Book review - What Sport Tells Us About Life by Ed Smith

So a while ago while I was waiting for the Bro, I started reading this book in a bookshop (natch) after noticing it's eye-catching cover featuring that iconic image of Zinedine Zidane headbutting Materazzi in the WC final 06. What I found was an entertaining analysis of sport-related topics such as why there will never be another Bradman or whether free market principles are ruining sport. I found it interesting enough to purchase it a few months later.

Reading the book, I felt like I was witnessing the discussion of really stupid topics conducted in a highly intelligent manner. That's a good thing! The chapters are prefaced by some sport-related question and author Ed Smith (who apprently played cricket for England although I don't remember him) lays out the argument featuring snippets from things as varied as neurosurgery and religion to back it up. My favourite chapter was on the Beauty Queen Effect or how talent is a curse, using the examples of Steve Waugh being dropped in the Test squad for his twin and Michael Jordon being crushed on the childhood basketball court by his older brother to demonstrate how losing can drive on to being a champion later!

My main criticism would be that sometimes the argument is a bit too simple or one-sided. Case in point would be the free market chapter where he argues it has improved the pay for baseballers and created the ODI/2020 revolution in cricket. However, I would argue that if you look at the free market at work in European Football (soccer) and the EPL in particular, the difference in the funding of teams has created such an uneven playing field that there literally are only four clubs that ever challenge for the crown and a *slave* market in terms of player trading. Can you really argue that this is better for the game? *shrug*

Anyway, I recommend this to anyone who's interested in sport or life, not necessarily both at the same time! It is that accessible. But for people who are wondering why did Zizou did it - it was because he was a superstar! And superstars, just like Senna, Ali, and The Special One, capable of doing feats that others believe impossible, feted and treated like gods, eventually believe that they can always do these things and hence behave in ways normal people wouldn't. Like headbutting someone in the final of the World Cup in front of millions of people.

Sculpture of the Week - David by Donatello

Donatello, David, c. 1425-50
Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy

Back to sculpture, David was a popular subject in the Renaissance due to the use of the character as a political tool in Florence - the whole thing about Florence being a small city-state triumphing over their larger enemies. Donatello's David differs from other previous representations of David in that he's a nude.

David is an adolescent male casually standing over the head of Goliath. The representation of various things have led some art historians (notably Schneider) to interpret this sculpture as a sign of Donatello's (unsubstantiated) homosexuality. Other historians have called that reading a complete crock (most notably Dixon) and say the bible says David took off his armour as a sign of his faith before heading off to battle. Regardless of whether he's meant to be gay or a literal interpretation, David was the first life-sized nude bronze since Roman times and the use of nudity changed the iconography of the subject matter - something that came handy for Michelangelo about 40 years later.

Priorities

So regular readers may have noticed a decrease in the frequency of my posts (hai Pooey!). Rest assured, I am perfectly hale and hearty. The drop off is due to my setting of ridiculous targets of giving Da Boss one thesis chapter draft per week. I've managed to stick to it so far, but at the expense of basically not being able to write anything at all - I'm usually staring at toshi wondering why the hell I can't seem to think at how to write. And then I feel I should read more articles. So I look them up and print them out and think *oh, that's interesting too!* and download it and print it out until I have a stack of articles which end up not being read. Heh. But yes, the end result tends to be not sleeping. *thumbs up*

Of course, the not sleeping bit also comes from waking up at 5am on Thursday morning so I could watch BARCELONA WIN THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE. I will admit to being torn about wanting Utd. to lose since they are my EPL team, but seriously, given the way they've demolished La Liga, Barca deserved it. Look into your hearts, you know it's true.

Anyway, hopefully at some point in time I will be able to write reviews of two books, Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, and What Sport Tells Us About Life by Ed Smith. Or you know, do something interesting other than work. Toodles!

Old School Hotties - Edition Homme

A while ago I did a post on old-school Hollywood actresses who aged gracefully. Since then, I've been thinking of compiling a similar lists for male actors and here it is. Unfortunately while all the females on my list are still alive, all the men on my list are deceased and some of whom grew old and fat before then. Tant pis. Let's get this list on the road!

Paul Newman.
Seriously, what more do I have to say after posting this photo?! Apart from being a hottie right up until old age, he was also awesome at giving to charity and married to the same woman for 50 years. Awesome.

