Recently my beloved Liverpool were taken over by a couple of Americans. I have nothing against them per-se but they do not seem to understand quite what they have bought. This is not a franchise that they can play with, this club is much more important than that to paraphrase the great Bill Shankly.
Recently they have started to stray away from the Liverpool way and the team is not playing as well as it was earlier in the season, the extra players we should have brought in during the January transfer window have not been bought and one of the best managers in the world has been made to feel unwelcome. However, this being Liverpool the fans have not let it happen unopposed. There have been a number of shows of support for the manager including a march to the ground by a few thousand fans before a home game.
Now comes the most audacious idea of the lot. Get 100,000 fans together to buy the club for a cool £500 million ($1 billion!) so the club is owned in the same way as Barcelona. Never again will anyone be able to buy the club. The fans will elect the board and de-select them if they do not perform.
I think this is a fabulous idea and given the fact that the website for this scheme crashed not long after launch due to the number of people trying to visit it I am clearly not alone.
Watch this space.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
Why Liverpool FC?
One constant love of my life has been Liverpool FC. Footie was not part of my family life, my father being from the valleys and an ex-rugby player, winger, which oddly enough for the one season I was forced to play rugby at school was my position too). On that point it was not part of my school life either, my school was solidly a rugby school and the school rules stated that you could not play football within 30 metres of the school building and you could not play on the playing fields as it would “cut the turf up for the rugby boys”. Possibly one of the most asinine diktats in the history of eduction. Given the playground stopped about 20 metres away from the school building it was therefore physically impossible to legally play soccer.
Anyway, the one soccer match that we always watched was the FA Cup Final. In the 1970s out of the three channels available two carried coverage from early in the morning through to some time after five. Obviously we had to pick a team to support and I had no bias whatsoever from my father, when he was young Huddersfield used to battle for the title but it never reached the fires in the hillsides of Glamorgan. Sometimes I chose the team on the day, this would depend on how they came across in the various programmes prior to kick-off, such as “Meet the Teams”, chats with them at their hotel before they left for Wembley, the road to the final sections. However, one year I was incensed by the attitude of one player, especially when compared to the attitude of the opposition.
Malcolm MacDonald was the sort of striker that Newcastle fans always love, big, ballsy, almost the traditional English striker. He was also incredibly arrogant. In one interview he basically said Newcastle were far superior to Liverpool and they would wipe the floor with them in the final. Looking back not only is that sort of arrogance common in some people but it is also something that I take with a pinch of salt now. However, to my eight year old self this was unbelievably rude. The Liverpool players by contrast were the personification of the old-fashioned sportsmen. One of them, Ian Callaghan, had never been booked and throughout his professional career of almost 900 games for the only club he ever played for Liverpool he was never booked. Indeed the one booking he picked up, playing for England against Luxembourg (I think) was a travesty, it was not even a foul let alone a bookable offence. The Liverpool manager was one of those postwar Scots who came from a tough background and who never forgot those lessons; Jock Stein and Sir Matt Busby were two others in the same mold.
It was therefore clear to me from some days before the final who I would be supporting, Liverpool all the way. The build-up from early morning on TV showed that most of the Newcastle players were not as arrogant as their star centre forward but it was too late I had set my heart on Liverpool. The match itself showed that Malcolm MacDonald had been right about one thing, it was very one sided. Keegan, Toshack and the boys in red put three past Newcastle with no reply. They played beautiful football, skillful and not dirty. I had found my team. Just to put the tin hat on it their goalkeeper, Ray Clemence, shared the same birthday as me.
In the last 33 years the players have changed, the manager has changed, even the owners have changed (more of that in another post) but the ethos has stayed the same. Just as a recent example when Liverpool beat the non-League Havant and Waterlooville after twice going behind to the amateurs the Kop stayed behind to give the opposition a standing ovation. No other fans are as generous in their praise of opposition players, no other ground sounds like Anfield on a European night. No other club is quite like Liverpool, especially for me.
Anyway, the one soccer match that we always watched was the FA Cup Final. In the 1970s out of the three channels available two carried coverage from early in the morning through to some time after five. Obviously we had to pick a team to support and I had no bias whatsoever from my father, when he was young Huddersfield used to battle for the title but it never reached the fires in the hillsides of Glamorgan. Sometimes I chose the team on the day, this would depend on how they came across in the various programmes prior to kick-off, such as “Meet the Teams”, chats with them at their hotel before they left for Wembley, the road to the final sections. However, one year I was incensed by the attitude of one player, especially when compared to the attitude of the opposition.
Malcolm MacDonald was the sort of striker that Newcastle fans always love, big, ballsy, almost the traditional English striker. He was also incredibly arrogant. In one interview he basically said Newcastle were far superior to Liverpool and they would wipe the floor with them in the final. Looking back not only is that sort of arrogance common in some people but it is also something that I take with a pinch of salt now. However, to my eight year old self this was unbelievably rude. The Liverpool players by contrast were the personification of the old-fashioned sportsmen. One of them, Ian Callaghan, had never been booked and throughout his professional career of almost 900 games for the only club he ever played for Liverpool he was never booked. Indeed the one booking he picked up, playing for England against Luxembourg (I think) was a travesty, it was not even a foul let alone a bookable offence. The Liverpool manager was one of those postwar Scots who came from a tough background and who never forgot those lessons; Jock Stein and Sir Matt Busby were two others in the same mold.
It was therefore clear to me from some days before the final who I would be supporting, Liverpool all the way. The build-up from early morning on TV showed that most of the Newcastle players were not as arrogant as their star centre forward but it was too late I had set my heart on Liverpool. The match itself showed that Malcolm MacDonald had been right about one thing, it was very one sided. Keegan, Toshack and the boys in red put three past Newcastle with no reply. They played beautiful football, skillful and not dirty. I had found my team. Just to put the tin hat on it their goalkeeper, Ray Clemence, shared the same birthday as me.
