Twitter, Death, and Football

A football, yesterday

I note, with interest and a little unease, that I have posted four hundred and fifty three (453!) tweets on Twitter since I first had a poke at it last month. In that time I think I've put up two (2!) blog posts here.

Given that the occasional bazooka rounds of my blog have been replaced almost entirely by the countless shotgun pellets of Twitter... if anyone has any interest in what I'm blasting away at, please feel free to follow me here.

Something I didn't mention yet on Twitter is that a top-floor neighbour of ours was carried out of the building on Sunday evening, wearing an oxygen mask, strapped to a stretcher, and accompanied by eight paramedics (two ambulances turned up). She had been very, very sad lately.

Cast rather a pall over the week.

Anyway, let us turn our face away from sorrow, if we can't comfort it. And we can't... Football is back, back, back on Saturday, when the English Premier Division ("See the most overpaid young men on earth kick an imitation pig's bladder!"), QUITE LITERALLY kicks off. I have selected my unstoppable team (Bike Dynamo Berlin), and will be playing in my usual Fantasy Football League (The Stoney Battery... full of friends who live, or once lived, in Stoneybatter in Dublin). If you would like to join our league, or would like my mighty warriors to play in your league, contact me through that unobtrusive "Mail Me" button on the right hand side of the page...

Croatia 2, Germany 1

Well, if that ain't symbolic.

(For the benefit of my North American readers, Croatia, with a population of four million people, just beat Germany, population eighty two million - and the 1954, 1974, & 1990 world champions - by two goals to one in the group stage of the European Football Championship Finals.) 

Ah, the pathetic fallacy. Back when Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth were lads, it was the weather in their poems that reflected their moods. Now, it's the football scores in our blogs. That's progress.

 Actually, my mood is more Croatia 9, Germany 9.  I hope Croatia and Germany both go through.

Nikolina just wrote from Zagreb, "Everybody here went crazy, if we get to the final, I foresee a baby boom in March '09."

The silence of the streets of Berlin is  one heck of a big, gloomy silence. They've all gone to bed early, but baby boom? Germany has lost its erection.