When describing a hustling bustling area of London you can opt for sociocultural, socioeconomic, and multicultural exemplars. Or you could just tell stories like for example what happened today when I came out of New Cross Gate station to find a man standing there with his penis hanging out of the top of his track pants.
Just standing there minding his own outside the entrance. And the really funny thing is that people just cruised along on their business, barely taking notice and not even really sidestepping. The police had arrived by the time I cleared my errands and made my way back home. They shuttled him off with a caring hand.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
New Cross Penis
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Jonathan de Guzman
Canada keeps ending up at or near the top of global quality of life but no argument seems strong enough to convince some of our sporting superstars not to defect to other countries.
Nationalism may be fading as a social construct but since so many of the major global sporting competitions are based on nationality it makes a big difference to nations when individuals swap sides. For Canada this has been a strangely persistent trend in recent years and it begs the question ... why?
Lennox Lewis famously maintained his amateur boxing status for four more years after losing to Tyrell Biggs in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In 1998 in Seoul he captured a heavyweight gold medal for Canada before promptly declaring himself a British national for whom he went on to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
Some might point out that Lewis was born in London, England and only moved to Canada when he was 12 so perhaps Greg Rusedski is a better example. After turning professional in 1991 and shooting to the top of the Canadian men's tennis national rankings, Montreal-born Rusedski chose to adopt British citizenship in 1995 and has had a long and successful professional career including losing in the final of the 1997 US Open Championship.
Finally we move to the subject closest to my heart. Professional football or soccer as Canadians like to call it. Owen Hargreaves moved from Calgary, Alberta in 1997 at age 16 to train with FC Bayern Munich, the traditional powerhouse club of the German Bundesliga. By 2001 he was a regular in their starting line-up and faced a choice of national teams. With British born parents he chose to represent England and got his first cap against Holland in a friendly in the summer of 2001. Once a player plays an international match for a country they can never again play for another country so Hargreaves was fated to never wear the Canadian read-and-white. I followed this process closely at the time and was tremendously disappointed with the choice of the Alberta-born player who could have been the pivot around which a whole host of new emerging Canadian players could form a competitive international squad.
Interestingly Hargreaves star has waned in the hyper-competitive English midfield and he looks unlikely to get a call-up for the national side in the 2006 World Cup in Germany. In fact he has not been called up for any international matches since September, 2005. With the wealth of emerging talent in England that might be his last international match ever which is what makes his choice not to be part of an emerging Canadian threat all the more frustrating.
Finally we arrive at the present and another round of this seemingly unending cycle of Canadian sporting heroes looking to shores afar. This time the subject is Toronto-born Jonathan de Guzman, a tremendously talented 18-year-old midfielder for Feyenoord Rotterdam in the Dutch Eredivisie. Apparently he is currently applying for Dutch citizenship and without any international caps will have his choice of national sides. His brother, Deportiva de la Coruna midfielder Julian de Guzman already has 13 international caps for Canada and is a linchpin of our fledgling side, ranked 85th in the world.
But in the notoriously weak CONCACAF World Cup qualifying group (Trinidad & Tobago qualified for Germany 2006) one can only imagine what it would have looked like with Hargreaves and Julian de Guzman planted in front of the back four as holding midfielders, and Jonathan de Guzman nestled in front in a floating role behind Fulham striker Thomas Radzinski. With Tottenham wing-back Paul Stalteri overlapping on the left Canada surely could have posed a serious threat for years to come. With Hargreaves already gone it is crucial for the future that the younger de Guzman join his brother in the midfield to provide attacking threat.
So why might it not happen? These words from Jonathan's father hint at an explanation:
"Between Julian and myself, we don't push Jonathan in one direction or another," their father said. "He is a proud Canadian who would love to represent Canada, but how much sacrifice can you make for your country when you could have a chance to win the World Cup for Holland and participate in it."
