their dressing room. Football is less than ever simply a matter of ball. Here's some information in French, and more in the article below.

Say hello to Miss Montenegro, 12 June 2006, by Tim Garton Ash

How many countries are there in Europe?
It depends on what you mean by Europe - and what you mean by a country.
The European Union has 25 member states. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has 55 "participating states," but they include Andorra, the Holy See, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino, which are all within the bounds of the EU without being members of it. The Council of Europe, which claims on its Web site to represent "800 million Europeans," has 46 member states.

The Miss Europe beauty pageant has had contestants from Turkey, Israel and Lebanon. However you tally it, there's no question that Europe has more countries per capita than any other continent. China is one country for 1.3 billion people; Europe is somewhere between 45 and 55 countries for (at most) 800 million people. And this week, we'll get one more. Step forward, Miss Montenegro!

On May 21, 86 percent of the 484,720 people on the newly cleansed Montenegrin electoral register turned out to vote in a referendum - and 55.53 percent of those voters chose independence. According to rules embraced by Montenegro under pressure from the EU, a majority of 55 percent in a turnout exceeding 50 percent was needed for the independence vote to be valid. So they just scraped through.

The Montenegrin parliament has to formalize the claim to independence, and the knotty details of a velvet divorce from Serbia must be negotiated, but there's no doubt that a country called Montenegro will soon appear on the political map of Europe. Or, rather, reappear - Montenegro was there before, for 40 years between 1878 and 1918.

The original Montenegro, a kingdom created after an armed struggle for independence against the Ottoman Turks, was the model for the comic Ruritanian-style kingdom of Pontevedro in Franz Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow. Montenegro was extinguished with the help of the Western allies after World War I and replaced by Yugoslavia.

Its reappearance today is, in the first place, a shattering defeat for the nationalist project of a Greater Serbia opportunistically embraced by the post-communist Slobodan Milosevic. When Kosovo follows Montenegro to independence, as it surely will, then Serbia will be a landlocked rump state - a bruised loser of European history.

Yet the Montenegrin pole vault over the high bar set by the EU is also a defeat for a certain West European approach that kept urging the ex-Yugoslavs to stay together when they obviously wanted to part. In the region, people referred to the Union of Serbia and Montenegro (the ramshackle state structure that Montenegro voted to leave) as "Solania" - an ironic reference to the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, who was its main architect. Solana's fear was that a Montenegrin dash to independence might encourage Kosovar Albanians and Bosnian Serbs to demand the same, undermining the fragile peace that the EU was working to preserve.
Though the fear was understandable, the approach was misguided. If people really want to divorce, and if it is possible within the frontiers of viable states, they should be allowed to do so. What matters is that they do it by peaceful, constitutional and democratic means.

The unresolved issues of sovereignty and constitutional status have crippled attempts at economic and social reform in Serbia and Montenegro and Kosovo for the last five years. Sometimes it's better to cut the Gordian knot. Now the citizens of Montenegro and Serbia know that they have to make their own way to prosperity, democracy and the rule of law.
The end of Solania need not mean a return to Ruritania.

Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University.

Angola

Yesterday Angola, the former Portuguese colony, fought a brave game against Portugal. Portugal won 1-0, from a goal scored at the 4th minute, but this game was beautiful for the history behind it, and for the sheer determination displayed by players on both sides. I certainly hope Angola makes it through. This article from National Geographic provides great insight.

Greater Goal: Healing a War-Torn Land, by Henning Mankell

The first time I visited Angola I was not aware that I was in that country. It was 1987 and I was living in the northwestern corner of Zambia, near the Angolan border. Narrow sand roads twisted through the endless bush. It was easy to get stuck while driving, and I often lost my bearings on my way to some distant village. When I'd stop to ask for directions, if the person I spoke to answered in Portuguese then it was imperative to get back to the right side of the invisible border quickly. Angola, so deeply wounded by its long colonial period, was throttled after liberation from Portugal by a violent civil war. The rebel leader Jonas Savimbi's warriors, infamous for indiscriminate violence, were everywhere. A generation of Angolans did not know what it was to live in a country where peace reigned.

