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29 July 2010
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I know football is not best known for its contributions to English grammar, but it continually
strikes me how it should hang its head in equal shame over some of the highly distorted
information it gives. Think back to the World Cup final when English referee Howard
Webb ‘showed’ almost the whole lot of players yellow cards. But come on! He didn’t show
them the cards at all, how are they supposed to see them when he just waves them over
their heads? Show? Surely the word implies some kind of visual experience, a transfer
of detail from the object to the beholder leaving them informed as to the appearance of
something. Show? Surely this means that time is given to savour the textures and colours of
something. Would you want to go to see the Mona Lisa to have somebody wave it over your
head? Football has it all wrong, how many of those players that went in the official’s book
could accurately describe the contours and dimensions of those cards after the game. None!
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Because they weren’t given chance to see the damn things!
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It was even worse for that guy who got sent off, when Webb displayed the red card supposedly so he could have a bit of a shufty he wouldn’t even let the guy hang around to appreciate it. It’s a cruel world.
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Less so in Italy which is just as wonderful as ever. My camera managed to remind me that it doesn’t work so here are some inferior snaps taken on my phone...
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... which you might like to note do not contain any images of Venice, (either that or I’m waving those over your head). There didn’t seem any point going there despite being so near. I had gone to visit friends in Bassano del Grappa...
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... and then on to Trento to see some more, who weren’t there but in fact right in the north of Trentino where they grow apples. I went up to see them (friends), there were millions of them (apples). So if you look more closely at these pictures than Wayne Rooney gets to look at the many cards he gets, you’ll see a fair range of evidence that I take a lot of pointless pictures. Point and press, so easy.
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As usual I refused to speak English to anybody even in the airport although by now it’s hardly an issue, people can tell it’s not necessary, but I did take slight offence at the airport when some jobsworth tried to use his five words of English. Sometimes I overreact, this time it was cheeky, I don’t need ‘please’ translating, and he knew that.
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The only other person who annoyed me was a German (I think) who was staying in our hostel room. The hostel in Trento is pretty neat, I would recommend it if only for its lockable lockers. Bliss. But not if this bearded oddball is staying there. I expect I’m no better, but this guy took two and a half hours to get ready for bed. He walked slowly round the room, sometimes completely starkers, picking one thing up at a time and coming in and out of the bathroom. He had about twelve showers, although admittedly he could have been washing his socks. By the time he did go to bed it was close to half one, and those still awake were beginning to get annoyed. Not intensely, it wouldn’t have come to trouble, but the huffing and puffing wasn’t just coming from me, trust me.
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21 July 2010
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| I’m sitting on a broken chair wondering if it’ll last the time it takes me to write the blogge without collapsing. Then I should probably admit to wondering if I’ll last the time it takes me to write it without running out of ideas. July’s been a continuation of June in the ‘lack of desire to write’ sense. I suppose I should qualify it, it’s not a lack of ingredients but instead culinary technique, I have things to say but no real plan of action re: their articulation.
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| Being back in England has had its benefits, the main one being fresh air. We’re not blessed air-wise in Almaty and the chance to clear a few airways has been gladly taken. A week into a six week break and I must say it’s been a nice rest. I’ve consulted with alternative health gurus who have sorted my problems out immediately, as always, lounged round in the sauna and even found time to mark a few exams just across the Welsh border. By contract I’m not supposed to publish what kind of examiner I am but it is an English exam and not TOEFL, which stinks.
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| It was interesting to examine more than the usual range of suspects, the ongoing 6s and occasional 5s and 7s. This time I was plunged into the unpredictable Bangor testing room from which candidates emerged with scores as low as 3 and as high as 8. Top is 9. Most of them were Chinese and all of them scored lowest on pronunciation, and highest on vocabulary. I also tested a native speaker, odd in some ways but Australian immigration rules are the same for everybody so she needs to pass the exam. I can sneakily hint that she got the score in Speaking but was not involved with her other tests so don’t know if she can emigrate.
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| Many of the candidates were native speakers of English and from what they were saying in their essays, they mostly work for the National Health Service and want out. The shockingly low salaries are more than matched by those on offer down under (Australia for those who don’t know) and their hope for better working conditions is likely to be reasonable in itself, too. Yet I fell into the trap of thinking them all Welsh, wanting to leave Wales. Wrong! Some of these candidates had travelled from the north of England where life can be equally as grim as the north of Wales.
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| I was pleasantly surprised how Bangor had improved since I was last there. And as the old song put it, yes, I had a lovely time.
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| I’ve got a new watch, neither analogue nor digital but binary. You need to learn to read the little blobs. On means 1, off means 0. I suppose it’ll take some getting used to, but whether for geeks or freaks, it’s certainly off the beaten track, and I was only too happy to sacrifice some of the other functions I was hoping to get. It was an early birthday present from mum, who also got me a 500GB hard drive too. Thank you :)
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| One of the things that has struck me about England since being back is the amount of people who are evidently struggling with something. Most people seem to be overweight, some shockingly so, others walk like they’re carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Some as young as 40 walk with the aid of crutches or sticks, others seem to have mental problems. I could go on. I just don’t see people like this in Kazakhstan. Occasionally maybe, not everybody is slim there but almost everybody is. People seem more dynamic than a lot of those here. We could speculate as to the causes, but it’s fairly clear that something’s not working.
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| My annual trip to Italy starts today and I don’t plan to write any blogges there, although I should admittedly get finally to my Italian blogge page which I haven’t even started yet :(
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| For the next week the priority is to banish the annual fret, the fear that I can no longer speak Italian. Last year it took ten minutes to reassure myself. Hoping for a similar result this year.
