The night George Best nutmegged Johann Cruyff

As concern grows over George Best's fading health Bill Elliott remembers a fun-loving man who was nobody's fool

Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer

Mac, the village newsagent, had The Sun open on the page led by the medical bulletin on George Best. He pointed at the story. 'He's an idiot, isn't he?' he asked. It was, of course, a rhetorical question but it still deserved an answer. And the answer is 'No'. Like, I suspect, millions of others, Mac only knew - or thought he knew - one George Best. The one who was weak, unable to say no to almost anything, a man lost in a shambolic world, an alcoholic who never managed to beat properly the old foe. Now, weeks on from that first bulletin, comes more of the same, confirmation again of his weakness. But an idiot? No, not an idiot, never an idiot.


And so I tried to tell Mac about the Best I knew in the late 1960s and the 1970s when I was a Daily Express football reporter in Manchester, covering United and City and travelling with the Northern Ireland team for their matches. And trying to keep up with Georgie Boy and a fast life that captured the times. It was fun but, Christ, it could be difficult as well. Those were the days when reporters still had real contact with the stars. First priority was to have a contact number. I had one for Bobby Charlton, one for Denis Law. For George, at his height, I had 19 telephone numbers in my book. These included his old digs in Chorlton-cum-Hardy and his 'second mum' Mrs Fullaway, who fussed over him and to whose modest home he retreated when he needed a break from the bollocks, and where the local kids guarded his E-Type Jaguar from the sharp scratchings of envy.

There was the number for the home he had built, an uber-modern place with a huge TV set that disappeared up a fake chimney. It had more glass than brick in its construction, so the fans could see straight in and George was forced to sit with the blinds down to avoid being watched all the time. He loved looking at his house, but he hated living there. A goldfish would have felt edgy, so, soon after he moved in, he moved out.

The other telephone numbers were for a bunch of his best pals, a few were for women and the rest were for the various clubs and pubs that George frequented, places like The Brown Cow or Slack Alice's or Blinkers. It was in these places that he would be protected as he drank his then alcohol of choice - vodka and lemonade - and held court quietly and shyly. He was, almost always anyway, friendly with everyone except the fools and, of course, he was especially friendly if the interloper wore a micro-mini and sported long, blonde hair. There were a lot of these about at the time and George made friends with all of them.

The rest of us young men could only watch all this with a mixture of fascination and envy, but if we were gobsmacked by his effortless pulling power we were even more impressed when we watched him play football. London back then had Michael Caine and Twiggy and The Rolling Stones as it swung, Liverpool had The Beatles and the rest of the Mersey sound but Manchester, grey, old Manchester, had The Hollies and Bestie. Mancs, to a man, felt they had the better of the deal.

The old TV pictures of George playing do him some justice but not enough. Tom Finney once told me George was, by far, the best, most complete footballer he had ever seen, a view echoed by Bill Shankly. What was he like? You had to be there to appreciate the brilliance, the imagination, the balance, the commitment, the goals. Most of all, he had the belief.

In 1976, Northern Ireland were drawn against Holland in Rotterdam as one of their group qualifying matches for the World Cup. Back then the reporters stayed at the same hotel as the team and travelled with them on the coach to the game. As it happened I sat beside George on the way to the stadium that evening.

Holland - midway between successive World Cup final appearances - and Johan Cruyff were at their peak at the time. George wasn't. I asked him what he thought of the acknowledged world number one and he said he thought the Dutchman was outstanding. 'Better than you?' I asked. George looked at me and laughed. 'You're kidding aren't you? I tell you what I'll do tonight... I'll nutmeg Cruyff first chance I get.' And we both laughed at the thought.

A couple of hours later the Irish players were announced one by one on to the pitch. Pat Jennings, as goalkeeper, was first out of the tunnel to appreciative applause. Best, as No 11, was last. 'And now,' revved up the PA guy, 'Number 11, Georgie [long pause] Best.' And out trotted George. Above him, a beautiful blonde reached over with a single, long-stemmed red rose.