But there was also something magical about that land beyond the invisible border: Soccer was everywhere. On gravel pitches and sandy beaches, on sidewalks and city squares, the ball was played back and forth between hordes of young men. The balls were made of the most remarkable materials, an old T-shirt or fishing net or woman's handbag filled up with paper and grass. But they rolled and bounced, and you could do headers with them and make goals with them. War could never kill soccer in Angola. The soccer fields were demilitarized zones, and the face-off between teams conducting an intense yet essentially friendly battle served as a defense against the horrors that raged all around. It is harder for people who play soccer together to go out and kill each other.

Angola has seen many of its soccer players leave the country to seek their livelihood, mostly in Portugal. But they have not given up their citizenship. And when they are called home to put on black shorts and red socks and jerseys, their national team colors, they do not hesitate. They are known fondly as Palancas Negras, the "black antelopes."

On the eighth of October 2005, Angola arrives at Amahoro Stadium in Kigali. At that moment the astonishing situation is that if Angola can beat Rwanda by even a single goal, it will qualify for the World Cup ahead of Nigeria—no matter what happens in Nigeria's game against Zimbabwe. It is a nightmarish wait for all the Angolans who sit with their ears glued to radios. Luanda stands still, Huambo, Lubango, Namibe, Lobito, Benguela, Malanje, every city, every village is gathered at radios. Perhaps even the antelopes themselves stand out on the savanna with pricked ears.

When the first half ends, the score is tied at zero. Meanwhile, Nigeria is on its way to victory over Zimbabwe. But in Kigali the game continues without a goal. It all seems to be ending badly for Angola. One wonders what the players and coaches said to each other at the half. Nervousness spreads among the players. Rwanda, playing only for its honor, comes close to scoring on several occasions. Everyone agrees that Angola is playing miserably. It is a team at the edge of a breakdown, missing passes and misunderstanding each other. There are ten minutes left. The Angolans are almost unconscious in their desperation. Then the last-minute replacement Zé Kalanga makes a cross pass that is as surprising as it is brilliant. Fabrice "Akwa" Maieco is in the right place. With a header he perfectly launches the game's only goal, past Rwanda's goalie, one bounce on the ground, and then the ball flies up into the net.

A person would have to live for a long time in Africa to understand what this victory means. Of course no one imagines today that Angola will get very far in the tournament. But it is in the very nature of soccer to be unpredictable. If it were not the case that underdogs can sometimes defeat the predicted winners, soccer would be uninteresting.

But a great victory has already been won. It brought no gleaming cup. This triumph exists first of all in the hearts and minds of the Angolan people. To go to the finals of the World Cup in soccer means an enormous amount to the self-confidence of a country that has been ravaged by war and deprivation. A country, battered for so long, will be built up again.

(Henning Mankell is the author of some 40 novels, including crime novels featuring inspector Kurt Wallander. He divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he directs Teatro Avenida.)

Ivory Coast

The Way to Win: Juju on the Field, by Paul Laity

The party began at ten to six. Ivory Coast had just qualified for the World Cup—for the first time ever. In an instant, the city of Abidjan was full of people and noise. Fans in tangerine and white and green poured onto the streets, drivers hooted their horns; loud zouglou music was playing, and pots and pans were joyously banged. The partygoers danced a new dance, the "Drogbacité," named in honor of the team's star striker, Didier Drogba: They mimed his feints, turns, and the unleashing of unstoppable shots. Others tried out the fouka-fouka, Drogba's trademark celebratory hip-swivel—a little piece of Ivoirian culture known to soccer fans everywhere. The maquis—open-air cafés, bars, and mini-nightclubs—stayed open all night serving "Drogbas," bottles of local beer, so called because of their size and potency. A number of the drinkers had "Les Éléphants" painted on their chests, the nickname of the national team: Elephants represent power and are said to be lucky, too—protected by a spell. The team had suffered its share of disappointments; finally, the name seemed appropriate. Excited fans announced that soccer could do more than any politician to put an end to the civil war.