Marlon Brando
Forget the fat and bloated old Brando. Watch A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), especially the 'STELLA!!! STEEELLLLLAAAAAAA!!!!' scene and imagine the madness when this movie was shown to 110 girls (as so happened when it was shown at my school).


Gene Kelly
All singing, all dancing, some people prefer the top and tails of Fred Astaire but Gene's dancing was more physical and, dare I say, masculine? Plus, I don't see the equivalent of the 'sexy' or 'what a hottie!' threads present on Gene's IMDB board on Fred's!

Marcello Mastroianni
Geez, where would I start on Marcello...I suppose all I can say is that Caramelbear considers Marcello her only older man. Yes, he is that smooth he overrides her tendency towards young emos.

Gregory Peck
The man of honour in To Kill a Mockingbird, the romancer in Roman Holiday, looks good in a suit, that voice... Atticus Finch, the enigmatic and yet somehow obtainable perfect man. *sigh*

and I don't really rate him, but I'm just going to put in this photo of young Elvis for the orangehoodies.

In other news, I'm pleased to find that Sean Penn has discovered the errors of his way and decided to get back with Princess Buttercup. Good for all!

Birthday blowout

To celebrate my descent into senility, 14 close friends and I went to Cafe Vue for their Friday cocktail night, the theme of which was fittingly enough, 'A Taste of Asia' (previewed by ellemischka here!).

Now, because I am retarded, I did not manage to get a pic of the menu nor of everyone there. Anyway... QQ, Lydia, Ruilin, Laulita, Natty, Ladiesman_217, dancinghula, Rao, Suboo, nickyliou, jenn, AnnieB, Dr. V, elleMischka, and myself settled in for a night of stronger than expected cocktails!

Luckily, they publish their cocktail online so here's a screencap of what we had!

Course 1 - the pancake...didn't look like a pancake but very tasty!

Suboo and jenn enjoy their apple shogun.

The keduree (curry flavoured) risotto and samurai gure-pu.

Ruilin and laulita listen intently to QQ.

Natty and ladiesman_217...

and Suboo and I get smiley.

jenn gets ready to photograph the veal belly and une buke. Nums!

The compressed melon...which kinda tasted like normal melons...

And I didn't manage to get a photo of my sago pudding but which was pretty damn tasty or as mischka described it - better than expected! Since Ruilin didn't drink, I had to have some of hers as well. As you can imagine, Saturday was a world of pain although I am proud to say that I didn't disgrace myself! I would like to thank everyone who came and again recommend Cafe Vue cocktail night as an event to have!

P.S. It has been requested that I make a comment about going out dancing afterwards. I have only two things to say - Baroq and Baraki are extremely dodgy and Suboo is a man-magnet!

Painting of the Week - The Holy Trinity by Masaccio

Masaccio (Tomasso di Giovanni), The Holy Trinity, 1420

Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy
(Source)

Until and during most of the Renaissance, sculpture and architecture were considered the superior arts. This changed when Brunelleschi, loser of the Baptistery doors competition, 'discovered' vanishing points - the optical phenomenon that objects get smaller and disappear into a point into the horizon, like when two parallel lines of trees appearing to converge together. This opened up the ability for artists to create landscapes and figures which looked more real and had depth. And to have a bit of fun if they wanted!

The Holy Trinity is a key piece demonstrating early linear perspective and it's been speculated that Brunelleschi may have advised Masaccio on how to create the vaulted space in the painting. It shows God the Father, Christ on the cross, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove with the Madonna (looking out of the painting, St. John the Evangelist, plus the two kneeling donors of the work. Under this scene is a skeleton representing Adam.

While the space in which the scene occurs is depicted as being 'real', it's not entirely logical with the main problem being exactly where God the Father is meant to be located in the space. This spatial problem given that Masaccio appears to have known what he was doing has led people to speculate that he was trying to symbolically show that God works outside of mathematics and is therefore beyond ordinary constraints of the world.

Happy Birthday, mi esposo!

I'd just like to wish my husband Iker Casillas a happy 28th birthday. To celebrate, please enjoy this picspam.

If only you played for Barca...oh well. Te quiero, mi marido and I'll join you in the BA28 clubhouse soon!

Bouldering!

