A Little Update, Drenched in Tiredness

Every now and then, and it's rarer than you might think, I come across something that takes another small part of my vanishingly small amount of faith in humanity, kicks it to the floor and jumps up and down on it until it gives up it's pension book. This is today's: Arrow Fired Through Family's Cat. Now you read the article and it says that the police are investigating whether or not it was a deliberate attack, but you and I both know that it was. 18-inch aluminium arrows are not usually found wantonly falling out of trees and, when they do find themselves hitting something, particularly something as small as a domestic moggy, it's almost always deliberate and invariably shot by a 16-year-old youth with blindingly white trainers and an accent like Sean Paul in a tumble dryer, who's under the distinct impression that he's from South Central Los Angeles.

It's said that one of the early childhood signs for recognising a future serial killer is torturing and killing animals. Jeffrey Dahmer did it, Ted Bundy did it, Son of Sam did it and now British 'yoof' is doing it, seemingly en masse. I don't understand this trend, even less than I understand the concept of kicking someone in the head as a good night out. I think I'm just out of touch with the modern youth. Of course, the simplest solution would be to kill them all. Perhaps we could fire arrows through them. Imagine the Youtube hits.

That's all the news I have really. There's nothing particularly interesting to report on and I'm operating on 4 hours's sleep and so far today I've already been to the dentist, shouted at my accountant, and I've resolved a massive family drama, and tonight I've still got to wrap my television in cardboard in preparation for moving house next week, but I want to draw your attention to a staggering display of beureaucratic stupidity: a local council telling a pub landlord to dismantle his gazebo because it contains seven screws, which violates a staggeringly rediculous planning law meaning it's legally a permanent structure. The council have told him he has to take it down, but I can't be the only one that sees a far simpler solution: Take one of the screws out and just hope you aren't around when it stops being permanent.

Hi ho, Indian food now.

Goodnight.

Daft Cunts in Football, How I've Missed Thee

There seems to be a peculiar ailment spreading throughout the football world this week, and for once it's not the dreaded metatarsal, this one's a little bit higher up - football figures ranging from Premiership to international managers have been hit by the terrible condition of talking bollocksitis.

Fabio Capello's talking bollocks were in full effect as England were roughed up and outplayed by the Czech Republic, who were the better team throughout and deserved more than the draw they came away with after Joe Cole spared everyone's blushes. Once again the midfield was an absolute bloody shambles, and once again Capello seems to be stuck in the rut of playing the players with the biggest egos rather than the players with the most cohesive ability as a team - Gerrard on the left for almost an hour just to accomodate Frank 'Shit-Since-2003' Lampard? Defoe up front instead of the infinitely more promising Walcott or Agbonlahor, the latter of whom wasn't even in the squad, sacrificed to accomodate a player who has never, ever had a reasonable game in an England shirt, despite his nearly 30 chances? It really is a sad indictment of the standard the national football team has fallen to that we have to rely on an ageing fashion model who sells pens to dig us out of our rut, but the fact remains that Beckham was the closest thing we had to class the other night. Are you McClaren in disguise?

Speaking of McClaren, the other serious talking-bollocks case of the week was his next opponent, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, who still thinks he doesn't need to buy players despite losing 1 - 0 to a team that only just evaded relegation last season, barely registering a shot on Mark Schwartzer's Fulham goal. He's spent the week talking about Gareth Barry having no resale value at 27, but resale value means nothing in football. The only true currency is silverware and in recent times Arsenal have been paupers, largely because of their mizerly misbehaviour in the transfer market - yes, Nasri is a promising footballer and Ramsey might be good in a few years, but the other signings this month have been distinctly uninspiring; who is Amaury Bischoff anyway? Mickael Silvestre is over the hill, always injured, and in fact didn't play yesterday because he was perched on the treatment table, much like he was for the entirety of his last season at Old Trafford. Francis Coquelin is another typical Wenger signing in that he's 17, French, and nobody's ever heard of him.

