S O C C E R

Teams I will cheer for this year during the World Cup (from each pool):

Poland/Ecuador (perpetual underdogs)
Ivory Coast/Netherlands (i like both)
England (in my blood)
Portugal (madeira)
Ghana (the african teams are always exciting to watch)
Australia (first appearance in awhile)
Togo (they would have quite the party if they won)
Tunisia (because it reminds me of Raiders of the Lost Ark)

No Ireland this time, alas. Teams I dislike:

Brazil
Germany
France
Argentina
Spain

I wonder if Iran and the USA will find a way to meet. I want the Ivory Coast or England to win.


Interesting how close the IC flag is to Ireland's... Ivory Coast was deep in war not long ago. Interesting account:

IVORY COAST, 2000
by TONY D’SOUZA
I was in Abidjan in 2000, shortly after General Robert Guei’s bloodless Christmas Eve coup, which eventually helped to usher in the bloodshed of the past six years in Ivory Coast. At the time, there was a small contingent of United States Marines in the city—the U.S. Embassy Guard. They were housed in a spacious apartment in a downtown high-rise in the Plateau district. I was in my first year with the Peace Corps, and whenever I was granted a break from my posting in the bush I’d travel to the city, to a Peace Corps-run hostel that was always crowded with volunteers. Now and again, eager to spend time with the white women among us, the marines would invite us over. They were well provisioned: alcohol, air-conditioning, and all the latest magazines, CDs, and DVDs. When they called, we’d round up a couple of cabfuls of the willing, and then happily dig into the marines’ top-shelf goods. The women needed little coercing—they enjoyed the Snickers bars, People magazines, and Bacardi as much as anybody.

The marines’ apartment—leather couches, tiled bathrooms, and a big-screen TV—was spotless, and they ferried between it and the Embassy in black armored S.U.V.s. They lived a life so sheltered and insular that they could have been anywhere. At the Embassy, they spent their shifts behind bulletproof glass, using an intercom to command visitors to present their papers through a narrow slot. They left the confines of partition and machine only on Sundays, when they would jog together through the leafy and exclusive Riviera district, to the delight of the few gardeners and shoeshine boys allowed in. Even then, they kept a tight phalanx: large, well-muscled white men rising and falling in sonorous unison in brand-new combat boots.

The marines also maintained a shelf of bottles at the Grand Bleu, a small night club in Deux Plateaux, with velvet couches, a cozy parquet dance floor, and a house stable of the finest prostitutes in West Africa. It was a de-facto social club for the white invested male—C.I.A. and Mossad agents, American timber and rubber men, Embassy functionaries, tenured teachers from the International School—and a definite no-go for unwashed Peace Corps volunteers. But, one night, that’s where we went—Albert and I. Albert was a fellow-volunteer, and famous among us for once having walked across the border into Mali to try to buy a camel. At the Grand Bleu, we shook cigarettes out of the mangled packs in the breast pockets of our crumpled shirts, and ordered neat whiskeys. Then we rolled our shoulders and sipped those whiskeys like two cowboys in Manhattan. All around us, conversation stopped just long enough to let us know we’d been noticed. Then we were ignored.

The marines were there, doing shots of Grey Goose, and they were animated and loud. We pieced together from their conversation that they had been invited to train some Ivorian commandos in sharpshooting at the military range, and that the Ivorians had closed their eyes as they shot, their bullets raising puffs of dirt from the turf.

“Can you believe these people?” one of the marines said, laughing, and shook his head. “They closed their fucking eyes.”

Albert and I leaned back against the bar to watch the women on the dance floor. They all wore long braids and hoop earrings, and were shuffling their feet as though half asleep. No one was dancing with them, so, after another whiskey, we went out to them. We held the girls close. Soon, we were kissing them. Then the club’s bouncers put us into headlocks with such force that we could feel ourselves beginning to pass out, and tossed us onto the street. We didn’t go to the Grand Bleu again.

A few weeks later, a story about the marines began to circulate. One night, they were watching a new DVD together—my guess is porn, but who knows—when the doorbell rang. The marines were not alarmed, because they had African security-service guards screening visitors down in the lobby. So one of the marines set down his bottle of beer on the glass coffee table and went to answer it. At the door was a gang of African bandits with AK-47s.

The marines jumped up from the couch and put up their hands, and, for whatever reason, the bandits made them strip down to their briefs. The bandits went into the marines’ closets, got out their uniforms, put them on, and began to sing and dance. Then they stubbed out their cigarettes on the floor, stuffed their pockets with liquor bottles and DVDs, and left. They didn’t steal anything major—just sang and danced in the uniforms while the marines held their balls and shivered.

