Messages from the Other Side

Keep Rancho Clean

2012-01-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

By way of preamble to this message, I'd like to make clear that The Referee has for many years been a fan of Woody Guthrie. I want you to know that I'm not one of those Johnny-come-lately types who latches on to trendy things because someone at Rolling Stone or OK! magazine decides they're hip. Oh no. I'm a hardcore fan.

"How hardcore are you?" I hear you ask. I'm glad you asked that. Well, I'm so hardcore that one of the Little Referees (who are not so little as they used to be) is named after Mr Guthrie. And the other is named after Mr Dylan, who looked up to Guthrie as his hero, famously visited him in hospital in New York when he was suffering with complications related to Huntington's disease, and wrote the wonderful Song to Woody, which was one of the few original songs on Dylan's debut album "Bob Dylan" in 1962. In fact, it is often said that Dylan moved to New York from his childhood home in Minnesota at least in part to seek out his idol and visit him in hospital before he died. And the rest, as they say, is history.

For those not too familiar with the great man, Woody Guthrie was born in Oklahoma in 1912 and died in New York City (so good they named it thrice: see my message of 18/9/06, or 9/18/06, if you prefer) in 1967. In the interim he wrote hundreds of great American folk songs, most famously "This Land Is Your Land", often played with the words "This Machine Kills Fascists" emblazoned on his guitar, and is considered by many people who know about these things to be the Godfather of modern American folk music.

Why am I going on about this? A fine question.

Well, the Information Steve Heighway has recently been abuzz (abuzz?) with an extract from the great man's notebook scribblings from 1943 (or 1942; there is disagreement in some parts of the blogosphere about exactly which year he wrote it.) (Note here the use of the semi-colon, the Godfather of punctuation: neither a comma (let's pause for a moment) or a colon (look what's coming next), it says "let's pause for a moment before we see what's coming next"; and (there it is again), because it's often misunderstood, it's also criminally under-used.)

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. Woody's notebook, in which he used two pages, right in the middle of the book, plus lots of scribbled illustrations, to set out his "New Year's Rulin's" for whichever year it was.

And what a great read they are. A couple of things are immediately noticeable. Firstly, there are 33 of them. I expect it's true for most of us that we attempt at best 2 or 3 resolutions at this time of year: "I'll go to the gym more often, possibly"; "I'll be nicer to the children, or not"; "I'll be slightly less offensive to chuggers and salespeople this year". Perhaps it takes a great man like Guthrie to take on ten times the number of resolutions that we mere mortals can muster.

The other thing that strikes one is that Woody's rulin's are so, for want of a better word, elemental. He doesn't mess about with avoiding gluten or donating a larger proportion of his income to charity. Oh no. He focuses instead on more basic and urgent concerns, including "Take Bath", "Change Socks", and "Wash Teeth, If Any".

That last rulin' perhaps suggests that Mr Guthrie had intended that his resolutions would not just be for his personal use but would also one day be read by the likes of you, dear reader, and me. Otherwise, why bother with "If Any"? Presumably, even in the early 1940s, people were aware how many teeth they had, give or take. And, if one had no teeth at all, one would almost certainly have noticed.

Whether or not the rulin's were intended for wider consumption, I for one am grateful for the work of the folk who look after Woody's huge archives of song lyrics and other writings, for preserving his down-to-earth resolutions, which perhaps put into perspective the rather pale, post-modern angst of our twenty-teens new year concerns.

Amongst my favo(u)rite rulin's are "Read Lots Good Books", "Listen To Radio A Lot", "Keep Hope Machine Running", its close relative "Stay Glad", the spectacular "Dance Better" (how I wish) and, especially relevant for those us with a rather, shall we say, expansive domestic management style, "Keep Rancho Clean".

And so, for this year, I have resolved not to dream up 2 or 3 lily-livered post-modern whinges that I have only a limited intention of addressing. Instead, I am going to attach the New Year's Rulin's to the wall of my office (AKA Message Central) and do my level best to embrace each and every one of them with the gusto they deserve.

And so, a belated Happy New Year to all. Stay glad, read lots of good books, and blogs, and keep your rancho clean.

Elvis Buys His Tree Here Every Year

2011-12-24T15:30:00.000-05:00

So, where were we?

After 3 years and 7 months, The Referee has finally decided to retire from his self-imposed retirement and get back on his blogging horse, if you will.

And so, those of you who have missed reading pointless and rambling stories, who have longed for unfathomable tangents, who have pined for the almost criminal over-use of parentheses (that is to say, brackets) (see what I mean), you need to wait no longer.

No doubt you, dear reader(s) (note the optimistic plural), are wondering why The Referee entered his self-imposed retirement in the first place, and why he has now retired from it. Both fine questions, if I may say so.

The answer to the former question is far too dull for an action-packed organ such as this. The latter question, however, can be answered by a simple road sign. Let me explain why.

I have long been fascinated by the search for the perfect retail moniker, that is to say, shop name. Creative retailers the world over have often entertained their customers with comedy names for their establishments. You know the sort of thing I mean. Herr Kutz the barber. Paws for Thought the pet shop. Wok this Way the Chinese restaurant.

My personal contribution to this list occurred to me in a recent visit to Washington DC's national zoo. While communing at the orangutan enclosure, it came to me, like a Damascene revelation, that orangutans would make the perfect logo for my aspirational chain of tanning salons, which would be named Orange-U-Tan. If no one else has already done it, I'll be off as soon as I've finished this message to register the name Orange-U-Tan with whoever it is that registers the names of tanning salons. Presumably the Federation of Authorized Tanning Salon Owners, or something along those lines.

Anyway, this remained just an idle (some would say pointless) (others would say worrying) obsession, until I heard a rumo(u)r that, right here in what the locals like to call the DC Metro Area, there was a Christmas tree selling establishment with the glorious name of Elvis Buys His Tree Here Every Year.

Elvis Buys His Tree Here Every Year. Could it really be true? If so, this was enough to cause me both to seek it out for my own arboreal acquisition purposes, and to emerge from retirement into the warm yuletide twinkle of the blogosphere. How could I wallow in retirement in front of the Fox Asocceration Football Channel, with such rich nuggets of American popular culture almost begging to be mined for your edification?

And so, loading up Mrs Referee and the Little Referees in the back of the RefereeMobile, I set off to find the place where Elvis buys his holiday (don't get me started) tree.

Sure enough, only a matter of minutes from Chez Referee, we spotted clear evidence that Himself had been seen nearby, in the form of a roadside sign that is well known to the locals. Better still, the folks who run this establishment could not have been nicer or more helpful, they had some top notch trees, one of which we purchased and, to top it all, the sounds of Barry Manilow filled the advent air.

The only downside of the whole experience, which dawned on me as I studied my receipt on the way home, was that the name of the establishment was actually Suzanne Eaton Christmas Trees of Florida. And the sign was just a sign. Still, they were fine people, and maybe, just maybe, they had at least one very special customer. And I'm not talking about The Referee.

Either way, for better or worse, I was already out of retirement. I'll let you decide, dear reader, whether that's a cause for glad tidings, or bad. Or something inbetween. Middling tidings, perhaps.

Which leaves me only to offer something on the true meaning of the season. I'd like to think it's the time of year for spending time by the fire with family and friends, for thinking back to a time when the King walked among us in person and wondering if, in a sense, he still does.

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one.

Jolly Hockey Sticks

2008-05-26T04:48:00.002-04:00

For reasons which are complicated and also too dull to relate on a site as dedicated to thrills and entertainment as this one is (!), The Referee recently found himself at the Coliseum in Nassau, Long Island to witness the New York Islanders being hammered at home by the Ottawa Senators. The visitors from north of the border looked superior throughout, so much so that the Islanders were lucky to come second, as they say.

For those who have not already spotted it, I am of course talking about (ice) hockey. (Ice) hockey is known here and in Canada as "hockey", such that if one wants to refer to hockey, one has to say "field hockey". Luckily, I rarely want to refer to hockey, and therefore this additional requirement is not particularly onerous in my case.

I have nothing more to report about Islanders 2 Senators 5 that can't be derived from the score or the brief synopsis above. I do, however, want to relate some of the things I learnt about (ice) hockey that evening, a sport about which I had not previously thought or cared very much at all. Whilst not all, or indeed any, of these things might be accurate, they are at least heartfelt, and that ought to be more important.

And so, The Referee is proud to share with you, dear reader, his hard-researched 5 Things You Never Knew, And Still Don't, About (Ice) Hockey:

1. There are 250 players on each team, although each player is on the ice for an average of only about 10 seconds each. For some reason no one ever thought to build a door in the dug out, so substitutes have to fling themselves over a little wall, hoping to land on their skates rather than their rear ends.

2. All (ice) hockey players have elaborately broken noses. By this I mean that these are not common or garden broken noses, the sort of injury that could befall anyone. Oh no. These are noses so comprehensively and numerously broken that they appear to be marking out a new slalom route for the benefit of a passing downhill skier. How could I tell this from the stands?, you are wondering. Well, I was lucky enough to meet a legendary former Islander before the game. He had clearly once been a good-looking chap, before the slalom bulldozers had moved in.

3. All (ice) hockey players fight, all the time. Except in the game I saw, in which no one so much as raised a question about the masculinity of his opponents. Obviously, fighting is bad, and The Referee was not in the least disappointed not to witness any. Although this to some extent restricted his ability to research the full extent of the game of (ice) hockey for your benefit, gentle reader.

4. The following point might say more about the age and constitution of The Referee than it does about the nature of (ice) hockey, but for quite a proportion of the game I couldn't actually see the puck as it skimmed at high speed across the surface of the ice. It appeared that this was not a problem shared by most of the crowd, since there was a good deal of ooh-ing and aah-ing some seconds before your correspondent had worked out what was happening. Ho, hum.

5. All (ice) hockey players fight, all the time.

Just before his visit to the Nassau Coliseum, The Referee received the news that he was to be summoned to return to the Motherland, AKA the UK of Blighty, without further ado. Again, the reasons for this are much too dull for an entertainment-heavy organ such as this. Suffice to say that The Referee's US odyssey would soon be at an end.

As I left Long Island and contemplated an impending return to the green and pleasant hills of the Motherland, I allowed myself a small and appropriate celebration. "Jolly hockey sticks", I thought.

The Phantom Tollbooth

2008-03-25T22:22:00.000-04:00

I will say again here what I have said in a number of messages on this site: The Referee does not do politics. Or rather, he does not use this site to promote any particular political perspectives. That is not about to change.

It is, however, nigh on impossible to have lived in this country over recent years without taking at least a passing fascination with the oratory style, shall we say, of the 43rd President. As you, discerning reader, will be well aware, this a well-trodden path, which is not enlightened in the least by The Referee trampling it down a bit further. However, the following alleged quote came to my attention recently and I felt that it would be remiss of me, perhaps even churlish, not to share it with you.

It is alleged by some - not necessarily The Referee, you understand - that on 1 February 2000 the august news organ that is the New York Times quoted the 43rd President as follows:

"I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth".

I don't think any of us could disagree with that.

Dames on a Plane

2008-03-04T22:22:00.000-05:00

Everything that follows is absolutely true.

I make this point at the outset not because The Referee makes a habit of telling fictional stories on this site. He doesn't. When you live in this country, why make things up, when reality is so much more entertaining?

No. I make this point only because I want you, gentle reader, to be assured that The Referee had truthfulness and accuracy at the forefront of his mind, when recounting this tale.

The Referee often has occasion to travel to and fro between his two adopted cities, New York and London. Most of the time this journey is pleasant and uneventful. On other occasions, it is a little more memorable. The following recounts an example of the latter.

As a final preamble, I should mention that I tend towards a particular airline whenever possible because, in the humble opinion of The Referee (and he is, after all, The Referee) it is superior to any other airline making this journey. So as not to show favo(u)ritism, I will assign this airline a code name for the purposes of this message. Let's call it, say, Virgin Atlantic.

So, I was heading to London on an overnight flight from New York. I was planning to be very busy immediately on arrival and was therefore hoping for a quiet flight involving sleep and not much else.

Imagine my horror, then, when, immediately on arrival in the lounge, I noticed a group of about 25 or so New York ladies of, shall we say, a certain age, behaving in an exuberant manner and taking pictures of each other. As I sat eating a pre-flight dinner (in order to maximise the time available for sleep on the flight, you understand), all but one of the ladies in question launched into a rousing rendition of "Happy birthday to you".

I have to admit, in all honesty, that I was not thinking "How nice. I hope whoever it is has a lovely birthday". Oh no. I was thinking something much more along the lines of "Please God - I need some sleep - please don't let any of them be seated near me".

I dare say, dear reader, that you are already ahead of me.

As soon as I arrived in my section of the plane (I have to admit that it was one of the posh areas near the front) it dawned on me that every seat apart from mine was occupied by one of the ladies. Worse still, I was seated right next to the birthday girl.

To get a sense of what followed, imagine, if you will, a remake of that Hollywood classic "Snakes on a plane" starring the original cast of the St Trinian's films, and you won't be far out. Except that the ladies in this case were dripping with furs and jewellery. And - how can I put this delicately? - those who had left God's work intact were in a significant minority.

The ladies had no idea what to do with a seat belt. Some of them apparently had no idea that it was a requirement to sit down while a plane takes off. I was required to become the official photographer for a number of charming group shots, whilst the crew (ie the folk that used to be called "stewards" and "stewardesses", but now seem to be called something else) tried to wrestle them into their seats. I was told with some enthusiasm that there were another 25 ladies on another flight - perhaps I should be grateful, I pondered, that I'd only got half of them. I was told that some of them had never been to London before, and that they were off to Windsor castle - I wondered if it was strong enough to withstand the onslaught. I was asked if I was married, and, when I replied in the affirmative, the lady in question shouted "Never mind, girls, he's married!".

Although I consider myself a patient person, I thought that I might be about to lose my marbles. Just as I was starting to lose them - and at this point we had only just reached cruising altitude - a glimmer of hope emerged. One of the ladies reached into her handbag and marched around the cabin shouting "Who wants an Ambien?". (For those not intimately familiar with the world of American medical TV ads, Ambien is a popular sleeping pill.) To my great relief, she received a number of positive responses, and soon there followed a hysterical banter about who was going to take the pill first, and no, no, you take it first, and I'm not taking mine until you take yours. Five minutes later, the cabin was silent.

After enjoying blissful sleep for all of 3 or 4 hours, I was woken by sleepy chatter about the crown jewels and where they might be viewed. I decided not to chime in to assist with the answer to this question, since that would reveal that I was now awake again, hence drawing attention to myself. So instead I lay very still and listened whilst one of the ladies pointed out that one of the others was wearing some of the crown jewels, right now, on the plane. It turned out that she was not joking. The lady in question admitted that her husband had given her a necklace which he had bought from Sotheby's and which had originally been given to Victoria by Albert. I couldn't help thinking that the phrase "more money than sense" had been coined for this moment.

Imagine my relief when we finally reached Londinium and the end of my torment was in sight. I gathered my things and sneaked away as quickly and quietly as I could. As I did so, several of the ladies were engaged in trying to revive a lady for whom the Ambien had apparently been particularly effective. As I left, they had had no success.

Suddenly, the American obsession with unnecessary prescription drugs didn't seem so bad after all.

A Special Relationship: Part 2

2007-12-03T21:50:00.000-05:00

It's possible, in all the circumstances, that the tirade encapsulated in my previous message was enough to turn off a large proportion of my American readers, horrified by my flagrant anti-Americanism. Supposing that that proportion is 50%, and supposing that American readers made up 25% of my readership, until my previous message, I have just lost something in the region of, let's say, one reader, give or take. Ho, hum.

In fact, of course, The Referee doesn't have an anti-American bone in his body. Why move to live in a country that you can't stand? Despite all the little things that annoy one about wherever it is that one lives, one tends nevertheless to form an attachment to the place. When it's the US of America, and indeed New York in particular, that attachment is not difficult to establish. Here are the top ten reasons why.

In other words, please stand to attention (although not in the sense of my previous message), put on an old recording of God Bless America at high volume, and enjoy The Referee's Bumper Top Ten Reasons to Live in the New World.

10 Trains

In the New World, trains are modern, or at least clean. There is always - and I mean always - a uniformed conductor with a nice hat who is very interested in whether or not you have (ie one has) a ticket. And - this is the best part - the trains leave and arrive when the timetable says they will. I can remember only one occasion when my train was as much as ten minutes late, and that was the day after a record-breaking two feet of snow had fallen on Central Park. British readers should note that I am not making any of this up.