Wenger's degree in economics is clearly eating into his ability as a football manager. A supreme coach with a stunning ability to pluck uncut diamonds from the youth teams of world football and mould them into world-beaters, his failure is an inability to move with the times. Chelsea have changed the face of world football, and it is now impossible to achieve success without debt, and there are only two ways to get rid of that debt once it's rooted into your club - have a billionaire owner who is willing to bankroll you all the way to the Champions League, or drive yourself into deep, dark debt to achieve international fame, and then let your worldwide fan base of 500 million Chinese people pay off your debt by all buying a wooly hat with the club crest on it. Cristiano Ronaldo probably has the currently highest 'resale value' of any player in the world, but if you were to ask Sir Alex, and every Manchester United in the M25 commuter belt, you wouldn't find one that wouldn't want to have the Portuguese tied to the club until he's 35.

Arsene Wenger is running a real risk of losing his better players because they are sick of failing to achieve trophies. Cesc Fabregas is an absolutely brilliant player, and a worldwide prospect who is going on to become a better footballer than even the wildest predictions made him out to be when he came to the Premiership as a 16-year-old kid with funny eyebrows, but how long is he going to stay around at a club that, frustratingly, would rather sit on a bulging bank balance than look at a glimmering trophy cabinet? And make no mistake, if he goes, Arsenal really will end up where the doomsayers say they will every year, midtable or worse. Just hope that Arsene never realises just what some of the big clubs of Europe would be willing to pay for him - the Gunners would be down scrapping it out with Fulham and Wigan in one swoop of economics.

Frankly, I don't know what it is that's befuddling these great managers - Cappello, Wenger, and so on. Perhaps Wenger really is of a different age, when economics really were a part of football and there wasn't this culture of silly money and silly debt, but he really has to move on and learn to spend, even if it is against all his principles, because not doing so is surely against the terms of his contract to bring success to his club. Perhaps Cappello is too rooted in Italian football to understand the English game, and an extremely private man too worried by the media backlash to drop the big-name players that have now failed to perform under three managers - and there is absolutely no technique, not even from the greatest man-managers in the world, that will motivate a player who thinks the name on his shirt gives him a free pass into the team.

The two of them, truly, have opposite problems and need to tackle them in opposite ways - Wenger is overrun with youth, and has no-one of experience in his team that can teach the younger players how to win trophies - he has talked up William Gallas, who is at best an uninspiring captain and at worst a wet flannel of a center half, and Mickael Silvestre, who has won six league titles but the majority of them on the treatment table, or the bench. Experience and quality the like of Gareth Barry or Xabi Alonso - both mooted targets before he shot down the idea of Barry due to the dreaded 'resale value' - are what he needs to win trophies or at the very least hang on to his players of true quality, which are fast becoming few and far between.

Capello is the opposite - he needs the youth. His current players are complacent and know that they are guaranteed their place in the side regardless of how they perform. For all his talk of nobody being untouchable, you have to question the powerbase of a manager who plays Steven Gerrard wide on the left because he can't be dropped, but equally neither can Frank Lampard and David Beckham, both of whom play worse than Gerrard in positions Gerrard is better in - the net result being that left-sided talent such as Ashley Young, who has been knocking on the door for a couple of years, Stewart Downing, who had a superb game against Trinidad, and even the mercurial Joe Cole, who always seems to be England's best player when he comes on, are restricted just so the Big Three get to keep their places. Other players like Gabriel Agbonlahor, Theo Walcott and even potentially James Milner have earned their chances as well, but have not been given them, as another England manage clings to a failed system.

All I can think is that Lampard has pictures of Brian Barwick in a compromising position with Lord Triesman's missus. Oh well, he'll be gone soon, so we might get a change in the near future. There might be no hope for Arsenal this season if they don't think of a reason to change as well.

Here's hoping.

Goodnight.

An iPhone Review, Written on an iPhone

So, that iPhone thing. Not really as popular as Apple would have you believe.