Following pilates in 2005, teaching myself how to ride a bike in 2006, Brazillian jujutsu in 2007, I've decided that Bouldering is going to be my sport of the year partly due to The Pom's influence and since it's considered an even harder version of what was supposed to be my epic fail of a sport for 2008, rock climbing.

I can attest to the harder bit - I found rock climbing pretty easy with all the ropes and stuff. But without ropes it's freaking difficult! I can pretty much only do the super-easy green trails and need to drop the fear factor. When did I get so afraid of falling?! Especially since I'm falling onto giant crash mats?! Curse age and experience. The good thing would be that you don't need a belayer but that bad thing is I seem to only progress when people are yelling stuff at me so I need someone who doesn't mind standing around yelling at how I'm supposed to position my feet and how I'm never going to get to the next hold.

Anyway, I managed to get a photo of The Pom actually climbing and overhang but because it was on my crappy phone camera, it looks like a smudge so I won't upload it here. What I did manage to photograph is the chunk of skin that I managed to rip off my hand while I was trying to get myself from one hold to another!

Anyway, I hope to stick to this perhaps once a week augmented with gym and pilates to build up my core and upper-body strength and then we'll revisit this later in the year!

Ummm....okay

Caramelbear said this needed to be done, to prove once and for all that yes, I am the Asian Julie Delpy.

Okay, not the best pic of my mother but *shocked dog face.*

Movie review - Star Trek

Reactions to my saying that I was going to watch the Star Trek movie ranged from *"Errr...are you sure you want to tell me this?" to "You're gonna love it! You're gonna come back speaking Klingon!" Not having seen any of the other Star Trek things - but well aware of various aspects of Trekerie due to its presence in pop culture (thanks, Futurama!) - I decided to go into Star Trek with an open mind. It has been requested that I try not to spoil this so if details are a bit vague, there you go.

Like the Batman and Bond franchises that successfully rebooted their series, ST goes right back to the beginning to James Kirk's birth and through his time at Trekkie Academy with Spock, and their first big adventure together. I can't really say much else about the story given that stuff that happens right at the beginning indicates that it's completely deviated from what I assume is Trekkie canon but I didn't have as many problems with the story compared to the onliners complaining about it. :D

The acting is alright, I suppose. Chris Pine as Kirk is good although he reminded me of a more able Captain Branigan in a few scenes. That's not a bad thing. But it really really annoyed me to see Simon Pegg as Scotty! I LOVE Hot Fuzz and seeing Nicholas Angel speaking with a Scots accent was grating - why not just employ a Scottish actor?! Otherwise he was good with the comic timing. Eric Bana is fairly unrecognisable as the baddie Nero until he opens his mouth and you hear him speak. Hehehe.

ST is not a movie for character development - it is essentially a bit dumb action movie. Being a lover of mindless action, I was pleased in that respect. The movie kicks off with a big action battle sequence and a variety of chases, fist fights, big space shoot outs and forth. However, while the action is good and entertaining, there were a few points in the final battle when all those phasers or whatevers are shooting around that I did think to myself *Whoa! Epilepsy! Epilepsy!* and I'm not epileptic. Another member of the party actually got motion sickness from the editing of the action and had to leave and sit at the back. That's not a good thing but seeing as no one else got sick, maybe it will only affect a small number of population

The main thing that hampered my enjoyment was the fact that when significant people who must have been characters in the series popped up, unless they were special enough to make it into general pop culture, e.g. Scotty, I had no idea who they were. This was not helped by the other people in the audience and my own personality. Case in point, when the character Chekov turns up in his Russian accent, there were murmurs around me. And it drove me nuts that I didn't know who he was and they did! This also happened when various catchphrases were uttered or when people laughed at a joke I didn't get. It drove me nuts to not know!!!

Anyway, it was an enjoyably passable way to spend two hours. I didn't walk out full of complaints, but I wasn't as ecstatically pleased as my companion Suboo (who is a Trekkie) so it's in the lower half of a pass.
6/10

WTF?!?!?! YOU CAN DO BETTER!!!

So I come into work today and Pooey has stayed awake (it would have been about 1am in Meldon) to tell me some Very Important News.

Natalie Portman and Sean Penn are together.

My reaction was this:
Now I'm in a state of zombie-shock.

I suppose if you're a young ambitious actress, Sean Penn might be alright cos you know, he's got two Oscars and contacts but....Natalie Portman is no talentless hack!

