Football Party at Sweetgrass part 1

Today at Sweetgrass they have a Football Party. For Americans it will be a Soccer Party.

What Americans call soccer is called football everywhere else in the world (football in British English and French, futbol in Spanish, fussball in German, voetbal in Dutch etc.). There is in an international body governing this sport, so it's safe to say that American soccer and British football are exactly the same sport.

The official name of the sport is associative football. The international governing body that I mentioned above is referred to as FIFA, from the French "Federation Internationale de Football Associatif" (International Federation of Associative Football). It seems that at some point, "associative football" was abbreviated as "assoc," from which we somehow got the American version "soccer."

All this is complicated by the fact that America has its own game called "football," with helmets and touchdowns and such. This game is completely American, although the rest of the world is beginning to learn about it. To distinguish it from soccer, other countries refer to it specifically as "American football".

Yesterday Argentina lost from Germany. Argentina coach Diego Maradona watches his team go down 4-0 to Germany. Not long before that the once-great Maradona wants everyone in the world to know, just in case there was any doubt, that he’s not gay.

No serious, he certainly is not. He likes women. He really likes women. He’s fucking pretty Veronica. And now we know that Diego Maradona is not gay we better check his team.

Can gay footballers ever come out?

Watch the 'Kick Homophobia Out of Football' ad. Made in conjunction with The FA and produced by Ogilvy. But the Football Association delayed the launch of this film, aimed at tackling homophobia on the terraces, to the anger of gay rights groups. They'll probably never launch it.

Hardly surprising, then, that football remains an intensely homophobic society. We live in a society in which respected public figures and entertainers are stand-up-and-be-counted gays, but football remains a world almost untouched by the seismic advances in tolerance that have shaken society across the past four decades.

Most male sports, though, are homophobic. Rumours that an athlete is gay can be destructive; Carl Lewis was hounded by such tales and was nicknamed “the Flying Faggot”. He wasn’t, isn’t gay, but he was also rightly keen to say, so what if he was?

Very few males have come out in any sports. The sole British footballer to have done so was Justin Fashanu, whose desperate, short and tragic life ended in suicide. This is not the sort of story that makes a modern footballer think, “Well, what’s to lose by coming out?”

Is this desperate or not?

Desperate

–adjective
1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer.
2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention.
3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness.
4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste.
5. extreme or excessive.
6. making a final, ultimate effort; giving all: a desperate attempt to save a life.
7. actuated by a feeling of hopelessness.
8. having no hope; giving in to despair.

"Maximizing the Audience"

Last week, when I reorganized my music collection, I found back a cd "Maximizing the Audience" composed by Wim Mertens. The opinions are divided on the Flemish composer Wim Mertens. When I heard it the first time I was amazed, but when I let my colleagues hear, they said that it was a little too weird. Some of my friends found the music nice, but not too impressive, while I spend a whole weekend to listen and still don't know why it touched me that much.

Wim Mertens born Neerpelt, Belgium, May 14, 1953 is a Flemish Belgian composer, countertenor vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and musicologist. Mertens studied social and political science at the University of Leuven (graduating in 1975) and musicology at Ghent University; he also studied music theory and piano at the Royal Conservatories of Ghent and Brussels. Known primarily as a composer since the early 1980s, Mertens is best known for his opus "Struggle for Pleasure". He is also well known for his piece "Maximizing the Audience", which was composed for Jan Fabre's play The Power of Theatrical Madness, which premiered in 1984 in Venice, Italy.














Mertens never liked his music to be defined as "minimalist". "In the Sixties and in the Seventies, the Minimalism was an alternative to the historical avantgarde, but then people like Glass and Reich were trapped into their academic stiffness. The Minimalism is only the starting point of my job".

The Minimalism was born during the Seventies, with Philip Glass' works. His intuitions marked the musical scenes since his first tour in Europe. Glass had already met David Bowie and Brian Eno after a ceremony in the Royal Academy of Music of London in 1971. In Germany Glass had dealt with avantgarde bands and electronic pioneers like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. And some echoes of his style could be found even in the disco-music songs written by Giorgio Moroder for Donna Summer and in British synth-pop bands like Human League. But the disciples of Glass were mainly the "new wave" composers, Michael Nyman, Lost Jockey, Regular Music, Soft Verdict and other artists of music labels like the Factory and the Belgian Disques du Crépuscule.

If you not like, than you can always skip to the next song.

About Poems and Robert Frost

Last week Tim and I talked about my post "About Roads"
http://christo-second-live.blogspot.com/2010/06/about-roads.html
and the poem of Robert Frost "The Road Not Taken".
It is Tim's second favourite poem of Robert Frost. The first is hanging, now more than a year, near the front door of our house.

I made it shortly after Tim recite it to me.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem written in 1922 by Robert Frost, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery and personification are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it "my best bid for remembrance".

Frost wrote this poem about winter in June, 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont that is now home to the "Robert Frost Stone House Museum". Frost had been up the entire night writing the long poem "New Hampshire" and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". He wrote the new poem "about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I'd had a hallucination" in just "a few minutes without strain."

Wrestling & Gym Party at T.R.A.C.S.

This Saturday we had our theme party in front of the gym at Timothy Street.

We had some new guest, even one different looking avatar.

I love our low gestures parties and agree with Nidge Bracken and what he wrote on his blog. http://pteridium-aquilinum.blogspot.com/?zx=a7a5d98ba3a8c7b6

"Of course there is another scourge of the SL club scene...gestures. Fine, they can be funny or slot nicely in to the conversation, but when they fill up half the screen or drown out the music, they annoy the crap out of me. My eyesight isn't so good, so I have text size set to maximum; it doesn't take much to blot out my screen. If you need to tell the person you are with that you love them every two minutes, you need to review the stability of your relationship. And if your loved one means so much to you, perhaps you can find something more inventive than a gesture on repeat."

I not have problems with my eyesight but I lose track of the conversations in open chat.

Not that the conversation at our parties have much profundity but is fun to chat, joking and teasing around with the other people. For me, is going to a party at Second Live something social. Big gestures that been play over and over again are a good way to send me in private chat. But maybe some club owners want me to keep my mouth. Already been banned two times from a club when I honest said what I was thinking. Okay, maybe my words and examples where not that well chosen.
But that is another story. *smiles*

I had a great time and I hope other guest had to.

Open Minds Party

Yesterday at Open mind it was hot enough in RL, to have a Fire Fighter Party. They had great new dance floor.

Swing your booty Norbie.

At the end every body took of there sweaty fire fighter outfit. Dillon did run up the stage dancing........

and at the end he even got naked. (Snapshot made by Timothy)

Drama or Not?

Today I been reminded that I still have to finish my post about my Gorean times and drama, when I was exploring Second life and landed near this house.