My experience with the hype machine has been limited, but began in earnest this morning when I rang up the local O2 mob and they started playing riddles with me; apparently they had more than five, but less than ten, and in any case were unable to put one by for me anyway, just in case there was a stampede of between six and nine people clamouring for some touch screen goodness. There obviously wasn't as the minute I got there and flashed my magical debit card of wonder at them they were falling over each other to sell me something shiny and Apple-eu, sold to me by their most sexually attractive member of staff.

Anyway, within ten minutes I had my shiny bit of kit and was on my merry way, and five minutes sodding about with iTunes when I got in was sufficient to have it all up and running, and I immediately did what any self-respecting man would do when presented with a tarriff offerring unlimited free internet, and tried to get some porn on it. For those of you for whom this is a pressing concern, rest easy, as you can indeed get your filthy spaff-fix on the move thanks to the miracle of 3G, and at the rate I'm going through it (3G, you perverts, not all porn - though mostly...), I think O2 are going to live to regret making that offer based on my usage alone - I've got through about two thirds of the entire Internet in the few hours I've had the thing.

Anyway, the most pressing issue before you part with your £100-plus is, does the sodding thing work? Well, if you can read this post and it isn't lost somewhere in the ether, it works, as I'm painstakingly typing this post out on the dinky little touch-screen keyboard in the iPhone's web browser. The keys are a little hit and miss for a while, but it's only taken a couple of hours for me to get to the point where most of my errors are coherent enough for the phone to work out what I'm trying to say and correct for me - it certainly isn't the digital Satan that some quarters were making it out to be on release, and each keypress produces a satisfying little clickwheel-esque, well, click, which isn't particularly relevent but satisfying all the same. The presentation is, as with all Apple products, very good, and the whole thing is gorgeous to look at, but the main screen could do with some additional customization options other than being able to shift the odd little widget about, and there is no intuitive method of deleting downloaded applications once they are on there - you have to hold your finger on the block for a couple of seconds until they all start to wobble, then click the little red 'x' that appears, and at no point is this made obvious in the interface or in the Quick Start guide, and in the end I had to resort to Google.

The applications are all very useful, however, although the eMail and SMS apps seem to suffer from the same style-over-substance syndrome as the main screen - individual messages, hell-bent on being shiny and part of the 'Apple experience', take up far too much space with bells, whistles and speech bubbles where a more simplistic interface would be a boon. I honestly can't fault the other apps, though, as the Photo, Maps and Camera apps are all brilliantly put together, and while I normally loathe cameras on phones, the one on the iPhone seems high enough in resolution to appease those of you that like to spend all day taking pictures of your fringe.

That just leaves the web browser, which cleverly rotates from portrait to landscape when you turn the phone on it's side, by way of some sort of gyroscopic magic, and enables you to do things like read this post. It does have issues - sometimes the gyroscope will get confused and take a few seconds to update your screen position, but that's no real pressing issue, and it does have a tendency to crash when using Facebook, but then Facebook does a good line in crashing Firefox too, and frankly you have no business being on Facebook unless it's to chat up impressionable emo girls, so perhaps it's just saving me from myself.

Conclusions? It's good. I'm not sure it would be worth it without the fantastic internet plan as most of the apps rely on the Internet to function, and without them or with them being expensive to use, the iPhone would lack so many of it's good points - the phone app being a good app, but certainly not the core of the iPhone appeal, which is much more of a mobile Internet device that also makes phone calls rather than a mobile phone which happens to have a web browser.

It is, essentially, a hip PDA with good PR, but a very very good one, and the worst part of the whole experience was Apple, or O2, whoever it was, trying to artificially drive up the hype by playing phone riddles with me before they'd let me have one. After that , for its price point, you're probably not going to find anywhere near as useful a gadget as this for quite a while.

Plus, it being an Apple product, it can also heal wounds, cure cancer and make attractive women lust after you. Probably.

Goodnight.