The next morning, the marines canned their security guards, and the story got out. Soon, they moved from Plateau into a three-story maximum-security mansion with a metal detector and cameras, in Riviera, which was probably where they’d belonged in the first place. They kept a lower profile then. But the story remained popular, maybe because the only Ivorians with access to AK-47s then were government soldiers.

Here’s another story: During my Peace Corps training, I lived with a cocoa-growing family in a village in the south of the country. My host father, Donatien, was the choir director at the village’s Catholic church. He had two wives, and how that blended with Catholicism I don’t know. He liked me and wanted me to learn as much as I could about his people, the Ghwa. He showed me the tribe’s sacred tree, a towering thing in the forest with gris-gris tied like ornaments in its highest branches, and he taught me a few words of the tribe’s secret language, which was only for men. One day, he took me to the edge of the village, to an overgrown stretch of bracken on the bank of the Comoe River. He poked about in the elephant grass with a stick, pointing out thick cement slabs that were once the foundations of huts. Donatien said, “This is where the Dioula used to live.”

The Dioula were Muslim people from the north whom I’d soon be sent to serve. “What happened to them?” I asked.

Donatien stared at the foundations as though he were searching his memory. Then he said, “The price of cocoa fell, times became hard. We told the Dioula to go, but they refused.”

“What did you do?”

“We came in the night and killed them.”

Back at his compound, his many children ran to greet me, as they always did. Three of the little boys had their mouths stuffed with something, and they groaned and rolled their eyes with happiness as they tugged at my hands to make me notice.

“What do you have in your mouths?” I asked.

They threw back their heads and opened their jaws. Out flew three birds—a dash of yellow, two dashes of blue—and there was barely time for me to recognize what had happened before the colors had already disappeared in the sky.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Anyone in possession of a major truth that he can’t get others to accept begins to feel that he’s losing his mind. The skepticism he meets turns him into a soreheaded obsessive. After a while, he becomes “pedantic,” and then, inevitably, “condescending” and “humorless.” Al Gore has been in possession of a major truth about global warming for more than thirty years, and he has suffered the insults of political opponents, the boredom of ironists, and, perhaps most grievously, the routine taunts of a media society which dictates that if you believe in anything too passionately there must be something wrong with you. As many commentators have noticed, there are self-serving elements in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the epochal documentary that Gore, with expert Hollywood help (the director is Davis Guggenheim), has put together about his obsession. He appears as the noble-browed warrior of enlightenment, brooding over the ravaged earth and the weakness of man, once or twice too often. He mentions family tragedies, which were moving to me, but which strike some viewers as maudlin notes from a campaign biography. Yet the faults of the movie, semi-excusable as self-vindicating ploys, are nothing compared with its strengths. - The New Yorker

N B A
NYTimes

Commissioner David Stern's decision to stop anyone who isn't at least 19 years old (and a year out of high school) from entering the National Basketball Association draft creates a philosophical notion that's as easy to support as it is to criticize. On one hand, the move seems destined to improve the quality of the game and save a few misguided teenagers from throwing their lives away; at the same time, it appears to violate a legal adult's right to earn a living (while handing those same misguided teenagers academic opportunities they're likely to waste). It's hard to argue that awarding large contracts to Kwame Brown, Korleone Young and Leon Smith was not profoundly detrimental to their social and professional development; it's equally impossible to suggest there would have been any benefit in forcing LeBron James to spend a year at Duke. The deeper motive, of course, is that an enforced maturity will make the pro game less ragged by giving young players more time to polish their skills. The viability of that premise remains to be seen. But at least one aspect of the debate is irrefutable: the age limit is going to make draft night, on June 28, a lot more fun to watch.

Granted, it takes a certain kind of person (read: weirdo) to watch a draft for entertainment — the kind who watches C-SPAN. Most casual fans check in only periodically to see (a) whom their favorite team selected and (b) what's new in the world of very long suits. But the N.B.A. draft used to be a fascinating spectacle, at least compared with those of the National Football League and Major League Baseball; basketball is the only major sport in which a rookie can immediately redirect the trajectory of a franchise. If you followed the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament and then watched the N.B.A. draft, you could see, or at least imagine, how the league was evolving.

That changed with the selection of Kevin Garnett in 1995. Garnett shifted the paradigm for hoop greatness: suddenly, attending college was almost like admitting your game had flaws. College was for the staunchly nontranscendent. This put N.B.A. general managers in a troubling position: if they wanted a franchise-quality commodity, they were forced to pursue potential at the expense of all other qualities. They had to pick a concept. In 2001, Gilbert Arenas averaged 16 points a game for the University of Arizona, yet was ignored for the draft's entire first round; even though he was a proven scorer, his future seemed established and finite. The first two selections that year, Kwame Brown and Tyson Chandler, were high school post players whose true talents were unknown (and therefore assumed to be limitless). For the last 10 years, making top draft choices was like investing in the Internet in the late 90's.

