Concrete Achievements

Author: Anthony

  • Rise above it, Nigel

    Just left St James’ Park after watching Exeter get thumped 4-1 by Burton Albion. Albion looked a pretty good side, to be fair, but their manager, Nigel Clough, was on the edge of his technical area for most of the game, roaring extraordinarily complex instructions at his players like he was playing voice-activated Championship Manager.

    This obviously resulted in a fair bit of cat-calling from behind the dugout, and I was amazed by how personally he seemed to take it. A couple of times he even turned around and shouted “shut up” back at the fans, at least until the fourth official told him not to.

    You’d think an experienced manager would have a big more sang-froid.

  • Swampy (part 94)

    So now it’s apparently not OK to deny immigrants their rights.

    I get so confused.

  • Bad news from Spain

    They were not amused, so they damaged freedom of speech.

    Here’s the original, which the BBC didn’t want to republish.

  • Rotten timber

    The Daily Mail:.

    Democracy knows you as the poisoner of the streams of human intercourse, the fomenter of war, the preacher of hate, the unscrupulous enemy of a peaceful human society

  • LOLIZLINGWORDSTREET

    I think the LOLinator (link leads to LOLCATS version of this blog) may be a sign of the end times.

  • spEak You’re bRanes

    Some wonderful person has taken the risk to their sanity that is reading the Jerk Your Knee forums on the BBC and compiled the stupidest and most offensive into a blog called spEak You’re bRanes. Just great.

  • European anthem

    It’s fairly well known that Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (the 4th movement of the 9th symphony) is the European anthem, but less well known that the European version has no words, to avoid the need to translate it two dozen times.

    Billy Bragg has recently retranslated the passages from the symphony, taken from Schiller’s Ode to Joy, for a performance at the Festival Hall, and I think he’s done a great job. Given that English is one of the working languages of the Union, I think the relevant verses are a good candidate for an English set of words:

    See now like a phoenix rising
    From the rubble of the war
    Hope of ages manifested
    Peace and freedom evermore!
    Brothers, sisters stand together
    Raise your voices now as one –
    Though by history divided
    Reconciled in unison

    Throw off now the chains of ancient
    Bitterness and enmity
    Hand in hand let’s walk together
    On the path of liberty
    Hark a new dawn now is breaking
    Lift your voices now in song!
    Though by history divided
    Reconciled in unison

  • Boom-bang-a-bust

    As the pound and euro hit new dollar highs, New York magazine has an interesting article on the potential risks to the US economy.

  • English Parliament

    The slightly odd proposal not to have an English Parliament, but to have a sort of English pseudo-Parliament made up of existing MPs, is “debated” on the BBC’s Jerk Your Knee message board, where a lot of angry loners passionately agree that they want English independence (even if they can’t spell it).

    I think I’ve said this here before: there’s a perfectly rational case for an English Parliament as part of a wider constitutional settlement – reserve Westminster for UK-wide federal issues, and have an English Parliament in Birmingham or somewhere that, on the Scottish model, dealing with the elements of domestic policy that seem to be done best at that level. Of course, the sort of people who are proposing an English Parliament (or worse, a first-past-the-post English pseudo-Parliament) are not doing it for any rational reasons – they are doing it because they hate Blair/Brown/the Scots/the EU/black people and think that in some way having a more right-wing Parliament (which they assume it will be) will deliver for them.

    Actually, I should exempt Sir Malcolm Rifkind and his task force from this – they seem to be in this argument purely for party advantage rather than anything more nasty.

  • National sovereignty

    On the regular occasions when I get annoyed by the paranoid rantings of Eurosceptics, I like to read articles on what American politicians think about international law (for instance). Summary: they’re against it, because it might stop them doing whatever the hell they want, and damn what anyone else thinks. Give it a few years with the rise of China, and I expect they’ll be as keen on it as the Europeans are.