When you look like this

and you used to date this

why would you move onto this?!?!?!

(Pictures from WireImages via Getty)

Sculptures of the Week - St. George by Donatello and St. John the Baptist by Ghiberti

One of the reasons why Florence was the 'birthplace' of the Renaissance so to speak, was due to its political and social situation. In the 13th century, the aristocrats were expelled from the city and a merchant representative system supported by the Papacy was installed. Florence thus considered itself a republic and the city's growth and decoration was supported by merchant guilds - such as the Calimala paying for the Baptistery doors. Orsanmichele served as the chapel for the various guilds who each contributed to having their patron saint represented in the niches of the building. These sculptures are pretty good at illustrating the shift in artistic style.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, St. John the Baptist, 1414-16 Orsanmichele, Florence
(Source)

The powerful Calimala commissioned Ghiberti (again) to make them a bronze St. John the Baptist. With his swirling abstract drapes that conceal his body, St. John is the epitome of late International Gothic style. The guild chose to illustrate their wealth by having it made in bronze, but while Ghiberti did well in making this - it was the first work of this size to be cast as a single bronze piece in centuries rather than separate pieces soldered together - it essentially hobbled the artist.

Donatello, St. George, 1416
Museo del Bargello, Florence
(Source)

In comparison, the Armourers guild commissioned Donatello to make them a St. George out of marble (replaced on the Orsanmichele by a bronze copy). Approximately one-tenth of the cost of a bronze and notably smaller than St. John, the marble allowed Donatello to be more innovative. We see St. George as a soldier simply wearing his body-conforming uniform of a breastplate, cape, gauntlets and military boots. Thus, while St. George is more plain, it was considered superior and set the artistic agenda of aiming for naturalism for centuries to come.

Carreras retires!!!!

....from singing in full length opera roles although he will continue doing recitals.

No more of this - 1982 performance of Rodolfo in Puccini's La Boheme at the Met, NYC

Karma

You can argue that Chelsea were the better team over the 180 minutes, however they inevitably fell victim to their own tactics since they needed a win and Barca only needed a draw. You can also argue that they were deprived of three genuine penalties but then, they played about 25 minutes versus 10 men and should have taken genuine scoring chances rather than depend on being awarded penalties.

What you can't argue is that these photoshops and gifs are not hilarious because they totally are.

The original where Ballack looks like he's trying to eat the ref








Classic cartoon chases


There's a bee!!!


This one is almost mean. Almost.


Run, Cesc, run!!!


The Saga


You know this really would have happened if the Republicans won.

Anyway. Visca El Barca!

People I allegedly look like.

This post is inspired by the drunk guy who was sitting next to me at the wedding yesterday who said that he thought I looked like....

Michelle Yeoh.

Also I have a friend who for some reason thinks I look like...

Julie Delpy.

For other crazy lookalike, see here and here!

Sculptures of the Week - The Sacrifice of Isaac by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti

In 1401, the Wool Merchants Guild of Florence (Arte di Calimala) decided to commission a new set of bronze doors to the Baptistry (San Giovanni), the little octagonal church behind The Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore). So that you get the idea that this was no ordinary commission, the budget allocated to the new doors was 20 000 florins, which according to the lecturer I had in Italian Renaissance art, was equal to Florence's annual defence budget. I don't have a source for that. Anyway, to make sure they hired the right guy, the Guild decided to set up a competition whereby sculptors would have to make a relief sculpture depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac with various elements shown to test the skill and range of the competitors. This competition is regarded as the inaugurating event of the Renaissance because of the concentration on aesthetics of the work as well as the skill of the artist.

Filippo Brunelleschi, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1401
Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy
(Source)

Brunelleschi's entry is based on a planar, horizontal view with the characters in profile. The panel is filled with details and the action is front row centre. His interest is taken with depicting the scene realistically - Isaac actually looks young - and with a nod to the art of antiquity through the modelling of the characters.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1401
Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy
(Source)

Ghiberti's panel also shows the influence of classical art and realism, but instead has a greater narrative component. Using a diagonal composition, the angel flies in to stop Abraham just as he's about to do the deed. There is a greater emphasis of depth created by casting two separate pieces which were later soldered together. While more technically accomplished than Brunelleschi's, it actually used less bronze and implied that Ghiberti's work would therefore be cheaper than his competitor's.

Ghiberti won the competition :D