Given his nature, his training and his peripheral vision there was no way he was going to miss her or the rose, so he stopped, trotted back, reached up to take the flower, kissed her hand and ran out on to the pitch waving his rose at the punters as the applause grew even louder.

Five minutes into the game he received the ball wide on the left. Instead of heading towards goal he turned directly infield, weaved his way past at least three Dutchmen and found his way to Cruyff who was wide right. He took the ball to his opponent, dipped a shoulder twice and slipped it between Cruyff's feet. As he ran round to collect it and run on he raised his right fist into the air.

Only a few of us in the press box knew what this bravado act really meant. Johan Cruyff the best in the world? Are you kidding? Only an idiot would have thought that on this evening.

R.L Burnside 1926 - 2005

R.L. Burnside was born in Layfayette County, near Oxford, Mississippi in 1926. As a young man R.L. moved North into the neighboring Marshall County and began sharecropping. Inspired by John Lee Hooker's '50s hit "Boogie Chillun'," R.L. began singing blues and playing guitar. In 1998 R.L. released Come On In, which pitted his raw blues against modern electronica, courtesy of producer Tom Rothrock (Beck, Elliot Smith). The album was a critical and commercial success, and one of its tracks, "It's Bad You Know," became a respectable radio hit and was featured in The Sopranos and on its soundtrack.

http://www.fatpossum.com

Jeremiah Ketner

http://www.smallandround.com/#

nice qutesy stuff.

Uri Geller Art

http://www.uri-geller.com/art/uri-geller-art-70.htm

Excerpt from www.uri-geller.com. I think this says it all.

"...studied by scientists who worked with Albert EinsteIn and the world's most prestigious scientific magazine, Nature, published a paper on Uri's work at the Stanford Research Institute in the U.S.A - a unique endorsement, and an irrefutable proof that his powers are genuine. His work with the FBI and the CIA has ranged from using MindPower to erase KGB computer files and track serial killers, to attend nuclear disarmament negotiations to bombard and influence delegates with positive thought waves so that they would sign the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty. Uri also spoke for a group of US Senators and National Security Executives in the high-security room in the Capitol Building in Washington. For decades this aspect of his career was too confidential and controversial to discuss."

Solitude Networking

Anybody there?

'I am lonely, will anyone speak to me' pleaded the message on the website. Within minutes someone did - and soon thousands of total strangers were sharing their emotions. Oliver Burkeman on an online phenomenon


Nobody, give or take the occasional blues musician, likes to admit to being lonely. People who study loneliness, like Harvard psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds, typically have to rely on anonymous surveys to gauge the size of the problem; when you ask people to identify themselves by name, they tend to use words like "independent" and "self-sufficient" instead. On the internet, though, anonymity is the default position, which explains the extraordinary story of what happened on the website Moviecodec.com.

It wouldn't be unfair to call Moviecodec a website for geeks: codecs are pieces of software that transform audio or video files from one form to another, and discussion on the site is usually technical to the point of being incomprehensible. But in July last year, at 9.49 one Wednesday morning, someone posted a message with an incongruous subject line, no less heartfelt for its lack of punctuation. "I am lonely will anyone speak to me," it read. Half an hour later, the first reply arrived, bearing another hallmark of online anonymity: mindless abuse. "OK so how are you," the respondent wrote. "Are you a piece of pig's bollok?"

But then something remarkable began to happen. Within a week - for reasons having to do with the way Moviecodec's tech-literate owner had made it easily accessible to search engines - the loneliness discussion had become the number-one result if you searched Google with the phrase "I am lonely". And judging from the messages on the board, a lot of people were doing so.

"Dude, I typed 'I am lonely' in Google and your post was the very first response," wrote someone using the name Wetfeet2000. "Does that make you the most popular loneliest person on the planet?"

The messages grew from a trickle to a torrent, as visitors who had stumbled on the site posted their own thoughts. "I'm surrounded by so many people every day but I feel strangely disconnected from them," one wrote. "I used to have a big family and now am down to a few aunts and uncles," explained somebody else. "The friends I have had moved on and got married. I must have done something to deserve this." "It's 3am here," read another contribution. "Just woke up next to my boyfriend and felt so incredibly lonely and sad."

