Are my eyes really blue?

Well, the entire world knows what the beef is in this post, but the shocking upset of the night is that FIFA apparently plans to do something about it. Which is fine, as it goes, but it presents a problem: if Koman Coulibaly (a.k.a. Osama Bin Whistlin’) is defenestrated from the tournament, it will concede to all and sundry that the United States was jobbed out of three points – which would have essentially guaranteed their passage to the second round. If they can put the wood to Algeria, this will all be water under the bridge, but there’s still no way to figure how good the Desert Foxes are based on what we’ve seen in South Africa.

What this gets back to is the ongoing problem that soccer has in this country. Premier League games are now popping up in the early hours on ESPN, certainly, and Setanta (RIP) and Fox Soccer Channel show a lot of international games, but for Bubba P. American, the World Cup is probably the only sustained exposure he gets to international football at the highest level. And when he sees it, he sees a steady diet of flopping, whining, and officiating decisions that suggest the use of a dog and a white cane.

More than anything, this is the thing that FIFA needs to do if they really want to crack the American culture. In every other team sport in America, if a player commits an infraction, the ref names that player and that infraction right in front of everybody and usually over a microphone. There’s no debating what the ref claims to have happened – it may be a good call, it may not, but at least you have the ref asserting that #12 traveled or #56 false-started or that there was a two-line pass, and you can judge from there whether the call was justified. As far as I know, nobody has yet been able to ascertain what penalty Coulibaly was calling, and nobody has been able to get a public explanation out of him.

Sports depends on one thing and one thing alone: the integrity of the contest. WIthout it, you might as well watch wrestling. That’s why the Black Sox scandal devastated baseball and why Pete Rose is still suspended. That’s why the NFL was hounded endlessly about the Seahawks-Steelers Super Bowl and why Tim Donaghy was the NBA’s nightmare (and why many people still believe the 2002 Western Conference Finals or 2006 NBA Finals were worked). As long as Bubba P. American thinks that international soccer is a game officiated on the basis of bias, partisanship, nationalism or just whether the ref’s bowels were acting up that day, he will dismiss it. And he will be right to do so.

It’s 2010. We have replay. We can afford to pay more than one man to watch the 22 players. FIFA needs to straighten up and fly right well before 2014.

So I left my carry-on bag in the cab on the way to the hotel, the first day of the trip. I filed a report with the Lost Property Office at Transport for London (which handles everything – cabs, buses, the Tube, you name it) and have a case number, but they still haven’t heard anything. I had a couple of my business cards in there, but I’m not sanguine about the prospects for getting it back.

See, I don’t really care about the contents, because I didn’t have that much in it – a pillow, a dinged-up iPod Shuffle (I have now had three Shuffles and lost every single one of them), half a dozen magazines for strategic plane/Eurostar purposes. The real loss was the bag itself. It’s a Timbuk2 Messenger Custom, small size, army green – the sort of thing they would make if Timbuk2 had to convert to wartime production. And it was a gift from a grateful end-user in the old country – a fairly high-profile user at an extremely high-profile institution. That bag was the perfect size to use for anything – overnight/weekender, backup laptop bag, what have you. And I was on super monkey tilt for the first two days of the trip because I’d lost my bag.

I may have something already that will do for a replacement. For the time being. But it’s not going to be my old bag, and I’m a little bitter about that. (It doesn’t help that the rollaway carry-on that I took as my main suitcase lost a zipper and is about to fall apart itself. Last thing I need is to go buying luggage.)

I woke up at stupid o’clock in the morning on June 5, 2002. Portugal was the stylish pick to win the 2002 World Cup, and the Americans were just hoping to better the 32nd-place finish from France four years earlier. And the Metro didn’t start running early enough for me to go to a bar to watch it live. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t exactly sanguine about the prospects. And then John O’Brien slotted a goal for the US inside of five minutes, and then Portugal gave up an own goal at the half-hour mark, and the riot was on. There would be a goal from the mighty McBride, another own-goal from Jeff Agoos, and by the time the smoke cleared and the closing theme from Independence Day struck up, the USA had won 3-2…and the best World Cup ever was finally on.

I say best ever because I got to see a ton of games. I went straight to Lucky Bar at the conclusion of the first game so I could be there for the replay and drink heavily (and cast aspersion on the refs). It was the first of many trips. I saw games overnight flying to California on jetBlue. I saw the USA beat Mexico in the round of 16 in a conference room at work, on the clock, after we somehow luck-boxed our way into the second stage. I saw the Americans outplay Germany for 90 minutes and lose anyway, because the incredible Oliver Kahn stood on his head and just bricked off the goal.

