Butler-like, with my black coat and my serious frown so perfectly in tune that a violin bow drawn across my body would play “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and a gong mallet struck against my head would play David Brooks’s latest column from the Times, I direct your attention to the following items of note:
- The Run of Play is now on Twitter. It’s a bit scary, actually, because our little plot of land there seems to be haunted by the ghost of a seventeenth-century outlaw who never learned to work within the 140-character limit. Hopefully he’ll be exorcised soon and we’ll be able to get on with posting brief thoughts about commercials we remember from the ’80s. Follow along…if you dare.
- Brian Cook at MGoBlog has the best response to USA-Brazil I’ve seen. Even though part of it is about sort of disagreeing with me.
- The way Fredorrarci feels about transfer gossip, I increasingly seem to feel even about transfers that actually take place. Can’t we all just do something else for the summer and note the new rosters sometime in August? Richard has the right idea on this.
- How about an unofficial holiday on which we all, briskly and simultaneously, print some things out and get caught up? “Wow, Ronaldo’s at Madrid,” we’d say with a low whistle. “I can’t wait for the season to start next week.” We’d have exactly the same amount of information, but we’d be spared the months-long subliminal turmoil of not really knowing whether this is the end of everything or not.
- I make a partial exception for the Onyewu-to-Milan deal, which is delightful, in large part because we can now legitimately describe the Gooch as “Belgian-American.”
- EPL Talk has a new series on Legends of English Football, starting with Sir Stanley Matthews. See, now, Sir Stanley Matthews is the kind of thing I would like to spend the summer reading about. Also, this.
- If anything, Siobhan actually underplayed the fact that this was a five-course meal and that for one of the courses she made pasta from scratch. I watched the whole thing unfold with a kind of awe. I may have been Gandhi in a past life.