9 Guitar shops

OK, I accept that this is something of a niche entry, so I'll get it over with quickly. The Referee has had occasion to visit guitar shops at both sides of the Atlantic. Visit a guitar shop in this country, any guitar shop (probably), and you will find not only guitars, but also staff who are (i) knowlegeable about their subject, (ii) polite, (iii) friendly, and (iv) not troubled by an affliction by which their knuckles drag along the ground. Those who have ever attempted to buy a guitar in the UK of Blighty will know what I mean.

8 Newspapers

Just like the homeland, the New World has two types of newspaper: the serious and the not-so serious. The less said about the latter the better. But here the former are different. They actually make an attempt to report the news without assuming that the reader is such a numbskull that he (or she!) needs to be told what to think about it. And they refer to everbody, and I mean everybody, as Mr or Ms - even bad people.

7 The Stars and Stripes

One of the definitive sights of suburban America is a neighbo(u)rhood of quaint wooden-framed houses, almost all of which have a basketball hoop at the back, and the Stars & Stripes hanging at the front. If one is a Brit - and presumably one will know, one way or the other - it's worth pausing to think what the equivalent definitive sight might be. Whatever your answer, it's a safe bet that it won't include Union Flags aka Union Jacks hanging out in front of houses. In fact, if one does see the national flag hanging outside a house in the homeland, one assumes that the occupant is an eccentric, extremist fruitcake. Worse still, one would, generally speaking, be right.

In recent years, a healthy exception to this rule has emerged, when England's finest are appearing at the finals of an important and meaningful international tournament. Following the recent Euro 2008 non-qualification debacle, this exception is not likely to apply for a while.

6 Motels

Anyone who has tried driving for any distance around the New World - and if you haven't, you should - will know the joy of deciding willy nilly that one has had enough for the day and turning unannounced into the next motel which presents itself, where one will almost always find an adequate and clean room, and sometimes breakfast as well, in exchange for a number of dollars which would probably not be sufficient to buy the coffee machine in the room. (Yes, I know that's all one sentence. Please feel free to breathe where you think it appropriate. No need to do the whole thing in one go.)

5 Holidays

All Europeans who have hung around in this part of the world for any length of time will have noticed that working Americans tend to have an average of about 5 minutes annual leave. This would be enough to make anyone miserable, not to mention unproductive, so the always-ingenious Americans have tended to mitigate the meanness of their corporations by inventing a long list of reasons to have public holidays.

To mention just a few, there's Martin Luther King's birthday (which also happens to be my mother's birthday) (hello mum), Inauguration Day (for the new President, every fourth year), President's Day (which is celebrated on Washington's birthday), Memorial Day (for those who didn't make it back from wars), Independence Day (the less said about that the better), Labo(u)r Day (which is set aside specifically so that Americans can work on their spelling), Columbus Day (which is odd in the sense that the country is actually named after another explorer, Amerigo Vespucci), Veterans' Day (for those that did make it back from wars), and Thanksgiving. On second thoughts, that's all of them. Unless you also include Christmas and New Year's (New Year's what?).

4 Thanksgiving

Notwithstanding the entry at #5 above, there is one particular holiday which constitutes a major contribution to American culture, and not just because we have celebrated it recently. Thanksgiving is not just a very welcome long weekend, but also a genuinely communal event in which friends and families fly and drive huge distances in order to be together, for no other reason than to sit around eating and drinking too much.

In theory, at least, it commemorates the arrival of English settlers in Virginia in 1619. Unless it commemorates the feast which another group of settlers enjoyed with Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621.

In practice, most Americans don't worry too much about the precise origins of the feast, at least not as much as they care about eating it.

3 Diners

Now, don't get me wrong. I am as big a fan of the fried English breakfast as the next chap, but there really is nothing like going to a traditional chrome-enhanced diner for breakfast, better still brunch. They really know how to do it. But make sure you go early in the day - by dinner time it's just another restaurant.

2 New England

For a moment, if you will allow it, dear reader, I would like to address just my fellow country-persons, and anyone else intimately acquainted with the UK of Blighty. American readers should go out into the back yard and shoot some hoops for a while, or something.

Imagine, if you will, the homeland, but with the following amendments: (i) all the coastline looks like Cornwall, only more beautiful; (ii) all the inland areas look like the Scottish Highlands, only three times as high; (iii) the open road is, well, open, rather than like a long, thin car park; and (iv) there are no chavs.

I rest my case.

1 Baseball

A serious debate is continuing over here, and I dare say over there as well, about whether the arrival of a certain D Beckham at LA Galaxy will be the catalyst which elevates Assocceration Football from minor also-ran to major player in the world of US sport(s). I can assure you that it won't.

I don't say this because I have anything against Becks (I don't), or because I think his arrival will cause any harm (it won't), but because I happen to think that sport is inextricably linked to culture.

To put it less pompously ("too late for that!" I expect you're thinking), the biggest sports are the biggest because they matter to people, and they matter to people because they come up from the streets.

Baseball is America's pastime not because somebody organised it that way, but because young kids here have for more than 100 years gone out into the street with sticks and stones and anything else that came to hand and tried to emulate Willie Mays or Reggie Jackson or Babe Ruth. As I have argued previously on this site, one can learn a lot about this country from watching baseball, which occupies a similar place in hearts here as football does in the homeland.

Whilst it may not be THE beautiful game, it is certainly A beautiful game, and the thing I will most miss about the New World when I eventually return to the old one.

So, there you have it. Certain readers will no doubt conclude that the #1 entry above confirms that I have finally lost my marbles. You know who you are. It's a fair cop.

For everyone else, should you ever feel a little twinge of anti-Americanism developing, just have a lie down and perouse this list. I guarantee you'll feel better.

A Special Relationship: Part 1

2007-11-12T23:26:00.000-05:00

As all my regular readers (!) will be well aware, November marks the two year anniversary of The Referee sending messages from the other side. To mark this auspicious occasion, The Referee has decided to offer, at no additional charge, not one but two Top Ten lists. The purpose of these lists is to give you, dear reader, a summary of the best and worst things about being an Englishman (or Englishperson, these days!) in New York.

Coming soon, my top ten things about living in the US of America.

For now, however, I am proud to present the top ten things that drive me to distraction about this great country. In other words, please sit back and enjoy The Referee's Bumper New World Bottom Ten:

10 College sport(s)

What is the point of college sport(s), as distinct from professional sport(s)? Please don't feel the need to answer this question; it's rhetorical. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against young folks running around in the open air and enjoying themselves between college work, or indeed instead of it. But what does that have to do with anyone else? I don't know about you, but I played a good deal of five-a-side football whilst at university. No one ever turned up to watch it, not even my mother (hello mum). Why on earth would I expect crowds, TV cameras and cheerleaders? I wouldn't. Bonkers.

9 Stairs

There are a lot of places in the great city of New York where there are flights of stairs right next to escalators. Grand Central Terminal, to give the station its official name, has many of these. The interesting thing about this scenario is that it presents the traveller with a choice: stairs or escalator? What do New Yorkers choose? I'll tell you. On the basis of my highly scientific research into this issue, which involves looking around when I get off the train in the morning, I can tell you that New Yorkers choose the escalator, at a rate of at least 90%. I sometimes wonder what percentage of that 90% are the proud owners of expensive gym memberships. In New York, the chances are that many are, perhaps most. To those people, I say simply this: try the stairs - it's free!

8 Boxing Day

For a country that prides itself on celebrating Christmas with style, Christmas is not celebrated with much style over here. In particular, as soon as Christmas day is over, it's over. Mention the phrase "Boxing Day" to most Americans and you will get a blank look (unlike Canadians, who observe it with some enthusiasm). So Americans are deprived of not only the best and laziest day of the year, but also that great British tradition of taking all week off work, eating far too much and watching old films on TV until next year.

7 The word "program(me)"

This might seem an obscure one to those who have not spent much time in the New World, but bear with me. Those who have done so will know, if they search the deep recesses of their consciousness, that Americans use the word "program(me)" all the time. About anything. Leave aside for now the fact that the locals here run out of enthusiasm for spelling this word just before reaching the penultimate letter. Everything here is a program(me). My elder son plays in a soccer program(me); my younger son eats pizza for school lunch once a week, and that is a pizza program(me); my wife teaches an art program(me). If I stand up and walk around the room for a while, I am quite convinced that I could legitimately say that I was executing my personal circulation program(me).

6 Halloween

What is the point of halloween? For a start, it is decidedly odd to make such a fuss about All Hallows Eve, when hardly anyone marks the day that follows it, AKA All Saints day. That aside, why encourage children to dress up in stupid costumes, act obnoxiously and eat too much "candy"? Most of them do all those things with no encouragement at all.

5 Live radio football commentary

One of the greatest joys of my life - and I mean this sincerely - is listening to live football commentary on BBC Radio Five Live. Don't ask me to explain this. You will either understand it, or you won't.

I appreciate that this is a point about not living in the UK, rather than living in the US of America as such. But, for whatever reason, whilst it is possible to listen to most BBC radio output online, try listening to live football commentary from outside the UK of Blighty and you will get only an automated message saying something about "contractual obligations".

I have often wondered what precisely is in the contract in question to prevent those of us living overseas from listening. Presumably it says something along the lines of "In no circumstances should live commentary of Hereford v Scunthorpe in the first round of the Carling Cup be broadcast in Turkmenistan, in order that the rights may be sold separately to the National Turkmenistan Broadcasting Corporation, for local transmission to the numerous Scunthorpe fans in that part of the world". The problem with that, of course, is that there are not too many Scunthorpe fans in Turkmenistan, so local broadcasters are not interested, so there is no local transmission, so it's not possible to listen.

I have heard it said that people living overseas can't expect to have access to all BBC output because we don't pay the licence fee. In fact, we can't pay the licence fee. I expect I'm talking for a large number of ex-pat footie fans when I say that I would gladly pay the equivalent of the licence fee just to get access to football commentary on Five Live. So, come on BBC, take my money!

4 Medicine

After two years living here, I still cannot begin to fathom the American approach to all things medicine. Something close to half of all the commercials on TV here are for drugs: to treat hair loss, erectile disfunction (whatever that is) (simmer down, ladies!), "stubborn belly fat" (this is true), insomnia, and countless other ailments. But none of this is available over the counter. So almost all these commercials end with the phrase: "Ask your doctor if "Stand To Attention!" is right for you".

Then, presumably, when you next go to see your doctor (which, for the average American, is in the next five minutes) you are supposed to say "So doctor, do you think "Stand To Attention!" is right for me?". And the doctor says, "Well, the last patient I gave it to is still standing to attention three months later. But, yes, I'm sure it will be fine. Here's a prescription for the next 20 years". And then the doctor receives a fat cheque from Erections R Us, the makers of Stand To Attention!, and everyone is happy.

3 Tea

I have written before on this site about the difficulties of getting a half decent cup of tea in the New World. Well, despite two years of personal intervention on my part in terms of introducing numerous Americans to the concept of a teapot and suggesting that they fill it with something that one can actually taste, the situation at the national level is just as dire as it was. It remains the case that, in most beverage-serving establishments in this country, a request for tea is likely to be met with a cup of hot water presented alongside a Liptons yellow label tea bag. If you're lucky, your Liptons yellow label will be delivered on its own saucer. Perhaps The Referee is losing his touch.

2 The suburbanisation of the Beautiful Game

Here's what (association) football means to me, and has meant to me since I was first taken along to a non-league game at the age of six (hello dad). Long shorts, mud, rain, cold tea, meat pies, old blokes in flat caps and no teeth shouting helpful advice to the referee relating to his eyesight and his parentage. It means total commitment to one's team, the belief against all the evidence that they are the greatest team in the world, and a hatred almost as passionate directed towards any visiting team.

But what does (association) football mean (if anything) for the average American? Well, it probably means something more along the lines of clapping politely as a gaggle of 7-year-old girls skip happily around an elementary school playing field in the leafy suburbs, whilst sitting on a folding deck chair and shouting encouraging but incomprehensible phrases such as "Way to hustle!", whatever that means.

At least "The referee's a wa**er!" is grammatically correct.

1 Disney World

Consider for a moment, if you will, all the worst bits of the Big Country: excess, self-centredness, obsession with money, a lack of awareness of the rest of the world, a rather annoying over-confidence, etc. Then imagine that all those worst bits were somehow fashioned in plastic, covered in melted cheese and dropped in a field in the middle of Florida. Then imagine that you had to part with thousands of dollars in order to hang around in this field for a few days. Then imagine that, to your horror, your children thought this was a really good idea and lobbied you to do it all over again. Well, kids, it's not going to happen. Get over it. I am never going there ever again. Period. Whatever that means.

So, there you have it. I hope you feel better for having read my Bottom Ten. I certainly feel better for having written it.

American readers need not despair. I love your country really. Top Ten coming soon.

October

2007-10-30T22:47:00.000-04:00

As Oscar Wilde most certainly didn't say, there is only one thing worse than the Yankees losing in the play-offs, and that is the Red Sox not losing in the play-offs.

Looking for a New England

2007-09-30T23:15:00.000-04:00

It goes without saying, and indeed typing, that one of the essential activities for those from Old(e) England when visiting (or living in) this country is a visit to New England. Preferably, this should take the form of a tour of several or all the six States which make up the beautiful and historic north eastern corner of the country.

(Now, in the days before the Information Steve Heighway (without which this site would not exist, of course), I could have had some fun by asking you to name the six States of New England. Thanks to the good people of Google, however, my fun has been curtailed. But here's a suggestion. Just for fun - no prizes or any of that nonesense - British and other non-American readers (imagine that!) should resist the temptation to Google it and try to guess the six using only their grey matter. The answers will appear at the end. But there'll be a couple of clues along the way.

Go on - do it now, before you read any further.

OK, let's move on.)

So, this summer, The Referee and family decided to make the traditional pilgrimage north and east to see what we could find. We decided to start on the coast of MA, then inland to NH, and then back east to the coast of ME. (You will note that I am writing in code in order not to spoil your fun.)

Well, it was just as beautiful and peaceful as we had imagined, in part. On the other hand, it was also strange and over-eventful...

1. MA

I cannot over-recommend to you the beautiful villlage of Rockport MA which, like St Ives in Cornwall - another of The Referee's favo(u)rite places - is both a fishing village and an artists' colony, as well as the proud owner of some lovely beaches. We spent a very happy couple of days there, staying at a wonderful B&B (the Old Farm Inn) which, having been there since at least 1705 (as the home of one Cpt William Woodbury), must be one of the oldest buildings in MA, and indeed in the US of America. But Rockport is most famous for "Motif #1", an old red lobster barn on the harbour, so-called because it is said to be the most-painted object in the country. I don't mean that it is often re-decorated, I mean that... You know what I mean.

2. NH

From there we drove north and west into the spectacular White Mountains, which are not particularly white in the summer, but a popular place to ski at other times of the year. They are notable primarly for (i) Mt Washington, the highest point in New England (and, at 6,288ft, half as high again as Ben Nevis, the highest point in the UK of Blighty), and (ii) the Mt Washington Hotel, which sits at the foot of the mountain in the town of Bretton Woods, and which hosted the famous post-war financial conference which goes by that name.

(It has also been said by some that the spectacular hotel was the inspiration for Stephen King's novel The Shining, although Mr King himself in the introit to the book explains that the inspiration was a hotel in Colorado, which seems to rather scupper that theory.)

Anyway, it's a remarkably beautiful area - like the Scottish Highlands on steroids - and we enjoyed a fascinating day taking the steam railway up to the top of the mountain, which the engineers were keen to explain is the second steepest railway in the world, after one in Switzerland. When you're going up the section which has a gradient of over 37%, you take their word for it.

The locals like to say that Mt Washington is the home of the world's worst weather. This might seem impausible at first but, being something of an anorak for this type of thing, I was pleased to learn that it holds the world record for the faster-ever recorded wind speed: 231 mph.

3. ME

Then things started to go awry. We had booked ourselves into an apparently beautiful little cottage, on the coast, in the middle of nowhere, in upstate ME. Sound idyllic? That's what we thought.

The first sign of trouble reared its head when we arrived in the nearest metropolis, let's call it Little Inbred. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the good people of this area are completely uncivilised. But - this is true - the man employed by the local chamber of commerce to give out tourist information warned us to be careful about the locals, who were not always particularly welcoming of outsiders. For a town where there was clearly absolutely nothing going on except tourism - and there wasn't much of that - this was quite an admission. (The chap in question, who, it seemed to me, was doing his best in difficult circumstances, was wearing a t-shirt proudly advertising the local Lupin Festival 2007.)

Feeling rather unsure about whether we'd done the right thing, we set off in search of a supermarket. Since Little Inbred clearly had nothing at all to offer in this department, we decided that, before finding our cottage, we would have to check out the nearby settlement of Imarriedmysister. It quickly became clear that Imarriedmysister was a much more happening place, boasting not only a supermarket but also a parking lot, a couple of fishing boats and a dog with almost the requisite number of legs. We came away relatively pleased, in all the circumstances, with our haul of some long-grain rice from the 1970s and several potatoes with some lovely green shoots.

