Loose Cans

So I'm really not going to talk about the final. I was at Le Pavillion, bastion of Francophonia in Beijing, from midnight through till 5am. With all these French people I befriended specifically for the purpose. It was a brilliant game, one of the best I've ever seen (as Rob Smyth put it for the Guardian, the teams "shared defences that are tighter than a nun’s budget"), and I think penalty kicks are bullshit. Furthermore, a whole slew of lip readers have independently deduced that Materazzi told Zidane, when the former offered to exchange jerseys with him after the game, "Non voglio, perche tu sei figlio di terrorista." Which is quite literally the worst thing he could have said to the Marseille-born son of Algerians. ZZ still has a 61% approval rating in France. And with me. It was stupid as hell, and I'm sorry it was his last act, but yo--that's low. And what a headbutt.

So I'm really not talking about it. I got addicted to the Times' football play-by-play blogs during the cup (all games broadcast at 12am or 3am, and the few I missed, I enjoyed reading online). The Guardian's blog coverage was particularly brilliant:

"--16 mins: The intrepid Grosso gets into a nice position wide on the left... and shanks his cross into Austria."

Bah. I'm not talking about it. Italians use too much hair gel. I object to this even more than the grotesque diving.

The Beijing air is getting to me. A sore throat considerably interfered with today's nap. These lozenges taste like hell. My new roommate (Ong-Bak went back to thailand) is a nightmare. 16 year-old Chinese-French-American Dungeons & Dragons type-A nerd, Daddy gorged on money, goes to sleep at 11pm, wears a mega-girly hari band and never never NEVER STOPS TALKING. First thing in the morning, talkytalkytalky. Christ. He's doomed.