I'm often wrong.
I thought Jamie Carragher would be at most a dependable big-hearted player who would never learn to pass. I thought we should have resigned Michael Owen when he became available. I thought Jean Arne Riise wasn't the right man for left-full. I thought goalkeepers should almost never punch the ball. I thought Stephen Gerrard was not a leader but a child. And I thought Momo Sissoko was lacking one vital area of his trade.
Jamie Carragher moved in from the wings and took on a central role, literally and figuratively, becoming in the process the undisputed hero of Merseyside and probably the best defender in the country.
Michael Owen transferred, perhaps fittingly, to Souness's Newcastle and has spent most of the season, as Pat predicted, not even on the bench, while Sven Goran Erikkson's idiocy, naivety and greed when faced with the hounds of the British tabloid press has exposed the true hometown of Owen's ambitions, a place, for better or for worse, far south from those sacred bastions of traditional northern football pride, Anfield in the east and St. James's Park in the west.
As Rafa Benitez finally saw the strobelight of why Djimi Traore should never ever be in a Liverpool starting lineup, and Stephen Warnock started to show that his lionhearted prowess in the tackle and gameness in getting forward is matched only by his utterly hopeless, "who's been messing around with the magnets", positional sense and total inability to read the game, Jean Arne Riise's returns to the left-back position started to coincide with clean sheets, unbeaten games and records being broken.
Somewhere along the course of this season the sight of the diminutive Jose Reina well off his line, one arm extended in a crowd bodies, stopped giving me the jitters.
Then Stephen Gerrard started to match his massively improved performances on the pitch (what a season he's had) with sensible, team-oriented interviews that deflected attention away from himself, "the man". After all the recent tantrums, ill-advised comments and debacles, this newfound captain's maturity is a credit to both Gerrard and his mentors, not to mention a welcome surprise.
And I didn't really understand the fuss about Momo Sissoko until last weekend's F.A. Cup victory over Man. Utd.
Most would agree the key area Sissoko needs to improve is his passing. Most would also say the ability to pass, if not with the visionary brilliance of an Alonso, Kaka or Bergkamp at least with the dour consistency of a Wilkins, Makelele or a Keane, is a vital element of the trade of a central midfielder.
Never mind the visionary. Until last weekend, I hadn't even seen the dour and dependable from Sissoko. I thought it was a case of not being able to put in what God's left out. I didn't believe Sissoko had it in him to pass the ball.
Until last weekend. The United game was the first time I've seen Sissoko pass consistently and successfully, and to one of our players. Even better, it was also the first glimpse I've had of vision and creativity, of thinking, waiting for the right moment and then finding the angle. Now I'm not saying he'll ever become an Alonso or a Kaka, because he won't, but I do now think he could equal, or even better, Makalele or Keane in the passing department. Is it the calming influence of understated master craftsman Didi Hamann, the exposure to the vision and genius of Alonso and Gerrard or just committed hard work by Sissoko himself? It's impossible to know. But the United game marked in my eyes a change for the better in Sissoko's game.
In fact, when it ended, Sissoko's performance pleased me more than the fact that we'd beaten United in the Cup for the first time in 85 years. It felt very good to be wrong again.
Tim from Sleeping in the Mountains has written a really good piece about Hokkaido, my home from home from home.
It really captures what's happening to the ghost towns of Japan's Wild North frontier.
I would like to add to it a couple of scenes.
The first is the glittering pachinko parlour and its full car park of shining SUVs. It's somewhere down the highway out of town or right in the centre near the whitewashed brick English-village style railway station. The pachinko parlour is the only show in town, a hub of gaudiness in sparkling oranges and yellows syphoning off any vibrancy that's left from the surrounding void of emptiness, dying and decay.
The other is the old woman. Surely you have seen her, that one solitary old lady, alone at midday on an empty main street in a world of ordered silence, sweeping fastidiously imagined dust in front of her already immaculate store? She has no time for your sadness at the scent of death.
The Alex Kerr-esque stuff Tim describes with the public works and the mascot and the record-breaking, ridiculous grand-scale European immitations and the empty museums and rest of the pork-barrel tourist attraction extravaganzas, and how things were before and after the bubble, and how Hokkaido was in the war all rings true.
