That kicky, footy, sport thing

I'll say this for ESPN, while their inevitable coverage of the World Cup will invariably include chortling studio nitwits poorly analyzing games and bad American commentators who don't really understand the sport calling the games, they do know how to set up a good video series promoting the World Cup. That series would be I Scored a Goal In the FIFA World Cup Final, in which both winners and losers from World Cup Final matches talk about what the sport means to them, what the experience was like, and what it felt like to score both at the time and after. It's quite well done.

Embedded below are the parts that revolve around Martin Peters 1966 goal for England and Paul Breitner's 1974 goal for West Germany. Breitner seems pretty pissed, but he actually won. And scored. He's just really German.

Give the whole series a look. Sure it's mostly Brazilians, Argentinians, and Italians being interviewed, but someday they'll be interviewing an American about what it was like to score in a cup final. That day will be whenever it is most of the good soccer nations are felled by a mysterious disease in the week before a World Cup starts. God willing, it'll be this year. USA! USA! USA!

Quote of the Day

The Copenhagen conference is over with a weak, toothless, non-binding, low target, do little climate agreement as our elected world betters (stop me if you've heard this one before) failed to heed obvious warnings, listen to experts, or take necessary action due to short term political calculations. The US Senate was blamed, China was blamed more, Gordon Brown claimed the talks were "held to ransom", Banksy unleashed snarky art, and Thom Yorke was apoplectic. Hope you like a Radiohead album full of melting arctic ice references and climate statistics.

But still, in Copenhagen we found out that there were still things we can learn from our European brethren that could be applied back here in the States. Oh, not about climate change. No, we're all fucked horribly. No, I'm talking about the way their press deals with horridly regressive and embarrassing climate change deniers like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) who went to the Copenhagen conference to enact his "one man truth squad" and ended up bumming around Copenhagen for about two hours, before calling a press conference and getting heckled by the few press that bothered to even cover him.

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

Ouch. That cold shoulder was so cold that might have proved that global warming is a hoax... if the snow in Copenhagen during the summit didn't already prove that global warming was a hoax.

So, American press, would it be too much to ask that when a crazy person starts yelling bullshit about science that you'd speak up and go "You're ridiculous"? Or are will still doing that whole "Some people say that they have facts, figures, numbers, decades of research, and scientific analysis, while others say they have a notion about what God will or won't allow the planet to do. Who can say who is right?" thing? Ah well, thanks Germany for shaming Inhofe, however little his capacity for shame is. Thanks for treating him like a buffoon. Here he's treated like an important man with considerable power... which he is. It's incredibly sad.

Pictures of the day

With the Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall happening yesterday, what better way it there to celebrate than by knocking over fake walls? I can't think of one. Via the Times Online comes a look at the many various fake walls that were knocked over to mark the 20th anniversary.

Domino wall!

Foamcore cinderblocks!

Paper!

Probably foamcore again, but it looks pretty realistic!

Aww even the Palestinians got in on the celebration action, setting up their own fake wa......oh...right. My bad.

Actual history

Today marks the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As such, there are many celebrations, weird puppet shows, and retrospectives celebrating this day when Ronald Reagan told the commies to "tear down the wall" and they we're all like "Yessir, Mr. Freedom, please don't hurt us", had the wall taken down about 15 minutes later, and no one from Europe or Russia or anywhere else had anything to do with it; just Ronnie. Or so I've heard.

But the celebrations have brought many world leaders to Berlin to help commemorate the anniversary. In fact Nicholas Sarkozy has already taken the time to make erroneous claims about his own involvement in the fall of the wall in an attempt to make himself look good. But instead of releasing trite statements about "freedom" and "the world uniting" after the re-unification and wanton wall destruction, some leaders have decided to take a different track on the anniversary. Like Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is kind of depressed and mad that the wall fell

Dmitry Medvedev is in less celebratory mood than most. He says Russia has often felt on the back foot since the Wall fell, despite assurances at the time that NATO would not expand eastward, as it since has.

“We were hoping the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact would be accompanied by a different degree of Russia’s integration into common European space,” he told Germany’s Spiegel magazine.

“What have we received as a result? NATO is still a bloc whose rockets are targeting the Russian territory."

...yeah...FREEDOM! Why are people so obsessed with celebrating the positives for Germany? Why can't they be more focused on the negatives for Russia? Some people and their priorities.