What was revelatory was not so much the well of unwanted solitude, as the way that participants were discovering it. We have become accustomed to relying on Google as a gateway to information of any variety. But countless people seemed to be using it for something more profound - as a source of oracular wisdom, and for answers that the internet was surely unable to provide.

Or was it? Only days into the life of the Moviecodec discussion, which is still going on today, the benefits of finding people in the same boat began to make themselves apparent. "I feel so much better that I am not the only one that typed in 'I am lonely' on Google," one person wrote. And: "Can't believe I typed in this message and found so many people feeling the same way."

Of course, many people might argue that spending too much time on the internet was one of the causes of all this loneliness. Some of them argued that on the website itself, even though they must have come there in a similar manner themselves. Others just seemed disgusted that the topic had been raised, and a taboo broken: "My suggestion to your problem is two things," wrote SAGoon. "First, buy a gun. Second, shoot yourself in the head. Fuck you and don't post faggot shit like this again."

As summer turned into autumn, though, the discussion began to adopt a pragmatic tone. "Maybe some volunteer work is the right way to go," wrote someone under the pseudonym LonelyMan. "At least then I'll be doing something to help others, instead of feeling sorry for myself." Another participant said he felt suicidal, and a fellow site visitor tried to talk him back to calmness. Bjarne Lundgren, who runs Moviecodec from Denmark, added his own thoughts. "I'm the webmaster/owner of Moviecodec.com and I'm also quite lonely," he wrote.

For as long as people were still accessing the site by typing "I am lonely" into Google, the discussion had the air of a shared secret. Most visitors, by definition, had already overcome the hurdle of verbalising their feelings and typing them into the search engine's little white box. Then, the week before last - after the discussion had grown to 107 pages, and thousands of messages - a brief article about it appeared in the New Yorker magazine.

The website suddenly had a whole new audience, many of them presumably curious, rather than lonely - and the site's regular visitors responded with all the hauteur that might be expected from the followers of an underground phenomenon that had suddenly entered the mainstream. (The New Yorker article, at the time of writing, has even replaced Moviecodec as the first Google result for "I am lonely".)

"I'm outta here!" wrote FrenchToast. "This used to be a pretty cool site. People discovered it through serendipity and wound up sharing some very personal stuff. But since that %@&* New Yorker story there have been a flood of idiots."

If that judgment was overblown, the tenor of the discussion was certainly beginning to show signs of intellectualisation. One contributor last week took a moment to note the distinctions between the words athazagoraphobia (fear of being forgotten) and eremophobia (fear of loneliness).

A hierarchy of loneliness began to emerge with the old guard at the top - something new contributors felt obliged to acknowledge. "I read about this site in the New Yorker . . . guess I'm not an authentic 'I'm so lonelier'. In fact, I can't say I've ever thought of typing in emotions on Google." Before long, the number of participants who had discovered the site through the New Yorker appeared easily to outnumber those searching with the phrase "I am lonely".

For more than a year, Moviecodec had provided an unlikely connection in a world in which there aren't enough of them. But by last week, the discussion was beginning to feel disjointed, oversubscribed, as if it had outlasted its usefulness. The site's original participants seemed to be discovering that, while it is definitely distressing to feel as if one has too few friends, it can also be possible to have too many.

Some of the messages so far ...

In NYC, millions of people, but here I am: quite overweight, single, nearing a big, ugly birthday. Time to stop the pity party, I know, but terribly lonesome in the meantime - NYERREADER

I was reading one of the posts at this site a few hours ago. It said a good thing to do was just go out walking. So I did and ended up on the main strip in the city, all bright lights and hundreds of people having fun. Nothing worse. But then I bumped into a friend of a friend and his friend. We talked about nothing for a while. I suddenly felt a lot less lonely. So, yeah, point is getting out of the house worked for me - I googled too

