Messages

I'm happy for all the people with fond memories, I just advise these people not to go back and watch the old cartoons or read the old comics again. Don't ruin your good memories with the horrible reality.

There's rumours that Lucas Neill [the bloke who was penalized at the end of the match] might be heading to Barca. The poor bugger will have to deal with Spanish refs every week then.

I can only assume he can't tell the difference between Basques and Catalonia.

Ugh, after years of breakout cups where teams did unexpectedly well, last cup being Turkey and Korea, we now have 7 quarter finalists who are traditional powers, and an 8th that was part of a traditional power. In fact, 6 of the 7 countries who have won the cup are in the quarters. There's no explicit bias in bad refereeing, but it does tend to favour higher regarded teams [this was actually statistically proven last world cup in an article I stumbled onto in an economics journal].

None of this is so bad, but the fact that most of these powers have been mightily unimpressive through the group stages.

Best referee we had all cup, only made two bad decisions all match.

Unfortunately, they were both absolute utter shockers [the other being the red card], and were the two most important decisions in the match.

Still, Australia's inability to score says alot more about the Italian defence than about our attack. Some of the best zonal defence I've ever seen.

Don't worry, just be wary of Wired since it's a magazine really based in reasserting what people already beleive, or want to. I know most media is like that, but consider how closely tied it was to the dot com boom. All booms rely on stupid mutual assuarance of bullshit, in the 1920s stock had "reached a permanently high plateau", in the bubble economy everyone knew that Japanese property prices couldn't fall, in the early 90's Wizard magazine made sure everyone knew their copy of X-Men #1 was worth a thousand dollars and in the late 90's Wired made sure everyone knew that tech stocks were immune to gravity or the need for physical assets or revenue...or anything you need to look at to run a solvent business.

Japan as a massive consumer society which drives massive technological innovations is one of those things that "everyone knows", so people go out of the way to tell them. Everyone knows that Americans are lazy and Japanese are hard working, so the stories will always contrast the workplaces in that mindset. The fact American workers are, and have always been, far more productive [amongst the most productive in the world] doesn't matter. An article about Australia would probably be full of anecdotes confirming relaxed and laid back people. Massive suicide rates, prescriptions for anti depressents and long work hours come second to the image.


An interesting thing, that I stumbled on the other day whilst trawling through some statistics [you may have guessed I study this stuff formally and in my spare time because I like it]. Whilst in the early 90's the Gini coefficient of Japan was 0.22, it was 0.33 by the end of the decade. 0 means all households earn exactly the same, and 1 means one household earns every single cent. Most industrialised countries are between 0.25 to 0.35, and America is around .33 to .34 [and the likes of Brazil 0.6]. Japan was a wonderfully equitable society, but that's now dead it seems. I wonder how long the image of a middle class country will take to die.

Actually, you chose the worst possible example for Japanese infrastructure. Bloody minded protectionism of certain zaibatsu in Japan [as well as a bit of technological chauvinism] led to a reliance on a mobile phone network that relies almost entirely on wires. The system doesn't work in most cases unless you're within a few hundred metres of a receiver, and from there it's wires. As Japanese mobile phone prevalence is actually less than many western countries [I know this doesn't fit with our perceptions, but reality frequently doesn't] since it hasn't infiltrated all demographics like Europe and elsewhere, the bottlenecks haven't come up too much yet. But they will.

Which is wonderful if you're already in a country where all the power and phone lines are above ground to protect the telegraph pole industry [I'm not kidding].

Another minor point I find about Japanese mobile phones is that they have no SIM cards. You get a new phone, you get a new number. Fullstop.

The sad fact is, the most major and important consumer trend in Japan is the past 15 years has been the proliferation of 100 yen shops.

I could certainly see the Melbourne bred AFL influence in the Croatian box, some fine tackling and a few fists through for the behind.

Vel has the money on yet another team that fails to qualify!

If he goes for The Ukraine I'm going to bet all my money against them.

* Las Naranjas kisses Guus.

Eric's motor is a tad sticky when it's cold, so we tend to start her up with something with a tad less mellanin. Swedish babies are great in winter, but when she's rumbling along you can haul in all the darkies you want, just don't start him on black people.

seriously, Fred?

Since they're embedded swfs, you are downloading them rather than streaming, it's jsut that swfs can be opened before the entire file is completed.

And I can't say I can get angry at a company providing free content for "witholding" that content.

If you want to really ingratiate yourself to a german, make allusions to historical militarism at all possible opportunities.

Buy The Sun for examples on how to do it tactfully. It's the bible for teutonic diplomacy.

I

It's all about you isn't it

can't

Your typical defeatest attitude. Try some fucking optimism man,

talk

Yeah, talk talk talk. Talk is cheap dickhead.

to

Proposition this!

you

Oh, so now it's me that's the problem eh?

Vin Diesel really lacks the essential homoeroticism of the 47 character.


And I'm pretty sure Ghostbusters Go To Hell is one of the cinematic equivalents of Duke Nukem Forever, but then again, so was Superman Returns.

Worse problem is that you picked up the single worst piece of English slang already.

The missus didn't take Japan's loss too well....there's a broken table in the bar we went to.

The rest of the two dozen or so Japanese fans took it well though. Just not my violent Kansai love.

I agree, I was all ready for there to be a puzzle, and then it ended.

Indeed, and the wonderful mister Hiddink gave us the secrets on how to injure Dutchmen as well.

I hope for an Australian victory over Japan tomorrow so I can beat the missus by proxy.