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No Sports Signal for Spurs in the Snowy Snow Snow…

Sunday, February 12th, 2006

It’s taken me a while to come to terms with my addiction. I used to be a casual user. If I was home on a Saturday night then a quick fix would do for me. Occasionally I’d go fetch some papers on a Sunday morning..

But since I left England 6 months ago its spiralled dangerously out of control. Which is how I find myself in a coffeeshop with a borrowed laptop in Charlottesville, Virginia at 8.30am on a Sunday morning. The (news) papers just dont do it for me no more. I want to keep track of my football team, Tottenham Hotspur (Spurs), live. Och. The lengths obsessional sports fans go to for that mysterious enigma that is live sports coverage. I had to walk half an hour across thick snow to make it here this morning. Am I crazy? Delusional?

Of course, it is soddy sod the silly sod’s law that the more effort you have to put in to get live coverage of your chosen sports event, the less of that event you’re actually going to catch. And darn it if proving soddy sod’s various laws isn’t one of my eternal strengths. So, I sit down bleary eyed with a cup of coffee only to find that none of the internet radio stations that cover English football are working. This is sad. But my pain can be relieved so easily by a good result in the game. You may be delighted to hear that Spurs took the lead in the 38th minute & still held it in the 88th. You may care more about the rate at which Dulux dries. You may be very sad & dissapointed to hear that Spurs then gave it all away to an equaliser on 89. You may care more about the relative speeds of earthworms & cockroaches.

So, onwards & upwards. Or backwards & bedwards as the case may be.

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Did a ton of washing in washington…

Wednesday, February 8th, 2006

Ok…I know that that was a particularly crap joke. But it happens to be true. My wardrobe in a backpack is slowly expanding however. I came into possession of a brand new lime-green t-shirt the other day. It was a gift from a bunch of anti-Bush activists who were here to, er, march against Bush and stuff… Truth be told, the geezer wanted to give me a whole armload of shirts to take back to england, together with numerous wristbands (“You guys do wear wristbands in the UK right??”). Now I have no qualms about being anti-Bush. I’ve even donned a monks costume and marched through the streets of London myself. But as the evening wore on it became clear that I was in the company of some fairly wacky paranoid conspiracy theorists. So I made my excuses and went to drown my brain in the product placement advertisers wet dream that is American televison.

Oh, and how. I wonder how British TV viewers would react if they were exposed to the sheer depth of commercial immersion that confronts one over on this side of the pond. You might think that inserting adverts in between the end of a program and that programs credits might be a bit silly, especially when another advert break comes after said credits. You’d be right. Sports lovers might also get slightly exasperated when trying to watch the superbowl, a very BIG american football match that was played a few days ago. American football by its nature seems to be rather a stop-start sort of a game with innumerable excuses for the players to stop and give each other hi-fives. Challenging the ref’s decision, re-challenging the tv ajuducators decision, time-outs, bottom of the fourth, top of the twenty-seventh… If you add the halftime show by an increasingly geriatric looking rolling stones, you have on your hands a sports match that lasts about 3 & a half hours. And thats a long time….

Which is why I was very happy that, for me, the superbowl was no more than background entertainment for a far more interesting sporting event: a game of poker. While tapping ones chips, lifting pizza to ones mouth, and occasionally standing up at crucial moments may not constitute sufficient physical exertion to elevate poker to the olympics anytime soon, it remains a jolly engaging pastime. Plus, when one is playing with a bunch of guys who grew up here in D.C, there’s plenty of scope for some fascinating stories…

Of which I will mention just one. “John” – whose name has not been changed because its a pretty common one, used to be friends with the former Vice-President’s Al Gore’s son: Al Gore junior (They must have had a real hard time coming up with that one..) And one day whilst playing with young Gore, John felt the need to move his bowels. So he went into the Vice-presidents house, sat on the Vice-presidents toilet, and used what apparently is particularly pleasant vice-presidential bog roll. Oh how humbling it feels being THAT close to someone who was THAT close to a toilet that Dicky Cheney has sat on…

Hope everyone is well.

Bucky

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Salsa, Salsa & The Politics of Water

Thursday, January 12th, 2006
The salsa was hot, and I was sweating slightly. I stepped off the dancefloor & dipped a tortilla chip in a pot of red sauce. The salsa was hot, and I was sweating slightly. I put down ... [Continue reading this entry]

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Jerry Springer Show…

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
There's a 2-year wait to get on the Oprah Winfrey show. So I went to see them film Jerry Springer. Oprah gives dvd players, caviar, & monte cristo's to her audience. Jerry gives beads. Oprah's set is sparkly & has ... [Continue reading this entry]

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Bucky, Bucky’s & a Buckaroo…

Friday, January 6th, 2006
It all began a couple of weeks ago when I first arrived in the city of Lawrence, Kansas. As my girlfriend Jane drove me across town she told me not to look to my left. I didn't. Several times ... [Continue reading this entry]

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Things to do in Denver when you’ve got bronchitis at 2am….

Friday, December 23rd, 2005
Well. The first thing you could do is try & go back to sleep. You might find that counting buffalo (there aint too many round these parts no more..) helps in this situation. You might find that ... [Continue reading this entry]

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