A common complaint of all of the defectors is that they were underappreciated in Canada's sporting context, by fans and officials alike. It does seem a bit bizarre that Hargreaves was cut from the Canadian national junior side shortly before departure and that de Guzman has not yet featured for the national side. Seems we should be getting these types of players who are training in top-class European academies on to the field in red-and-white when they are 16 or 17 to give them crucial experiences at a young age. And after all with our host of abysmal recent results what have we got to lose?
Or maybe we should reflect on Jamaica who have provided Canada with countless Olympic heroes over the years including sprinters Donovan Bailey and Ben Johnson and most recently bobsledder Lascelles "Pusher" Brown who just one month after gaining Canadian citizenship helped Canada to a silver medal in the Turin Winter Games 2006 after pushing much-maligned Jamaican sleds from 1999 to 2004.
But what seems clear is the least we can do is let our sporting stars who are working outside of Canada know how much we appreciate their successes. If you are a Canadian who'd like to see one of the world's top young footballing talents lead our nation to future success send an email to klantenservice@feyenoord.nl with the subject ATTN: Jonathan de Guzman expressing your desire for him to suit up for Canada. Also contact the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) on how much you'd like them to overtly express Canada's desire for Jonathan to join his brother in our midfield. If and when Jonathan makes a decision I'll post it in comments here.
Nationalism may be fading as a social construct but since so many of the major global sporting competitions are based on nationality it makes a big difference to nations when individuals swap sides. For Canada this has been a strangely persistent trend in recent years and it begs the question ... why?
Lennox Lewis famously maintained his amateur boxing status for four more years after losing to Tyrell Biggs in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In 1998 in Seoul he captured a heavyweight gold medal for Canada before promptly declaring himself a British national for whom he went on to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
Some might point out that Lewis was born in London, England and only moved to Canada when he was 12 so perhaps Greg Rusedski is a better example. After turning professional in 1991 and shooting to the top of the Canadian men's tennis national rankings, Montreal-born Rusedski chose to adopt British citizenship in 1995 and has had a long and successful professional career including losing in the final of the 1997 US Open Championship.
Finally we move to the subject closest to my heart. Professional football or soccer as Canadians like to call it. Owen Hargreaves moved from Calgary, Alberta in 1997 at age 16 to train with FC Bayern Munich, the traditional powerhouse club of the German Bundesliga. By 2001 he was a regular in their starting line-up and faced a choice of national teams. With British born parents he chose to represent England and got his first cap against Holland in a friendly in the summer of 2001. Once a player plays an international match for a country they can never again play for another country so Hargreaves was fated to never wear the Canadian read-and-white. I followed this process closely at the time and was tremendously disappointed with the choice of the Alberta-born player who could have been the pivot around which a whole host of new emerging Canadian players could form a competitive international squad.
Interestingly Hargreaves star has waned in the hyper-competitive English midfield and he looks unlikely to get a call-up for the national side in the 2006 World Cup in Germany. In fact he has not been called up for any international matches since September, 2005. With the wealth of emerging talent in England that might be his last international match ever which is what makes his choice not to be part of an emerging Canadian threat all the more frustrating.
Finally we arrive at the present and another round of this seemingly unending cycle of Canadian sporting heroes looking to shores afar. This time the subject is Toronto-born Jonathan de Guzman, a tremendously talented 18-year-old midfielder for Feyenoord Rotterdam in the Dutch Eredivisie. Apparently he is currently applying for Dutch citizenship and without any international caps will have his choice of national sides. His brother, Deportiva de la Coruna midfielder Julian de Guzman already has 13 international caps for Canada and is a linchpin of our fledgling side, ranked 85th in the world.
But in the notoriously weak CONCACAF World Cup qualifying group (Trinidad & Tobago qualified for Germany 2006) one can only imagine what it would have looked like with Hargreaves and Julian de Guzman planted in front of the back four as holding midfielders, and Jonathan de Guzman nestled in front in a floating role behind Fulham striker Thomas Radzinski. With Tottenham wing-back Paul Stalteri overlapping on the left Canada surely could have posed a serious threat for years to come. With Hargreaves already gone it is crucial for the future that the younger de Guzman join his brother in the midfield to provide attacking threat.
