Patience.org

So you may or may not noticed two things about patience.org recently :

1. I like fiddling with things related to this site.
2. I am not very good at/don’t have time to – complete these fiddlings to a satisfactory level.

So I am currently waiting for community help in upgrading the Gallery photo management software that handles al the photo albums we have here. I have still not been able to complete the upgrade to the next verson of Gallery and until I am able to do so, the albums linked to on the right, will not work. Sorry.

But apropos number 1 – I have chanegd the theme of the site to this one, which I think is a little simpler and more elegant.

Back to fiddling….

There’s not many decent football blogs out there (although the Guardian’s been fairly good during the World Cup). And the websites of most professional footballers are usually a wasteland of cliches whereby ‘you’re only as good as your next game,’ and you easily become ‘gutted for the lads,’ at the slightest mishap.

Into this vacuum steps Moritz Volz. Who he, you ask? He’s a German U21 international right back (even though he’s 23) and best of all, he’s one of our own. Fulham, bought ’220′ as he’s known (think voltage in Europe) from Arsenal a couple of years back and he’s been great for us – a whole-hearted player if ever I saw one (and I saw him launch into the crowd at Pompey a couple of seasons ago to try and avoid giving up a throw-in). But the diary on his website is an absolute classic.

He’s German and he knows it, i.e. he knows all the stereotypes people have about Germans and he has the ability to poke fun at himself, while truly assimilatuing into English life – he’s just passed his maths A-level (sounds as if he’s doing four in all) for instance. He has a phrase book on his site where he translates phrases such as, “Wo ist der pool? Ich will meine handtuecher hinlegen/Which way to the pool? I would like to put my towel down,” and “Kannst du meine aermel abschneiden/Please can you cut the sleeves off my denim jacket.”

It’s hard to know when he’s being ironic and when he’s not, but this is the man that went into a Niketown in Londona and bought a pair of custom-made football boots with “Volzy.com” on one and “The Hoff” on the other, in honour of German’s obession with David Hassehoff, which he says “should be fun in close-ups in the Premiership next season.” He even has part of his site devoted to the Hoff.

When meeting Roger Milla (famous Cameroonian footballer from years gone by) at Cologne airport, he gets him to sign his Panini sticker album and has his pictute taken with him, captioning it “Me with Rog the Ledge.”

So much other funny stuff as he makes his way around Germany following the World Cup. You can read the lot here. Can’t link to individual entries, you’ll just have to page through, but it’s worth it. A fan’s diary written by a very professional footballer.

No, not the teams and the tournament, but its use as an educational tool.

With our wallchart almost complete, I wanted to share some of the things the boy has learned over the last month:

• He’s learned to fall over, holding his leg, waiting for the ‘doctor’ to come on and spray his leg, befofre immediately getting up and continue playing. Where on earth could he have learned that from?
• Flags – well where do we start? Within a week of the start of the tournament, he was waiting for a bus outside a pub displaying small flags of all the competing nations, he asked if that was Portugal’s flag he spotted next to that of Trinidad & Tobago? Why yes it was.
• Walking down Park Avenue last Monday, once the semi-final teams were known, there’s a French restuarant that for some reason was hanging large flags of Brazil, France, Germany, Portugal and Italy. He spotted them and asked if they had deliberately hung the flags of the four semi-finalists and if so, what was Brazil doing there too?
• Tears were shed when Sweden scored against England and when England went to penalties against Portugal in the quarter final.

As the torunament went on, we switched our attention to the second kits of countries, mostly the ones that had been knocked out. Just this morning I had this conversation:

Him: what’s Brazil’s second kit?

Me: Blue.

Him: What’s Switzerland’s second kit?

Me: White, I think.

Him: Oh just like South Korea! And speaking of South Korea, what’s their second kit?

Me: Erm, perhaps blue, I’m not sure.

Him: OK

Swap out those teams with any others in the World Cup and you have the basis of many conversations over the past few days.

Overall grade for the World Cup as an educational tool? A+, I reckon.

With the Coupe de Monde winding down, or up depending on your point of view, the Tour De France has been up and running (as has Wimbledon playing havoc with home life in Southfields, or Southfields Village as the estate agents call it).

But anyway, this being now, I figured someone must’ve put together Google Earth with the tour, a sure enough they have, and here it is (in fact it’s Google itself) and it tracks the race live. If you use the tilt feature you can ‘fly’ along the course.
If you haven’t got Google Earth already, why not? Go get it.