Without going into boring detail (imagine that!) about the accommodation in question, suffice to say that, on arrival, we quickly concluded that life is not always like the internet. Perhaps that's a blessing. But this place was not only different, it was also dirty and it smelled (although not as badly as the chap on my flight to Melbourne - see my message of 8 August).

We then did something which we hadn't ever done before, but which was actually rather fun. We had a family meeting, and we made a democratic decision. The unanimous decision was that there was no way we were going to spend a week in this place - we would stay only that night and leave again first thing the next morning.

After an unpleasant night, on the floor in my case (the kids were so spooked out by their creepy room that they got in our bed and refused to get out), we packed up and drove off, to nowhere in particular.

I don't know if you've tried this, but there is something strangely invigorating about driving with a car load of stuff and children without any idea where you're going to spend the night.

To cut a long story short (too late for that! I expect you're thinking) we were taken in like waifs off the street by the wonderful Carl at the Old Farm Inn back in Rockport MA, and spent a lovely few days there back on the beach, eating at the same restaurant every night, followed by the same walk to admire the wonderful harbour and Motif #1. Perfect.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that things which look like they're going to go wrong sometimes turn out better than they would have done if they had gone right, if you see what I mean.

And finally, the answer to the quiz is, of course: Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachussets, Maine and Rhode Island. But then you already knew that.

Can A-Rod Save Baseball?

2007-09-01T20:30:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you, but The Referee tends to be the sort of person who is not at the centre of things. I am generally the last to know when something important happens, and I'm probably not there at the time.

So it was recently when I slipped out to Australia for five minutes (see my message of 8 August 2007) that, whilst I was over there, or under there if you prefer, two important and long-awaited baseball records were broken back here in the US of America.

Now, you might actually have heard about the first of these record-breaking incidents, which received a good deal of media worldwide, including in Oz, a country which takes about as much of an interest in baseball as Americans take in Australian Rules football. However, unless you live in my adopted country and take a keen interest in these things, you are less likely to have heard about the second piece of baseball news I am about to report. But I suggest that this other news will ultimately become more important in the great sweep of history. And, this being The Referee, dear reader, I am not going just to suggest this - rather, I will demonstrate it using complicated math(s). Oh yes.

The first piece of news, of course, is that, on 8 August, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hit the 756th home run of his career, thus breaking the record of 755 held by Hank Aaron since 1974. You might be interested to know (!) that the third person on the list remains the great Babe Ruth, who hit 714 homers in his career, and headed the all-time HR list from 1921 until Aaron overtook him.

(By the way, although the record was broken at AT&T Park, San Francisco, in a game against the Washington Nationals, the record-breaking ball was caught by one Matt Murphy, a Mets fan from New York who was there only because he was on the way to Australia. Spooky, or what? In case you are looking to make an investment, the ball is currently up for auction and is expected to fetch half a million dollars.)

Those who are not close to these things might reasonably expect that this amazing record-breaking effort might have been accompanied by celebrations across the world of baseball. This was not the case, only because Bonds is one of a group of players widely suspected of taking performing-enhancing substances from the late '90s until the baseball authorities began testing for them, which was amazingly not until 2003.

Let me make it clear that The Referee is not going to comment on the veracity of these allegations. I have nothing to offer in that department. All I know is that the record books on the single-season HR records make interesting reading. The record for home runs in a single season is also held by Bonds, an amazing 73, set in the 2001 season. The odd thing, statistically, is that the next five records in that list were also all set between 1998 and 2001, all of them by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, both of whom have also been alleged to have been involved with inappropriate substances. It seems odd, to say the least, in a sport with a history of more than 100 years, that the HR records should be bunched in a span of just four years. (Ruth's best ever in a single season, by the way, was 60 in 1927 - the 8th best all-time.)

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Barry Bonds is a great player and one of the best hitters of all time. I can only speak for myself on this point, but I have no doubt that, even if The Referee was to take a good quantity of every performance-enhancing substance known to man, I would never be able to hit a baseball out of a stadium 755 times or anything close to it. In fact, just watch a live major league baseball game as hitters face a small, rock-hard ball arriving at over 90 miles per hour, and you'll be amazed that they ever hit it at all.

But, you are thinking, what was the second record I promised, and how can it be more important that Bonds' new record? I'll tell you.

On 4 August, just three days before Bonds hit number 756, one Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees hit the 500th home run of his career. Rodriguez, universally known here as A-Rod, thus entered the fabled "500 club", becoming only the 22nd player ever to do so, and the youngest. (As I write, A-Rod has 45 home runs this season so far, and has now entered the top 20 list for career home runs.)

Bonds is now 42 years old, which is about the time most baseball players hang up their romper suits, even those who have pickled their vital organs with human growth hormone - allegedly. A-Rod, however - and this is where it gets interesting (I promise!) - is only 32, and can expect to play for another decade, if he stays healthy. None of the other current players near the top of the career HR list is anywhere near as young as A-Rod. In fact, one has to go down to 64th on the list (Andruw Jones, currently on 366) to find someone younger than A-Rod.

Put all the above together, and you can see why many commentators believe it is just a matter of time until A-Rod takes the HR crown from Bonds, which would be widely popular, including amongst those who believe it still really belongs to Aaron, because it would be aided only by the unnatural number of sunflower seeds which players are able to consume during games.

But how long will we have to wait? I'm glad you asked that.

A-Rod has phenonemal numbers, as they say. His single-season record is 57 home runs, whilst playing for the Texas Rangers in 2001. And his season average, in the 14th season of his career, is 44. That includes hitting no homers at all in his first season (with the Seattle Mariners) and only 5 the following year.

Let us suppose, for the sake of this scientific experiment, that A-Rod keeps up his average of 44 for the rest of his career. If he does, The Referee calculates that he would reach Bonds' record-breaking 756 after another 5 and a half seasons, or in the early summer of 2013, to be precise.

On the assumption that Bonds will hit a few more this season and then retire, A-Rod might just need until the end of the 2013 season to top the list.

Of course, it's quite possible that he will not keep up his impressive average for that long. But The Referee prefers the view that we have yet to see the best of A-Rod, whose average may even improve over the next few years, as he climbs up the top 20 list, passing such greats as Mickey Mantle (13th), Reggie Jackson (11th) and Willie Mays (4th) on the way.

And so, there you have it. Keep your eye on the HR top 20, but don't hold your breath. And remember that you heard it here first.

As we often say in our house, "Let's go, A-Rod!", whatever that means.

The Referee Down Under

2007-08-08T19:19:00.000-04:00

The Referee finds himself in Australia.

I don't mean by this that I am undergoing some sort of spiritual awakening which was possible only by travelling halfway around the world and wandering off into the outback. Oh no. I mean only that I find myself in Australia for a period, for reasons which are not important for the purposes of this message.

For the purposes of this message, let's assume that I have made all the effort of travelling over here for the sole purpose of writing pithy and erudite comments about the cultural differences between opposite corners of the New World. This is, of course, not the reason, at least not the only one, and you are not about to read any such comments, but please see if you have it in your heart to humour me on this point, at least for the time it takes to read the next few lines.

After considerable research and analysis of empirical evidence, The Referee can reveal the shocking and unexpected news that not all corners of the New World are the same. It turns out that, rather like babies and pet guinea pigs, each former colony has its own personality, distinct in interesting and subtle ways from each other as well as the Motherland.

And so, for your edification and delight, gentle reader, The Referee is pleased to present Interesting Cultural Differences Between the New Worlds, or Ways In Which Australia Is Not The Same As America.

1. Chocolate

I'm sure you'll agree with me that there are few cultural barometers which are as important (or as good to eat) as the stuff our American friends insist on calling "candy". Imagine my delight then, when arriving at my first Australian supermarket, to find that a good 90% of fare in the confectionery department was just the same as that which might be found in a similar establishment in the UK of Blighty - Kit Kat, Dairy Milk, Turkish Delight, Bounty, etc. I immediately bought up a job load of my personal favourite - Maltesers - and scuttled hurriedly back to my hotel room to devour them in peace. Better still, the establishment in question was good old Woolworths and, even better, I noticed that the locals referred to it as "Woolies". I realised I had landed in civilization.

2. Football

Regular readers (imagine that!) will not be surprised to find that I was keen to investigate the health of the Beautiful Game over here, as well as the terminology employed by the locals to refer to it. I had an idea that this was another corner of the world given to using the s-word but, given the seriousness with which I take my role as your correspondent, dear reader, I wanted to hear it for myself. I was therefore very pleasantly surprised to learn that the world's most popular game is commonly called football over here.

But this discovery was soon tainted slightly when I realised that almost all other sports here are called football as well. In fact there are four Oz footballs: Association, Rugby League, Rugby Union and Australian Rules. In other words, almost everything is football unless it's cricket (and the less said about that the better).

(By the way, The Referee was lucky enough to attend an Aussie rules game the other day - a local derby between two Melbourne teams, Carlton and Collingwood. It was fast, physical and exciting. The pitch was enormous and there were roughly 300 players on each team. But the (oval) ball bobbled all over the place in an ungainly fashion, as did the players, who often ended up in a heap of bodies - the Beautiful Game it ain't.)

3. Body Odour

I can't really pretend that I have discovered an empirical difference between New World body odours as such, but equally I can't resist sharing with you the following story. For reasons that will become obvious, some of the details have had to be obscured.

The Referee was travelling the other day between two Australian cities, let's call them Adelaide and Melbourne, with a certain national airline beginning with Q, let's call it Qantas. Although it's a very short flight, I was mildly dismayed to find myself in a B seat on a Boeing 737 (which, as you jet-setters out there will know, is to be avoided for the same reason as E seats - ie that you are squashed in the middle between two fellow passengers, who tend to be either rather larger than the space afforded by the seat, or taken to spreading their elbows out of their own space and into yours, or both).

On this occasion, neither of these appeared to be the case, and I thought for a moment that my luck was in. How wrong I was. As I settled into my B seat, I noticed almost immediately a very odd smell, which at first I couldn't place. After a couple of minutes I realised that I was dealing with two smells mingled together in a very unpleasant way - it turned out that the chap in A was emitting a very strong mixture of tobacco and body odour. The result was nauseating and almost sweet. (If I was one of those people who write the labels on the back of wine bottles, I would say that there were strong notes of chocolate, but that would of course be ridiculous.)

I realised that I wasn't going to be able to deal with this for the whole flight and that I would have to employ defensive tactics. I reached up to the little air nozzle that sits above aeroplane seats and turned it up full, pointing directly at my nose. I calculated that perhaps this would direct the offending odours downwards before they reached my olfactory awareness. It didn't.

Becoming desperate, I decided that I would have to go on the offensive and turn the nozzle to the left to point at the chap sitting in A. But clearly that might have looked a little odd to say the least. So I compromised by pointing the air slightly to my left, but not so far as to suggest that I was actually pointing it at him. Needless to say, it made no difference at all.

Mercifully, by the time I had finished fiddling we had arrived in Melbourne and I dashed into the airport terminal, gasping lungfuls of lovely, fresh air.

And so, there you have it. The Referee encourages his fellow country-persons to remember that not all the colonies have panned out the same.

Please also remember never to sit in the middle seat.

Hand in Glove

2007-06-30T23:44:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you, but The Referee has never been terribly interested in those official days throughout the year which we're all supposed to observe with some reverence but which most of us suspect were made up five minutes ago by people with a significant financial stake in the success of greetings card companies. This includes Fathers' Day, which has never done a great deal for me, despite the fact that I have now qualified to be honoured for more than a decade.

(Those in doubt about these sorts of things should note that it is properly "Fathers' Day" - the day belonging to fathers plural, not "Father's Day" - the day belonging to one father, unless of course one is of the view that everyone currently alive is the offspring of just the one man, in which case the latter would be correct, if a little unlikely. (Fill in your own joke here about which man it might be, and the fact that he must be very tired, etc.) Alternatively, those who are uncomfortable with having to calculate precisely which day belongs to whom might like simply to opt out of the possessive by using "Fathers Day" - ie the day which nods generally in the direction of fathers without actually belonging to them as such. I hope that helps.)

Anyway, unlike my previous nine qualifying Fathers' Days, this one was a pleasant surprise, for two reasons. Firstly, I received from my two sons the best Fathers' Day offering I have ever received, or could reasonably expect to, of which more in a moment. Secondly, the gift came with a mystical tale, elevating it instantly to the stuff of legend, at least in our house.

The gift in question was a baseball glove. Not just any old baseball glove, you understand. To be precise (and vegetarians, vegans and other cattle-lovers should look away now) it's a Rawlings black leather 12.5 inch Instinct series with a pad lock, dual wings and basket web. I have no idea what any of that means, but I do know that there is something undeniably manly about going out into the yard (how can a place almost exclusively comprising grass, trees and wildlife be called a "yard"?) and throwing an implausibly hard ball with all one's might in the direction of one's junior male offspring, only for them to smile as they catch it in their glove and return it just as agressively as it arrived.

(By the way, anyone reading this (as if!) who is in need of work could do worse than get into the US patent business. I notice that the Rawlings Dual Wing has US patent number 4,853,975, and the Pad Lock has number 5,457,829. But I still don't know what either of them are.)

Even better than the glove, however, was the story of its purchase. The offspring had visited the local branch of a well-known US sporting chain, let's call it Sports Authority. After deciding that their old dad was a Rawlings 12.5 inch Instinct black leather kind of chap, the offspring stood "in line", as New Yorkers insist on calling it, when they noticed something of a kerfuffle (a much under-used word, I'm sure you'll agree) at the check-out. It transpired that a number of other small boys were jockeying for the autograph of the one and only Mariano Rivera, who was in the middle of paying for something.

American readers will need no further explanation. Others need to know that Rivera is the principal closing pitcher for the Yankees - ie the most accurate and reliable pitcher of all, who is brought on only for the last inning, if that, to ensure that the lead is not squandered or - more often this season - that things don't get any worse. Suffice to say that Rivera is perhaps the most senior and respected closer currently playing. For British readers, you'll not be far off if you imagine nipping into your local J&B Sports for a pair of shin pads and finding yourself in the queue behind John Terry.

Being enterprising sorts, the offspring joined the kerfuffle and each came away with an autograph of the great man who is, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice chap.

On the morning of Fathers' Day, the glove was handed over and the story was recounted. One way or the other, I was informed, the glove was blessed by having been bought in the presence of the great Rivera.

We then set off to our local church, where there is a Fathers' Day tradition of an impromptu men's choir, in which fathers, sons, nephews, uncles etc are all invited to join in the enthusiastic singing of hymns which are either sexist or employ military imagery or, preferably, both.

Afterwards, the junior boy pointed out to me that the announced number of males in the impromptu choir - 42 - was also the Yankees shirt number worn by Mariano Rivera for more than a decade. Not to mention the number of our house. And, for fans of the late Douglas Adams, the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Perhaps, I pondered, the glove was pointing us towards what physicists call the Grand Unification Theory.

To put it another way, as we often say in our house: spooky, or what?

The Age of Aquariums

2007-05-23T22:35:00.000-04:00

One of the good things about so-called Middle Age is that it is so poorly defined. And so, if one is in danger of approaching this stage of life, or indeed is in danger of having reached it already, one can simply move the goalposts - as we fans of assocceration football like to say - and so pretend still be to "young", even if, in moments of totally honesty, one would admit that all the messages being received from ones elbows, knees, teeth, bowels, children and birthday cards suggest otherwise.

(I should clarify at the outset that Middle Age is in no way to be confused with The Middle Ages, which is something else entirely. The latter was a brutal period of human existence when people with rotting teeth worked all the hours God sent and never had any fun. The former, on the other hand, ...Oh, never mind.)

Now, just like Ebeneezer Scrooge, and indeed the Baby Jesus, The Referee has recently been visited by three wise messengers, each bearing clues which suggest that You-Know-When is perhaps approaching. And so, despite the considerable personal risks of self-revelation, I have decided to introduce you, dear reader, to my three messengers, in the hope that you might later recognise them, should you experience a visitation at some point.

1. Gluten

I don't know about you, but I had no idea what gluten was until, relatively recently, with no apparent provocation that I can recall, it started an argument with my lower intestine, causing all sorts of digestive chaos. After the argument had been going on for a while, I decided to admit defeat and simply give up eating anything involving wheat, which turns out to be the host of this sinister gloop. The improvement in my health was almost instant, but so was the sense of missing lots of things I liked to eat. However, the good news which awaits one in Middle Age is that there are lots of tempting foods which are made especially for those who find themselves in these circumstances, including disability bread, disability cakes and disability cookies. These "speciality" foods may have looked and tasted like cardboard a few years ago, but now, I am pleased to report, scientific improvements mean that they are almost edible.