So why might it not happen? These words from Jonathan's father hint at an explanation:
"Between Julian and myself, we don't push Jonathan in one direction or another," their father said. "He is a proud Canadian who would love to represent Canada, but how much sacrifice can you make for your country when you could have a chance to win the World Cup for Holland and participate in it."
A common complaint of all of the defectors is that they were underappreciated in Canada's sporting context, by fans and officials alike. It does seem a bit bizarre that Hargreaves was cut from the Canadian national junior side shortly before departure and that de Guzman has not yet featured for the national side. Seems we should be getting these types of players who are training in top-class European academies on to the field in red-and-white when they are 16 or 17 to give them crucial experiences at a young age. And after all with our host of abysmal recent results what have we got to lose?
Or maybe we should reflect on Jamaica who have provided Canada with countless Olympic heroes over the years including sprinters Donovan Bailey and Ben Johnson and most recently bobsledder Lascelles "Pusher" Brown who just one month after gaining Canadian citizenship helped Canada to a silver medal in the Turin Winter Games 2006 after pushing much-maligned Jamaican sleds from 1999 to 2004.
But what seems clear is the least we can do is let our sporting stars who are working outside of Canada know how much we appreciate their successes. If you are a Canadian who'd like to see one of the world's top young footballing talents lead our nation to future success send an email to klantenservice@feyenoord.nl with the subject ATTN: Jonathan de Guzman expressing your desire for him to suit up for Canada. Also contact the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) on how much you'd like them to overtly express Canada's desire for Jonathan to join his brother in our midfield. If and when Jonathan makes a decision I'll post it in comments here.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Crossing the Analog Divide
Most of the hype about new projects on the Internet focuses on integrating new technologies or processes into daily life. But there are countless examples, like BookCrossing (or BXing), of how use of the Internet can inject new life into old technology.
If you are not familiar with the phenomena, the premise is fairly straightforward. Person A registers a copy of a book with the BookCrossing website, scribbles the registration number on the inside jacket, and leaves the book in a public place. Person B finds the book, reads it, visits the bookcrossing website to enter the registration number and jots down a journal entry of their experience (eg. where they found it, if they liked it, where they left it). Person B then leaves the book in a public place, Person C finds it and the cycle of sharing continues.
The website was started in 2001 and was inspired by similar initiatives like phototag.org with disposable cameras (Squid goes around the world in 99 days ... view Squid's pictures), and where's willy or george tracking small currency movements. The idea is to release objects into the "wild" like tracking tagged animals or birds and follow movements and associated narratives through the Internet.
Quite sad to see that the book business is as scared as the music industry of change. According to Caroline Michel, publisher of HarperPress: "book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing". This approach seems especially absurd in the week that pop history is made by the first single to achieve number one on the UK singles chart based solely on computer downloads. It's just another case of a business model coming under threat, not a business.
Fortune and friends of similar literary taste brought me two copies of Tom Robbins' debut Another Roadside Attraction over the past couple years so it seems like a good place to start. It is already registered with a BookCrossing ID so now I just need to decide the best place to introduce one of my favorite texts into the wild Londinium streets. Maybe on one of those benches in the courtyard of St Paul's Cathedral, or on a bar stool in a ragged southeast London pub, in a capsule of the London Eye, or dropped off the Hammersmith Bridge onto a passing fishing trawler. If you happen to stumble upon it, soak up every word of a cracking read, and release it to the wild once more. Abraham Lincoln could just as well have been describing BookCrossing as books when he said: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".
If you are not familiar with the phenomena, the premise is fairly straightforward. Person A registers a copy of a book with the BookCrossing website, scribbles the registration number on the inside jacket, and leaves the book in a public place. Person B finds the book, reads it, visits the bookcrossing website to enter the registration number and jots down a journal entry of their experience (eg. where they found it, if they liked it, where they left it). Person B then leaves the book in a public place, Person C finds it and the cycle of sharing continues.