Over the past six years, the Ivory Coast's southern-based regime has fomented hatred of immigrants and Muslims, yet many of the country's best soccer players are from Muslim and immigrant families, so the national team has become an irresistible symbol of unity. At the end of the Abidjan victory parade, the head of the Ivory Coast Football Federation addressed a plea to President Laurent Gbagbo: "The players have asked me to tell you that what they most want now is for our divided country to become one again. They want this victory to act as a catalyst for peace in Ivory Coast, to put an end to the conflict and to reunite its people. This success must bring us together." The party on the streets lasted another whole day.

President Gbagbo did his best to be identified with the conquering team. He talked of a rejuvenated nation and gave each of the players the equivalent of a knighthood and a swanky villa. But Henri Michel, the French coach of the Ivoirian soccer team, was notably absent from the celebration at President Gbagbo's residence. He was, presumably, an awkward reminder of the colonial legacy. The governmental sponsors of anti-French thinking in today's Ivory Coast face a difficulty when it comes to soccer, however. Of the first-choice players on the national team, many play on French teams during the regular season, and a number have lived in France most of their lives: Drogba left the Ivory Coast at the age of five to stay with an uncle and tells of a childhood watching European soccer on TV.

Gbagbo will choose to ignore the importance of France to Ivoirian soccer as long as Ivory Coast keeps winning, and he has loudly publicized the extent to which his government has financed the national team. But he is likely to distance himself from another form of assistance. In 1992, the only time apart from this year that Ivory Coast played in the final of the African Nations Cup, the sports minister enlisted a battalion of fétisheurs—juju men—to give the Ivoirian team a supernatural advantage against Ghana. The story goes that when the minister reneged on promises to pay the fétisheurs, they put a hex on the team, which suffered a ten-year run of disappointing results. In April 2002, defense minister Moise Lida Kouassi approached the witch doctors to make amends, offering them bottles of gin and large sums of money. The hex was lifted, and presto: World Cup qualification.

Witch doctors scatter charms on the field or smear the goalposts with magic ointments to keep the ball out. In 1984 no fewer than 150 fétisheurs stayed with the Ivoirian national team at their hotel before a crunch game in the African Nations Cup: Each player took a bath in water treated with various potions, before being invited to make a wish in the ear of a pigeon. Another soccer club was taken to court in 1998 when, following a decisive league match in Bouake, its players admitted to drinking a concoction prepared by a juju man (the case was dismissed).

Soccer's governing body in Africa is aware of the PR damage done by juju stories and has now banned "team advisers" from being part of a squad's official entourage. But superstition, of one kind or another, has always played a large part in sport, and fetishism is sure to continue in Ivoirian soccer. Before last September's crucial World Cup qualifier against Cameroon, the gutters of Abidjan ran red with chicken blood. For better or worse this is V. S. Naipaul's Africa: a place of magic that is also on display at the many roadblocks in the north and west of the country, where soldiers are convinced that the amulets they wear around their necks will ward off bullets. War, too, encourages superstition.

Everybody—on both sides of the war—is willing the team to do well in Germany. But the mix of soccer and politics can get ugly. When the Ivoirians lost for the second time to Cameroon in the qualifiers, and it was believed their chance had gone, Drogba—who had played brilliantly in the match and scored two goals—received threats and menacing messages from fans, and was worried enough to consider not playing for the national team. In 2000 Gen. Robert Guei, who had just engineered the country's first military coup, held the national team in detention for two days as punishment for being knocked out of the African Nations Cup in the first round. He stripped the players of their passports and cell phones, publicly denounced them, and suggested they should learn some barracks discipline. "You should have spared us the shame," he said.

With qualification for the World Cup secured, there is, for the time being, no shame. By itself, soccer will never bring about national reconciliation. But the summer of 2006 promises to remind Ivoirians, however fleetingly, of a national life beyond politics.

(Paul Laity is an editor at the London Review of Books who plays left back in pickup soccer games.)
-National Geographic, June 2006-

Ah! The World Cup!

My staff and I are on the same wave-length : we should close at 16h instead of 18h and get home in time for the first game everyday.

But as socially responsible citizens living in times of dearth and desolation, of which today’s Budget Speech will remind us, we have sensibly refrained from voicing our dreams. We will trudge on.

No matter that we will be missing those heart-tripping moments when the national anthems play, or those corny clichéed descriptions of star players in each team before the game begins, or those ads which we will be mouthing simultaneously by the end of the Cup.