2. Myopia

Now, until quite recently, as far as I can remember, road signs and shop signs and the like used to be painted up very clearly and, in the main, were mounted in a sturdy manner such that they would generally keep still, even in windy weather, and so were reasonably easy to read, even from a distance or from a passing car. It has come to my notice recently, however, that such signs tend to present themselves rather more sloppily than previously, such that some of the lettering can be difficult to read, and in some cases tend to move around in a very annoying manner, just at the moment one is trying to focus on them.

Having identified the potential root of this problem, I set off with some trepidation to visit an optometrist. (Have you ever wondered, by the way, what happened to all the "opticians" out there? I like to imagine that their bodies were somehow taken over by an advanced race of "optometrists", rather like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.) Anyway, after investigating me with a variety of weird and wonderful contraptions, the young and female doctor asked me - and this is true, word for word - "Can you get dilated today, sir?". I have to admit that I was sorely tempted to say something highly facetious along the lines of "I have no idea but, with your help, perhaps we can make sweet music together". Needless to say, I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I said something much more along the lines of "Well, it's not all that convenient just now because I have to go back to my office and read some emails".

Anyway, after returning to be dilated at a more convenient time, I emerged with a prescription for mild shortsightedness and the news that I have a freckle on the back of my left eye. This is obviously important information which is bound to come in useful one day. For example, if I am ever separated from my left eye and need to identify it in a line-up (using my right eye, of course).

3. Young love

There may be many potential measurements to test whether things are going for one or against one in life. But few could be more telling and poignant than this one: Am I getting more or less romance than my children? Although it pains me to admit it, if the answer is "less", one really must be arriving in You-Know-When.

I raise this only because the senior offspring recently announced, with considerable poise for one yet to turn 11, that he has a girlfriend. He then proceeded to explain to me, perhaps thinking that I needed a lesson in these things, that, at his age, a girlfriend is a girl, who is a friend, whom you like. I tried briefly to encourage him to explain how that distinguished one particular girl from many others, but decided not to pursue the point very far. I knew what he meant, and so did he, even if he doesn't quite yet have the vocabulary to express it.

More surprisingly, having announced with some conviction that I knew which of the young ladies at his school we were talking about, it turned out that I was completely wrong. As usual, my finger was right on the pulse. Having spent much of the last few months hanging out, as they like to say here, with a particular young lady, it turned out that he had had his eye on someone else "ever since 4th grade". The tone in his voice had the unmistakable "doh!" of Homer Simpson, as if to say "get with it, daddy-o". I had been put firmly in my place, and, more disconcertingly, in my Age.

And so, there you have it. My advice - offered entirely free of charge - is to watch out for the three messengers of Middle Age and, if you see them coming, run as fast as you can. Followed, obviously, by a little lie down.

A Game of 18 Halves

2007-04-09T01:18:00.000-04:00

Not since my message of 16 May 2006 have I mentioned America's pastime, rapidly becoming The Referee's second favo(u)rite sport, and its most famous exponents, who also happen to be my local team, the New York Yankees.

So, in response to what, in my fevered imagination, is mounting demand from you, dear reader, for an update, I proudly present the second in a series which might be subtitled "Why everything that one needs to know about life can be learnt from baseball".

After a deadly dull and frigid winter, when the only sport(s) to watch are football (not assocceration) and basketball (college or otherwise), the baseball season arrives here like the spring - bringing with it the promise of something better just around the corner.

And, so far, one has not been disappointed. Let me explain why.

My kids were keen to see the Yankees again, and this time my wife said that she wanted to come along as well. So, off I went to procure the earliest tickets I could get - at home at Yankee stadium against the Baltimore Orioles (or Oreos, as The Referee likes to refer to them, to the amusement of no one but himself). (You might at this point like to note something I have recently been forced to face up to personally - that, if you can't get your 8 year old child to laugh at a joke, it's probably best not to pursue it a great deal further.)

Anyway, the big day came and we scaled up the steep sides of the stadium in a chill wind threatening flurries of snow. Not all that springlike after all. Sure enough, the early stages of the game did not deliver much seasonal warmth. The debut of new Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa, who promised more than he delivered, was such that we were 7-2 down by the 4th inning.

After that, precisely nothing happened for three innings, except that everyone got colder and I was forced to scale down from the heights to forage for chips - by which I mean chips, not chips - just to keep everyone warm. Despite the fact that I was gone for what felt like several weeks, I missed only a single run for the Yanks, making it 7-3 to Baltimore.

At that point, something odd began to happen. People began to leave. Not just in their ones and twos, but in their droves, whatever they might be.

The senior offspring turned to me in some bemusement about why people were leaving in the 7th inning. "Do they think we're going to lose?", he asked. I explained that they might, but that you should never give up until the end, and perhaps not even then. That response seemed to go down well, mainly because it left open the possibility that something interesting might happen.

By the 8th inning, the stadium was perhaps a little over half full. And then, with just the dedicated faithful left, something interesting did indeed begin to happen. The Yankees found 3 runs out of nowhere, and suddenly it was 7-6 - only one down and an inning to go. What was left of the crowd suddenly realised that we had a role to play and started to make a noise.

The great Mariano Rivera came out to close for the Yankees and finished off the last of the Baltimore hitters without much ado. The crowd was by now feverishly screaming for some action.

The chance of that happening seemed to dissipate as quickly as it had arisen after the next two Yankee hitters were out almost immediately. Surely, with only one out to go, we were expecting too much?

Then someone got to first base. Then someone else did the same. The crowd started to sizzle again. Then Bobby Abreu came out, got hit on the leg by a pitch, and hobbled, rather than walked, to first base.

Bases loaded. Only one out left. And the crowd went wild when they realised that Alex Rodriguez was up next. For those who have not followed his story, Rodriguez is one of the most precociously talented players in baseball, who hasn't always delivered, despite being one of the most highly-paid sportsmen in the world (including players of assocceration football). The result has been a love-hate relationship with the immensely demanding Yankee fans. And the buzz around the stadium said, more or less, "OK, show us what you can do".

You couldn't make up what happened next. He fumbled at the first couple of pitches - two strikes - one more and the game was lost.

As the next pitch came in, he swung at it with everything he had, and the whole stadium followed as it sailed way over the hapless pitcher's head and carried on soaring for a beautiful home run right over the middle of the park.

For those unfamiliar with the game, that's what is known as a "grand slam" - a bases-loaded home run, worth one run for the hitter and one each for the three runners. The Yankees had won 10-7. And this was not just any old grand slam - rare enough - but a walk-off grand slam, ie a grand slam which ends the game.

Everyone in the stadium leapt in the air. Rodriguez skipped around the bases, clapping his hands and beaming as he went, only to be mobbed by his entire team on arrival at the plate. The second that he did so, the stadium speakers belted out the familiar opening strains of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York". It was a pretty good moment to be a New Yorker, even an adopted one.

The next day, the NY Times reported that, in the 105 year history of the Yankees, they had at that point played a total of 16,116 games, of which this had been only the eighth to end in a walk-off grand slam. If my math(s) is correct, that means that the chances of my wife witnessing such in her first Yankees game were 1 in 2,014, and a half.

I was tempted to conclude that I should immediately send my wife out to buy a lottery ticket. But, instead, I reminded the senior boy about our agreement that one should never give up, nor should one ever leave a baseball game in the seventh inning, even if one is worried about how long it might take to get out of the car park.

As we say in our house, "Let's go A-Rod!". Whatever that means.

Ohio Boy Accidentally Buried by Snow Plow OK

2007-03-05T22:38:00.000-05:00

My message of 30 October 2006 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, at least in my mind, the importance of proper and orderly punctuation in all our lives, or, at the very least, in all our sentences. Responses that I have subsequently received to that message from a number of "regular readers" (in my dreams) have suggested, in the nicest possible ways, that The Referee perhaps tends towards the affliction of punctuation anorakism. This is, as far as I can tell, a specific and acute strain of the more general and common affliction of grammar anorakism, although perhaps one can have both simultaneously. I certainly hope so.

Anyway, bouyed by these generous compliments, I am proud to present the second message in an ad hoc series that might be entitled something along the lines of The Referee's Guide to the Importance of Proper and Orderly Punctuation in All Our Lives.

In researching this series on your behalf, dear reader, I have noticed that the "tabloid" media is particularly helpful in providing examples that spotlight the importance of good punctuation, if I may have your permission to use "spotlight" as a verb for a moment. (It won't happen again.)

I'm not sure why this should be so; perhaps it's because the more low-brow media tend to pack as much meaning as possible into breathless headlines, so as to grab the attention, and/or to be able to keep the accompanying article as short as possible.

Whatever the reason for it, my attention was caught recently by a headline on foxnews.com - and the brow doesn't get a lot lower than that - about a young man in Ohio who fortunately walked away unscathed after a rather wintry scare. In fact, after having gone unnoticed by a frozen precipitation removal operative, his plight was reported by a friend, and he was then whisked away to a hospital, where he was declared unharmed and not in need of admission.

So, all's well that ends well, and there was apparently no more to the story than that.

If only the same could be said for the headline, which has almost as many words as did the story; and, if you sit back and look at them, those words seem to be scrambling over each other in a desperate attempt to blurt out the span of the whole story before the edge of the page turns up to spoil the party.

These seem to be perfect conditions for multiple potential meanings and nuances, and therefore ideal circumstances for demonstrating the importance of proper and orderly punctuation.

This time, however, I'm not going to mollycoddle you (and it's not often enough, I'm sure you'll agree, that we see the word mollycoddle these days). No. Because you, I surmise, are an educated reader who requires no stabilisers in order to navigate the rocky terrain of punctuation.

And so, without further ado, I give you a few alternatively-punctuated versions of the same headline.

1. Ohio boy accidentally buried by snow plow OK.
2. Ohio: boy accidentally buried by snow plow; OK?
3. "Ohio Boy", accidentally buried by snow plow, OK.
4. Ohio boy accidentally buried by snow. Plow OK.

There may be others.

You're on your own.

I expect you can almost feel the wind of punctuation blowing through your hair...

Return of the So(u)n(d) of Monster Magnet

2007-01-30T23:14:00.000-05:00

Those readers who are parents - and I expect you would have noticed, one way or the other - will understand the next sentence; those who are not parents will have to take my word for it. There is nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your offspring perform, particularly if they're any good. The thrill is rather reduced, I'll admit, if they're awful and you have to pretend that they're any good. But, if you don't have to pretend, there's nothing quite like the swelling chest and "that's my boy!" sense which grips the proud parent, even if it's your daughter.

The Referee enjoyed such a moment last week at the school band winter concert, featuring the senior offspring in the percussion department.

Now, before you beat me to it, so to speak, I know as well as you do that the answer to the old joke "What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?" is "A drummer", and perhaps there's something in that. But, it seems to me, the percussion department of a band or orchestra is quite a different matter. Percussionists have to play all types of drums, and other things that need to be hit, with sticks or otherwise, as well as things which actually have notes, like vibes - sometimes all in the same tune.

So, I watched with considerable pride as the senior boy furrowed his brow and hopped dextorously between instruments, pausing to glance at the conductor, or at fellow band members, before beating the cymbal into submission at precisely the right moment.

As I watched, and listened to the selection of classical pops and pop classics, it occured to me that I had heard something very similar before. I wracked my brain for a while and then, right in the middle of "We will rock you", it came to me. I turned to my wife and said "Peaches en regalia". She gave me that smile that wives give when they're hoping that you're about to go straight back into your own little world without bothering them any further.

But you, cultured reader, will no doubt have realised what my wife didn't immediately realise (until I expained it to her at length) - that I was referring to the legendary opening track of Frank Zappa's debut solo album after the demise of the Mothers of Invention: the seminal Hot Rats.

That's right. I had realised something of devastating musical importance that I had not realised before. Not that Zappa sounds like Queen - or even vice versa - he doesn't. What I realised was this: a large gathering of 5th graders who are just in the early stages of mastering their instruments but who nevertheless follow the conductor's instruction to belt out the classics with carefree gusto at the maximum possible volume sound almost exactly like a small band of virtuoso musicians playing incredibly complex arythmnical 1970s jazz/rock.

Now, you might take the view that this revelation doesn't really matter one way or the other. If that is the case, I'm afraid I can be of no further help to you.

On the other hand, you might realise the potential consequences of this near-scientific discovery, but simply have difficulty in believing it to be true. I have some sympathy with that latter response and, in the interests of science, I offer the following assistance. Come with me, if you will, into the land of interactive blog experimentation...

Which is not quite as scary as it sounds. All you have to do is follow these 3 steps:

1. First, look at the lovely photo above of the band in action.

2. Play, as loud as possible, and preferably out of some speakers near your computer, the tune "Peaches en regalia". Unfortunately, if for some unfathomable reason this wonderful track doesn't already feature in your collection, you won't find it in i-Tunes, which features shamefully little by way of the huge FZ back catalogue. This means, for the benefit of those under 21, that you would have to go into a shop and hand over some cash in exchange for one of those thin plastic music boxes.

3. To complete the effect, hold your computer a few inches above the desk and shake it vigorously in time - if you can! - with the crazy rythmn.

I rest my case.

May you never become a Dancin' Fool, nor be struck unexpectedly by Cosmik Debris.

How Green Was My January?

2007-01-07T21:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday in New York it was 68F (or 20C for those of you reading this in Europe). On the 6th of January. Or January 6th, as the preposition-shy Americans prefer it.

In case you didn't catch that - perhaps you were distracted by a thing, as they like to say in The West Wing - let me run it past you again. In New York, on 6 January, it was 68F.

What is going on? Normally at this time of year, New Yorkers remark on the weather only if it rises above freezing, and tend to spend most of January wearing furry ear warmers and (at least in the suburbs) looking for good places to go sledging.

This year, on the other hand, something strange is happening. A high of 68F makes yesterday the warmest 6 January in recorded New York history. Or it was the warmest January day ever recorded. Or both. Or neither. No, hang on - not neither.

What's more, we have had no snow at all so far this winter. This is very unusual. In fact, it's the latest New York has gone without snow since 1878. Which, the New York Times pointed out yesterday, was before the arrival of the Statue of Liberty, and before NYC existed in the sense of comprising the five boroughs as it does today (see my message of 18 September 2006).

(Which reminds me that the Statue of Liberty is only a short-hand informal way of referring to the famous landmark. What is it's official title? Answers via the comment button, please. When I say "button", I don't mean "button" in the sense of... Oh, never mind.)

In response to the question "What is going on?", some people answer: "Nothing". These people must be avoided. They are dangerous lunatics. These people appear to believe that we should not admit that the climate is changing because, if we do, we'll have to try to do something about it and, as soon as we make any efforts in that direction, everyone in the world will instantly lose their job and/or go out of business. I exaggerate somewhat for emphasis, but you get the general idea.

The problem with this argument is that most of us, if we are honest, and over about 20 years old, can tell from our own experience that things have changed since we were younger, even without drawing up historical charts, or waving a sock in the air, or whatever else it is that meteorologists do.

And, once we have agreed that things are changing, the next logical question is "Why?". Is there a serious chance that the answer has nothing to do with human behaviour? About the same chance, I estimate, that the whole thing is an evil plot for world domination hatched by Little Jimmy Krankie. (Americans will need to ask a passing Brit about this reference. On second thoughts, don't bother.)

Which brings me to one of the cinematic highlights of 2006, Weird Al Yankovic's fascinating dental/meteorological documentary, An Incontrovertible Tooth. If you haven't seen it, see it.

Is everything presented in the film necessarily accurate and/or directly relevant to the weird things which appear to be happening to our climate? I don't know. What I do know is that a documentary about a middle-aged politician giving a lecture about the weather had no right to be that gripping or entertaining.

Regardless of your view on the thorny issue of climate change, anyone who has seen his film will have to admit that Mr Yankovic is (i) intelligent, (ii) articulate, and (iii) a man with something to say.

As they like to say over here, "Go figure". Whatever that means.

Happy New Year('s).

Isn't Fruit Clever These Days?

2006-12-13T23:01:00.000-05:00

The other day, as I was rushing thr(o)u(gh) Grand Central Terminal (which, I can report for the benefit of those who have never visited it, is both grand and central) it occured to me that I was holding in my hands the two central icons of contemporary American culture, or New York culture at least.

(It may surprise you to learn, if it elicits any sort of emotion at all, that The Referee's favo(u)rite US train station - and I know you had been wondering about this - is not the aforementioned GCT, but the splendid Union Station in Washington DC, which, as well as being named after the backing band to marvellous country singer Alison Krauss (check out her version of "Baby, now that I've found you"), is arguably even more grand and indeed central.)

