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Since his arrival, Cheeves has gotten used to being dragged around Norrath for the flimsiest of reasons.  Jabber Longwind was unamused, it being the 17th time he'd heard that joke today. Continue reading Maltheas and the Superb Owl – A Cheeves and Maltheas adventure!!! We’re moments away from the start of the Ashes, the biannual series of cricket matches between England and Australia. We’re down in Australia this time around, so my sleep patterns are at risk, but I don’t care. It’s going to be a winter of hope and pain, beefy sixes, and outrageous referee decisions!!! I may be a little distracted for a while,but that’s alright! Let’s celebrate with Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis, and their fine musical stylings! Test Match Special has begun. Geoffrey and Aggers are discussing our chances, and we’ve won the toss. Let the games…*clang* BEGIN!!! As the mood of England swings from “Capello should be fired!” after two draws, to “Capello! What a genius! England are going all the way!”, after two draws, and a win against Slovenia, a plucky little nation with a population of two million, I must admit I’m getting a bit tired of the World Cup. My comments from Euro 2008 still pretty much sum up how I feel about the whole business. So, this blog has gone a little quiet for a month or so. What have I been up to? The chief suspect is Pirates of the Burning Sea. I got quite heavily into it, running the forum for my Nation, and currently chairing the Council of guilds. My addiction seems to be waning though, so we might see a bit more posting here in the future. Far more importantly, I was lucky enough to get the chance to do a week of work experience in the newsroom of Radio Broadland. It was a massive learning experience for me, and the folks I was working with were wonderful. Even better, they hired me the next week to do some filming and film-editing for their website. Nikki Fox and myself travelled down to Wembley with Lowestoft FC in preparation for their FA Vase final on the 11th of May. Neither of us had ever done anything like this before, so I think the results turned out quite well, especially considering the only video editor we had was Moviemaker! If you look really carefully, you can see my head reflected on the side of the coach, and yes, that is me waxing lyrical about the joys of bacon. Not got any more work coming up there currently, but I’m hoping they’ll get desperate enough to call me eventually. I’m missing the place like crazy. The Sun, Mirror, and just about every other UK paper report:
Just because we invented the game doesn’t give us a timeless right to be in tournaments, if we can’t be bothered to assemble a team that doesn’t suck. Premier football in Britain, and increasingly the rest of the world is so flush with money that the players are paid such incredible fees that I’m not surprised they don’t really care all that much about victory. So, you drop out of the cup. You can just go back to your mansion (either of them), sportscars, model wife, or yacht. How can you be 100% passionate about an individual game, if you can afford to do or buy anything you want? Maybe some of them do still devote themselves to the beautiful game all the way, but to many others I suspect its like a lot of us view our own jobs. An inconvenience necessary to being paid. Like us, bonuses are a lot more inspiring to extreme efforts than your regular salary, so maybe if we slashed top rank footballers salaries by, hmm, 90% perhaps, and increased bonuses for playing well, we might do a bit better. With ever-rising ticket prices for attanding a match, we deserve players that care enough to play their hearts out. If I won the lottery, I’d probably quit my job. Team England footballers HAVE won the lottery. And have quit trying. As Barry Glendenning in the Guardian said today:
While watching mindblowingly rich people running around on a field for 90 minutes can be fascinating, I’ll stick to my true love: Watching comfortably well-off people standing around in a field for four days. |
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