Plenty of Nothing

Frank Sidebottom the Statue, Part 3

The Frank Sidebottom statue was unveiling 11:37 a.m. yesterday in Timperley. Source.

Unarigoe, Chapter 5, Page 13

Away to Cowdenbeath

Yuyushiki is a cartoon about Japanese high school girls cracking up over lexical peculiarities.

Today Greenock Morton visit the Cowdenbeath Speedway for an afternoon of high-octane association football.

This is the beginning of the second quarter of the season. In the first nine games Morton earned 1 win, 3 draws and 5 loses, for 6 points, a goal difference of -8, and a firm grip on last place. Cowdenbeath are in 9th place with 2 wins, 1 draw and 6 loses, and a goal difference of -10. In terms of losses and goal difference Cowdenbeath are the worse club. Okay, they have both been pretty awful.

Is this Morton's worst start since joining the First Division in 2007? No! At this point in 2008-09 they had only 4 points, with no wins, but they had eliminated Hibs from the League Cup, and they went on to finish that season in sixth place.

Optimum scenario: Morton beat Cowden by six goals; Queen of the South and Livingston lose: Morton end the day in seventh place.

How do the other Scottish leagues look at the one-quarter mark? Spartans are at the top of the new Lowland League, though third-place Dalbeattie Star with their games in hand are contenders. Dalbeattie and Spartans play each other today. [2 - 2.] Formartine and Brora have perfect records so far in the Highland League. East Stirlingshire continue atop League 2. Rangers have a perfect record of 8 - 0 - 0 in League 1. Inverness CT are a strong second in the Premiership and can still talk about winning the treble, if they ever did.

Morton have re-signed 6 foot 1 inch Craig Reid who had been away trying out for Coventry. Football is so bereft of statistics I'm reduced to giving his height.

[Cowdenbeath win 5 - 1. The first scorer for the Blue Brazil, at the 2 minute mark, is named Jordan Morton. The gods are just laughing at Greenock now.]

Scotland beat Croatia 2 - 0 Tuesday.

Yesterday Boulogne hosted Paris FC. [US Boulogne nil, Paris FC nil.]

Tomorrow Consadole Sapporo host Montedio Yamagata. Coincidentally these are the only two J2 clubs left in the Emperor's Cup. [Consadole win 3 - 1.]

T.H. White on Valkenswaard

In the old days when the great falconer's toast could still be drunk (Here's to them that shoot and miss) there had been a village in Holland which lived entirely by its trade in hawks and falcons. It lay at the edge of a heath situated directly on one of the great migratory routes of birds; the heath took its name from the falcons which followed the birds: and this name was also given to the village. Valkenswaard: Falconsheath: you had to speak it aloud to hear its music. There the hereditary families of falconers lay out in their huts to catch the lovely wild birds, with incredible ingenuity and patience, and there a great fair was held, to which the austringers and falconers of principalities and powers resorted for the purchase of adult hawks: often at great prices in the public auction. All was gone. Mollen, the last representative of a noble and ancient trade, had given up catching passage hawks ten years ago: the heath had been broken up, the link broken. The duke's men, the prince's men, the king's men who congregated at the great fair -- hawk-masters with lean and worried looks, who like the Latham described by David Garnett would be ready to 'gallop off with an expression of torment on their faces' -- they and the hawk-catchers with their centuries of experience in patience and cunning and benevolence (nobody could be a master of hawks without benevolence) and the very raison d'être of that village name near Eindhoven: all, like my own Gos, were now gone.

    It happened like this in the world. Old things lost their grip and dropped away; not always because they were bad things, but sometimes because the new things were more bad, and stronger.

...

    The following is the way in which passage hawks used to be taken at Valkenswaard. The falconer possessed a more or less commodious turf dug-out, on the heath, perhaps even with a little stove in it. Beside his dug-out he had at least two traps. From the first trap, which was at the top of a high pole, he could fly a tied pigeon which would be visible for a considerable distance, and which could be pulled back again into the trap at the last moment: from the second, which was at ground level in the centre of his bow-net, he could offer a second victim.

    In the Middle Ages they believed, quite a good belief, that everything on land had its counterpart in the sea. The elephant was doubled by the whale, the dog-fish by the dog. In the same way, we might expect a counterpart in the air. At any rate, as there are hounds for foxes and pigs for truffles and setters for grouse, so the grey shrike took particular notice of hawks. The falconer at Valkenswaard had a couple of these birds tethered outside his dug-out.

