Soc it to me

According to the ratings, just less than 13 million Americans watched Saturday’s World Cup match between the U.S. and England.

Or, put another way, 296 million Americans did not watch. *

It was the highest rated World Cup match on American TV since 1994.

BTW, do you know where the term soccer comes from? According to something I read, as various forms of football evolved in the late 19th century, the form Americans now call soccer came to be known as Association Football. FIFA, for example, is the acronym in French for the organization known in English as the International Federation of Association Football, Fédération Internationale de Football Association.

The soc in soccer comes from the soc in Association.

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* I’m just picking on Hugh. Actually the 7.5 rating for the England-U.S. match is about the same as the NBA Finals and not all that bad. And it’s 13 million Americans ages 18-49 who watched. People older and younger than that do not count. So, probably it was just 290 million Americans who did not watch.

June 14th

Diablo Cody is 32 today. Donald Trump is 64. Kevin McHale of Glee is 22.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born 82 years ago today in Rosario, Argentina. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has a profile of the man we know as Che Guevara.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on this date in 1811. This from The New York Times obituary in 1896:

It has already been hinted how the book came to be written. Escaping slaves were familiar to her. She heard their stories, she saw their wounds, she helped their flight. Uncle Tom was the husband of a domestic in her family, and his death was the chapter first written. Topsy was a pickaninny named Celeste who lived on Walnut Hills, Cincinnati. Eliza’s escape across the ice floating in the Ohio was an incident recorded in the press of that period by a witness of it, and so the story came to her eyes. Thus she was brimming over with her topic when she was asked to write a story for The National Era. It was begun in the expectation that it would run through a month or so, but it was scarcely finished within a year. Week by week, the installments were produced and read aloud to the family before being dispatched to the narrow circle of readers who saw it first. To say that it was not appreciated in serial form is to state the case mildly. Her publisher was anxious for her to stop. Her brother, Henry Ward, warned her to cut it short, lest its length should prevent printing it as a book. She answered them never a word. Her genius was in travail, and, whatever others might think, she could not stop or turn.

It’s said that when Abraham Lincoln met Ms. Stowe he remarked, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war!” It’s doubtful that actually happened, but her novel (and play) was instrumental in telling the story of slavery better and to more people than it had been told before.

Flag Day

On this date in 1777 the Continental Congress approved a national flag:

Resolved, that the Flag of the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the Union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation.

In 1916 President Wilson issued a proclamation declaring June 14 Flag Day.

The present design of the flag was established in 1818 — thirteen stripes to represent the original states and a star for each state. Until 1912 the arrangement of the stars was left to the discretion of the flag-maker. The current flag with 50 stars was established on July 4, 1960, when Hawaii was admitted to the Union.

The Star-Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 had 15 stars and 15 stripes.

 Avenue in the Rain, Childe Hassam

“Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance by Act of Congress on this date in 1954.

Another fine debut

Don Nava of the Red Sox came up for his first Major League at bat yesterday in the second inning with the bases loaded.

And he sent the first Major League pitch he ever saw into the right field seats for a grand slam home run.

Lest we get too excited, the only other major leaguer to hit the first pitch he saw for a grand slam was Kevin Kouzmanoff.

Who?

Doing the Chicken

When England’s goalie Robert Green fumbled Mr. Dempsey’s weak shot, he committed what Brazilians call a “frango,” Portuguese for chicken. Minutes after the goal, Brazilian soccer commentators were already talking about the “biggest chicken in World Cup history.” Today, the front-page headline in the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo was simply “English Chicken.” In another usage, Mr. Green “swallowed a chicken.”

The Brazilian use of the word chicken shouldn’t be confused with American slang for cowardice. For Brazilians, chicken is a soccer metaphor reserved for shocking goaltending mistakes. It’s what happens when an armless animal like a chicken tries to defend the net.

The Daily Fix – WSJ

Tonight’s film

Omigoodness. Tonight’s film was as good or better than last night’s (Sin Nombre), which was better than the night before’s (Paris, je t’aime), which was better than the night before that (The Band’s Visit) — and that first one was terrific.

Via DVD from Netflix tonight I watched Captain Abu Raed, a 2007 film made in Jordan, in Arabic with English subtitles. Abu Raed is an elderly widower who works as a janitor at the Amman airport. Neighborhood children mistake him for a pilot — a captain — when he retrieves a captain’s hat from the airport trash. A self-educated man, Abu Raed tells the children stories of places in the world; places he’s never been and the children themselves are unlikely to ever see. From there, the movie focuses on Abu Raed’s growing friendship with a female airline pilot and two of the children.

Superbly told, superbly acted, with a few surprises along the way. The movie is amusing, but dramatic, even heart-wrenching as it develops.