Anyway, back to cultural icons. In my left hand, I was balancing a cup just purchased from ****bucks - the ubiquitous coffee chain, which now has more shops in the US than Americans have teeth, unless I just made that up. Admittedly, I was drinking their tea, as usual, but one has to hang on to some sense of one's homeland. In other words, I like to celebrate diversity, and indeed multiculturalism, whilst doing my best to integrate into my host country, save, of course, for speaking the same language.

In my right hand, I was fondling my new toy. A little device, named after a fruit, which is perhaps the only cultural icon now more numerous than branches of ****bucks. Let's call it a Kumquat.

Well, I can tell you that the Kumquat is a very clever little fruit indeed. It can do all sorts of things which will come as no surprise to those of you who are modern, thrusting techy types. But for a relatively crusty Luddite like me, it is nothing short of a revelation.

For a start, wherever I go since giving birth to my Kumquat, so to speak, my emails - both work and personal - arrive
thr(o)u(gh) the ether and land, literally, in the palm of my hand. Now, you may ask, is this necessarily good, or useful, or important? It's not necessarily any of those things, I answer, but it is very clever and very modern.

And there's more. The Kumquat is also a telephone, and a calculator, and an address book, and a diary. And it plays little games, or at least it would if I could work out how to play them.

But the best thing of all is this. The best thing is, wherever I go, I can "surf" the World Wide Information Steve Heighway using only a small piece of fruit in the palm of my hand, with no wires or nothing. (The previous sentence contains a reference for fans of 1970s assocceration football.)

Being a persistent sort, you ask again: is this necessarily good, or useful, or important? This time, I answer "yes", "yes" and "yes", but not necessarily in that order. Let me explain why, by way of an example.

Having battled thr(o)u(gh) the scrum that is the centre of GCT the other day, balancing a couple of cultural icons in my hands, I made it to the train and settled down for my daily commute thru (OK, I give up) Harlem and the Bronx. As is often the case during the first part of the journey, I gazed out of the window at the delis, delivery trucks, apartment blocks and police cars that make Harlem one of the most fascinating slices of urban life you will ever see. Whilst I was doing this, a thought occured to me which had never before occured to me in Harlem. I wonder how the Palace got on?

Now, for the benefit of those with only a passing acquaintance with the UK of Blighty, I need to point out that I was not wondering about Buckingham Palace. And, for those with slightly more than a passing acquaintance, and/or a subscription to Hello! magazine, I was not wondering about Beckingham Palace either. I was, in fact, wondering about the recent fortunes of Crystal Palace - my formerly local South London assocceration football team about which, it has to be admitted, the terrace favo(u)rite which ends with the words "we're by far the greatest team the world has ever seen" is sometimes sung, but never actually meant.

Anyway, now that I had a portable device designed for this sort of thing, why not find out how they had done, there and then, on the train?

Well. As I passed some kids playing extra-curricular basketball in a Harlem school playground, I learnt that we had won 3-0 against QPR. (Hurrah, I thought - first win in ages.) And as we trundled across the Park Avenue Bridge over the Harlem River, bidding farewell to Manhattan for another day, I read that the scorers had been Freedman, Kuqi & Morrison. And then, as we passed the warehouses and "gentlemen's cabaret" joints that tell the Metro North commuter that he (or she, these days) is entering the Bronx, I learnt that our manager, Peter Taylor, was convinced we could still make the play-offs, despite languishing in 16th place.

At that, I switched off my Kumquat, sat back in my seat, and day-dreamed contentedly about the glorious season that lay ahead for the Palace, all the way to the green and pleasant suburbs of Westchester County.

Now, if that's not multiculturalism, I don't know what is. And if it's not good, useful and important, I'll eat my hat. Or perhaps just my fruit.

Referee in "Referee is Referee" Shocker

2006-11-23T12:19:00.000-05:00

Both of my regular readers will no doubt agree that it has been far too long since I shared with you the exploits of my senior son's Assocceration Football team. In fact, since my message of 21 November 2005, his endeavours have earned him a promotion from the Raptors (U10 C team) to the Rams (U11 A team), and so I now enjoy the privilege of spending every Sunday afternoon screaming and shouting from the touchline in the direction of a much higher quality expression of the Beautiful Game.

Until this week. This week, on the last game of the season, I did no shouting or screaming of any sort.

(I should point out - for those who are thinking that the season is not yet halfway thr(o)u(gh), and that there are no prizes for being top at Christmas - that over here the season starts in spring and finishes in the fall/autumn (and the kids have a break in summer as well). This is because it is very cold in winter. No, very cold. And so American footie fans are deprived of the joy of freezing in the stands and trying to warm their hands with a plastic cup of lukewarm tea, while the players are battered with hailstones until they succumb to falling on their behinds in a river of mud. Now that's what I call sport(s).)

Anyway, you are wondering, why did The Referee not get to deliver his usual quota of encouraging screams and shouts, or, indeed, any at all? Thanks for asking. Well, it's because I was the referee. That's right. For reasons too complicated and dull to explain here, the actual referee was nowhere to be seen, and so The Referee was, for the first time ever, the referee.

Now, for those of you who have never actually had the privilege of being the referee, I can report that it is a very interesting experience. So interesting, in fact, that I have decided to share with you, dear reader, the life lessons which I drew from it. May they be enlightening to you and yours.

1. Being impartial is not so far removed from being partial.

Almost from the second one blows one's whistle, one is overcome by the need to be fair and upright, despite screaming in a very partisan manner for one's team just seconds before the whistle string went around one's neck, and again after it is removed. Perhaps this has something to tell us about our ability to adapt to the roles life throws at us. Or perhaps it just tells us something about how far we will go to avoid being lynched by the opposition's parents.

2. Even if one is freezing standing still on the touchline, one can quickly become warm by running around on the pitch.

Actually, I'm not sure there is a deep life lesson in this one. But make sure you keep warm this winter.

3. Not everyone who claims he is having his shirt pulled is actually having his shirt pulled.

This is an easy one - don't assume something is so just because someone tells you it is. Go and look for yourself. In this case, having looked for myself, I saw no shirt pulling and waved play on, much to the disgruntlement of a certain section of parents, who clearly had developed the approach that little Johnny should always be believed, and had perhaps abandoned the discipline of going and looking for themselves.

4. It is better to let the game flow than to blow up every couple of minutes.

This is a bit trickier. Perhaps it tells us that we should stop trying to interfere in other people's lives and let them get on with it. They are adults, after all. Or something.

5. Some small boys are better behaved than their parents, who are loud and annoying.

Perhaps this tells us that things don't necessarily always get worse; sometimes they get better. On the other hand, perhaps it just tells us that some people are loud and annoying. We should also remember that a foul is not a foul unless the referee (who might not necessarily be The Referee, although was in this case) says it's a foul. I hope that's clear. It certainly makes me feel better.

So, I don't know about you, but the next time I go to a game, I will certainly think twice about shouting some helpful advice in the direction of the referee. And then I'll do it anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pedants' Revolt

2006-10-30T21:13:00.000-05:00

An old friend once told me the following joke: "Who was the leader of the Pedants' Revolt? Which Tyler."

I think this is a joke which (or should that be "that"?) separates the population into two groups: those who get it and those who don't. If you don't get it, there is no hope for you. And if you do get it, there is no hope for you either, although for a different reason.

I offer this by way of introduction only because I was reminded again recently of the importance of dull discplines such as punctuation and sentence construction, and not only for those of us who live in non-English-speaking countries. (Just a little joke.)

Before sharing with you the example which got me thinking about this, I should re-iterate (why is it that no one ever iterates for the first time?) that - as explained in my message of 23 April - this is not a political site and has no axe to grind in that direction. Oh no. Despite the apparently political nature of the following example, The Referee's interest has nothing to do with the war on terror and everything to do with the proper use of the English language.

The Referee recently stumbled across the following news headline: "Bush: Sept 11 architect to be tried".

Not a particularly remarkable headline in itself, perhaps, but I couldn't help thinking that there is quite a lot one can do with that sentence just in terms of punctuation, even if the seven words are left untouched.

For example, "Bush, Sept 11: architect to be tried", involves only a couple of minor changes - losing a comma and moving a colon - but creates quite a different headline which might have less to do with terrorism than the President's level of satisfaction with structural changes to the West Wing.

There are, of course, some rather more straightforward changes one could make along the same lines, such as "Bush, Sept 11: architect to be tried?", if it wasn't clear whether the President was satisfied with the work or not.

Or, just by adding a couple of hyphons, "Bush, Sept 11: architect-to-be tried" suggests that the root of the problem might have been that the chap in question was not yet fully qualified.

But the most fun one could have with this - and I suspect you might be ahead of me here - would be "Bush, Sept 11 architect, to be tried". In that case, only three small changes - lose the colon and add a couple of commas - are all that's required to set off a wild conspiracy theory.

If a little comma can change the course of recent history, can we afford to ignore it? I think, not.

The State of Things to Come

2006-10-11T22:38:00.000-04:00

Back by popular demand - ie The Referee consulted himself and made a decision in the absence of any dissenting opinion - I am proud to bring you the second in the ground-breaking series, "Things I Learned from Studying My Children's Plastic, Easy-Wipe Place Mats" (see my message of 27 July, or 7/27 as they like to say here).

(You will have noted, I am sure, that the apostrophe in "children's" - ie something belonging to the children - goes before the s, and not after it, as is usually the case with plurals (eg "the boys' waistcoats"). This is, of course, because it is necessary to distinguish between "the boy's waistcoats" - a number of waistcoats belonging to the same boy - and "the boys' waistcoats" - a number of waistcoats belonging to a number of boys. "Children", however, is necessarily a plural, despite the fact that it has no s, and so there is no need to make such a distinction by putting the apostrophe after the s, and so it stays in front. Best to clear that up at the outset, I thought.)

Anyway, a big shout out (whatever that means) to the good people at Painless Learning Placemats - painlesslearning.com - for inspiring this series, the second of which might be sub-titled: "Why is it that some States are more interesting shapes than others"?

I am sure you, like me, will from time to time have spent an idle moment or two staring at a map of the USA and wondering how such different shapes and sizes could possibly have emerged. In particular, I often wonder whether those in the very boring almost-rectangular States are secretly insanely jealous of their neigho(u)rs in the State next door, which is so much more random and, well, wiggly.

Texans, for example, must be intensely proud of the splendid and unfathomable shape of their huge State, particularly the southwestern part which meanders along the Rio Grande and around the corner created by the Gulf of Mexico. And how much more pleased with themselves must Texans be when they look to the north west and see New Mexico - by all accounts a beautiful area - but which is almost entirely rectangular, except for the bit in the south west corner which looks as though the ruler of a small boy drawing a map slipped south a couple of times, and for some reason he didn't have time to erase it and start again, and so New Mexicans will forever have to put up with a funny little step in their south west corner.

And what about Kansas and Nebraska and the Dakotas (North and South)? All periously close to being depressingly rectangular, except for the saving grace of the Missouri River and Minnesota River respectively, which meander along their eastern extremities just enough to make them slightly interesting.

Now, in case you should think I am wittering on incoherently (imagine that!), I should point out that I have, in the interests of research, decided that mere subjective description of the shape of the States is insufficient. And so I have developed a highly scientific and objective method for calculating how interesting or dull the shape of a State is exactly.

Now, you are no doubt thinking, if such a method exists, surely it could be used on other countries and states anywhere in the world? Well, maybe, but let's not run before we can walk.

I have called this measurement the Geographical Interest Index (GII). The GII of a State can be measured by calculating the proportion of its borderline which is defined by rivers, coastlines or is otherwise natural and wiggly-looking, minus that proportion of its borderline which has clearly just been drawn on a map by someone with a pencil and a ruler.

Well, the results are very interesting. What a statistician might call the median State - with a score of precisely 0 - is the lovely State of Oregon up in the Pacific Northwest - which scores 0 because the percentage of interesting borderline is exactly matched by boring straight lines. (I hope you're following this.)

Just to the south, the great State of California scores a surprisingly poor -4, since its lovely coastline is more than matched by the horrible straight lines someone decided to draw inland in order to ensure that neighbo(u)ring Nevada (which scores a shocking -90) goes round a 140 degree corner.

A special mention should be made of Idaho which, despite scoring a rather modest 2, manages an attractive narrowing towards its Canadian border which serves to draw the eye away from the hopelessly square bit at the bottom.

But, without further ado, joint last place goes to Colorado and Wyoming, both of which manage the lowest-possible GII score of -100 - in other words, not one yard of the border is the slightest bit natural or wiggly - all of it is shamelessly drawn by a cartographer with something of a right-brain creativity deficit.

And, finally, congratulations to the marvellous State of Michigan, nestling as it does between the Great Lakes, which scores an unbeatable 76, thanks in large part to being defined by lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron, which are, without exception, commendably wiggly.

So Good They Named It Thrice

2006-09-18T22:03:00.000-04:00

Regular readers, if there were any, might find this difficult to believe, but The Referee was recently told by a colleague that he is a "geography anorak". All I had done to deserve such a compliment was to point out, during a conversation back in Blighty about what a nice day it was, that it was in fact the warmest September day since 1940-something. Which happened to be true.

(Which reminds me, those who are unsure about all this climate change fuss should ask themselves why it is that every weather record you can think of has been beaten within the last five minutes.)

If I have established this reputation, deserved or not, I thought, I may as well dine out on it for a while. And so I offer the following local anorakism which I thought you might enjoy. And even if you don't, I'll enjoy telling it.

You will no doubt be familiar with the old Gerard Kenny song, "New York, New York", in which we learn that my adopted city is named twice because of its inherent qualities, rather than the actual reason, which is of course that New York is the name of both the city and the (roughly) triangular state in which it nestles - in the southernmost corner, to be precise.

You might also know that New York city comprises five boroughs - Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. (A brief aside - is it just me, or does your blood also boil when you see or hear the phrase "comprises of"?. For those who can't see what's wrong with this, please pay attention: the word "comprise" means "consist of". There is already an "of" built in. Please don't feel the need to add another one.)

Anyway, what readers outside of the Big Apple might not know is that the five borough names listed above are in fact only informal nicknames. This is because the five boroughs of NYC are formally counties of NY state, and have official county names to go along with that status.

Now, in a couple of cases, this does not amount to a great deal to write home about - the official name of the Bronx is Bronx County and Queens is formally known as Queens County. But - try to contain your excitement if you can - in the other cases it's not quite that simple. Brooklyn is more properly known as Kings County, and - keep this under your hat for next time you find yourself at a pub quiz - Staten Island is actually called Richmond County.

Which brings me to the bombshell that Manhattan is in fact called - and I expect you're ahead of me here - New York County. Oh yes.

So, when you're next strolling thr(o)u(gh) Greenwich Village, lacing daisies into the hair of your beloved as you dodge the splash of rainwater caused by the trundle of an early morning delivery truck thr(o)u(gh) an overnight puddle, as I often do, don't forget that you're strolling thr(o)u(gh) New York County, which is one of the five boroughs of New York City, which nestles in the southernmost corner of New York State.

So good they named it thrice.

Get Me POTUS On The Line

2006-07-27T20:32:00.000-04:00

Fans of the West Wing (that's everyone, I assume) will remember that the original pilot episode contains a string of difficult and embarrassing situations for Sam, the White House deputy communications adviser (played by Rob Lowe). The most difficult and embarrassing is that he spends the night with a woman whom he discovers only the next day is what he euphemistically describes as a "high-priced call-girl". He makes this discovery because, after their tryst (whatever that means), they each inadvertently leave with the other's pager. During the next day, Sam receives a number of interesting and surprising requests, whilst his new girlfriend receives a number of mysterious messages from "POTUS". She takes this to be a friend with an unusual name, until Sam points out that the messages are from the President of the United States.

As my regular reader(s) will be aware, The Referee sees part of his mission to be painstaking research on aspects of American culture, such that you, dear reader, are able to benefit from my travails without the trouble of having to put in any effort. Now, I would like you to think that this involves me pouring for days over historical tomes in the Smithsonian library, but that is not always the case. In fact, it's never the case.

This occasion is no exception. In this message, I am proud to bring you the summarised highlights of what I have been able to glean from one of my children's plastic, easy-wipe place-mats, entitled "Presidents of the United States of America".

Firstly, although we are currently enjoying/experiencing/enduring (delete as applicable) the tenure of the 43rd POTUS, the current President is in fact only the 42nd person (by which I mean "white bloke") to have held the office. That is because Grover Cleveland (a Democrat and later a '70s soul singer) was President on two separate occasions: 1885-89 and 1893-97, separated by a stint from Benjamin Harrison (Republican).