    The birds migrated, the hawks followed the birds to Holland, the shrike set up a cry and pointed, the falconer released his high pigeon, the hawk saw it and hurried to the kill, the trap concealed the decoy once again, the baffled hawk swung round, the second pigeon in the bow net was disclosed, the hawk stooped, and the ingenuity of man had added one more wild grace to the stock of passage hawks which were to be loved all over Europe.

T.H. White, The Goshawk (pages 105-6 and 134-5 in the Penguin edition). Valkenswaard.

Handrit

Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum (The Árni Magnússon Insitute For Icelandic Studies) has a very handsome website, mainly in Icelandic as you would expect, but that's good because it immediately starts your brain learning Icelandic just by looking at it. Handrit, for instance, means, pretty obviously, manuscript. The rondel on the left is from this illumination detailing the stages of medieval book publishing. The last step, often forgotten, is to teach the kids to read.

Night Depository

If Saturn Were the Moon

It would look this big. Video.

2013 Emperor's Cup, Round Three

Emperor Akihito in Ottawa, 2009.

Emperor Akihito's Heisei era began in 1989, and so corresponds very closely to the era of the J-League, which began in 1993 and saw the professionalisation of the top levels of Japanese soccer and the emergence of Japan as a soccer power.

It's the third round of the Emperor's Cup. 32 teams compete, including Consadole Sapporo who visit Júbilo Iwata, Mito HollyHock who are up against Vegalta Sendai and Zweigen Kanazawa who face Shimizu S-Pulse. [Sapporo advance.]

Ushi no Toki Mairi

    At the bottom of a little lane, close to the entrance of the village, stands an old shrine of the Shintô (the form of hero-worship which existed in Japan before the introduction of Confucianism or of Buddhism), surrounded by lofty Cryptomerias. The trees around a Shintô shrine are specially under the protection of the god to whom the altar is dedicated; and, in connection with them, there is a kind of magic still respected by the superstitious, which recalls the waxen dolls, through the medium of which sorcerers of the middle ages in Europe, and indeed those of ancient Greece, as Theocritus tells us, pretended to kill the enemies of their clients. This is called Ushi no toki mairi, or "going to worship at the hour of the ox," and is practiced by jealous women who wish to be revenged upon their faithless lovers.

    When the world is at rest, at two in the morning, the hour of which the ox is the symbol, the woman rises; she dons a white robe and high sandals or clogs; her coif is a metal tripod, in which are thrust three lighted candles; around her neck she hangs a mirror, which falls upon her bosom; in her left hand she carries a small straw figuer, the effigy of the lover who has abandoned her, and in her right she grasps a hammer and nails, with which she fastens the figure to one of the sacred trees that surround the shrine. There she prays for the death of the traitor, vowing that, if her petition be heard, she will herself pull out the nails which now offend the god by wounding the mystic tree. Night after night she comes to the shrine, and each night she strikes in two or more nails, believing that every nail will shorten her lover's life, for the god, to save his tree, will surely strike him dead.

A.B. Mitford, Tales of Old Japan, volume 1 (1871), pages 38 - 40. See here. Also here.

Home To Hamilton

Say you want to get from Port Glasgow to Greenock. You could take the A8, I suppose, but then you'd be missing out on the rustic vistas of Dougliehill Road.

Hamilton Academical visit Cappielow today. The Accies hold first place in the division; Morton last. The Ton are having such a weird season: they've beaten St Mirren and Celtic, but have only one win in the division. Maybe if they think of Hamilton as giants they can kill them. It all hinges on whether there are any former Morton players on the Accies roster. Uh oh, Kevin Cuthbert.

But, Nacho Novo!

Morton's last win against Hamilton at Cappielow was February 20th, 1999.

Alloa's win last weekend was their first at Cappielow in league play since 1928.

If Morton win by five goals today they can move ahead of idle Livingston. [1 - 1. Morton goal by Habai.]

Tomorrow it's [one of] the Ramsdens Cup semifinals: Raith Rovers v Annan Athletic. [Stenhousemuir v Rangers goes October 29. ] Stenny are the only one of the semifinalists to have won this trophy before. [Raith win 3 - 0.]

It's the Cinquième Tour of the Coupe de France, the French equivalent of the Scottish Cup, the cup everyone gets to play for. But whereas in Scotland everyone means 82 teams, the Coupe de France starts out with 8,264. This round, the fifth, there are 596 teams in action, including the 20 of the Championat National. Boulogne face Avenir Olympique d'Hermies at Bapaume. Hermies and Bapaume are about 80 miles east of Boulogne at the inland end of the Pas-de-Calais. In the Coupe de France the underdog is given home field advantage if the other club is two or more leagues above them. [Boulogne win 0 - 7.]