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6 July 2010
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Back in the days when people still used floppy disks these new fangled flash what-dja-me-call-ems held something like 128MB and while a big step up from the 3.5 inch option, a stick that small today just wouldn’t sell. I’ve noticed the obsession people seem to have with storage of this nature and I bet half of the people who own a memory stick of more than 8GB capacity have barely ten per cent of it taken up by anything worthwhile. The growth of my collection parallels the growth of my compulsion to back everything up. We’ve had some sinister viruses at work recently and the risk of infecting my own PC is a pretty dreadful thought, so everything is saved in plural locations.
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I’ve got two decent PQI flash cards which have a write protect mechanism (which is now a priority), but by now they don’t hold all my teaching files so I need to upgrade sizewise. Should be easy enough, these days you can buy external hard drives with thousands of gigabytes’ space to save to. So far, every time I’ve bought a bigger unit, I’ve found ways of rendering it too small. 500 gigabytes? That’s a lot of lesson plans.
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World Cup, boring or what? I admit it’s got a lot better, but nothing much worth writing about. So I won’t.
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But it does lead me to a point I wanted to make a few days ago, when it would have been the only thing on the blogge thus it never happened, about goal line technology. The Wigan chairman, Dave Whelan, made a very interesting point about introducing some kind of electronic (whatever) system which would guarantee an instant and correct decision as to whether the ball had crossed the line. This technology does exist and has been trialled in I think Germany. Now I’m cynical, I think FIFA reject the idea so they can exert outside influence on refereeing, but I’ve never heard the point made by anyone else. Dave Whelan didn’t bother to speculate as to the hows, whys and WTFs but just spat out a passionate plea for a little adolescent pig-headedness; and I paraphrase, England and the other teams should ‘refuse to play’ in these competitions until they introduce this technology.
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The act of throwing toys out of prams generally meets with disdain from those they hit, or those who just witness the event. We are supposedly bound to some loose schedule called growing up whereby, for example, we leave dummies behind at 2, nappies at about the same age, and tantrums behind approaching ten or eleven. OK, seems fair, but what’s so precious about maturity that we have to display it every time some muppet spoils something for us? OK, it’s a useful attribute (doubtless overwhelmingly), but sometimes surely the toys really do have to come out. All the ‘mature’ FIFA talk has led to nothing but the same endless excuses about preserving the simplicity of a beautiful game. But at the expense of fairness? In order to get things done, I feel the stiff British upper lip could be shelved sometimes as we sort things out the French way.
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In about 1988 when the organisers of professional cycling tried to enforce the donning of helmets the cyclists lined up for the start wearing helmets, were waved off and then promptly took their helmets off, got off their bikes and refused to ride. All of them. What happened next? The rule was very promptly changed.
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Instead of listening to the likes of Blatter and Platini spouting, football players everywhere should get together and do as the cyclists did. When the ref blows for kick off, they should just sit down and refuse to play. I might not be advocating making a habit of it, but I think it has its place.
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Incidentally, while footballers get paid a lot, so do FIFA executives, UEFA brown nosers and Premier League chairmen. There is money in football, that is the reality of the market and the world passion and interest that the sport generates has created a neat pile of cash. More money should be invested in the grass roots of the game, but this would still leave a lot available to pay club employees. It’s either big salaries for the players, or more cash for the chairmen. Take your pick.
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I wonder if most of the people whingeing about footballers’ handsome remuneration stop to consider that JK Rowling, Orlando Bloom and CEOs of companies like MacDonald’s, which most people happily patronise, are paid a lot more than any football player. So’s Roger Federer, I don’t think I’ve ever heard any gripes expressed about tennis players being rich. Having said that, footballers are often very out of touch with the realities of life and the shocking manner in which England let themselves down in South Africa probably proves this.
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Last time I was on Facebook I discovered (without wanting to) that Michael Ballack is on, with a friends list which includes somebody called Ronnie O’ Sullivan, whose list includes Mark Williams. Not sure if it’s all for real like, but who cares? I’ve made my views about Facebook here before, they haven’t changed. This week three people have requested I join their friends list. One of them was a close friend and I felt guilty letting him down. Two of them were people I’ve never even heard of. What’s the point? Facebook isn’t about quality of friendship, it’s about quantity of friends, most of whom are nothing like friends as I would understand the word. And sadly some people I would consider real friends turned out not to be when Facebook was to be the only way they would keep in touch. Keep in touch doesn’t mean universal, badly spelt and irrelevant messages on your wall.
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Better an occasional email or SMS written for me than some undecipherable bellowing on the message board. By now I know who my real friends are, and most of them were on Facebook with me, but in turn, most of them have time for me away from the superficial world of tagged photos and pokes.
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I felt that there was enough call to rewrite part of my Kyrgyzstan page and in the most shocking and saddening way has my observation about there not being the ‘slightest hint of racial nor religious tension’ been proven at best questionable, at worst tragically wrong. I have the most amazing job and get to share the lives of some of the most amazing people, so I know I can see the world through rose tinted spectacles sometimes, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I wouldn’t rewrite the page. My website is a personal diary, OK, rather too introspective in places I know, but it’s not a travel guide nor a documentary, I write about the world as I experience and see it. I never saw anything in Kyrgyzstan that prepared me for recent events, not in Bishkek nor in Osh.
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I’ve included a new introduction, guess it had to be said.
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I noted recently that my old school in Bishkek is advertising for teachers. I think it’s a sign that the new government has got things under control a bit, the school did tell me that. Let’s hope so. Kyrgyzstan may not have a name that trips off the tongue nor a presence on the world stage which commands immediate respect from the teeming masses, but take it from me, it’s a bloody nice place.
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