Coincidentally, Cleveland and Harrison both appear in perhaps the most historically significant sub-category: serving Presidents who sported facial hair. A number of Presidents deserve an honourable mention on this point, but the most salient facts are perhaps the following:

* shamefully, it has been almost a century since we have been blessed with a President who displayed any facial hair whatsoever - well done to William H Taft (R) (1909-1913);

* before Taft, citizens of the USA enjoyed an unprecedented 40 year period in which all Presidents were facially hirsute - back to and including the splendidly-named Ulysses S Grant (R) (1869-77) - with the disappointing exception of the hopelessly clean-shaven William McKinley (R) (1897-1901);

* before Grant, the only incidence of Presidential facial hair was thanks to the one-and-only Abraham Lincoln (R) (1861-65), who was famously the only President ever to sport a beard without a moustache; although an honourable mention should be made of Martin Van Buren (D) (1837-41) who sported flamboyant and unruly sideburns;

* only five Presidents have sported full beard & moustache combinations: Grant, Harrison, Rutherford B Hayes (R) (1877-81), James A Garfield (R) (1881), and Chester A Arthur (R) (1881-85) - although it should be noted that Arthur's was one of those beards that is all edge and no middle, and therefore the purist might prefer to assign him to a separate list all his own;

* only three Presidents have favoured a solo moustache: Cleveland, Taft and Theodore Roosevelt (R) (1901-09).

In case you are looking for some political significance here, and heaven knows why you wouldn't be, it should be noted that, of the nine Presidents to have sported some sort of facial hair (not including Van Buren's sideburns), eight have been Republicans - well done once again to the marvellous Mr Cleveland, the only Democrat of the bunch.

On matters hirsute of a more general nature, there is not a great deal to write home about, except for the admirable James K Polk (D) (1845-49), who favoured what fans of 1980s British football would describe as a "mullet". With some regret I have to report that there has never been a completely bald Leader of the Free World, although the consecutive pairing of Harry S Truman (D) (1945-53) and Dwight D Eisenhower (R) (1953-61) at least made a nod in that direction, so to speak.

The only other President who made any serious effort to lose his hair whilst in office was John Quincy Adams (1825-29), whose father was the second President, John Adams (1797-1801), and who therefore shares with the current President the distinction of keeping it in the family.

On a more serious note, four Presidents died in office of natural causes - William H Harrison (Whig) (1841), Zachary Taylor (Whig) (1849-50), Warren G Harding (R) (1921-23) and Franklin D Roosevelt (D) (1933-45). Harrison (whose designation as "Whig" has nothing to do with his slightly dubious comb-over) has the distinction of being the shortest-serving President ever, at a rather minimalistic one month. That makes 1841 one of only two years ever to see as many as three serving Presidents: Van Buren, Harrison and John Tyler (Whig) (1841-45); the other being 1881 (Hayes, Garfield and Arthur).

The splendid and grandfatherly FDR - forever immortalised by an ugly and permanently-congested dual carriageway running down the east side of Manhattan - shares with Benjamin Harrison and Lyndon B Johnson (D) (1963-69) the distinction of sharing the surname of a former President without having been his son.

Four Presidents were assassinated: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and, of course, John F Kennedy (D) (1961-63), who, like the second Roosevelt, has the distinction of being immortalised in a somewhat inappropriate transportation landmark - in his case, New York's largest and most-infuriatingly congested airport.

Only one President has ever resigned: Richard M Nixon (R) (1969-74), who fell on his sword after testing positive for a banned performance-enhancing steroid.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly of all, only one POTUS shares his name with a former Crystal Palace striker sold to Everton this summer for GBP 8.6M - step forward Andrew Johnson (D) (1865-69).

I don't know about your hopes for November 2008, but personally I'm holding out for Hillary v Condi. At least we wouldn't have to worry about the facial hair.

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Converted A Penalty

2006-07-03T23:37:00.000-04:00

No hope, no harm, just another false alarm.
Last night I felt the semi-finals around me.
No hope, no harm, just another false alarm.
So tell me how long, before the next one?
And tell me how long, before the right one?
This story is old, I know, but it goes on.
And on.

With apologies to Mr S Morrisey, another ignominious loss to Portugal on penalties at the quarter-final stage is not exactly what The Referee had predicted (see my message of 15 June). Nevertheless, that prediction was based on empirical scientific evidence, and you can't say fairer than that. Needless to say, I will be going back to the proverbial drawing-board to check my calculations.

In the meantime, a thought: if we lose to Portugal on penalties in the quarter-finals for a third time, do we get to keep the wooden spoon?

Whilst you're pondering that, I am pleased to report that US interest in the World Cup of Association Football, at least in the NY area, appears not to have been dented in the slightest by Team USA's early exit, which was hastened considerably by the penalty kick awarded to Ghana on the basis that the USA's new promising central defender, Oguchi "Gooch" Onyewu, was apparently guilty of being tall and well-built in the penalty area.

On the contrary, most locals that I speak to about such things appear to have been "rooting", as they like to say here, for other teams as well as their own. I have been pleasantly surprised to note that England has often been the favoured choice of second team (and sometimes first team), particularly since we are "celebrating" independence this week.

In case you are finding that concept difficult to grasp, I can tell you that, over the weekend, not one, not two, but around half a dozen of our American friends and neighbo(u)rs sought me out in order to say variously that they were (i) sorry that England had been eliminated, or (ii) disgruntled with penalty shoot-outs (or should that be "shoots-out"?) in general terms, or (iii) not particularly enamoured with the sort of sportsmanship that involves running halfway across the pitch in order to point out to the referee (rather than The Referee) that an opponent really might appreciate a brief glimpse of the redder of his two cards.

In defence of our Portuguese friends, and in a spirit of fairness, I felt obliged to explain that, in "soccer", it is not generally considered appropriate to stamp on the delicate parts of one's opponents, whilst accepting that in "football" it is considered almost essential.

Having agreed on that balanced approach to things, my American friends have largely been content to return to more important matters, such as following the Mets v Yankees weekend series, or organising the 4 July fireworks.

How long, indeed.

Sporting Math

2006-06-15T23:00:00.000-04:00

Americanisms are so infuriatingly inconsistent, at least in the logic department.

For example, "sports" is so much more logical than "sport", since there are of course more than one of them. On the other hand, "math", in the singular, is a rather poor abbreviation of "mathematics", which is clearly plural, and therefore the Britishism "maths" has it. At least according to the Referee. And he is, after all, the Referee.

To its credit, the US media - if not its people - is making a good effort to become caught up in World Cup fever. Following the opening-match 3-0 humbling of Team USA by the Czech Republic (in which I take no pleasure at all, absolutely none), there has been an outpouring of outrage and disappointment which is all too familiar to those of us who have been England fans at any time in the past 40 years.

The New York Times astutely pointed out this week that that outpouring is the most important thing to have happened to US soccer in a long time. In other words, although the performance was poor, the public angst with which it was greeted can be taken as a sign that Association Football might just be starting to matter here, at least at the national level.

It is often said that, given 20 years or so, the omnipresence of well-organised soccer at youth level here will come to fruition and the US will lead the world. I don't buy this, as they like to say over here. Were people not making the same point 20 years ago?

The lack of US dominance at national level - to which it is accustomed in so many other sports - is not because they are not doing enough to develop young talent (they are probably doing more of that than any other country in the world), but because Association Football has not mattered here. And, because it hasn't mattered, talented kids drift away in their teens to play "football", baseball or basketball instead.

If they start to care here - if the beautiful game becomes "much more important" than life and death, as Bill Shankly put it - the rest of the world will have to watch out.

In the meantime, a word about England. Whilst my fellow countrymen are working themselves into a lather about our boys' rather pedestrian performances to date, they might not have noticed a fascinating and statistically significant pattern, which I share with you now, at no additional charge.

England won their first game 1-0. They won their second game 2-0. Can you see the pattern yet?

Given that there are a maximum of seven games at the finals, I hereby confidently - and scientifically - predict that England will win the World Cup Final 7-0.

You heard it here first.

Too Much Monky Business

2006-05-28T00:17:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you, but the Referee finds that there are, from time to time, things which one feels compelled to do which one nevertheless senses one will regret, but that, despite this, one does, and regrets. This message may be one of those things.

Last week a new film opened here - and everywhere else, I shouldn't be surprised - which seems to be causing disproportionate fuss, not to mention nonsense. I haven't seen this film, nor have I read the book on which it is based. I have no plans to do either. I am therefore in absolutely no position to summarise its plot. So here goes.

A monk - let's call him Brother Sven - is murdered. In the process of investigating this murder, it is discovered that a murky religious society - let's call it the Association Football Association - is preserving an amazing secret. The secret is that Our Lord - let's call him Wayne - didn't meet His end in quite the way described in scripture. In fact, he didn't break his metatarsal at all. Rather, in a mysterious bid to avoid spending the summer in Germany, he faked a broken bone and sneaked off with Coleen to a secret beach location - let's call it Fuengirola. These facts are hidden from the faithful for generations, for fear of sparking chaos and unrest.

Now, some people have got worked up about this story. Some people in the US - including people who know as much about the film and book as I do - have been out on the streets protesting about its blasphemous contents. Other people have gathered together to produce other books and documentary films, now showing on US television, aimed at proving that the book and film in question - both self-declared works of fiction - are nothing more than works of fiction.

The question is: why does anyone feel the need to do this? I don't mean, why does anyone feel the need to disagree with something that they disagree with? I mean, why does any self-respecting person of faith feel the need to put time and energy into earnestly battling with an English bloke in polo neck sweaters who's done quite nicely with a novel, and a balding American chap who used to be in Happy Days and has now made a film of the book? Are these two the sort of folk St Paul had in mind when he exhorted the Ephesians to struggle against the "principalities and powers of this dark world"? I rather think not.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Referee is himself, or at least attempts to be, a person of faith. He is most certainly not a person standing outside, doing something inappropriate into the proverbial tent. He is most assuredly inside the tent, but sometimes bemused about the behaviour of some of his fellow campers.

Think of it this way. Those of us inside the tent consider ourselves to be followers of someone who is - in the final analysis - the Supreme Being. We believe He created us, and everyone else, and the entire universe (although don't get me started on how precisely He might have done it). We believe He is all-knowing and all-powerful (I know there are fancy words for those two, but I can't remember what they are).

Those of you outside the tent may not believe in such a Being, but at least you believe that we do, and that we believe we're following Him, and that will do for the purposes of the next bit of logic.

So, when someone writes a book, fiction or otherwise, or makes a film, which suggests, directly or otherwise, that things might not be quite how we campers believe them to be, do you suppose for one moment that the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe is quaking in his heavenly boots? Do you suppose He (or She, ladies!) is cowering behind a cloud, wishing that that troublesome English bloke in the polo necks would go away and bully some other celestial beings? Do you suppose He is concerned that this little novel might surpass His own debut work as best-selling book in the history of the world? Do you suppose He is desperately hoping that we campers will protect Him from all this slander by painting up some signs and hanging around in front of the local cinema?

I rather think not. I rather think He might instead prefer the approach taken by Oscar Wilde, when he famously said: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about".

Or, in the more recent and perhaps slightly less eloquent words of the President of the United States: "Bring 'em on".

I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy

2006-05-16T23:47:00.000-04:00

Some of you reading this - how I love to pretend my readers are in the plural! - are, like the Referee, both male and English. You know who you are. Anyone fitting this description should turn away at this point. In fact, one might almost say that reader discretion is advised. Except that that wouldn't make any sense.

A riddle. I am cut short if it rains, and I always stop for tea. What am I?

The church fete? No. The annual outing of the Mothers' Union? Wrong again. Cricket. (See, I warned you.)

Cricket is dull. There's no two ways about it. Dull, dull, dull.

My gender and my nationality, when taken together, suggest that I should be first in the queue (or line, as they insist on saying over here) when it comes to drinking warm beer, wearing a floppy sun hat and discussing the finer points of the Duckworth-Lewis method. But somehow, I just don't get it.

(By the way - two cricket fans in the pavilion. One says, "So, do you really understand the Duckworth-Lewis method?" The other replies, "Well I thought I did. But Vanessa got pregnant anyway".)

I realise that this will make me something of a pariah as far as many of my fellow countrymen are concerned. To them, I can only apologise.

To make things even worse, I have for many years harboured a secret regard for baseball. Long before our move over here was even a twinkle in my employer's eye (or something), I could occasionally be found staring at Channel 4 at 2am, trying to follow the mysterious statistics being measured during a passionate clash between the Cardinals and the Astros.

But I wasn't an instant convert. At first, I couldn't work out why I was fascinated by a bunch of fat blokes in baby suits playing rounders. But fascinated I was. Perhaps it was the lightning-fast fielding; perhaps it was the explosive power of the home run; perhaps it was the unfathomable terminology. Yes, I know that cricket has the equivalent of all these things - but it's still very dull.

Last week, for the first time since moving over here, I took my kids (and visiting father) to the legendary Yankee stadium. New York Yankees v Oakland Athletics. A tight and fascinating game, which the Yankees won 2-0, thanks to home runs from Rodriguez and Williams, and some brilliant pitching by Wang. The atmosphere was astonishing - particularly in the 5th inning when Johnny Damon came up to bat with the bases loaded - despite a damp evening and a relatively thin crowd of 47,000.

This - and the fact that baseball is known here as the "national pastime" - got me thinking. Sitting in the crowd, I came to the conclusion that cricket - despite all the similarities - is the wrong comparator. The place that baseball holds in American hearts makes it much closer to football (Asocceration football, that is), seen from a European point of view.

I have long had a theory that everything a visitor needs to know about Blighty can be picked up by sitting in the crowd at a football match. Foul-mouthed blokes with tattoos; women and children left indoors; cold, damp weather; dry, self-deprecating humour; suspicion of outsiders; cold meat pies. I rest my case. (Now, don't get me wrong - I love the homeland dearly. But, if you think any of the football staples mentioned here doesn't have a resonance with wider British society, you'll have to tell me which it is.)

Perhaps the same was true of baseball. Was it possible, I wondered, to get to the essence of America by sitting in the Yankee stadium? Well, it's early days in the development of this new theory, but the initial results are encouraging. Communal singing of the Stars and Stripes; prayer for the troops; communal singing of God Bless America; top-notch hot dogs; giant, flashing signs; three strikes and you're out.

You know it makes sense.

Reader Discretion Advised

2006-05-10T22:10:00.000-04:00

It's very difficult to watch American TV.

No, hang on a minute. There's supposed to be a bit more to that sentence.

It's very difficult to watch American TV for long, these days, I find, without coming across the phrase "Viewer discretion advised". Very often, when the upcoming program(me) is going to be a bit racy, and just as often when it's not going to be racy in the slightest, TV stations over here are apparently obliged to announce, or display, or both, the mangled and dehydrated phrase "Viewer discretion advised". Just add water to get a sentence in English.

Now, I don't want to blind you with grammar, so to speak, but pause for a moment, if you will, and see if you can work out what that sentence actually means. I don't mean whether you get the gist of it. The gist is simple enough: "You are about to watch something with racy bits (except that you're probably not). There, you have been warned. If the racy bits upset you, please don't ask your lawyer to write a letter of complaint to our lawyer. If you do, our lawyer will write back to your lawyer pointing out that the offending program(me) was preceded by the magic words "viewer discretion advised". No, we don't know what it means either, but there it is."

In trying to get to the bottom of what these magic words actually mean - on your behalf, dear reader - I have consulted not one but two dictionaries: the Oxford English Dictionary (on the assumption - perhaps slightly hasty - that the base language we are dealing with is English) and the Webster's New World Dictionary (to ensure that I didn't miss any local subtleties or Americanisms).

The good news is that, on this occasion at least, we are indeed divided by a common language, in the sense that both dictionaries led me to the same conclusion, which is as follows. The word "discretion" is a noun which relates to the adjectives "discreet" (careful, prudent) and "discrete" (separate, autonomous). In the former sense, it is commonly used to mean judgement. The "viewer" is the object of the sentence - ie the person who may nor may not be about to watch something racy. And "advised" is the closest this phrase comes to a verb.

If you buy this, as they like to say over here, then the magic words must have one or more of the following meanings:

1. You are about to watch something a bit racy. We therefore suggest that you don't mention this program(me) to anyone else, unless it's strictly necessary.

2. You are about to watch something a bit racy. We therefore suggest that you don't sit near to any other viewers.

3. You are about to watch something a bit racy. Unless you decide not to watch it.

So there we are. I'm glad to have been able to clear that up.

The Referee, at your service.