This is quite the little postmodern community, lonely people who find each other at the touch of a button ... Do I feel less lonely now? I knew there were lots of lonely people out there before. Now I am in conversation with some of them, but maybe I am just saying my little piece, congratulating myself . . . Maybe no one will read my post and understand it. Maybe I haven't said it right. Maybe someone out there will read it and understand, and maybe she will write back - oddkod

I'll be everyone's friend!!! - Kristen

why do so few lonely people get along with other lonely people? - jingo

some of u talk to damn much! no wonder u lonely - Jac the King

this thread is so beautiful...it feels like humanity crying out in one voice... I'm lonely tonight too. Anyone in montreal? I wish we could go for a walk together ... - alonetonight


Tuesday August 30, 2005
The Guardian

Piotr Jaworowski

Some nice digital images.

http://he1z.deviantart.com/store/

Las Vegas casinos using oxygenated air

Proper air circulation is vital in all types of buildings. The topic of indoor air quality has made headlines and legislation over the last few years. Attaining that ideal combination of temperature, circulation, and filtration requiresa balancing act of budget, regulations, and the needs of theoccupants. Getting it right makes a big difference. The most recent example of this came to me from a friend who wanted to find out the truth about the kind of air casinos supposedly use to keep people gambling long into the night. She discovered that, while casinos do not pump in oxygenated air (a potential fire hazard), many do use a combination of fresh air circulation and refrigeration to keep visitors feeling alert. No doubt the knowledge that this formula works came from a lab and not a business meeting. Casino design also seems to have taken cues from experiments with mice in mazes. They take a stadium-sized room, build irregular aisles and dead ends with rows of
slot machines, and violá – wide awake people, certain there is a piece of cheese around every corner. The first article in this issue talks about supplying air for both people and mice, and takes an engineer’s look at some new technology.

www.animallab.com

McRorie - The One Man Band

http://mcrorie.net/
All the instruments are controlled via electronic pads attached all over his body.

Davis Shrigley Photography

Interesting scottish photographer who uses the everyday vernacular to
create surreal and humorous photographs.

http://www.davidshrigley.com/list_photographs.html

You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

by Death From Above 1979.

Great rocking out music with fat bass riffs and good rhythm section, which is basically all it is. Wire meets Sabbath.


The band, who had to change their name to avoid confusion (not to mention potential legal hassles) with the New York production team DFA, have managed to record an album that offers much more depth from such a simple arrangement than one would expect. The primary reason the album works so well is due in large part to bassist Jesse Keeler; sounding like a coke-fueled Geezer Butler channeling Fugazi, his basslines are especially nimble, his fast-picked notes coming from all over the fretboard, from extremely low, heavily distorted tones, to more mellifluous, upper-register licks, to all-out dissonant screeches. The key factor is that his performance is so versatile, you forget he's playing bass, his performance boasting the dexterity of an 80s metal virtuoso (Billy Sheehan, eat your heart out), but without all the pretension. Singer/drummer Sebastien Grainger is equally strong, providing muscular punctuation to Keeler's basslines, but at the same time, adding some variety to the proceedings with deft rhythmic changes, veering from straight-ahead punk, to disco-fused hi-hat workouts, to fabulous conga breakdowns, to the ever-reliable, much-loved cowbell.

On the Edge of Eternity

Philip K.Dick died on March 2,1982, the result of a combination of recurrent strokes accompanied by heart failure. In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis (an extensive journal he kept to explore the ramifications of 2-3-74) Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century.

www.philipkdick.com

Taxonomy

- The science, laws, or principles of classification; systematics.

The taxonomic organization of species is hierarchical. Each species belongs to a genus, each genus belongs to a family, and so on through order, class, phylum, and kingdom. Associations within the hierarchy reflect evolutionary relationships, which are deduced typically from morphological and physiological similarities between species. So, for example, species in the same genus are more closely related and more alike than species that are in different genera within the same family.

Carolus Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish botanist, devised the system of binomial nomenclature used for naming species. In this system, each species is given a two-part Latin name, formed by appending a specific epithet to the genus name. By convention, the genus name is capitalized, and both the genus name and specific epithet are italicized, for Canis familiaris or simply C. familiaris.