This strategy had myriad consequences, not the least of which was making TNT's draft coverage borderline unfathomable. Once the introduction of high school kids dovetailed with the explosion of foreign players, watching the N.B.A. draft wasn't much different from watching the Women's National Basketball Association draft; I had roughly the same familiarity with most of the talent. In the winter of 2002-3, I consumed well over 100 hours of college basketball; on draft night, I had seen only 17 of the 58 players who were chosen. My introduction to most of those guys was a 30-second highlight reel shown while they meandered to the podium, and all of the reels looked identical. In 2004, 8 of the first 19 picks were high school students. They were nothing more than big-boned aliens.

The biggest advantage basketball has over other sports is the element of personality; the game doesn't involve many people, and you can see their whole faces. The players become familiar by default. As a result, there's something satisfying about following a basketball player's career. You feel like you (sort of) know the man, because you (sort of) knew him before. That's why I'll watch the draft this year. I didn't like all those high school players, but not because they were too young. I didn't like them because they were strangers.

It's reassuring to know that the future is going to resemble the past.

For long stretches, Gore is photographed talking before an audience with the aid of slides and charts. There are side trips to fissured ice caps, disappearing glaciers—the snows of yesteryear—and expanses of newly parched and broken terrain. The science is detailed, deep-layered, vivid, and terrifying. Every school, college, and church group, and everyone else beyond the sway of General Motors, ExxonMobil, and the White House should see this movie, and, with luck, they will. It’s great propaganda, but there are also passages in which Gore, off camera, speaks in an intimate voice that we’ve never heard before. He talks about lying beside a river on a lazy summer day—the commonplace idyll of a lone person in a tranquil ecstasy, utterly at home in nature. “An Inconvenient Truth” begins that way, and each time Gore returns to this enraptured mood, after a procession of nightmares and dangers, it has greater resonance. He knows that people find him exasperating, and he has learned to modulate his voice; one has the impression of a complex personality that has gone through loss, humiliation, a cruel breaking down of the ego, and then has reintegrated itself at a higher level. In the movie he is merely excellent. But in person—he is on a speaking tour to promote the movie—he presents a combination of intellectual force, emotional vibrancy, and moral urgency that has hardly been seen in American public life in recent years. It will be interesting to watch how skeptics will deal with Gore’s bad news on the environment without making themselves look very small.

Critics Blast Al Gore's Documentary As 'Realistic'
May 31, 2006 | The Onion

NEW YORK— The Al Gore-produced global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth is being panned by critics nationwide who claim the 90-plus minute environmental film is "too disturbingly realistic and well-researched to enjoy." "I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief in man-made climate change for the first half-hour—and utterly impossible after that—which makes for a movie-going experience that's far more educational than it is enjoyable," said New York Post film critic Skip Hack. "Gore's film overwhelms viewers with staggering amounts of scientific information until nothing about global warming is left to the imagination, and that's just not good entertainment. Two stars." Some critics have called the film's claims that sea levels could rise 20 feet somewhat sensationalistic, although most agree that this is not enough to save the film from being unwatchably factual.

What cartoons should you let your kid(s) watch?

Two books I just bought:

The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
By Jonathan Harr
In 1994 Jonathan Harr, author of ''A Civil Action," the gripping and beautifully fleshed-out investigation of chemical pollution in Woburn, published a magazine piece about the sensational discovery of a major Caravaggio painting at a Jesuit residence in Dublin.

It was a taut, immaculately paced account of the art world's most cherished fantasy: that somewhere in obscure attics and backstreet junk shops, a lost treasure lurks hidden under centuries of grime and neglect -- Cinderella in rags.

It is a fantasy hardly ever vindicated, but the rare once-in-a-while keeps it alive, like a poor man winning the Christmas lottery, though culturally far grander. The poor keep on ticket buying, junk-shop junkies keep on looking, and curators and restorers, armored in skepticism, never entirely seal themselves off from the itch.

Now Harr has turned his article into a book, ''The Lost Painting." It has to be said at once that it is far different from the usual such expansion (a matter of padding and stretching with additional research and more details). After nine years' work he has produced the vibrant painting to the preliminary sketch. The existence of ''The Taking of Christ," which shows Jesus embraced by a bearded Judas while two Roman soldiers move in to seize him, was known to scholars. They identified a half-dozen copies but were unable to trace the original. Harr recounts two simultaneous searches. One was by Francesca Cappelletti and Laura Testa, two young Italian researchers. The other was by Sergio Benedetti, a restorer at Ireland's National Gallery and a particular student of Caravaggio.

