Another day inside today, I hate Sundays, so I usually stay in and watch football. It doesn’t matter who is playing, it doesn’t matter who you support, it’s just about enjoying a good game and there were two good ones today - Fulham/Arsenal (1-1) and Spurs/Chelsea (3-4). Football is an intense experience, you can’t look away until half-time, it seems like it’s not like that with all sports - all those breaks in American football, you could read the complete works of John Steinbeck during a game and not miss anything. Today Chelsea’s Cole Palmer took two penalties, scored the first one and when it came to the second one, he did the ‘Panenka’. It’s your lucky day, because now you can learn some football trivia that you wouldn’t ever know if you weren’t reading this right now. Don’t you love Wikipedia?
"Antonín Panenka came to international prominence playing for Czechoslovakia in the 1976 European Championship; Czechoslovakia reached the final, where they faced West Germany. After extra time, the result was 2–2, and so the first penalty shootout in a European Championships final ensued. The first seven kicks were converted, until West Germany's fourth penalty taker, Uli Hoeneß, ballooned his shot over the bar. With the score 4–3, Panenka stepped up to take the fifth Czechoslovakian penalty, which would win the match if he scored. He feigned shooting to the side of the goal, causing West German goalkeeper Sepp Maier to dive to his left, and then gently chipped the ball into the middle of the net. The perceived impudence of the shot, in addition to its success, led a watching French journalist to dub Panenka "a poet". The goal was very widely reported on, and Panenka's name became synonymous with the technique. After the game, Panenka was told that he could have been punished if he missed, as it may have been seen as disrespecting the Communist system in place at the time in his home country. On viewing the penalty, Pelé described Panenka as being "either a genius or a madman”.
I’m having trouble with electrical items. One of the lava lamps seems to have a damaged switch and I’m going to have to take it to a shop and hope they will explain to me how to fix it. The switch is in the middle of a power cord (that’s power cord, not power chord) and it threads through into the base (that’s the base, not the bass) and then connects to the light bulb assembly. So it looks like the whole cord has to be replaced with a new switch on it. It’s a small problem that’s a pain to fix. This is one of the large lava lamps, I have two this size, today the bulb blew in the other one, Sundays are so exciting.
Also today the power cord to my ipod dock sparked out. Sometimes it’s nice to drift off to some mellow music instead of the rain app. My problem though is that I start listening to it closely, it’s hard for me to have music in the background, I can’t ignore it and it doesn’t matter if it is good, bad, or in between.
Music today has been Dome 2 (1980). Dome was the solo project of Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, the guitarist and bassist from Wire respectively. It’s some interesting early eighties post-punk experimentation. It’s great - if you like that sort of thing.
I've only recently become a fan of Premier League football but I love the flow of it and the lack of commercials.