But for all the joy and remembrance and freedom, I do think we are forgetting something important. Maybe the most important thing that happened during that whole period. Of course I'm referring to David Hasslehoff's legendary performance on the Berlin Wall, where he wore a light up jacket and almost got hit by rockets. How important was it? According to David: it possibly was the reason Germany unified. He's still bitter Reagan is getting all his credit and there isn't a picture of him in the wall museum. So on this, the 20th anniversary, we leave you with the only historical moment worth remembering: HASSLEHOFF!

Broken News: Archaeologists discover evidence of first blog

Above: Paintings depicting exploits on the battlefield and in the bedroom

ULM, GERMANY--A team of archaeologists from Arizona State University has unearthed what it believes to be mankind's first blog, a series of cave paintings depicting critiques of other cave paintings made by more virile, popular cavemen. The discovery was made during a routine survey of the Hohle Fels caves in southern Germany, and promises to revolutionize theories on the earliest days of human communication.

"I've never seen anything like this," declared expedition leader Dr. Timothy Frick. "This is an unprecedented collection of hamhanded social commentary mixed with clearly exaggerated claims of achievement.

Discovered by a handful of graduate students and faculty, the paintings depict, among other things, the daily adventures of an unusually creative hunter-gatherer from the Upper Paleolithic era, or about 40,000-10,000 years B.C.E. What separated this discovery from others is the nearly exclusive self-aggrandizing nature of the artwork.

One set of paintings depicts the artist, distinguished in all representations by his elevated stature and elongated phallus, atop a pile of roughly two dozen presumably female figures with long, flowing hair and physically improbable breasts. Another shows the same figure slaying several beasts, including a mastodon, lion, giant centipede, and what appears to be a winged dragon with two-headed sharks for feet.

Several experts, having examined photographs of the cave, were quick to vouch for both their authenticity and importance. Lars Brackbun, chief archaeologist at the University of Bonn, explained the community's enthusiasm.

"History is replete with lords, kings and holy men eager to record their exploits for posterity. Traditionally, this has been an effort to solidify their reputations as demigods or instruments of the divine. However, to find evidence of what appears to be as common a human as you might find at the time engaged in the same activity, well, that's something else entirely. And that is before one takes into account the childish criticism of other cave paintings and the ignorant etchings about the decisions of the tribal elders."

"Look here, this appears to be some sort of prehistoric feline playing a musical instrument in a fashion meant to be mocking this secondary depiction of a caveman who has seemingly fallen down," an excited Brackbun pointed out. "Simply fascinating!"

Indeed, based on previous excavations and fossil research, most of the slain animals in the paintings didn't exist in this region at the time, while others were blatant fabrications. Additionally, the team found no evidence of any of the large beasts having been consumed in the cave.

"If he'd actually killed and eaten any of these things, we'd have found the bones," explained Dr. Frick. "We found plenty of rabbit skulls and a few calcified snake carcasses, not to mention what must have been an unhealthy number of acorns smothered in a primitive cheese curd, but not much else. Nor was there any evidence of the tool-making prowess that would have been required to kill anything larger than the common household dogs of today."

One significant oddity was a large pile of what initial testing has determined is a pile of wadded up leaves with approximately 5 milliliters of solidified protein deposits at the center. While Frick has yet to determine what was contained at the center of these deposits, he ventured the guess that, "Our subject most likely spent a great deal of time in the cave. Alone. In fact, near as I can tell, this area of the cave seems to be in the back section of a larger dwelling populated by what evidence leads us to believe were normal, more productive members of the epoch."

These paintings are just one of the many new and startling discoveries to be found in the caves. In an adjacent cave, a team of researchers from MIT found what they believed to be a community set of paintings depicting a first-person narrative in which various tribal members would paint depictions of themselves singing songs poorly, playing musical instruments poorly, and other various situations in which they were generally made to look like asses.

In an area to the north, teams from Stanford unearthed small, short-form paintings of what team members called, "the most banal and mundane activities one could imagine, depicted in the most artless and boring way possible. We were given the impression that these were painted and exhibited almost as soon as these trite, uninteresting events happened."

"What we are seeing here is some of man's most primitive forms of this species' need to embarrass, brag, boast, and publicize the most basic details, thoughts, and opinions that occurred in their tiny, unimportant, brutally short lives," explained Dr. Brackbun.

"It seems that some of our most cherished internet applications are just the most technologically advanced method of expressing these primal inklings that evolution lodged in our reptilian brains for some reason. What an exciting development."

"Well, maybe not exciting," Brackbun corrected himself. "But it's a development and you can't deny that. Is it our fault all the good discoveries were made decades ago? No. Fuck off if you don't like it then."