But there was more going on than soccer. I had a vacation in California that month, a week spent stooging around and reading and relaxing. I had my old iBook, which had just been fitted with an AirPort card, and I got to walk down University Avenue in Palo Alto and see open wireless around literally every corner. I had an iPod for the first time, and was able to listen to all my girlfriend’s new wave tracks and a band called Air that I’d just discovered through a Nick Hornby book. I saw a Cingular store where all the phones were GSM-based and marveled at the newer better technology than what I was carrying – better battery life in a smaller phone that you could change out without any input from the phone company. And I was amazed over and over again by the fact that it got cold at night – and really didn’t get that hot during the day, thanks to the morning fog and the lack of humidity otherwise.

It was amazing. I knew that this was the girl for me and that our future was on the West Coast, but that June was the first time that I really began to absorb what it would genuinely be like to be in California. All the things I would come to rely on – pervasive wireless, fully digital mobile telephony, all my music available all the time, Mediterranean climate – can be traced back to that June. I mention it because here I sit, watching the World Cup streaming at work, waiting eight days for the delivery of my iPhone 4. The circle of life continues to turn…

* If you really want an iPhone 4 and you have an iPhone already, your best bet is to use the new Apple Store app and upgrade direct from the phone. That worked for me in under 5 minutes, including the time to download and install the app.

* The former Big-XII is rapidly turning into a joke conference. Basically, it’s Texas-Chokelahoma-A&M trying to get all the money they can (they are literally getting all of the severance money from the Colorado-Nebraska departures at the expense of the other 7 schools). Basically it’s going to be the new WAC – a vanity conference of negligible strength for its one capable member school (i.e. Texas).

* Boise State to the Mountain West is a step up for both, and something that should have happened years ago.

* California voters are just paste-eating stupid. Prop 14 will give the state the same jungle primary that Louisiana is abandoning – all candidates run in one big primary, and the top two go to the general election. Get ready for the 2003 recall gangbang EVERY YEAR – the system disembowels political parties in favor of giving all power to those with the most name recognition and the money to get it. Meg Whitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Huffington – lather, rinse, repeat. Idiots.

* Nothing makes me laugh harder than people trying to take the partisanship out of politics. What next? Taking the alcohol out of whiskey? Partisanship is why we HAVE politics, you morons. It’s how we resolve large-scale disagreements in society without resorting to firearms. The alternative to politics is not some big hand-holding circle of consensus where we all sing Kumbaya and do the right thing for all and sundry. The alternative to politics is fucking Somalia.

* Speaking of paste-eating stupid, nobody with two brain cells to rub together should listen to a single word the Republicans have to say until they purge themselves of their Confederate sickness. I can get along just fine with actual conservatism. Populist redneckery is not worthy of serious consideration.

* The reason I really hate crackers isn’t because they’re terrified of anything different. It’s because they’re terrified of the very concept of difference. The Confederate sickness stems from fear and outrage that anybody or anything might be unlike them in any way, and I have eighteen days of dragging a real live fossilized Wallace-ite like a ball and chain through Europe to prove it. I am not kidding when I say we should get Sherman’s descendants on the phone and see about getting an estimate.

* I was up 24 hours yesterday. I have had a shit-ton of caffeine. I am about one more cup of coffee from turning directly into Captain Jack Sparrow.

Home from vacation. Trying to stay awake ’til 9 PM so I can get ten hours of sleep and still be up by 7 for work. This will mean that I will be up 24 hours straight on travel day, same as when we went out.

I’ll have more to say about the trip later. For now, I will just say that the California elections were predictable as ever and California voters are not really deserving of the power of direct democracy. Also, I’m pretty sure I can drink under the table any of my blood relatives who did not to go my high school.

And in a couple weeks, when it’s hot as balls, I’m really going to wish I was back in Switzerland…

Christmas week, 1996, I sat at Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter, sipping on an au lait and nomming a beignet and looking at the USA Today. And on the front page of the business section: Apple Acquires Next; Steve Jobs Returns. And I thought to myself, well, that’s that – we will live or die with this one.

At the time, Apple was worth $16 billion, and Microsoft $556 billion.

Cut to today.

Market cap – debt = AAPL worth more as a company than MSFT.

I feel a little lightheaded just thinking about that.

If you weren’t an Apple aficionado in the mid-90s, I don’t think you can appreciate just how much Cupertino Hexachrome Fruit was hanging on by a fingernail. The PowerPC-based systems had failed to change the world. A whole litany of projects – CHRP, OpenDoc, GeoPort, PowerTalk – had utterly failed to catch fire. Copland – the mythical System 8 – was a year late and a GNP short. Michael “The Diesel” Spindler had given way as CEO to Gil Amelio, who seemed bound and determined to run Apple off the rails – the January 1997 MacWorld Expo keynote rivaled only Labour’s 1983 election manifesto for the title of “longest suicide note in history”. And after doing what everybody had insisted Apple needed to do – open its hardware to clone manufacturers – other companies were making better (or at least sufficient) hardware for less money, digging away at Apple’s most reliable profit margin. And to add insult to injury, Power Computing was outmarketing the Mac OS in almost every conceivable fashion.