Beautifully filmed with wonderful views of Amman.

All four of the films this week were excellent and each highly recommended.

‘[E]very time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes’

If you’re reading this blog post on a computer, mobile phone or e-reader, please stop what you’re doing immediately. You could be making yourself stupid. And whatever you do, don’t click on the links in this post. They could distract you from the flow of my beautiful prose and narrative.

Nick Bilton – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

Bilton goes on to discredit that theory and survey some recent thinking on the topic. Among other things, his discussion led me to this:

And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

Steven Pinker

Both are worth reading if you’re not too distracted.

Best line of the day

I read another comment on Severson’s story: “So, from the picture, does this look like a good job? I mean really! Maybe this ‘way of life’ wasn’t so great after all?”

To that commenter, I say this: I’m with you, if what you mean is these people should be treated and paid with respect. But if what you mean is, as I suspect, all this talk of goodbye to Gulf seafood is just romanticized bullshit, I can tell you that it’s hard work and it can suck and you can get carpal tunnel and you stand in the cold all day and stink like low tide, but for many people working these jobs, it’s what they’ve got.

Francis Lam – Salon.com

Best line of the day

“Waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon is sort of like waiting for the Cubs to win the World Series. In theory, it’s overdue to happen, and when it does, it will be huge. But until then, it’s best to treat it as a fantasy—an event so unlikely that we’d be wise to go about our normal lives until we see real evidence of it actually occurring.”

Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine

Scenes from the Gulf of Mexico

Based on recently revised estimates, BP’s ruptured oil well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico continues to leak 25,000 to 30,000 barrels of oil a day. The new figures suggest that an amount of oil equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster could still be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico every 8 to 10 days. Despite apparent efforts to restrict journalists from accessing affected areas, stories, video and photographs continue to emerge. Collected here are recent photographs of oil-affected wildlife, people and shorelines around the Gulf of Mexico on this, the 51st day after the initial explosion. (41 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Tonight’s film

Via Netflix streaming I watched the 2009 film Sin Nombre (Without Name) tonight. It’s a U.S.-Mexican production filmed in Spanish. (The version I saw had English subtitles.) The movie won the dramatic directing award for Cary Joji Fukunaga and a cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival last year.

A remarkable and well done film that portrays a part of the immigration story from the other end. Sayra, her father and uncle are attempting to migrate to the U.S. from Honduras to join the father’s new family in New Jersey. Willy, aka El Casper, is a violent gang member in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico. His loyalties are divided between the gang and his girlfriend, however, so that neither trusts him. This leads to trouble which ultimately puts him on the same train northward through Mexico as Sayra.

The acting is excellent throughout, the pace brisk but never hectic, the violence appropriate to the circumstances.

I gave this five out of five on Netflix. I thought it was that good.

According to background I read about this movie, many of the extras portraying immigrants in the movie were in fact immigrants. As director Fukunaga reportedly said, he didn’t have to tell them what to do.

He must think he works for BP

“Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told lawmakers on Wednesday that the riser cut increased flow four to five percent — though given the extraordinary range of guesses involved, it’s hard to fathom how he could be so sure.”

Dan Froomkin

Here it is, live. I’d say it’s about 2.475% better than yesterday. What do you think? Your guess is as good as anybody else’s.

Another damn socialist

“Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it.  We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that.”

Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

America, the land of double-entry bookkeeping. If it’s in the black, it’s profit. If it’s in the red, it’s the government’s problem.

And, of course, heterosexuals aren’t really all that into pornography

A contributor to the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston said yesterday he regretted a portion of a column that has infuriated gay Catholics in the region.

In the column, published last week, the writer argued that one reason the children of gay parents should not be admitted to Catholic schools is the “real danger’’ that they would bring pornography to school.

That allegation, plus several others in the column, has drawn a torrent of criticism from gay rights advocates.

And yesterday, the editor of the paper, The Pilot, said in a statement, “The tone of the piece was strong, and we apologize if anyone felt offended by it.’’

. . .

The Boston Globe

Hard to understand why anyone would take offense at that.

Tonight’s film

Tonight via Netflix streaming I watched Paris, je t’aime (Paris, I Love You), a 2006 montage about love in Paris consisting of 20 independent five-minute stories, one after the other, created by 20 filmmakers with an international cast, among them Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Ben Gazzara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Nick Nolte, Natalie Portman, Gena Rowlands and Elijah Wood.

Not surprisingly, the 20 episodes varied considerably — some appealing more than others; some where five minutes was too long, some where it was too short, and some where it was just perfect. Several were touching; a few haunting.

In French with subtitles; some English.

Very, very enjoyable and different. Love comes in many forms.

Nice views and scenes from Paris, too.