Patience.org

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.

Good documentary on BBC this week and next on Trojan Records here. First part up till this Saturday, next part for the week after.

Do you think the BBC slipped this news out tonight, just before a fairly siginificant football match thinking nobody would notice?

Not sure wallcharts are such a big thing in the US – (unless you’re bettng on the NFL season or something like that). But they are a tradition in the UK for things like the World Cup. Every four years we would get one from the paper and meticulously fill out the results of each game and build the tables for the end of the first round etc (I suspect that’s more of a boy thing!)

With that in mind we searched around and printed out a few and M chose this one from The Guardian:

He would have worn his England shirt, but it was in the laundry as he wants to wear it the minute it gets clean (might have to get him a US shirt as they’re pretty nice).

He’s also got map of the world and some flags to cut out and this morning he picked out Angola and Ecuador from the list of flags, noting that they’re “in the World Cup.” How’s that for educational side effects of watching some blokes kick a ball around a pitch.

64 matches in one month? – we can’t wait, that’s for sure.

People fiddling with computers in the mid-1990s – well perhaps only men in their 20s/30s and then probably only those in northern Europe, anyway – may have been familar with the strangely-named PC game Sensible Soccer, a veritable classic of the genre.
While the various ‘official’ FIFA games saw the player sprout realistic heads and limbs, Sensible stuck with stick men, but highly controllable stick men. So controllable in fact that while watching lowly Fulham in the early 1990s (admittedly an activity given to being easily distracted) I found myself comparing one wayward pass after another with Sensi, as us aficionado’s called it. 😉

Now I see this in the Guardian and my interest in PC games is suddenly revived, as it says, “….Sensible Soccer is the greatest comeback of 2006.” Can’t wait to see just how great.

I have a funny feeling that Peter Crouch could be shaping up into an English national hero, if he continues to score and dance like this and this [all links to videos].

Tragic news that the local Wansdwroth brewery is selling up and more importantly, closing its brewery in Wandsworth High Street. Perhaps inevitable, given property proces in the area I guess, but having done my formative dirnking on the local brew and considering it’s been “round the bend since 1851” as a long standing ad hoarding says just round the corner, it’s sad news indeed.

They still do tours of the brewery, so get yourself along there if you can, while you still can.

Youngs used to be different. It reverted to delivering its beer by horse and cart many years ago after it worked out it got it there faster and cheaper than deliveing by truck. The horses still live within the brewery.

And how more English can you get than if you ask for a “pint of ordinary” in any of its pubs, you wil get a pint of best bitter, rather than someone looking at you as if you’re mad?

I’d have a Ram & Special to commiserate, if I could find one in New York.

I finally uploaded the pictures (sans kids) from our trip to Lancaster, PA in April, like this one but more here.

Never mind present-day thirsty Jack Kerouac’s, what about our 451 people, who have a special place at this bar, which is set to close for 6 months so condo’s can be built on top of it?

It was on page 2 of this free rag today – should’ve been the lead story!

We’re going to Paris in a week or so for a couple of days – taking the kids to their first European country outside of the UK (and yes, that is a European country, despite what some people there and elsewhere might think!).

So my eye was caught by an announcement from Google that it’s improved its imagery coverage for a few European countries for Google Earth & Maps, resulting in aerial shots like this one of the Eiffel Tower.

It’s almost as if you no longer need to go up it, which with two small kids, I’m pretty sure we won’t be this time around.