In the last 33 years the players have changed, the manager has changed, even the owners have changed (more of that in another post) but the ethos has stayed the same. Just as a recent example when Liverpool beat the non-League Havant and Waterlooville after twice going behind to the amateurs the Kop stayed behind to give the opposition a standing ovation. No other fans are as generous in their praise of opposition players, no other ground sounds like Anfield on a European night. No other club is quite like Liverpool, especially for me.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Re-launch of my music weblog
Following problems with my original blogging software I have decided to bite the bullet and jump ship to a new package and all things being equal I am trying out WordPress and MarsEdit. It will take up to three days for the DNS data to percolate through the Internet.
I have written album and concert reviews only when really moved to do so since 2001 and I am going to add a new feature covering specific tracks that affect me. To start the ball rolling I will be listing my 10 favourite Prince songs.
Leave it a few days and then check out R145.com. Where did the name come from? It was my account number for some time at a specialist record shop where I used to order the majority of my CD's from back before the Internet made getting Japanese imports, rare, long deleted records and very limited editions much easier to come by for those of us daft enough to care.
I have written album and concert reviews only when really moved to do so since 2001 and I am going to add a new feature covering specific tracks that affect me. To start the ball rolling I will be listing my 10 favourite Prince songs.
Leave it a few days and then check out R145.com. Where did the name come from? It was my account number for some time at a specialist record shop where I used to order the majority of my CD's from back before the Internet made getting Japanese imports, rare, long deleted records and very limited editions much easier to come by for those of us daft enough to care.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Free Apple Gadgets?
I have found this site and it seems to offer free Apple kit (and other manufacturers). You simply sign up for an offer (I went for something from Corals but there is a wide choice including film rentals, credit cards and energy supply) and then pass on the good words to your friends. I am aiming for the iTouch. I will let you know how it goes. Oh and it is open to our American friends too.
Free Apple Kit
Free Apple Kit
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The Untimely Death of HD-DVD
With the recent news that Warner Brothers have jumped high def DVD format from HD-DVD to Blu-Ray the format wars appear to be all over bar the shouting. However, for those of us in the UK (or indeed anywhere outside the US if you can speak English) this is bad news. Why? Because there is only one region for HD discs, Region 1. This means any disc will work on any player anywhere in the world. No more waiting to play it on your region coded machine whilst it is sitting in the bargain buckets of America for a few bucks.
Take the recent definitive (I will believe it when I see it) release of Blade Runner. I bought the special edition five disc standard definition DVD version for £18- from a UK online retailer. I could have bought the HD version for the same price but the HD version in the UK only included the final cut of the film, whereas the five disc SD version contained the original US release, original international release, 1992 Director’s Cut as well as the final cut and all the extras you could think of plus another disc that had never occurred to you.
So what, I hear you say, or perhaps not but I shall plough on regardless, well the US got a five disc HD version too (well and a Blu-Ray version but Blu-Ray has traditional region coding and my PS3 is UK specific, so no joy there). Just for the really sad amongst you (okay and me too) there was even a special, special version issued in a Decker briefcase. Why did Warners, for it is their release, not deem those of us outside the US as worthy of the full shebang in high definition? Ridley is actually British, his films have made millions over here, so why did they think there was only the market for it in mainland America?
Since I now have an HD player (well it is the add-on for the X-Box 360 but it does the job) I also have the special, special HD-DVD version in a briefcase courtesy of PlayUSA.
My advice, if you have an HD-DVD player make hay whilst the stocks last and grab discs from wherever you can lay you region free hands on them.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Apple Things - Part 1
Now those who know me also know I am an Apple nut. I will cover my love affair with Cupertino in another posting but this intermittent series will just highlight some of the little extra programmes that make using Macs so much more enjoyable than hacking around in Windows land.
One simple little programme that I have constantly turned on is iStats Menu. It sits in the System Preferences app but displays in the top bar of Mac OS X. You can choose what exactly you want to monitor, as I work on a laptop I am conscious of the temperature of my system rather more than if I used a desktop so one stat is CPU temperature but if you click on it then it also displays the current temperatures for all the key components of the Dual Core system.
I also have the network monitor enabled, which shows KB per second both in and out. Again you can click on it for further information including the ability to launch both Network Preferences and the Network Utility, which is very useful for me as I move from one wireless environment to another.
The final one that I will highlight is the HDD monitor, this actually only shows the amount of space used, again given I have a laptop with a fairly small HDD this is quite important for me. I also have a number of external drives linked at home with my iTunes collection, movies, photographs, etc. and if you click on the HDD monitor it will show you the used space and the available space on all the drives you have attached.
This great little programme is available from iSlayer.com along with a number of other useful items.
One simple little programme that I have constantly turned on is iStats Menu. It sits in the System Preferences app but displays in the top bar of Mac OS X. You can choose what exactly you want to monitor, as I work on a laptop I am conscious of the temperature of my system rather more than if I used a desktop so one stat is CPU temperature but if you click on it then it also displays the current temperatures for all the key components of the Dual Core system.
I also have the network monitor enabled, which shows KB per second both in and out. Again you can click on it for further information including the ability to launch both Network Preferences and the Network Utility, which is very useful for me as I move from one wireless environment to another.
The final one that I will highlight is the HDD monitor, this actually only shows the amount of space used, again given I have a laptop with a fairly small HDD this is quite important for me. I also have a number of external drives linked at home with my iTunes collection, movies, photographs, etc. and if you click on the HDD monitor it will show you the used space and the available space on all the drives you have attached.
This great little programme is available from iSlayer.com along with a number of other useful items.
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