Saturday, June 23, 2012

My feelings are deeply wounded

I was unlocking my bike from the bike-parking thing today and there was a small girl playing around them, so I smiled at her, which provoked her to go and hide behind her mother, saying "I don't like that man!"

This is hugely upsetting - children almost invariably like me, for some reason, even if I don't like them. I feel terribly hurt by this rejection.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Queen's Park and Rangers

Like most people, I'm really not interested in Scottish football at all, but I have been following the prolonged saga of Rangers and their amazing ability to get into more and more trouble as time goes on. It is a bit difficult to keep up with what's happening, though, because my usual first port of call for sports news is the BBC website, and in their strange way of occasionally being enormously biased for no obvious reason, the BBC are hugely anti-Rangers at the moment. But even so, and even if you ignore the BBC's assertion that Aberdeen have said they'll vote against admitting the new company to the Scottish Premier (the club themselves have loudly denied ever saying anything of the sort), there really does seem to be a possibility that Rangers won't be allowed to play in the SPL next year. Which is really unfathomable and goes against any kind of common sense, at least in the 'people want to make money and don't care about companies just not paying their bills and then wriggling out of it somehow' kind of common sense that football usually applies.

Still, I don't see why nobody's suggested Rangers applying to the English league instead. They've been whining about wanting to be allowed in there for years, and playing in the lower reaches of the English league has to be more lucrative than playing in the lower reaches of the Scottish. There are games there that are attended by two people and an apathetic elderly dog. Called Hamish. Actually, someone has probably suggested it by now, and someone else has probably told Rangers where they can put that suggestion if they do make it, but I haven't heard about it, and what I don't hear doesn't count as reality.

And as for the Scottish Premier League, what all those integrity-of-football people should do is go back to the olden days when Queen's Park, the amateur team who 'play for the sake of playing' and are run by a smaller number of slightly less dodgy businessmen, were allowed to play in the top division every year and were exempt from relegation. They could form a rivalry with Celtic, and everyone would be happy.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Superheroes

I never tire of looking at the stats page on Blogger and seeing what google searches brought people here to this strange corner of the internet. "Black superhero with a bird theme" gets you a picture of me in my superhero-bird-themed T-shirt. If anyone else comes looking for that, then the hero you're thinking of is probably the Falcon, but hopefully you found that out without my help.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Tickling the tastebuds

I'm back home from Basel now, and my first thought on entering my flat is "oh my gosh, this place is filthy!" That's what happens when you spend a weekend in a flat that's actually nice and tidy. I'm going to have to clean up, there's no getting away from it.

Anyway, while I was there, I was persuaded by the artist Rubén Grilo (who exhibited me at Liste and whose work you should all go and admire) to try gazpacho, which I previously only knew of from jokes on Red Dwarf and the Simpsons. I'd always sort of assumed it was exactly the same as the tomato soup you can get from a Heinz tin, only not heated up, but actually it's really quite nice! I'm going to order it the next time I'm eating in a fancy restaurant (which, as you know, I do as little as possible). This new culinary delight comes hot on the heels of some other friends persuading me to try a bit of kiwi fruit a couple of weeks ago - I've always maintained that I don't like it, without ever having eaten any, but in fact, it's not all that bad after all! Tastes much more like strawberries than anything green has any right to. I still don't trust it.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Basel: City of Roadworks

Basel is a very nice city, but I can't believe how many roads all around town are currently halfway through being dug up. Is it a once-a-year thing in Switzerland, that they rebuild the whole street system from scratch?