The World Cup is in town, so everything is on the backburner. It's hardly ten days old, but the big guns are already tumbling like tenpins. Bettors and bookies are biting bullets. Pundits are in hiding. The romantics are having a field day. Great, heroic and incredible performances are coming out of South Africa. Life's full of twists and turns. Let's celebrate them. This week's picks:
1. Five of the world's top ten football teams are staring at early and unceremonious trips home: Spain (ranked 2nd), Italy (5), Germany (6), England (8) and France (9). Their pathetic performance, drawing or losing to lowly, make-weight teams, have made great World Cup stories and history. The shocker of them all is what is now known as the Kiwi conquest, the New Zealand - Italy draw. Just consider the contrasts: Italy is 5th ranked, four-time winners, defending champions, with players selected from Europe's richest leagues. New Zealand is 78th, only one World Cup appearance before (losing all games), players selected from a population of 24 million (including 20 mill sheep), best player Ryan Nelsen plays for Blackburn but nobody knows. Sweet dreams are made of this.
2.The 13th Sukan Malaysia (Sukma) in Malacca ended last week, after competing head on with the World Cup. Looks like a foul-up of the highest order. What's the National Sports Council up to? Ambush marketing? And you guess what happened. Empty venues, sleepy judges, absent coaches, confused runners, half-pace press. All this despite PM's relentless rally for innovative ideas and breakthrough performance. A year has 52 weeks. Sukma runs for about two weeks. Even if you pick the two weeks at random, the chance of hitting World Cup weeks is a remote 10%. So my hunch is that Sukma dates have been selected on purpose by the bare brains, to pit the pitiful games against the World Cup. Why? You tell me.
3.The 2010 US National Annual Spelling Bee (a spelling contest) concluded in Washington DC recently. The champion was again an American Indian or Indian American or Indian Indian, but not Red Indian. It's simply amazing that in the past ten years, Spelling Bee has been won by an Indian six times (six different Indians). No surprise really. Indians' language skills and prowess is well-known. If anything, Spelling Bees are proof enough that English words are devilishly difficult to spell. I've never heard of any spelling contest for Indian words. At the same time, a peace-loving crowd of four people took to the streets demanding a wholesale change to the English spelling system. Slow should be slo, for example. I'm sad that only four people turned up for such a noble and urgent cause. I'd join this group anytime. We all know that, in English, we don't spell what we say, or conversely, we don't say what we spell. Spelling English words is a nightmare on daily basis. We're not talking about "onomatopoeia" here. We're talking about everyday words like access, necessary, accommodate, business, which can trick you into missing a "c" here or an extra "s" there. I've seen bosses who do nothing an entire day but correct spellings. I don't blame them if they've to sign off the papers or letters. Poor spelling makes poor impressions, and dooms an already slim chance of a VP hopeful. A high-achieving friend at Petronas had spelling problems even with plain and harmless words like response, which he spelt responce (probably a hangover from the defence/defense mix-up). He's a GM, but that's another story.
1. Five of the world's top ten football teams are staring at early and unceremonious trips home: Spain (ranked 2nd), Italy (5), Germany (6), England (8) and France (9). Their pathetic performance, drawing or losing to lowly, make-weight teams, have made great World Cup stories and history. The shocker of them all is what is now known as the Kiwi conquest, the New Zealand - Italy draw. Just consider the contrasts: Italy is 5th ranked, four-time winners, defending champions, with players selected from Europe's richest leagues. New Zealand is 78th, only one World Cup appearance before (losing all games), players selected from a population of 24 million (including 20 mill sheep), best player Ryan Nelsen plays for Blackburn but nobody knows. Sweet dreams are made of this.
2.The 13th Sukan Malaysia (Sukma) in Malacca ended last week, after competing head on with the World Cup. Looks like a foul-up of the highest order. What's the National Sports Council up to? Ambush marketing? And you guess what happened. Empty venues, sleepy judges, absent coaches, confused runners, half-pace press. All this despite PM's relentless rally for innovative ideas and breakthrough performance. A year has 52 weeks. Sukma runs for about two weeks. Even if you pick the two weeks at random, the chance of hitting World Cup weeks is a remote 10%. So my hunch is that Sukma dates have been selected on purpose by the bare brains, to pit the pitiful games against the World Cup. Why? You tell me.
3.The 2010 US National Annual Spelling Bee (a spelling contest) concluded in Washington DC recently. The champion was again an American Indian or Indian American or Indian Indian, but not Red Indian. It's simply amazing that in the past ten years, Spelling Bee has been won by an Indian six times (six different Indians). No surprise really. Indians' language skills and prowess is well-known. If anything, Spelling Bees are proof enough that English words are devilishly difficult to spell. I've never heard of any spelling contest for Indian words. At the same time, a peace-loving crowd of four people took to the streets demanding a wholesale change to the English spelling system. Slow should be slo, for example. I'm sad that only four people turned up for such a noble and urgent cause. I'd join this group anytime. We all know that, in English, we don't spell what we say, or conversely, we don't say what we spell. Spelling English words is a nightmare on daily basis. We're not talking about "onomatopoeia" here. We're talking about everyday words like access, necessary, accommodate, business, which can trick you into missing a "c" here or an extra "s" there. I've seen bosses who do nothing an entire day but correct spellings. I don't blame them if they've to sign off the papers or letters. Poor spelling makes poor impressions, and dooms an already slim chance of a VP hopeful. A high-achieving friend at Petronas had spelling problems even with plain and harmless words like response, which he spelt responce (probably a hangover from the defence/defense mix-up). He's a GM, but that's another story.
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