The website was started in 2001 and was inspired by similar initiatives like phototag.org with disposable cameras (Squid goes around the world in 99 days ... view Squid's pictures), and where's willy or george tracking small currency movements. The idea is to release objects into the "wild" like tracking tagged animals or birds and follow movements and associated narratives through the Internet.
Quite sad to see that the book business is as scared as the music industry of change. According to Caroline Michel, publisher of HarperPress: "book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing". This approach seems especially absurd in the week that pop history is made by the first single to achieve number one on the UK singles chart based solely on computer downloads. It's just another case of a business model coming under threat, not a business.
Fortune and friends of similar literary taste brought me two copies of Tom Robbins' debut Another Roadside Attraction over the past couple years so it seems like a good place to start. It is already registered with a BookCrossing ID so now I just need to decide the best place to introduce one of my favorite texts into the wild Londinium streets. Maybe on one of those benches in the courtyard of St Paul's Cathedral, or on a bar stool in a ragged southeast London pub, in a capsule of the London Eye, or dropped off the Hammersmith Bridge onto a passing fishing trawler. If you happen to stumble upon it, soak up every word of a cracking read, and release it to the wild once more. Abraham Lincoln could just as well have been describing BookCrossing as books when he said: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like".
Labels: internet, literature
Robotic Sociology
There is a tendency in current sociological theory to wax on endlessly about the 'western' influence on the world and the importance of not looking at the world through 'western' filters. I'm not sure if there is a fundamental lack of understanding about the changing socio-demographic and socio-political makeup of the global community, or if the discourses are simply lagging behind the reality. Like how the Chinese Government is a bigger threat to the emerging open-standards and interconnectivity of information and knowledge than the Fortune 500 put together.
Maybe it will be more obvious when South Korea, the world's most wired country, puts a robot in every home by 2015. And not just the $500 robots who sweep and clean the house, using sensors to chart a path around the kitchen table, but robots that teach and converse in dozens of languages, sing and dance for children when they are bored and patrol public areas.
That's right folks. The future is here. Well not here really, but in South Korea. As we speak, South Koreans watch free government-subsidized TV over cellphones, are connected anytime, everywhere, through blanketed national high-speed wireless Internet access, and over 40% of the population has a home page. Every school is interconnected by high speed Internet and collaborative educational initiatives. Homemakers enroll regularly in IT courses targeting use in real life situations and low-income families receive tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of hardware and software to participate in the national explosion in digital data.
But perhaps the most interesting developments are in the service sector initiatives to create robots capable of integrating into daily life. According to the South Korean Ministry of Information and Communciation, instead of operating independently, these service robots derive their information from being part of a network - a kind of collective robotic intelligence.
So beware to 'western' sociologists. The time for self-loathing and great laments on what we have done and what we should never do again is nearing an end. Soon we will speak of how the Koreans thrust their robots upon us and we scrambled around in a disoriented, robotic state.
Maybe it will be more obvious when South Korea, the world's most wired country, puts a robot in every home by 2015. And not just the $500 robots who sweep and clean the house, using sensors to chart a path around the kitchen table, but robots that teach and converse in dozens of languages, sing and dance for children when they are bored and patrol public areas.
That's right folks. The future is here. Well not here really, but in South Korea. As we speak, South Koreans watch free government-subsidized TV over cellphones, are connected anytime, everywhere, through blanketed national high-speed wireless Internet access, and over 40% of the population has a home page. Every school is interconnected by high speed Internet and collaborative educational initiatives. Homemakers enroll regularly in IT courses targeting use in real life situations and low-income families receive tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of hardware and software to participate in the national explosion in digital data.
But perhaps the most interesting developments are in the service sector initiatives to create robots capable of integrating into daily life. According to the South Korean Ministry of Information and Communciation, instead of operating independently, these service robots derive their information from being part of a network - a kind of collective robotic intelligence.
So beware to 'western' sociologists. The time for self-loathing and great laments on what we have done and what we should never do again is nearing an end. Soon we will speak of how the Koreans thrust their robots upon us and we scrambled around in a disoriented, robotic state.
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