How we will survive such trepidation when England or France (bearing Dhorasoo of Mauritian descent) plays, God only knows. My next demand to my director will not be a microwave for our kitchenette, nor a fridge, nor even a raise.

It might well be for a flat-screen TV with surround-sound to be hung in our open space, just loud enough for us to run to the show each time a goal is nearly scored, i.e., all the time.

Actually, I might just bring it in tomorrow.

England

Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans, by Nick Hornby

It was all so straightforward back in the '60s, when I started to watch soccer. England had just won the 1966 World Cup and, therefore, unarguably, were the best team in the world: fact, period, end of story. Then everything went wrong, pretty much forever. For a start, I became a grown-up and much more troubled about what it meant to belong to a country; meanwhile England's soccer team was hopeless. (I may not have been so conflicted about the subject of patriotism if they'd been any good.) The team didn't even qualify for the World Cup of 1974 and 1978; the world-class players we'd been blessed with in the '60s had gone, and by the '80s, the whole subject of patriotism and soccer had become much more complicated.

In the mind's eye now, England games during that decade were only just visible through a cloud of tear gas, used by European police to disperse our rioting hooligans. England fans were fast becoming a pretty sinister bunch. If you went to see England play at Wembley, you could observe people around you making the Nazi salute during the national anthem, and abuse of black players—even those playing for the home team—was commonplace. Sometimes it seemed as though the thousand worst scumbag fans from every single league club were gathered at Wembley so they could make monkey noises and sing anti-IRA songs. If you saw someone coming toward you in a T-shirt sporting the Union Jack, you'd have been best advised to cross the street. The T-shirt was a graphic alternative to a slogan that might say something like, "I'm a racist, but I hate you no matter what color you are."

And so some soccer fans started to feel a little conflicted about the national team. In 1990, when England played Cameroon in the quarterfinals of the World Cup, it wasn't hard to find people in England—middle-class, liberal people, admittedly, but people nonetheless—who wanted Cameroon to win. I watched that game with some of them, and when England went 2-1 down (they eventually won 3-2 in extra time), these people cheered. I understood why, but I couldn't cheer with them, much to my surprise. Those drunk, racist thugs draped in the national colors. . . . They were, it turned out, my people, not the nice liberal friends I was watching the game with, and England was my soccer team. I mean, you can't choose stuff like that, right? The 1990 World Cup turned out to be a turning point. The team wasn't embarrassing. The fans weren't embarrassing either. After a horrendous couple of decades, the national team once again basked in the warmth of the nation's affections.

The rebirth lasted about five minutes. There was a disastrous managerial appointment, which resulted in yet another failure to qualify. And by 1998 soccer was a different game. Many of the players in our top division came from outside the British Isles. The globalization of the transfer market was beginning to rob international football of much of its point. In the old days, you'd look at the best players in the club teams and think, What would they be like if they played together? And the answer was they looked like the national team. Now, Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan, and Barcelona have replaced the national teams as fantasy soccer teams.

In 1989 England played out a goalless draw against Sweden, helping to ensure qualification for the 1990 World Cup. The enduring image of that game is of the England captain, Terry Butcher, swathed in a bandage, his white England shirt and shorts covered in blood that had pumped steadily out of a head wound throughout the game. "Off the pitch I was always an ordinary, mild-mannered bloke," said Butcher in an interview. "But put me in a football shirt and it was tin hats and fixed bayonets. Death or glory."

That was the old England: the war imagery, the crucial nil-nil draw against modest opposition, the unavoidable replacement of style and talent with blood and graft. Those who loathe David Beckham, the current England captain, would claim that he will wear a tin hat and bandages only when tin hats and bandages become de rigueur in some ludicrously fashionable European nightclub. That's not fair, because despite his looks and his cash, he has worked hard to compensate for things he lacks as a player, notably pace. But there's no doubt he is brilliantly illustrative of a new kind of English sportsman: professional, media-aware, occasionally petulant, and very, very rich.