I'm also interested in where Hokkaido people came from, why they moved there in the first place, and who they replaced when they arrived.
And how that history influences their mentality and relationship with the island.
And the cold and cruel conditions of the place.
And how this affects its people (I'd live up there but for the winters).
And all the dark secrets.
And the relationship with an aloof and distant Tokyo.
And a rough and openly hostile Russia.
And how the conquistadores feel wronged.
And why the young want out.
You may think the comparison to Apartheid is sensational, but the arguments and context this article provides about the McGowan case are undeniable.
On the Road to Apartheid? Japan and the Steve McGowan Case
I was watching Season 5 of the Sopranos. The psychiatrist and Tony were talking about Tony's bouts of sudden rage and frustration, his feelings that things were falling apart, the sense of an impending doom/breakdown utterly beyond his control.
In a quintessential Sopranos moment, the psychiatrist quotes Yeats's The Second Coming and Tony asks her what the fuck she's talking about. We the viewers sit all-seeing on sofas, smiling knowingly, admiring the aptness of her reference, the expectedness of Tony's reaction, and the way the two characters feed off and stimulate each other.
The next day the reference still echoes. The Second Coming is a poem to read in the morning, when the mind is young enough to absorb all that beauty.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Japan Times Zeitgeist: Twisted logic deals rights blow to foreigners.
I read a lot of hanketsu (court decisions), most of them handed down by the Supreme Court for cause-celebre, heavily-under-spotlight criminal cases. What strikes me most about them is the arbitrary and pro-establishment nature of the judgements. Reasoning is often applied backwards. This is the judgement we want to give. And this is how we're going to justify it.
So when the regional High Court judge ruled against McGowan in his civil case claiming damages for racial discrimation, I wasn't surprised by the arbitrary, biased and quite frankly ridiculous reasoning he used.
I agree fully with Debito here. This one really needs to be appealed.
One of my favourite ways of relaxing is going back through a batch of photos I've taken in the past.
Japan Times: Female on throne could marry foreigner, Hiranuma warns
"Dozens of conservative lawmakers and their supporters Wednesday attacked a proposal to let females and their descendents ascend to the Chrysanthemum Throne, warning the move threatens a centuries-old tradition -- and could even allow foreign blood into the Imperial line.
The lawmakers, led by former trade minister Takeo Hiranuma, are fighting a bill being drafted by the government to avert a succession crisis in the Imperial family by allowing reigning empresses and their descendents.
Females have been barred from the throne since the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and a 1947 law further restricted ascension to males from the male line. No woman has reigned in more than 200 years.
The Imperial family has not produced a male heir since the 1960s and public support has been growing for a change in the law to allow Princess Aiko, the only child Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako, to ascend to the throne.
Hiranuma, however, warned the reform could corrupt the Imperial line, which he said has been the supreme symbol of Japanese national and ethnic identity for centuries.
"If Aiko becomes the reigning empress and gets involved with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him, their child may be the emperor," Hiranuma told about 40 lawmakers, academics and supporters at a Tokyo hall. "We should never let that happen."
Despite the overwhelming public support for the reform, traditionalists have stepped up a campaign to quash the move -- going so far as to propose bringing back concubines to breed male descendants as was done until the Taisho Era (1912-1926). Others have argued the aristocracy, banned after World War II, should be reinstated as a way of broadening the pool of candidates for the throne."
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I can't believe this guy was trade minister of Japan. Much as I love Japan, this country is still feudal, and the old men that run it are a joke.
Assumptions he makes:
(1) Aiko is naturally going to get swept away by some blue-eyed foreign man
Note: You have to wonder why he makes this assumption.
(2) A blue-eyed foreigner would taint the pure Japanese blood
(3) Women are not to be trusted with important things or to make important decisions
As for introducing concubines and reinstating the aristocracy...
The fossils of Nagatacho.
Nurtured immaturity, one-way sensitivity, blood-sanctioned arrogance.
Behold these leaders of men.
Alan Booth said it all those years ago and nothing has changed.
The sooner Japanese women start running this country, the better.
Which is best?
(1) "When you decide to no longer use your PC"
(2) "When you decide no longer to use your PC"
(3) "When you decide to use your PC no longer"