Modern taxonomy recognizes five kingdoms, into which the estimated five million species of the world are divided. This table presents a familiar organism from each kingdom and the names of the taxonomic groups to which it belongs.

Man's constant struggle to muzzle, pin-down understand the world.

Jim Lambie

Born, 1964, City TK, Scotland
Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland

Jim Lambie's objects and installations playfully find high-modernist forms in junk from the 1960s and '70s, the very era when "modern" became a truly mass-culture aesthetic. In his floor installation Zobop, black duct tape forms a monochrome abstraction on the floor, its pattern determined by the specific peculiarities of the gallery's architecture. Within this field, Lambie includes a series of sculptures, each of which cleverly transforms found objects into elegant abstractions. Made of chair backs, old handbags, and pieces of mirror, The Jesus and Mary Chain recalls both a plaza and the bedazzled inhabitants who might stroll there. Hanging high above, Sunbed (Tan Tropez) glows like an artificial sun; and leaning against the far wall, the Psychedelic Soul Stick playfully lauds the symbolic power of found abstraction. This unobtrusive work made from a branch wrapped with hundreds of layers of shredded record albums, photos, colored ribbons, and thread is part of a larger series in which bits collected from favorite recordings, significant photos, or beloved sweaters are transformed into a shamanistic object that possesses the combined symbolic powers of all the objects from which it is made.

http://www.themoorespace.org/JimLambie/JimLambie.html

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

"What was taking place in him was totally unfamiliar, new, sudden, never before experienced. Not that he understood it, but he sensed clearly, with all the power of sensation, that it was no longer possible for him to address these people in the police station, not only with heartfelt effusions, as he had just done, but in any way at all, and had they been his own brothers and sisters, and not police lieutenants, there would still have been no point in this addressing them, in whatever circumstances of life."

Meaning:- This quote, from Part II, Chapter I, illustrates Raskolnikov’s sudden realization that by murdering Alyona and Lizaveta, he has completely isolated himself from society. His separation, which began before the murders, is now complete, as he has truly crossed over the bounds that formerly kept him tied to the rest of humanity. Indeed, one can argue that only because of his increasing alienation and lack of empathy for other people is Raskolnikov able to actually commit the murders. Additionally, the act of having physically accomplished the crime makes it necessary for Raskolnikov to cement his understanding of himself as a “superman” so that he can evade the bothersome, banal consequences of his actions. Much of the novel is concerned with Raskolnikov’s gradual breakdown and deconstruction of this identity in the face of his alienation from others. Only when he confesses his guilt to Sonya, someone whom he sees as a fellow transgressor of morality, does he start on the path of rejoining society.

"A Dog Cannot Be A Hypocrite, But Neither Can He Be Sincere"

An interesting little idiom I saw on www.rollersparkers.com

Television

The early 21st century drug of choice. A shared illusion, making its addicts think they have friends, a life, access to good information, and the critical thinking skills to form valid opinions. Fatal in large doses.

Instance: Paul spent the day eating Cheetos and watching Television, then had a light heart attack in the evening.

The cathode ray tube is the retina of the mind's eye.

Long live the new flesh!

A device that causes attention deficit...um whatever...yeah, so like i was watching friends the other night and....

Why were we not so surprised on 9/11? Because we watch too much television!

Another way of making money.

What, TV used to educate, inform and inspire? Let's broadcast the Bold and the Beautiful instead, gets more ratings.

Definitions from www.urbandictionary.com

The Mirror - Andrei Tarkovsky

"In all my films it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people (other than those of the flesh), those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being there." (Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time, 1984)

Art - to grope blindly for connection with others in the dark. Been recommended the mirror to watch. Have already had a sneak peak at "The Mirror".

After watching. - A cerebral and deeply subconscious work. It's struggle to grasp any narrative probably because there is none. there's more of a mood and a collection of themes in this film. Summer - rebirth - posterity - memory - perception of childhood - family. Full images of an ephemereal and obscure nature I'll definitely need to watch this one again with a few notes or at some explanation to through some light on the ideas.