Roundabout: Soccer, Shootings, Senate, FOOTBALL

In which Josh takes a brief spin around the bloggable items in his head this evening.

Soccer

Rob tipped me off yesterday to the latest English column critical of MLS and its handling of David Beckham, by Martin Samuel of The Times. Unlike most of its genre, though, it’s actually well-thought-out (which I would expect, since it was Rob that sent it to me) and merits a response.

I can confess to being at least as confused as Samuel at the post-Beckham proliferation of coverage of MLS in the English press. The league is getting better and pulling in more stars, but it’s barely more newsworthy in the English context than, say, the Portuguese or Greek domestic leagues. They care about Beckham’s fitness for international play, and that’s all, which is fair; the variety of Premiership jerseys in my closet is entirely based on the wanderings of Claudio Reyna, Brad Friedel and Tim Howard. But the other problem is that, since Beckham plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy, the public face of MLS management in Britain is Alexi Lalas. For those of you not up on your American soccer history, consider Lalas as GM the equivalent of your favorite team in another sport hiring, say, David Wells, Sterling Sharpe, or Jeremy Roenick. He’s always been an entertaining commentator because he’s opinionated and unconcerned with public reaction. But that doesn’t make him an intelligent manager, and does make him an awful ambassador. I’ve said all along that I don’t mind having Beckham in MLS, it’s just a shame he had to go to such an incompetent organization as L.A. The image Lalas projects to an international audience is why.

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Becoming A Twit

You may notice a new section over there on the left (if you’re on the main page). It’s called Twitter, and what it does is display my latest update from the remarkably similarly-named Twitter, the microblogging/social networking site that appears to be the latest craze on the Internets. I can post a one-liner (140 characters or less) to Twitter, and therefore to this section, via just about any means of electronic communication around, the most handy being a text message. If you want to follow my posts there, click “follow me”, and if you’re a Twitter user, you can add me to your follow list; if not, you can find a feed there to add to your RSS reader. (You are using an RSS reader by now, right?)

If you use Facebook, this is awfully similar to its status function, only without the slightly-restrictive “name is…” formatting. And, of course, it doesn’t require you to be logged in to Facebook in order to read it.

The common name for an individual Twitter post appears to be “tweet.” I guess that leaves “twit” to refer to the users, then?

Scoreboard: Yankee Stadium

No, my blog isn’t limited strictly to customer service rants these days.

On Thursday, I made the run up to Yankee Stadium for the Yankees’ day game against the White Sox, making it my 11th major league stadium. I’m no Yankees fan, but the place is an integral part of baseball history, and it’ll be gone at the end of 2008. This is the time to see it, and so I caught jetBlue up and Amtrak back.

• Alarm 0400, Josh 0
• Dunkin Donuts IAD $4, Josh 2 (donuts? OK.  $1.69 for a half-pint of orange juice, not so much)
• jetBlue 1300, airlines that don’t provide DirecTV and respectable legroom 0
• Port Authority $5, Long Island Rail Road $7, subway $7, Josh’s transit pass collection 2 (AirTrain and LIRR sell a combined ticket)
• Bottled waters 5, high temperature 94, Josh 0
• Central Park chillout 45, Josh ++
• Josh 4, NYC subway confusion 2 (only a couple of missteps, neither costing more than 5 minutes)
• Stan’s Sports World $7, travel bags safely checked 1
• Stadium collections: MLB 11, NHL 8, college football 10 (regularly-scheduled)
• Tradition 5, modern accommodations 2 (Hammond organ++)
• White Sox 8, Yankees 0 (middle 2nd)
• White Sox 8, Yankees 8 (end 2nd)
• White Sox 13, Yankees 9 (final)
• Penn Station KMart $16, non-foul shirt and deodorant for the ride home priceless
• New Jersey 40, Amtrak schedule 0 (darn you)
• bedtime 0000, Josh’s day 20 hours