Back in the siddle

Ben's Old Ruts beat Reeds Weybridge quite handily yesterday which was quite gratifying as I don't recall us defeating them on the road before.

According to the teamer app, next weekend is Farham. I don't know if that is a typo of Fareham or Farnham and I don't know if it is home or away.

The Sunday after that we are playing London Welesh. I image that is London Welsh, but possibly we should invest in a club spell checker.

Dig the new breed

Right as the Wales national anthem finishes, Ben Woodburn slams home his debut goal. The beautiful game never fails. pic.twitter.com/b0gFPcZoSW

— Rex (@DoFRex) September 2, 2017

I sacrificed a party to see this. It was worth it.

Address to the nation

I don't know anything about Kenyan politics at all but this is a very impressive performance.

To infinity and beyond

Here's a picture of Callum with Jadon Sancho when they were playing for England in the European Under-17 Championship. It wasn't headline news yesterday as the transfer window closed, but Sancho become the latest young English player to move overseas after Borussia Dortmund confirmed the 17-year-old had joined from Manchester City for a fee understood to be around £8m.

He will wear the No7 shirt vacated by Ousmane Dembélé when he joined Barcelona for an initial £95m last week.

No pressure then.

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.

I'm about to start reading Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It as Evan Davis' event at the Wimbledon Bookfest early in October is among the three or four I mean to go to this year.

Dr Strabismus Rises Again

Whoppercoin is a cryptocurrency you can eat or trade. It’s part of a loyalty program launched by Burger King Russia.

Ford and Domino’s Pizza are teaming up to test self-driving pizza delivery cars in Michigan, as part of an effort to better understand how customers respond to and interact with autonomous vehicles.

It's Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht's world, we just live in it.

Silk Road: Drugs, Death and the Dark Web

I watched a documentary looking at the black market website known as the Silk Road on the BBC iplayer last night. This 'Amazon of illegal drugs' - the brainchild of a mysterious, libertarian intellectual operating under the avatar The Dread Pirate Roberts - emerged in 2011, promising its users complete anonymity and total freedom from government regulation, and grew into a multimillion-dollar (denominated in Bitcoin) digital drugs cartel.

Fascinating stuff, especially considering that two of the last three books I read were Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey and Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones.

It is available for another 22 days here.

Cardiff

The Blues beat reigning Aviva Premiership champions the Exeter Chiefs in a pre-season friendly on Friday, then the City beat QPR on Saturday to nail themselves to the top of the Championship.

And Dan Fish is back from his long term injury.

And Colin Jackson has come out.

All systems go in Wales' capital.

Conor McGregor's news conference after losing to Floyd Mayweather

nante Hampsteads, nante minces, nante riah, nante everything

... The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound...

Yep, I'm back in Cardiff.

Old Friends From High School Meet Up Every Year To Say Names Of Former Classmates

The Onion

Convening at their hometown bar to grab a drink and catch up on things, a group of old high school friends reportedly met up on Thursday as per their yearly tradition of saying the names of their former classmates. “Hey, remember that guy Dave Getler?” asked 32-year-old Kim Blackburn to a group of nodding Granville High alumni, each of whom took their turn listing a series of mutual acquaintances from the specific four-year period in their lives. “How’s Marcy Levesque doing? Anyone hear from her? Oh, who was Shane Cook and Trevor O’Malley’s buddy who used to date Karen Hest? Tanner Smith? I remember he would always sit with Devon and Sean in algebra—okay, now ‘Sean Houlihan’ is a name I haven’t heard in a million years.” At press time, those friends who still lived near each other agreed that there was no reason to wait another year to get together and say the names of former classmates as a smaller group.

That'll be me, Phil and Tim in the Claude later if everything goes to plan.

Tooting you own horn

Lonely Planet has pronounced on 10 of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods to visit right now.

Borgo San Frediano, Florence
Seongsu-dong, Seoul
The Triangle, Lisbon
Vesterbro, Copenhagen
Business Bay, Dubai
Damansara Heights, Kuala Lumpur
Sunset Park, New York City
Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro
Frelard, Seattle
Tooting, London

Myself: Tooting?