The England fans who went to the 2005 friendly match against Argentina (resulting in a meaningless but enthralling last-minute win) were still singing their "No surrender to the IRA" song, and there's more than a suspicion that they'd rather be watching Terry Butcher and his fixed bayonets than David Beckham, a man who, after all, has been photographed wearing a sarong. But then, that's England all over at the moment. We'd still rather be bombing the Germans; but after 60 years, there's a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren't coming back any time soon, and in the meantime we must rely on sarong-wearing, multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We're not happy about it, but what can we do?

-National Geographic, June 2006 -

The nano wave

"The main thing to know about nanotechnology is that it's small. Really small. Nano, a prefix that means "dwarf" in Greek, is shorthand for nanometer, one-billionth of a meter: a distance so minute that comparing it to anything in the regular world is a bit of a joke. This comma, for instance, spans about half a million nanometers. To put it another way, a nanometer is the amount a man's beard grows in the time it takes him to lift a razor to his face.

Nanotechnology matters because familiar materials begin to develop odd properties when they're nanosize. Tear a piece of aluminum foil into tiny strips, and it will still behave like aluminum—even after the strips have become so small that you need a microscope to see them. But keep chopping them smaller, and at some point—20 to 30 nanometers, in this case—the pieces can explode. Not all nanosize materials change properties so usefully (there's talk of adding nanoaluminum to rocket fuel), but the fact that some do is a boon. With them, scientists can engineer a cornucopia of exotic new materials, such as plastic that conducts electricity and coatings that prevent iron from rusting. It's like you shrink a cat and keep shrinking it, and then at some point, all at once, it turns into a dog."

-Jennifer Kahn, National Geographic Magazine, June 2006 -

You can see some pictures from the report on this link. Nanotechnology looks like the most amazing phenomenon we will come to witness in the next decades, with possible uses such as killing cancerous cells without the side-effects of chemotherapy. The risks are also great, as with any new technology, and scientists are only discovering the tip of the nano-iceberg. If we have to exert so much energy anyway, it might as well be to push back the limits of human imagination and realisation.

On the 10th day, a meal is offered to the family. It is a hustle and bustle of saree-clad aunts chopping, stirring and diatribing on cooking techniques.

On cooking "besan"
The cake, that is, not the flour. You start with oil & ghee heating in a deep pan. Then add chopped onions, pureed onions & garlic, and ground aniseed and turmeric. Stir until well mixed and then slowly add boiled water.

Yes, adding water to hot oil will cause dangerous geysers in the pan.

Then slowly add the previously pureed dhal and salt, then chopped coriander leaves. Stir until your arm drops. The liquid will evaporate and the remaining paste can then be pressed into a shallow tray to be later sliced into lozenges and served as a side dish.

Food is only an excuse to be together as a family, to face the loss, and to grab on to some sort of normalcy.

Fuelling our way to destruction

"There is no shortage of oil shale, much of it in the US and Canada, but it must be dug out by strip mining and heated to 450-500°C before being enriched with hydrogen from steam to separate the oil. The resulting sludge, which has increased in volume by 30%, must then be disposed of. The process is said to emit four times as much CO2 as traditional oil production. It also requires large amounts of water."

-The Guardian, Friday 2 June, 2006-

Mots d'une grand-mère française du 21e siècle

"Nous sommes des survivants rescapés! Nous sommes nés avant la télévision, avant la pénicilline, avant les produits surgelés, les verres de contact, la vidéo et le magnétoscope et avant la pilule. Nous étions là avant les radars, les cartes de crédit,la bombe atomique, le rayon laser, avant le stylo à bille, avant le lave-vaisselle, les congélateurs, les couvertures chauffantes, avant les chemises sans repassage et avant que l'homme marche sur la Lune.

Nous nous sommes mariés avant de vivre ensemble.

Nous datons de l'ère d'avant les HLM et d'avant les Pampers. Nous n'avions jamais entendu parler de modulation de fréquence, de coeur artificiel, de transplant, de machine électronique, ni de jeunes portant une boucle d'oreille. Pour nous une puce était un parasite, une souris était de la nourriture pour chat. Un site était un point de vue panoramique, un joint empêchait un robinet de goutter, l'herbe était pour les vaches et une cassette servait à ranger les bijoux. Que de changements nous ont bouleversés mais nous avons su les négocier! On a su sauter le fossé entre nous et la génération d'aujourd'hui. Nous sommes après tout, un bon cru!"