Poop Government

2006-04-23T23:41:00.000-04:00

Let me be absolutely clear about something: this is not a political site. It does not do politics. You may have imagined the odd pseudo-political comment buried in one or two of the messages here. But that was just your imagination. Perhaps you are the sort of person who imagines things. I don't know.

Having got that of his chest, the Referee is free to share the following message without fear of being misinterpreted.

I find that New Yorkers know quite a lot of things about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as I like to refer to it, or the UK of Blighty, as it is more formally known. One of the things they know is that it rains a lot over there, and in any case a lot more than it rains here.

This turns out not to be true. In fact, delving into the language of the great Eric Olthwaite only very briefly, if I may, the average annual rainfall in NYC, at 1,124mm, is almost twice that in London (611mm). But, as residents of the UK know only too well, those millimeters are spread nicely through the year - about 2 every day - with a couple of days off in the middle of the year, which we Brits like to call "the summer". In New York, however, most of the annual millimeters fall on the same weekend.

We just had that weekend. It rained heavily and constantly for two days and nights. Everything was cancelled, even Asocceration Football. (Americans do not appreciate - yet - that part of the joy of the "beautiful game" is standing under a corrugated iron roof eating a cold meat pie in the pouring rain while blokes in long shorts slide around in pools of mud.)

As a result, we had nothing to do. My two sons decided to spend Saturday afternoon watching what they now insist on calling a "movie".

Now, at this point, some of you - as though the readership of this site could properly be described in the plural - will be bemoaning my lack of parenting skills. You will be saying to yourselves something along the lines of "Well, when my children were young, they were never allowed to watch TV on a Saturday afternoon. Oh no. In my day, when it rained at the weekend, we amused ourselves with parlour games or teaching the children to speak Cantonese". To those people, I can only apologise. In our house, if there's nothing to do and the kids want to watch a film, they watch a film. Sorry.

Anyway, as my two sons were settling down in front of the TV, I overheard an animated debate about the certificate which the film had been given - apparently displayed on the screen as "PG". They were discussing whether this meant that they would be allowed to watch it in the cinema or not.

In a spirit of helpfulness, and because I thought it might assist in keeping the noise down a bit, I asked whether they knew what the initials "PG" stood for. As quick as a flash, and with a confident grin, my younger son - 7 years old - announced: "Poop government".

I have no idea what he meant by this. Being a 7 year old boy, of course, he would not discuss it any further. But his confident air in announcing this phrase made me think I must be missing something.

So, being a 21st century kind of chap, I Googled it. Not just "poop" and "government", but the precise phrase "poop government". Nothing. Not an episode of Spongebob. Not a new kind of Pop Tart.

Of course, if you were to Google it now, you would get something. You would get me going on about the fact that, when you Google it, you don't get anything. Google is funny like that.

And so my new favo(u)rite phrase remains a mystery. As they like to say over here, "Go figure".

An Ode to Upstate New York

2006-04-13T22:22:00.000-04:00

I really wanna wander
Through the streets of Tonawanda.

A Tisket, a Tasket, a Green and Yellow Basket

2006-03-31T23:57:00.000-05:00

For the sake of clarity, I want to start by saying that I am, in general terms, an enthusiast when it comes to sport, or sports, as they like to say here. Given that there are indeed more than one of them, I suppose the plural has it. Or has them, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, for the last couple of weeks much of this fair land has been gripped by the final stages of the NCAA men's basketball competition. My in-depth investigation - on your behalf, you understand - suggests that that stands for National Collegiate Athletics Association. That's right - the newspapers and airwaves have been whipped into a frenzy about - wait for it - college basketball.

In a recent chat about sport(s) - (what else is there for men of a certain age to talk about?) - one of our neighbo(u)rs asked me about the state of the college scene in the UK. How was college basketball, for instance? I pointed out that, whilst there may well be some college students playing basketball (and all sorts of other things) in the UK, it got no media coverage at all, because no one was interested.

He looked at me as though I had said something quite inappropriate about his mother. Which I had not. I don't even know the woman. So let's just leave it there, shall we?

Anyway, in case you think I am unjustly persecuting keen young students who are lucky enough to have their PE lessons televised, there is more to it than that.

Because, you see, CBS has been so accommodating of these important sporting events that it has actually - whisper it - moved "The Late Show with David Letterman" back in the schedules. Which is almost like saying something inappropriate about MY mother. For those of us who have reached the prime of life (see my message of 18 March), staying up 'til 11:30pm is bad enough; but 12:30am is out of the question. And so I have been temporarily deprived of my favo(u)rite program(me).

Now, you should know that the David Letterman show is very funny. I make this rather basic point only because my wife does not see it quite the same way. She thinks he is a lecherous old millionaire who reads out other people's mediocre one-liners. Maybe so, goes my retort, but he's still very funny. (You will infer from this that I am a first-rate debater.)

The show is so funny partly because it's always the same: Dave does topical monologue; Daves indulges in comedy banter with Paul Shaffer (his musical director); Dave gets the audience to do something stupid and/or reads out a comedy Top Ten list of something topical; Guest #1 (doesn't get much of a word in); Guest #2 (ditto); band (usually loud). End. Bingo. I don't mean that Dave actually....oh, never mind.

Now, in order to give the impression that we are living a showbiz lifestyle over here, I should mention that we were recently at a party and in the middle of the evening I realised that I was standing next to the one and only Mr Paul Shaffer. I thought briefly about having a chat and then decided against it.

On the way home, I pointed this out to my wife, who hadn't spotted him. "You should have introduced us", she said, "I would have told him that his show isn't very funny".

It's enough to drive one out into the yard to shoot some hoops. Whatever that means.

Big Bang and Fries, Please

2006-03-18T23:04:00.000-05:00

The Referee has recently experienced what might euphemistically be called a "significant" birthday.

In the context of birthdays, "significant" usually means (i) that the second digit is zero, and/or (ii) that the first digit is quite large. In my case, both of these apply.

Now, I don't know about you, but in my experience of birthdays where the second digit is a 0, the first digit tends to be a 3 or, on one occasion I can still remember, even a 2. So when it is a larger number than either of these, one is entitled to be a little surprised, not to mention concerned.

But, as I was on the verge of becoming anxious about this situation, the good old New York Times came to the rescue.

This week, the Times reports that astronomers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have come a step closer to proving what happened in the first trillionth of a second after time began.

As these experts estimate that the universe has been around for something in the region of 13.7 billion years, one could be forgiven for thinking that the odd second, let alone a trillionth of a second, was neither here nor there. Apparently not so.

The news is that there is fresh evidence to support the theory of "inflation" - ie, in the lovely words of the Times, that, in the first trillionth of a second following the Big Bang, the universe grew "from submicroscopic to astronomical size in the blink of an eye".

The journalist rather understates his case by comparing this to "the kind of growth spurt that would alarm any mom or dad". I should say so. You would hardly have time to take your receipts back to Mothercare before junior's waistline had to be measured in light years.

Now, I don't pretend to understand the science of how they work these things out, but apparently it involves mapping microwaves (the waves, not the ovens) in order to build a picture of what our 13.7 billion-year-old universe looked like after a mere 380,000 years, which provides clues as to what was going on even earlier than that.

One of the conclusions of this technique is that the first stars probably didn't start shining until 400 million years after the Big Bang. This is apparently something of a relief to many astronomers, who had been concerned that the previous estimate of 200 million years was "surprisingly early".

Enough to make you feel young, isn't it?

Who Will Rid Me of this Turbulent Mouse?

2006-03-05T19:21:00.000-05:00

In case you don't do so already, I strongly recommend keeping an up-to-date mental list of things and places to avoid.

I have found this to be a very useful technique because, without such a list immediately to hand, or mind, one can easily be swept by circumstances into a situation in which one realises too late why it was that the thing in question was on the list which one has failed to keep to hand, or mind. I hope that's clear so far.

By way of illustration, the top three things on my list, in no particular order, are currently:

(i) hospitals, or any other facility in which medical things are likely to happen;
(ii) nightclubs, or other similar venues in which I am likely to feel insufficiently young and/or trendy (increasingly both);
(iii) theme parks, and any similar attractions at which having "fun" is mandatory.

Well, with the exception of a brief accidental appearance at a trendy downtown Manhattan nightclub - which didn't really count because I left at 9:30, having remembered why I hate nightclubs so much - I had done pretty well at avoiding those places on my list whilst in the US. Until last week.

Last week, I finally caved in to pressure from the rest of the family that we couldn't reasonably live in the US for any period without trying the quintessential American holiday/vacation experience - ie spending a few days at Walt Disney World in Florida. I gave in strictly on the basis, you understand, that this was a one-off experience and it would be best to get it over with (like having your wisdom teeth taken out or getting a vasectomy - see (i) above).

Well, I learned a lot last week, including about my tolerance to take-away pizza. But a more interesting thing I learned is that WDW covers roughly the same area as Rhode Island. That's right - the property owned by WD in Florida is as large as the smallest of the USA's fifty states.

I also discovered that most of the attractions at WDW are constructed from one of two key Disney components - plastic and cheese. Occasionally these two elements occur together, although usually only in the fast-food outlets.

To be fair, most of the attractions are well presented and we found something enjoyable in most of the several theme parks. Having said that, I wouldn't recommend the "Magic Blingdom" - I don't know about you, but watching people drive around in BMWs showing off their jewellery is not my idea of a good day out.

But, being serious for a moment, if I may - consider this. WDW is the largest theme park in the world. It is located in the sunniest and most visited state of the richest country in the world. Each year it welcomes hundreds of thousands of well-heeled visitors, most of whom are Americans, but who also come from every corner of the world. Relatively few of them are people from the north of England wearing football shirts.

This being the case, WDW is in an enormously powerful position in terms of advertising and endorsements. Whoever Disney decides to get in to bed with, so to speak, is going to do very nicely. From my recent highly scientific survey, I can tell you that the two leading organisations benefitting from a conspicuous on-site presence at WDW are Coca-Cola and McDonald's. This is hardly a surprise, particularly to anyone who has tried to eat the food, but it shows a distinct lack of imagination.

Supposing someone high up at Disney decided to do something creative and daring. Supposing they decided, for example, to endorse fairly-traded coffee. Supposing WDW decreed that only fairly-traded coffee was going to be sold across its enormous estate of hotels and theme parks, and supposing it advertised to its hundreds of thousands of visitors what is was doing and why. I can't begin to put any numbers on it, but it's safe to say that the impact on the economic fortunes of independent farmers in South and Central America would be significant.

Is anything along these lines likely to happen soon? Not a mouse in hell's chance.

Do You Want Ice With That?

2006-02-28T21:58:00.000-05:00

And so we have seen off another Winter Olympics, or "nationalism on ice" as the New York Times put it last week.

Of course, it's all about the taking part, not the winning. But those of us who are a little partial to winning now and again can't help noticing that Team GB (which should obviously be Team UK, but let's leave that for another time) ended with a single (silver) medal in the women's Skeleton. I don't want for a minute to diss (as young folks say these days) the brilliant achievement of Shelley Rudman, but the fact of the matter is that the British sporting history books will remember her medal principally for its lack of company.

In case you hadn't spotted this already, one silver medal put us in joint 21st place in the medal table, alongside Belarus, Bulgaria and Slovakia. Despite that, the post-Games quote from the head of the British Olympic team, as reported by the BBC, was: "Overall, we are delighted. But we need to scratch below the surface of the medals table. There is no place for complacency". How precisely, I wonder, does one scratch below the surface of a solitary medal?

In stark contrast, the US team performance - 2nd place overall with 25 medals in total, 9 of them gold - has received a mixed reception here. The American approach is to expect to win and not to settle for anything else.

OK, it's not exactly a level playing field to compare Team GB/UK with Team USA. But is there any reason why we shouldn't compare ourselves with near neighbours of a similar size, such as France and the Netherlands? They finished in joint tenth with 9 medals each, 3 of which were gold.

In discussing this with my kids at the weekend, they wanted to know what the Skeleton was exactly. Once I had fed them with the idea of sliding down the bobsleigh track on something like a tea tray, they suggested that it might be more interesting if the competitors actually had to make tea at the top of the course (see my message of 18 February), and then scored points for the amount of tea that remained un-spilled on arrival at the bottom. There, I thought, was an event where the UK could hit gold.

That led me to wondering whether our chances could be improved by other tweaks to the make-up of the events. For example, the Biathlon (cross-country skiing and shooting) might be problematic, but what about the Unathlon, in which we could do just one event that we were good at, such as curling? On second thoughts, that would just be curling, wouldn't it?

Better still, then, how about Unathlon Freestyle, in which each country could choose a different event and compete against the others doing what it was best at? OK, the scoring would be rather tricky. But we could send David Beckham to represent Team UK in the ancient winter discipline of taking free kicks from just outside the penalty area. On ice, of course.

The Only Teapot in North America

2006-02-18T21:19:00.000-05:00

To misquote entirely the great Daffyd Thomas: "Mine is the only teapot in the village". In fact, it may be worse than that. It may be that mine is the only teapot in North America.

In the six months I have now lived in the US, I have seen only one teapot, and it's the one that sailed across the Atlantic with the rest of our belongings a few weeks before we arrived.

Now, you might think that it doesn't really matter how many teapots there are in North America. You might think that it's perfectly acceptable for the world's only superpower to be populated by non-tea drinkers, or at best people who think making tea involves dangling a tiny bag of Lipton's Yellow Label on the end of a string in the vicinity of a cup of hot water. Shame on you.

Consider this. The very existence of this country as an independent entity, the very gathering together of the collection of states which remains by far the most influential nation on the planet, was of course instigated by an argument with the British - about tea. Every American school child learns the story, and knows how it sparked a chain of events which led to the War of Independence. Why, then, do none of them have any idea how to make tea, or how to drink it?

Lest you think I'm exaggerating, a couple of examples from my highly scientific survery conducted over the past six months.

Whenever one asks for "tea" or, heaven forbid, "a cup of tea" from someone in the beverage service industry here, I can guarantee you that there will only be one of two reactions. The first is "Huh?", in which case one repeats the question until one arrives at the second possible reaction, which is "Hot tea"?

Now, I can't tell you how many times I've longed to say: "No, I'd like you to make it with stone-cold water, please, because I'm going to warm it up later by straining it numerous times through my rancid socks".

Needless to say, I don't say that. I say something more along the lines of "Yes, hot tea, please".

OK, I know there is such a thing as iced tea. But that's not the same thing as "'tea", is it? If I wanted iced tea, which I sometimes do, I'd ask for it by name.

Example number two requires me to brief against myself, as political types say. My wife claims to have spotted a second teapot in North America. But, in mitigation, I would point out that (i) I didn't see it myself, so it might not be true, & (ii) it was apparently a small Chinese type of pot, therefore not really the same thing.

Anyway, the mother of one of the classmates of one of my children invited my wife round for "tea". She had clearly gone out of her way to think about the invitation, including by dredging her kitchen cupboards for a "teapot" which had probably not seen active service for a very long time, if ever. This was an effort at reaching out to her new European neighbo(u)r in a spirit of cultural relevance, and all credit to her for that.

Anyway, having boiled the stove-top kettle - (the electric kettle hasn't made it into the New World either - don't get me started on that) - she proceeded to mix hot water and tea bags (with strings) together in the pot, along with - this is true - milk and sugar. After stirring all four ingredients for some time, she emerged from the kitchen and sheepishly asked my wife whether this was how it was done.

Independence, anyone?

Take Me Back to the Black Hills

2006-01-29T21:09:00.000-05:00

Even if you, like me, have never been to South Dakota, an image will immediately spring to mind when I mention Mount Rushmore (which I just did) (look, left a bit).

We are all familiar with the image of the giant heads of the four former Presidents carved into the side of the mountain, otherwise known as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. You might also be able to guess that two of the Presidents represented are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, although the other two are likely to prove more tricky, so I'll give you a hand - Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

Just a little joke - a first, I accept, for this site - Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

What you might not know, however, is that just 17 miles southwest of Mount Rushmore is another mountain-carving project so huge and ambitious that it will make the National Monument look like four blokes at a bus stop.

The Crazy Horse Memorial, depicting the revered Native American leader on his horse, will, when completed, be a massive 563 feet high (almost twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, including the pedestal) and 641 feet long. This will make it by far the largest sculpture or work of art on earth, a crown currently claimed by Mount Rushmore, where the heads of the four Presidents are each 60 feet high. Although Crazy Horse's head is 87 feet high, nothing beyond his head is finished, and that's where the story starts to get interesting.

Back in 1939, Korczak Ziolkowski, a Boston-born sculptor of Polish descent, who had been working as an assistant to Gutzon Borglum, the creator of Mount Rushmore, was invited to work on Crazy Horse. He evenutally began work at the site in 1948 and worked on it constantly for the next 35 years, always refusing to take a salary, until his death in 1982 at the age of 74. During that period, he also found time to get married and raise 10 children.

