TMFD

Punk Metaphor Watch #1: Guess His Theory

With the biting winds of PUNK ROCK beginning to blow through the Popular comments boxes it’s time to examine the ways in which punk has become institutionalised as a metaphor - starting with Richard Williams on the Guardian football blog: Stadium Rock of Top Flight looks Bloated Against The Joy Division.

… read on …

cthulhuedo

the hideously maddening game from World of Lovecraft: … read on …

mah jongg attacks!

belatedly reviewing lust, caution, the element i most woke up to was probably the mah jongg, a game my family played a little when i was a teen — we had a very strange set made not of ivory-bamboo or fake plastic equivalent but some curious crumbly black brick composite

as a game it has several evocative elements: problem being their evocativeness is often add-on orientalism introduced into the western version of the game; chinese mah jongg (as we saw in the film) is a fast-played social gambling game; i imagine ang lee had layered in certain plot/atmosphere/subtext elements which will have been lost on all non-players (not that i spotted any) (not that i really consider myself a player, tho i do sorta kinda remember the rules) … read on …

Freaky Trigger & The Moomins of Pop - 13 February

PLUG PLUG!

Tonight leading Moomin academic Dr Vick, Tom Ewing and Pete Baran, corralled into brilliance by the Atommick Brane herself halloo the return of the kid-lit husband list! (Ms Puddleduck come on down!) (PuddleDUMB more like!) We’ll tackle Tove Jansson, Raymond Briggs, Uncle (<— the Elephant in the Castle!) (he has a B.A.!), the general disjunction between morals and quality in children’s art and the horrific not-so-SUBtext of Toy Story II. Plus something SO SCARY even Beaver Hateman and Knobsman Carsmile will tremble in fear. Tune in and find out for yourself! 7pm GMT, 104.4 Resonance FM, online at www.resonancefm.com and follow-ups at freakytrigger.co.uk, wild surmise to ftlollards@gmail.com.

A Trigger Almanac: 2007

Here’s a selection of some of the most entertaining/interesting posts on the site this year - thoroughly incomplete, as it doesn’t include much of the frothing ephemera that makes FT so good (in my partisan view). As usual when I look at the FT archives I’m enormously amused, amazed that there’s so much of it, and frustrated that loads of good ideas don’t get followed up, but such is the way of the blog.  Huge thanks to all contributors and a Happy New Year to all readers. … read on …

amisquake: or u can’t spell “ESTABLISH THE CALIPHATE” w/o a “q”

i. BUQSHA, BURQA, FAQIR, INQILAB, MBAQANGA, MUQADDAM, QABALAH, QADI, QAIMAQAM, QALAMDAN, QASIDA, QAT, QAID, QANAT, QI, QIBLA, QIGONG, QINDAR, QINDARKA, QINGHAOSU, QINTAR, QIS, QIVIUT, QOPH, QWERTIES, QWERTY, QWERTYS, SHEQEL, SHEQALIM, SUQ, TALAQ, TRANQ, TSADDIQIM, TSADDIQ, TZADDIQIM, TZADDIQ, UMIAQ, WAQF, YAQONA … read on …

More Songs About Volleyball and Food

Following on from last night’s volleyballpop discussion on Lollards, I thought I’d do a quick post as a follow up with some links to the other songs I mentioned! Doing the theme tune to volleyball championships seems to be quite lucrative. I mentioned that the first NewS single was used as the theme to the 2003 World Volleyball Championships (although for convoluted reasons this wasn’t considered the band’s official ‘debut’!): ladies and gentlemen I present NewS NIPPON! Really, nothing, ever, could beat the awesomeness of this song which I loved for years before I even sought out the video which features dancing in space, Yamapi in shorts. They also appear to have borrowed some of Kylie’s spare C&A spacesuits - remember when Kylie went into space? Yeah! I could go on (seriously <3 <3) BUT there’s MORE to this volleyball lark!

Because - as it turns out, in 2005, ANOTHER NewS single was used as a volleyball theme, this time to the ladies volleyball championship! … read on …

Jump, They Say

Sorry, I don’t mean to turn this into the wacky world of inventions but these things keep nagging me from the edge of my consciousness. I’ll give you more on “The Scandal Of Skinny Water” later, but first let us look at the following statement. Bear in mind that when foreigners say “Jump Rope”, they mean Skipping Rope:

“JumpSnap founder, Brad LaTour, is a regular guy just like you, who struggled with his own weight for many years. He knew jumping rope was the best form of exercise to burn calories and lose inches, but tripping over the rope was incredibly frustrating. That’s why he invented JumpSnap. What started as the ropeless jumprope has grown to become so much more. “

… read on …

The Swish Of The Traditional Curtain Raiser

A question just occurred to me: does the phrase “traditional curtain raiser” get used AT ALL outside of a sporting context?

Actually I wondered if it even got used outside of the Community Shield context, but apparently it does - the Australian Grand Prix is a TCR, so is an MCC match at Lords.

It took until hit 35 on Google before a non-sporting traditional curtain was raised: hats off to the Malvern Spring Gardening Show, which is the traditional curtain raiser for the outdoor gardening show calendar, according to the Times.

What other non-sporting things have traditional curtain raisers? What should?

Intertotal Football

My adopted* Veikkausliiga (Finnish Premiership) team, FC Honka, seem to be suffering a touch of ’second season syndrome’, but I don’t mind, as one of my most enjoyable discoveries this summer has been the Football In Finland blog, written in English and always intelligent, entertaining and informative. This post is especially good, even if you’ve got no interest in the Finnish title race (such as it is) - it’s a reproduction of the programme notes from Tampere United’s recent Champions League qualifier game, and is a great look at playing in Europe from the minnow’s point of view:

And when we play in the Balkans or further east, where do you go for (e.g.) Armenian visas? Can you tell me where the nearest Armenian embassy is to Tampere? Apparently it’s a cash-only back-street alley in Tallinn. I know because I went there with 25 passports in my pocket back in 2002. 

*via the thoroughly modern method of picking them a couple of years ago in a Championship Manager game, because I liked the name.