Prodnose: Tooting in South London has developed into an uber-cool neighbourhood in recent years and lost none of its gritty charm in the process. Rubbing shoulders with perfectly pleasant yet slightly square Wimbledon, Earlsfield and Balham, Tooting is a more captivating affair, revelling in multiculturalism and originality. Its high street, which stretches between two Tube stations, is one of the best ‘curry corridors’ in the country, and contains some superb South Asian restaurants, like Dosa n Chutny and Apollo Banana Leaf. The best shopping can be found inside eclectic Tooting Market, and quirky bars and pubs include The Castle, The Antelope and The Little Bar. The Tooting Commons create over 200 acres of green between them, and are home to Tooting Bec Lido – the largest swimming pool in the United Kingdom.

85a Lower Richmond Road

Rod is back in Blighty from Greece and John is in town from New Zealand, so last night (and more than thirty one years after I moved out) we met up for a drink in the Half Moon pub which is a stone's throw from the flat we used to share with a revolving cast of colourful characters.

According to Zoopla, it is worth £583,000 now.

We must have left it in a better state than I remember.

A Raindrop in the Ocean: The Life of a Global Adventurer

I'll be starting on this new book shortly. It sounds fascinating. Here is a piece from the Torygraph on a life well lived.

Tubby, you go rest your thumbs. I'll drive.

RIP Jerry Lewis. I've always loved this scene. Dunno why, but there you go.

That went quickly

Time for Ben to apply for a provisional license if he wants to start learning to drive on his 17th birthday.

Premier League 2

Callum has been playing for Chelsea in something called Premier League 2 of which I have never heard, so here is the skinny:

It is a new competition that replaced the Under-21 Premier League from 2016/17, with a greater focus on technicality, physicality and intensity to bring players as close to first-team experience as possible.

The age limit for players has risen from Under-21 to Under-23.

The league will take on the same format of two tiers, Division 1 and Division 2, with 12 teams in each, and the factor of promotion and relegation.

The 24 clubs who compete each applied for 'Category One' status in the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP). There are 15 clubs from the Premier League and nine clubs from the Championship.

All players born after 1 January 1993 for the 2016/17 season are eligible to play, and the format stays as follows:

There are 12 teams in Division 1 and 12 in Division 2, with every club playing each other once at home and once away

In Division 1, the team who finish first are champions

The bottom two teams in Division 1 get relegated to Division 2
In Division 2, the league winners get automatic promotion to Division 1

Teams ranked second, third, fourth and fifth go into a promotion play-off

Second plays fifth place at home and third hosts fourth in the semi-finals, both at the club’s main stadium, while the final takes place at the home ground of the team who finished highest in the league

All play-off matches are one-off ties, decided by extra-time and then penalties if the match is level after 120 minutes

There is no relegation from Division 2

Teams in Division 1
Arsenal, Chelsea, Derby County, Everton, Leicester City, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Reading, Southampton, Sunderland, Tottenham Hotspur

Teams in Division 2
Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Brighton & Hove Albion, Fulham, Middlesbrough, Newcastle United, Norwich City, Swansea City, Stoke City, West Bromwich Albion, West Ham United, Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Chelsea are on top as I write and Callum got both their goals in the first game. Not too shabby when you think he was born in the year 2000 and players both any time in 1993 are eligible.

Fast was good. Faster is better.

A little-known feature of the 2nd-generation Amazon Fire TV Stick, which Amazon has never advertised, is that it supports USB OTG by default. This allows you to connect much more than a power cord to the device’s micro USB port, like wired keyboards, mice, hubs, and external storage, but by far the most common use is to connect an Ethernet adapter in order to get a fast and stable internet connection to the Fire TV Stick. If all you want to do is connect the Fire TV Stick to Ethernet, this all-in-one Ethernet adapter by UGREEN is by far the easiest way to go.

Thanks AFTV News, via Google's machine learning estimate of my wants and needs, one is on the way to Browne Acres.

the path of totality

TIME

A universal pop song and the universe are about to align.

Guests aboard the Royal Caribbean's Total Eclipse Cruise have an extra surprise in store for their once-in-a-lifetime viewing experience: Bonnie Tyler, the Welsh songstress of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" fame, will be on board to perform her 1983 hit just as the moon sails across the sun. (The cruise ship will be positioned in the path of totality for this critical moment. “Bonnie Tyler was a natural choice for this once-in-a-lifetime moment," said the president and CEO of Royal Caribbean International, Michael Bayley.)

Forever's gonna start tonight. Forever's gonna start tonight.

NSFW

Charlottesville: Race and Terror – VICE News

I'll watch this later. Not looking forward to it, but it needs to be done.