the sanctimonious and hard to please multimillionaire
below i quote extensive proof of why the fiver is something the great coffeehouse tattlers of the eighteenth century would have been proud to write.
Barry Glendenning
Thursday 2 July 2009
DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DONOVAN
The Fiver yields to no man in its admiration for American rhythm mag Sports Illustrated. At least that’s what we thought until this morning, when we learned that the collection of archive copies dating back to 1964 that we keep under our mattress isn’t as complete as we thought. It turns out they publish 51 other issues per year, issues in which photos of scantily-clad models playfully hooking their thumbs into each other’s string bikinis are forced to make way for less adventurously illustrated articles … about sport. For reasons best known to the Fiver, it seems that three million red-blooded American males take a weekly interest in this tedious nonsense. That’s almost half as many as take the Fiver.
It’s not as if these articles about sports are particularly incisive. Take this month’s issue, in which an extract from Grant Wahl’s book The Beckham Experiment sensationally reveals that David Beckham may not have had the best interests of LA Galaxy at heart when he retired from football to hang around with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes while occasionally playing soccerball in the MLS for $800m-per-year back in 2007, and that USA! USA! USA! star Landon Donovan got the hump when it was decided that he be stripped of the team’s captaincy so that Becks could be given the armband. A cynic might say that one over-rated blue-eyed poster-boy with a glamourous celebrity wife was jealous at being replaced by another. Not that Donovan’s ever been good enough to be considered over-rated, although he does win the celebrity wives.
“All that we care about at a minimum is that he committed himself to us,” moaned Landon, before spelling out The Rules of Engagement for the man whose time at the Galaxy has been as disastrous for the club as the Fiver predicted it would be six months before he first played for them. “As time has gone on, that has not proven to be the case in many ways - on the field, off the field. Does the fact that he earns that much money come into it? Yeah. If someone’s paying you more than anybody in the league, more than double anybody in the league, the least we expect is that you show up to every game, whether you’re suspended or not.” It’s a valid enough grumble, albeit one smothered by an acrid cloud of sour grapes.
Riper grapes feature in a vino-related vignette featured in the Sports Illustrated bit on Becks, relating to the time he and Abel Xavier were refused wine in a restaurant while out dining with their Galaxy team-mates because American restaurants and bars are staffed by idiots and they were unable to prove they were over 21. They got to join their team-mates in a toast once one of Beckham’s bodyguards pulled The Big “they are”, although Donovan became riled when “cheapskate” Beckham only paid his own share of the bill, rather than risk being labelled a “flash Harry” by covering the entire tab for a group of team-mates … including the sanctimonious and hard-to-please multi-millionaire Landon Donovan.
freedom at midmorning
great writing on yesterday’s high court decision. [via aadisht.]
newsflash: reading charles dickens will not help you deal with the economic crisis.
includes the hilarious line, “dickens is this year’s jane austen.” takes on the puzzling viewpoint that charles dickens’ literary preoccupations with money are somehow relevant to the present recession. …i don’t even know what to say, except that if you are from the novel-reading class of society, pride and prejudice is the one book that will teach you everything you ever needed to know about what money can do to human relationships.
[reminded of the harry potter fanfic i read the other day in which someone mentioned charles dickens was a slytherin who got rich peddling stories to muggles. great characterisation.]
homosexuality happens everywhere, so gays fight to be themselves everywhere
johann hari on fighting the long fight.
the ticking time bomb in the subcontinent
climate change. not news, but worse to contemplate every time it gets aired - which is not all that frequently.
