It was as I was reading my Euro 2004 pundit‘s latest comment –
“I will take this opportunity to say that Sven needs his bumps felt. He’s talking about starting with the same line-up for the match against Croatia. How many times do I have to say that Michael Owen couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo.”
– that I cheered Ibrahimovic’s Keystone Kops-style backheel goal take Italy to a 1-1 draw. The phrase ‘goalmouth scramble’ was never more appropriate.
Acno’s Energizer is a fun way to kill some time…and sports a catchy drum n bass music track.
via Melissa
Andy Yates, whom I have decided to adopt as the Euro 2004 football pundit for bignoseduglyguy.com. Even though he’s a zillion timezones away in Minneapolis where the games cost him $20 on pay-per-view, his devotion to the English game and unflinching reportage make him the obvious choice.
To encourage some click-throughs, here’s a small sample of his style:
England v France
Heskey came on and couldn’t remain upright or for that matter keep anyone else upright (cough, free kick, cough.) David James is a bloody donkey although he did have some moments where he looked like he had seen a football before….So how did it end 2-1? Three names for you: James, Heskey and Owen. Leave them all out for the next game Sven or I’ll send Ulrika round to pick up her CDs.
England v Switzerland
“I’m starting to wonder if David James ever moves for set-pieces. Once again he stood there like a deer in the headlights…And what the hell was that [single] Owen shot? My eighteen month old son has a better right foot than that…Thank God Heskey didn’t grace us with his presence.”
And now back to the studio – Gary?
Ask any ultralight (no pun intended) hiker or extreme mountain biker worth their salt and they’ll tell you that this is one of the oldest tricks in the book, whether they be Photons or their homemade equivalents. I have made various pieces of hiking gear over the years and most are still in use, like the Pepsi Can stove I made like this one – mmm, maybe I’ll redesign and update my old ultralight hiking pages.
Ray Charles, who will be buried today in California, played over 10,000 concerts during his 58-year career. If one allows just a couple of weeks off work each year, that means he pretty much played a gig every other day for each of those 58 years. Flippin’ Nora.
I had a small but pleasant surprise awaiting me this evening when I open my email to find Paul Boutin had kindly forwarded me details to obtain a Gmail beta account. Which was nice. The cherry on the cake was his three word comment “Big noses rule”. Let it be known I won’t hear a word against him 🙂
Please feel free to mail me at bignoseduglyguy@SAFETYPINgmail.com removing the safety pin to do so. I know there issues surrounding the privacy questions raised by Google’s scraping for target advertising but hey, you don’t entrust really private or confidential stuff to your email service…do you?
As someone who did so some time ago, I was interested to read Daniel Miessler’s ‘Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer‘ article over at Lockergnome. I have to say that he makes a fair and cogent argument, highlighting the issues that continue to bug folks about the world’s most used browser. Likewise, there are many good points made in the online discussions and forums that have taken up the story, like those in the thread over at Ecademy, pointing up the necessity of using IE to action Windows Updates (clever thinking, MS though one can configure auto-updates via Control Panel unless I am much mistaken) and to view those sites code-biased to it’s own non-standard display. In making this last point, one person commented that IE is pretty much essential for online banking sites. I beg to differ, as I regularly use The Cooperative Bank’s online banking service via the excellent Firefox browser without a hitch.
Given my recent posts on the lot of corporate managers and their longsuffering employees, Squonk’s Mind the gap… post doesn’t really make me feel any better. Meanwhile, I’m off to MOT the the department’s pool car – ah, the glamour of middle management.
As I mentioned below, Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian Weekend piece ”Sweet smiles, hard labour’ (from her forthcoming book, with it’s frank and unblinking look at the emotional investment demanded by employers these days, struck a chord with me.
Today’s follow-up extract is equally incisive, detailing how the prevailing cultures of overwork and consumerism are altering our attitudes to work. Bunting explores what she describes as “the emergence of a new form of elitism in the labour market: work as vocation and work as pleasure. In a society that places a high premium on self-expression and fulfilment, to have a lot of interesting work is a status symbol. It’s not just that you have a job that pays decently; you have a job which is so satisfying and fulfilling that you don’t want to stop working.” I don’t believe many of those involved in corporate life could deny the truth lying behind the observation of Kristen Lippincott, director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich: “We’ve become enamoured with deadlines. We want to feel an adrenaline rush. We believe that if we’re always chasing the next deadline, we must be important. A lot of our busyness is a way for us to avoid thinking about what is most important. There’s a difference between being busy and being productive.”
I used to work 5 minutes’ walk from home and yet I regularly stayed late in the office working on the ‘latest important thing’, missing never-to-be-repeated family moments, all because I knew that I could be home in 5 minutes…but never quite tearing myself away to do so. A good few years on, having worked out that such behaviour doesn’t actually change anything and garners little thanks from the Board, I have focused on working more efficiently in order to be more productive in less time. However, as I am now faced with a four hour round trip to the office and back, I have plenty of time to rue all those hours I wasted trying to feel important and make an impression. Rob Parsons – of Care For The Family and The Sixty Minute Father reknown – and many others, have often written that no-one ever lay on their deathbed and uttered the words ‘I wish I’d spent more time in the office’. How true.