On Ziolowski's death, his family continued to work on the project. Crazy Horse's completed head was finally unveiled in 1998, at a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the project. Progress has been painfully slow and often dangerous, but the protagonists insist that they will continue working as quickly as funds and conditions will allow, until the memorial is finished. They decline to put a date on when that might be. For those familiar with the principles of project management, this is not so much a critical path as a yellow brick road.

I strongly recommend the official memorial website - www.crazyhorse.org - which has to be seen to be believed. Have a look at "The Story of Crazy Horse Memorial" to see recent progress and a painting of the vision for the finished article.

The penultimate word should go to Henry Standing Bear who said, in explaining the vision for the memorial in 1939, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too".

Which leaves just one question: have they remembered to leave room for Neil Young?

The Tentacles of Doom

2006-01-12T22:48:00.000-05:00

Have you noticed how many organisations there are with the name "[blank] Solutions"? Not "Blank Solutions", but "[---] Solutions". I think you know what I mean.

In which case, have you ever wondered whether there are enough problems to go round? Don't get me wrong, I know there are a lot of problems in the world, but I was starting to worry that they were in danger of being outnumbered by the exponential growth in the number of experts and consultants who could sort them out for us.

Until I arrived in America, that is. Over here, they know a thing or two about how to keep the problem plates spinning.

For example, how did we ever survive with "Urine Gone" (urinegone.com)? Currently heavily advertised on TV here, this essential new invention is billed as a "stain and odor eliminator - for pet or people accidents". Now there's a pleasant thought. "But" I hear you ask, albeit rhetorically, "how will I be able to find all that stray urine sloshing around my house"? A good question. But never fear, the good people at Urine Gone are ahead of you. Because, included in the very reasonable price of $19.99 (not including shipping & handling), is a "stain detector black light". So, rather like a detective taking fingerprints, you can turn out the light in the soiled room and use your black light to track down the offending puddle. Then, when the puddle least suspects it, you pull the trigger on your ergonomic-grip bottle of UG and the urine is completely, well, gone.

If that example is a little grubby and domestic for your tastes, which would be understandable, perhaps the product for you is the Roll Up Piano (inventionchannel.com). This, believe it or not, is a 37 key electric piano, with built-in speaker, which can be rolled up and carried under your arm, so you can "play piano anywhere!". The website warns sternly that "other roll up pianos can sell for as much as $250". Which other roll up pianos? I think it's safe to assume that this market is not exactly overcrowded.

But my current favourite solution to a non-existent problem is the astounding Doggy Steps (doggysteps.com). "Does your pet have difficulty climbing up to his favorite spot? The solution is Doggy Steps. Doggy Steps gives your pet freedom from the floor - and more companionship than ever before!"

Now, I don't for a minute want to be considered callous, or indifferent to the problems faced by the smaller or overweight canine. But, without returning in any detail to my favo(u)rite topic of the moment (see my messages of 25 November and 26 December), I like to think that, when God invented the evolution of species, He knew what He was doing. So, for example, giraffes are not 20 feet tall so we can gawp at them in the zoo, but because they happen to live in a place where the only vegetation worth eating is 20 feet off the ground. Extending the same rather basic principle, if little, fat dogs needed access to lofty locations, they wouldn't be little and fat, would they?

Problem solved.

Another Annus Horribilis

2006-01-02T22:33:00.000-05:00

At this time of year, nothing fills one with dread like the arrival of a round-robin family newsletter. (If this statement doesn't apply to you, look away now.)

The various evils of these cheese-laden reviews of the family year are well documented and I don't intend to dwell on them all. But, just so we're on the same page, as they like to say here, I suggest that the two leading evils of round-robins are that they are (i) pointless; & (ii) designed to leave the reader feeling inferior.

They are pointless because the information they offer is either (a) important (births, deaths, new jobs, etc), in which case family and friends already know it, or (b) inconsequential (eg Veronica's grade 3 nose-flute exam), in which case they don't want to know it. Authors of round robins who are still with us please note - your family and friends love you very much, but this does not necessarily mean that they feel the need to know all the details of little Derek's post-modern reinterpretation of Bottom in St Kevin's end-of-term A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sorry.

But perhaps the greater evil of these upbeat summaries of blissful family life and "quality time" is their ability to leave the average reader feeling that his or her disfunctional and/or frustrated existence is somehow inadequate, rather than simply normal. And so, in an effort to redress this balance as we start a new year, The Referee would like to offer you an honest but heavily-edited review of his key failings and ongoing inadequacies during 2005:

1. For the second consecutive year (as far as I can remember), 2005 saw at least one day in which I bought the same newspaper twice on the same day, having forgotten I had bought it the first time.

2. My son's football team (see my message of 21 November) lost every game last season, with the exception of a 1-1 draw, thus ending the season with a solitary point.

3. For the ninth consecutive year, 2005 saw very few days on which I didn't lose patience with my children, and thus get into trouble with my wife, who is a much more patient and composed parent than I am.

4. Last year was also the third, or possibly fourth, year in which I have failed to meet one of my nieces for the first time. This is probably unforgivable. I used to live 300 miles from her and now live 3,000 miles away, so the situation is hardly improving.

5. Last year was yet another in a long line in which the large majority of birthday cards sent by me included the word "belated" and sent wishes in the past tense.

6. In the autumn/fall of 2005, on the way home from a work weekend away, I got lost trying to navigate to my own house, thus delaying a bus full of colleagues, most of whom consequently arrived at their own homes after 1am. This is true. As are all the others. And these are just the edited lowlights.

I hope you feel better now. I know I do.

Happy New Year's. (New Year's what?)

Son of Monkey Glue

2005-12-26T20:58:00.000-05:00

You should know that, albeit early in the life of this august organ, The Referee is beginning to have an influence in the upper echelons of US society, including none other than the Supreme Court. (You should also know that The Referee occasionally likes to refer to himself in the third person, like boxers and dictators.)

Anyway, returning to the first person, for fear of being tedious (heaven forbid!), I explained in my message of 25 November why I think the age-old argument between evolutionists and creationists is a huge waste of effort based on a false premise - ie that mainstream scientific and religious views on the origin of things are necessarily contradictory.

Well, it is now clear, on the balance of probabilities, although not necessarily beyond reasonable doubt, that that message was taken to heart by one Judge John Jones III (a Republican, by the way, appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bush). Just before the start of the "holiday vacation", Judge Jones delivered his ruling in the leading case of Kitzmiller et al v Dover. (Tammy Kitzmiller is one of the parents who challenged the local school board on the basis that teaching "intelligent design" was unconstitutional, in the sense of muddling Church and State; and Dover is the small town in Philadelphia where the (Republican) school board attempted to introduce intelligent design into science classes and was subsequently ousted at the recent local elections in favour of an entirely new (Democratic) school board (in a traditionally Republican-voting area) which swifty reversed the policy.)

If you will permit me (and even if you won't) I think that a section of Judge Jones' ruling bears setting out verbatim here. He says this: "Both defendants and many of the leading proponents of I.D. make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator."

I'm sure you will agree that there is little doubt that that passage was written in the light of The Referee's message of 25 November (or 11/25 as it is known here).

Just think of the potential benefits which could be unleashed if creationists and evolutionists would stop fighting a battle which doesn't need to be fought. For a start, those of us with a religious bent would save a huge amount of time and effort which could be put to much better use. Helping the poor and needy, for example. Just a thought!

Happy holidays.

'Twas the Night Before a Holiday

2005-12-14T21:03:00.000-05:00

How can you spot a conservative (small "c")? He (or she, these days) is the person who can't utter the phrase "political correctness" without immediately following up with the words "gone mad", in a sort of involuntary Pavlovian response. (Which reminds me, when Pavlov invented the pavlova, what was that a response to?)

Anyway, if, like me, you like to think of yourself as a modern, progressive, lover of all things PC, try living in the US in the build-up to what used to be called Christmas, and you will soon be cured of all your ills. In other words, why oh why, if we mean "Christmas" can't we say "Christmas"? And if we mean "Hannukah", why can't we say "Hannukah"? And if we mean "Eid", ...you get the picture.

Not here. Oh no. Over here, the done thing - for good honest PC reasons, you understand - is to get half way through a sentence and then forget which festival you were talking about. Then, in order to cover up your momentary lapse (as Pink Floyd might have had it), you say "holiday", in the hope that (i) no one will have noticed your stumble, and (ii) no one will have been offended, except of course for the people who wanted to follow what you were saying.

Of course, as soon as this sort of rot has set in, it becomes the norm which is followed forever after, in decreasing circles of illogic, by shopkeepers, signwriters and the designers of greetings cards. As a result, our lovely New York home is now decorated with "holiday lights" and "holiday cards", which we put up shortly after having returned from a session singing "holiday carols".

If you think I'm exaggerating, read on. Exhibit one. One of our kids has just received a letter from his art teacher about what the class will be doing next term. It starts - I'm not making this up - "After our holiday vacation...". Work that one out.

Exhibit two. Starbucks has just introduced two seasonal coffees, one called "Christmas blend" and the other called - wait for it - "Holiday blend". They do at least have the excuse of not being able to call them both the same thing, but what's wrong with, for example, "yuletide" - a lovely little word, now rather under-used, with the distinct advantage of being clearly linked to the topic at hand.

Exhibit three. Our guest wing (okay, room) is decorated with a sweet little picture of a reindeer, skipping through the snowflakes, with holly berries in his antlers, under the words "happy holidays". I wonder which holiday the little chap has in mind? Perhaps it's Easter.

Season's greetings!

Turkey Pardoning Time

2005-12-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

Fellow fans of the wonderful West Wing (that's what www stands for, right?) may remember a very funny scene in an early episode in which President Martin Sheen "pardons" a turkey from making a Thanksgiving sacrifice in a little ceremony at the White House. How we laughed at the silly and inventive script-writing! How on earth did they think that one up?, we wondered.

Well. Imagine the surprise in our house when preparations for our first Thanksgiving last week were interrupted by the news that turkey pardoning is not a script-writer's wheeze, but an actual tradition of actual Presidents.

In fact, on Tuesday 22 November - two days before Thanksgiving - President Bush and Vice President Cheney held a ceremony on a stage in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. They were joined by a gaggle of journalists, a class of visiting schoolchildren, and the chairman of the National Turkey Federation. In that esteemed company, the President pardoned a turkey named Marshmallow. How precisely he did so was not clear, although one imagines that the moment was mysterious and rather spiritual. An understudy turkey, named Yam, waiting in a van outside, was also pardoned, demonstrating that the President has long-distance pardoning powers.

However, as is so often the case regarding serious political matters such as this, controversy was not far behind. Pardoned turkeys have traditionally been sent off to somewhere called Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Virginia, where they have apparently tended not to last all that long, vis a vis this mortal coil. This year, the President announced that Marshallow and Yam did not fancy moving to Frying Pan Park; this was understandable, perhaps, but how he had established it was not entirely clear.

As an alternative, the two turkeys were sent - first class on United Airlines - to spend the rest of their days at Disneyland in California, where they took the roles of grand marshals in the Thanksgiving Day parade, before being moved to their new permanent home: an enclosure in Frontierland, near the entrance to Santa's Reindeer Roundup.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) said that previously pardoned turkeys had been badly treated at Frying Pan Park, where they looked "lonely and neglected", and sought to take some credit for the move to Disneyland. The National Turkey Federation were keen to point out that PETA had had no influence on the switch and suggested that if members of PETA believed otherwise they were "absolutely delusionsal". Oh, politics!

Pass the Monkey Glue

2005-11-25T01:57:00.000-05:00

Certain towns in parts of the USA are currently gripped in fervent (and sometimes litigious) debate over a fascinating late entrant into the old creation versus evolution argument, namely "intelligent design". Having apparently sprung out of nowhere, without so much as a big bang, so to speak, this is a movement which claims there is a radical, alternative middle way.

For those who have not heard the case put by intelligent designers, it goes something like this: The natural world is so amazing and complicated that it cannot all have come about by chance (even over a very long time) and in any case some of the things out there suggest evidence of having been designed by an intelligent force. Proponents of this approach claim that it is based on scientific evidence. Many mainstream scientists argue that this new theory is based more on religious conviction than serious science.

School districts here have got themselves into a lather about whether to teach this theory alongside evolution. Some that have attempted to do so have been sued by groups of disgruntled parents.

It looks like this debate will continue to run and run - it has after all been bubbling along on and off since the famous "monkey trial" of John Scopes, a Tennessee biology teacher, in 1925.

Another approach to all this - not so often aired in public because it invloves less arguing and litigation - is that there is no need to plug the gaping dichotomy between religious and scientific thought because the two are not necessarily in contradiction. In this approach, we allow theology to tackle the "why" questions, to which it is best suited ("Why are we here?", "Why should I be anything other than selfish?"), and we allow science to deal with the "how" questions, to which it is best suited ("How did we get here?", "How do things work?").

To put it another way, there is a good reason why scientists and theologians tend to produce different answers - it's because they are asking different questions.

When in doubt on such matters of deep philosophical significance, I find one can do a lot worse than turning to Ohio's post-punk flowerpot warriors, Devo. To quote their seminal "Are we not men? We are Devo!": "God made man, but a monkey supplied the glue". Amen.

Anyone for Association Football?

2005-11-21T01:12:00.000-05:00

When Paul Gascoigne once appeared in court and was introduced by his defence lawyer as a professional football player, the judge famously asked if this was a reference to Association Football. It was. This story often springs to mind here in the USA every time I have to remember to call the beautiful game "soccer" in order to be understood.

But there's more to it than nomenclature. There is something different about US soccer which it's not easy to put one's finger on.

Let me give you an example. My eldest son is very much enjoying playing in the village U-10 C team, otherwise known as the Raptors. I have been spending many a happy weekend hour freezing on the touchline whilst the Raptors get hammered by a variety of local teams, with names like the Eagles, the Raiders and the Gladiators. Needless to say, in such circumstances, one has to find a way to keep spirits up, and self-deprecating terraces humour usually does the job. At least to my British way of thinking.

So, away recently to the marvellously-named Armonk Fire (their debut album is first rate, by the way), at 5-0 down and with only two minutes to go, I shouted earnestly from the touchline, "Come on boys, we only need six!". (Okay, not perhaps the most original terrace heckle of all time, but not a bad effort.) Nothing. Not even so much as a courtesy chuckle from the gaggle of freezing parents all around me. Don't be seduced by the old fallacies about the American sense of humour or their grasp of irony - this is the country which gave us The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live and, er, Different Strokes.

On another occasion, we were hanging on (temporarily) to 0-0 against a team I shall not mention, for a reason which is about to become obvious. My boy broke away in the area, with only one defender to beat, and it appeared that his first goal for the team was a formality. Unfortunately the last defender was a huge kid, at least twice the size of anyone else on the field, in all dimensions. Ignoring the ball completely, he flattened my son, using only the forceful application of his huge belly. Once the magic sponge had been applied, and we had established that there were no serious injuries, my natural reaction was to lead the home parents in a stirring chorus of "Who ate all the pies?". But, looking around at the earnest faces, still concerned about my son's welfare, I decided that perhaps they might not know the tune.

More Yeast, Vicar?

2005-11-19T03:15:00.000-05:00

Most of us can remember being told, in Sunday school or RE lessons, something along the lines that "the Bible isn't a single book; it's 66 different books, including history books, poetry books, and books of moral instruction". Very rarely did that list include "cookery books". Nevertheless, the good people at Food for Life Baking Co Inc of Corona, California have not let themselves be restricted by such narrow hermeneutics. In the noble tradition of literal biblical interpretation, they are proud to supply "Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Grain Bread" to a health food shop near you. The orange wrapper explains that, in chapter 4 and verse 9, Ezekiel instructs us to "Take also unto thee wheat and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it...". And that is precisely what they have done. The result is a product which the wrapper proudly declares reveals the "miracle of the sprouts", which apparently means that "this unique bread is made from freshly sprouted live grains and contains absolutely no flour".

Needless to say, when my family and I discovered Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Grain Bread in our local health food shop, we couldn't resist the temptation to try it. An early warning should have sounded when it took all four of us to move a loaf from the shelf into our trolley. But, undeterred, we took it home and began to work our way through. Several weeks - and dental appointments - later, we had the loaf surrounded, and within a couple of months we had polished it off.

So, ye of little faith, if perchance you are planning to bake some bread and you are searching for a recipe, you could do a lot worse than turning to the Good Book, and the prophet Ezekiel in particular. After all, according to the folks at Food for Life, "this biblical bread truly is the staff of life". Amen to that.