As a favor to a gallery official, Benedetti looked over the Jesuits' fusty collection, was struck by a yellowy-brown blur that hung in the parlor, and convinced his doubtful superiors that it was worth investigating. After two years of precarious restoration -- including one near-disaster -- he had liberated the glowing original. Leading Caravaggio authorities authenticated it, thanks in part to a provenance partly unearthed by the two Italian researchers.

As in the magazine article, the search is the book's engine, but more finely and lavishly machined, and set with a gradually mounting complexity into more elegant motion. What the book gives us, though, is not just the engine but the journey, and in the largest sense of the word. Better than the quest, excellent as it is, we get the questers. (Just as in ''A Civil Action" it is the obsessed lawyer who stays with us even more than the scandal he battles.)

We get their labors, uncertainties, ambitions; we get the society, national and professional, that they move in. We see what it is to struggle up into the Italian scholarly hierarchy, and to deal, as Italians, with the more impersonal and less visibly convoluted English version. Along with their progress we also get the winds and crosswinds that spur, hinder, or plain distract it. Harr winds us entrancingly into his own side trips. His story is more than a road; it is the entire countryside the road runs through.

Francesca and Laura -- I borrow the intimacy that Harr manages to create -- come upon important materials concerning ''The Taking of Christ" while researching a different Caravaggio painting, that of Saint John the Baptist. They are among a group of students assembled by a temperamental and volatile scholar to help him prepare a seminar on the Saint John.

Seeking difficult access to the archives of the Mattei family, Caravaggio's patrons, Francesca resorts to a student friend connected in aristocratic circles (circular connections being a shorter Roman distance than straight lines). Thriving in circularity, she gets grudging permission from a surviving Mattei to visit her country house, decayed remnant of an ancient fortune, in the Adriatic Marches.

A toothless old woman opens the gate, gazes owl-like through two pairs of eyeglasses, and emits a summoning screech. All faded elegance, the marchesa appears and conducts them to the damp cellar, where papers dating back 400 years lie in great heaps. While the young women spend days going through them, the marchesa smokes and watches, dolefully recounting her family's ruined history.

In fact, though the Saint John material is valuable, the real find is documentation that records the sale of ''The Taking of Christ" -- mislabeled as the work of a Dutch painter -- to an English collector in 1802. Francesca later travels to Edinburgh, where the trail ends in 1921 after the painting, worth tens of millions of dollars today, was sold for 8 guineas to an unknown buyer. A dozen years later it resurfaced (in disguise) when an Irish doctor presented the yellowed blur to the Dublin Jesuits, leaving behind no clue to how she'd acquired it.

Although Benedetti's discovery and restoration were the heart of the magazine piece, and are told here in their full thrilling complexity, the heart of the book is Francesca. Her ventures and misadventures provide a rich texture that grounds her quest in a larger context. Her efforts are a voyage of discovery that takes us from the intricacies, politics, and passions -- professional and personal -- of Italian art scholarship into a spacious and utterly human portrait of contemporary Italian life and culture.

Francesca emerges as an exhilarating, I would like to say hopeful, exemplar. She is a free woman within the lingering, and dwindling, constraints of a profession largely dominated by men. Her work, carried out with utmost seriousness and not a little adventurous play, is patronized and to a degree exploited by her mentors. At the end she has won respectful recognition and a teaching post at the University of Ferrara.

Harr fashions an irresistible portrait of feminine independence not just within a profession but from it as well. We see Francesca's tiny rusted-out car shuddering its way over the Apennines; we see her, perpetually late, dissecting the Rome traffic at full speed, head turned to chat with her passenger. We read of a long relationship, as much discursive as passionate, with a fellow student. And, submerged in the Mattei archive, she hopes for an hour or two at the beach to ginger up her tan for a date with a former lover. No thought of renewing it: the point is to rekindle not desire but desirability.

There is no room to sketch the other splendid portraits that Harr gives us. His book is about the pursuit of lost art and also the life of the pursuit. He writes with a novelist's gift for character and a dramatist's for character in action.


Baseball Between the Numbers
by Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts
Who deserves recognition as the best baseball player of all time--Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth? The stuff of endless debates among baseball fans, such questions come into sharp focus when the experts of Baseball Prospectus start parsing their trove of statistics. Looking, for instance, at the Bonds-versus-Ruth issue, the BP statisticians systematically adjust the two stars' numbers to reflect changes in parks, in level of competition, and in training technology as they establish that although Ruth still holds the overall edge, Bonds could overtake him with a couple more good seasons. But these baseball mavens look beyond the performance of individual players, as they examine entire teams (the '04 Red Sox and '01 Diamondbacks, for instance) and even whole epochs (the golden era of 1949--57). BP numbers help readers see the world beyond the diamond as well, clarifying the economic pressures that push marginal players to use steroids and are increasingly pushing working-class fans right out of the stadiums their taxes are subsidizing. A valuable reference for baseball fans and cultural critics alike.