Links for you, and odds and ends.

 Etc, Links  No Responses »
Jul 102006
 
  • A fascinating and in-depth look at how to design a book interior.
  • A wrong-minded column that purports to describe the problems with Wikipedia. Column summary: in the minutes after Ken Lay’s death, some people wrote inaccurate/biased things in his Wikipedia entry. Over the next several hours those inaccurate/biased things were filtered out and by the afternoon of the day he died the entry was accurate. The column says that the fact that people can write things that are wrong in the posts is an enormous weakness. It doesn’t mention the fact that the thousands of contributors to Wikipedia ensured that less than a day after Lay’s death, his entry was up-to-the-minute accurate; that the very fault the writer finds in Wikipedia–the faceless masses with the ability to make corrections to every entry–is the reason Wikipedia is reliable. And of course the columnist neglects to mention that anyone concerned about the accuracy of an entry can easily browse every single change made to it and the citations to justify them. Just a generally bizarre column, overall, which in my opinion is a better polemic for Wikipedia than against it.

    Some examples of how misguided this column is: Mathew Ingram’s perspective, Open Culture, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post.

    It’s true, though, that Wikipedia’s value as a source of news information is limited. It’s neat that this year’s World Cup entry already lists Italy as the winner, but the presence of entries for contemporaneous people and events does make more glaring the short-lived but irritating “corrections” that are rightfully maligned in the column.

  • I saw Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend. I enjoyed it but it wasn’t particularly good. Certainly not $132,000,000 good. Depp’s Captain Jack was just a tired retread of the role in the first one, in my opinion–a caricature of a caricature going through the expected motions–and aside from the truly excellent bad guy and his minions I didn’t really have any interest in the other characters. The effects and action stuff were generally fun, though, and if you can manage to see it at a drive-in theater I can assure you of an entertaining evening (if you aren’t unlucky enough to park next to a van stuffed to the gills with pre-teens on cellphones).

In other news, if you want to talk to me you should add me to your google talk list–calamityjake at gmail.com.

 Posted by JHW at 10:52 am

By the way, Zidane was awarded the tournament MVP award this morning.

 Sports  No Responses »
Jul 102006
 

I hope you were all watching the World Cup final yesterday. And I especially hope you were watching toward the end of overtime when the French capitaine, Zinedine Zidane, brutally head-butted an Italian player, earning himself an obvious red card. Lucky for him, Les Bleueuueueus held on for penalty kicks, but they lost anyway because another player missed his shot (Zidane is a notoriously-skilled penalty shot specialist).

The head-butt is notable for about a million reasons, among them:

  • Zidane, 34, has previously said that after this World Cup he would be retiring from soccer. Even if that’s not true, this is almost certainly his final World Cup performance. He had scored France’s only goal of the game (on a PENALTY KICK) early in this match and fought through an injury to stay in the game so, win or lose, all he had to do was stay standing for another eight or ten minutes of play and he would been heralded and praised–literally around the world–for his incredible career. But, for a reason nobody’s quite clear on, he made his final act as an international player a brutal cheap shot that may well have cost his country a World Cup championship.
  • As I said right up there, nobody really knows why he did it. The player he struck hadn’t physically obstructed or even touched him may have tweaked a nipple or something, but nothing too serious. They had been exchanging words, but what on earth could the other guy have said to make Zidane go so completely out of his skull? There are some theories, most notably (and disasterously for this World Cup) suggestions that Zidane was reacting to some racist slurs, but truthfully there is absolutely no rational excuse for Zidane’s behavior. It boggles the mind.

    Incidentally, the guy he head-butted, Materazzi, is a pretty dirty player (warning: some swears in the soundtrack of that video). Not that it excuses anything, but it does give Zidane’s many zealous apologists a sliver of rationalization to work with.

  • Zidane, despite his general reputation as a great guy and a special player, has a bit of a history of these kinds of acts. He’s gotten tossed in the past for stomping on another player (in another World Cup match!), and for, er, head-butting another player. So although this is ridiculous, it’s not quite unprecedented.
  • All that being said, it was a beautiful, perfect strike. I have no doubt that Jean Claude Van Damme, surely watching the match, wept at the precision and sheer visceral barbarity of the head-butt. Watch it again: Look at Zidane cock his entire body like a cobra about to strike and–boom goes the dynamite–slam his forehead right into the Italian player’s sternum. If you’re going to destroy your reputation in an instant, that’s not a bad way to go about it.

Anyway, congratulations to Italy–you managed to flop and flail your way to the elimination rounds, at which point you decided it was time to actually play some soccer. And then you played better than each of your opponents and got the championship you awesomely lost in 1994.

Despite lots of referee problems and the sad but unsurprising failure of the US team, it was a really good World Cup–amazing goals, lots of competitive games, and a memorable championship match. Let’s hope the US can manage a better showing next time.

 Posted by JHW at 9:23 am
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