everything is f-locked after a while.
just ask, don't sweat it.

lately i've been inhaling nonfiction like it's going out of style. so far i've discovered that i have no interest whatsoever in economics, the micro or the macro kind; collected letters tend to be, in a word, BORING; hiroshima always makes me handwring and cry; travel books are pure evil; and philosophy books can be pretty brutal too. further, even though malcolm gladwell has excellent hair (google image this, i really mean it), i still can't sit through his retarded blinking tipping points for more than 70 pages.

but there is hope: what i'm reading now is the size of a small minivan and it threatens to smother me on a regular basis. it is thankfully filled with honesty and heart and things i am actually interested in, so i will now proceed to painfully transcribe 99% of the introduction because i HAVE TO. it is like a moral obligation, only slightly more pressing.


    from the ball is round by david goldblatt:

Is there any cultural practice more global than football? Rites of birth, death and marriage are universal, but infinite in their diversity. Football is played by the same rules everywhere. No single world religion can match its geographical scope. Even Christianity, borne on the back of European expansion, is a relatively minor player across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The use of English and the vocabularies of science and mathematics must run football close for universality, but they remain the lingua francas of the world’s elites, not of its masses. McDonald’s, MTV? Only the most anodyne products of America’s cultural industries can claim a reach as wide as football’s, and then only for a fleeting moment in those parts of the world that can afford them. Around half the planet watched the 2006 World Cup Final – three billion humans have never done anything simultaneously before.

Football is available to anyone who can make a rag ball and find another pair of feet to pass to. Football has not merely been consumed by the world’s societies, it has been embraced, embedded and then transformed by them. Football is a minority sport only in North America, Australasia and South Asia, where baseball, rugby and cricket are stronger, and even here it is a rising force. ( Whatever the course of its migration, whatever its geographical origins, whatever the hierarchies of the game, no single country or continent owns football. )

ain't no mermaid AU more interesting than that! (... right?)