I spent last weekend Liverpool--the absence of postings this week can be partially explained by the fact that I was there for my brother's stag party. 

The quote of the weekend was innocently uttered by a member of our party while watching Saturday's Liverpool-Man U clash in a cavernous drinking emporium somewhere off the main shopping district.

A Liverpool goal had just been disallowed for off-side. We looked over and saw a fellow "viewer"--a cuboid individual who seemed to be vacuum-packed into his T-shirt and khakis--fall to the ground and literally writhe on the carpet in dismay.

"They take their football quite seriously here, don't they?" observed our stagee, guilelessly...


Incidentally, a sign that the apocalypse is well overdue could be spotted outside the Liverpool branch of Waterstone's.  Coleen McLoughlin, Asda model and girlfriend of footballer Wayne Rooney, is scheduled to plug her book, Welcome to My World, this Saturday. Please note, however, that "Signing time is discretionary."

Last night BBC4 screened an solid documentary on the decline of New York City during the 1970s, a steep fall from grace that culminated in the infamous blackout/riot of July 13-14, 1977.

The programme offered a survey of some of the factors that brought Gotham to its knees: the collapse of a once-dynamic manufacturing base, the near-simultaneous influx of workers from poorer regions looking for vanishing unskilled jobs, over-mighty unions that dictated the terms of employment, and a complaisant political elite that didn't have the stomach to look reality in the face.

Ummm...anyone know where I can get some candles cheap?

Adam Curtis's documentary "The Trap - What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?", shown on BBC2 last Sunday, presented the thinking person's conspiracy theory.  Think Don DeLillo rather than Dan Bown. So rather than arguing that Opus Dei covered up Mary Magdalene's male drag act or sputtering that the Carlyle Group masterminded 9/11, Curtis suavely contends that the greed and anomie that characterize today's "developed" societies are rooted in the intellectual games played in Cold War think-tanks, specifically the ever-sinister RAND corporation.

Game theory, pioneered by mathematician John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind and Nobel Prize fame), viewed people as essentially selfish actors whose sole motivation was gaining advantage over their opponents (i.e. everybody else on the planet). This alluringly Strangelovian concept was co-opted by economists and psychologists (principally the borderline charlatan R.D. Laing) to demonstrate that society and, on a micro level, the family were simply battlefields on which foes fought ceaselessly for the upper hand.

Or so Curtis says.

But throughout the slightly dizzying exposition, in which minatory electronica supplements some wonderfully esoteric archive footage, a mild voice (not quite as literal, one hopes, as the ones that spoke to John Nash) murmurs, "Well, that's pushing it bit." Because, despite the superficial cohesion of Curtis's syllogisms, their fallacious starting point, it seems to me, is common to all conspiracy theories--the idea that a group of men in a room planned the future we are now living.

Still, it beats watching You're A Star...

Now that every news mag in the U.S. wishes it were more like The Economist (see the "Reagan's Tears" cover for an example of Time's new Econo-like look), the New York Observer features a timely debunking of the British mag's occasionally colourless/pompous prose style:

"The Economist is less provocative than it is aggressively boring: “The last time he ran for president John McCain spent months rolling around New Hampshire in a bus, the Straight Talk Express.” “In the absence of reliable, up-to-date information, markets go awry.” The layout is even duller—thick columns of type wrapping from page to page, like a cross between the old New Republic and the telephone book. The back page is filled with currency tables (for those who would convert the 16 different cover prices longhand). The only nod to magazine aesthetics is the sheen of the paper stock."

I'll never again read an Economist analysis of, say, the U.S. current account deficit in quite the same way.

In the wake of Ireland's astonishingly unexpected win over Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup, drawls can be heard throughout the bosky suburbs of Dublin proclaiming "You know, I could delivery a pretty mean googly before the rugger took up all my time."

Meanwhile, the angst of Pakistan's defeat has been compounded by the death of the team's 58-year-old coach, Bob Woolmer. But for some, Woolmer's passing only seems like an appropriate response to such a catastrophic loss. On the BBC site, "Mohammad Iqbal, an inventory controller at a department store in Islamabad" spoke about Woolmer:

"I felt that he must have been a good man, a man who was sensitive enough to take the defeat to his heart."

It's always good to see sports fans with a sense of perspective.