It wasn’t Apple Computer, it was “beleaguered Apple Computer.” Press speculation ran rampant that Apple would be bought by Sun. Or Disney. Or Microsoft, who had launched Windows 95 and brought a sorta-Mac-like interface to PCs that was good enough for the vast majority of buyers, and undercut a big part of Apple’s usability advantage. That was the worst part – Microsoft was selling a shitty operating system, on cheap-ass screwdriver-job PCs, and devastating Apple in the marketplace despite superior technology at every level from Cupertino. Maddening.

That’s why there was almost a religious angle to Steve coming back. (I’m not making this up – Wired magazine even had the controversial “sacred heart of Apple” cover in summer ’97 with the simple headline “Pray.”) And then, at the summer MacWorld, there on that big screen – Bill Gates. Because Apple had to do something to ensure Microsoft Office would continue for the Mac, because without it the last finger would slip off the cliff. Fortunately, Microsoft had every incentive to stave off the antitrust regulators circling them, and keeping Apple from going under was an insurance policy – and cheap, at only $150M.

People still rolled their eyes. No point to Apple, they said. When Microsoft put the 95 interface on NT, that was the end, they said. No future. No future.

Well, the future’s here.

Microsoft missed the boat on digital music. Then they missed the boat on consumer smartphones. Then they missed the boat on social networking. And while they sat on a near-monopoly in operating systems and office suites, letting that river of cash fund everything else, Apple pared their line of goods down and decided that they would only sell the best products out there – no more competing at the discount end any more than Dior sells at Wal-Mart or Mercedes makes econoboxes. And then, in 2001, Apple (and at this point, make no mistake, that meant Steve) decided to sell people something they didn’t even know they wanted. Six years later, when the iPod ruled digital music, they decided to sell something else people didn’t know they wanted, and the iPhone revolutionized consumer smartphones in a way that Danger or Blackberry or Symbian never had.

And around 2007, as Vista flopped, Microsoft looked up and realized they essentially hadn’t budged in six years. And they suddenly realized the meaning of Stagger Lee’s Tenth Law: “In the 21st century, if your Next Big Thing runs on a PC, it’s not the Next Big Thing.” Of all the hottest things going – iPhone, Android, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare – none of them relies on a PC running a Microsoft product.

Not to say that the race is over. It’s never over, and like the man says, in the end it’s only with yourself. But to look out on an Apple whose stock has gone up about 5000% since the old days, and to see the head of one of Microsoft’s most forward-looking groups resigning, and watching the world hold its breath for June 7…

I’m not gonna lie. It feels like a win. So I’ma call it a win.

Meanwhile, we wait for the fate of “beleaguered Microsoft”…

After eight tries, the GOP has finally won a special election since Obama was nominated in August 2008. This time in Hawaii-1, which is an uncommonly blue district and Obama’s old home district. So how did the GOP win?

Easy: two Democratic candidates. Neither would drop out, the DCCC washed their hands of it all, and the Honolulu City Councilman won the seat with a whopping 39.4% of the vote. The two Democrats wound up with 59% of the vote…which strongly suggests that the Republican had better rent rather than buy.

Naturally, the GOP is taking this as the latest omen of ultimate victory. But if Michael Steele wants to take this as proof that he can do the same thing nationwide – well, giddy up. If I’m running the D-triple-C, I’m more than happy to play on that field the rest of the way…

…people are saying that Android 2.2 will allow you to tether your phone and use it as a hotspot, thus leapfrogging the iPhone.

Setting aside how frequently these slobber-jobs use the word “will”, here’s the deal: the iPhone OS, version 3, has supported tethering from the day it shipped.  In fact, it was a working feature with 29 of the 30 carriers from day one, and people are tethering away with iPhones like there’s no tomorrow.

Except in the United States, where AT&T still hasn’t worked up the bandwidth to allow it.

Phones don’t exist in a vacuum.  In the United States, your phone exists at the sufferance of your carrier.   And if you think that AT&T’s going to blithely allow Android phones they sell to do this sort of wireless hotspot tethering, you are probably legally insane and should be given very hard drugs.

I kind of want to take this article out for drinks and see if it will be my friend. If I weren’t married, I might even try to make out with it a little.

Daniel Larison is the finest blog-based pundit working today.  I don’t care what your political beliefs are; you will be enlightened and rewarded by keeping up with his work, because even if you disagree violently with him he will make you at least give serious thought to what he has to say.

Well, it’s here.  Sort of.  If you have a Nexus One, it looks like before very long at all you’ll be able to update to Android 2.2, and with it (chorus of angels) run Flash beta.

Time to unpack this:

1) IF YOU HAVE A NEXUS ONE.  Apparently, HTC is not going to be drawn on how long before other phones support Android 2.2 – though “if you bought a phone this year,” you should be OK.  Assuming your carrier supports the update.  And if you don’t have to wait for an upgrade to MotoBLUR or Sense.

This is now the 5th version of Android in under 2 years.  The HTC G1, the first Android phone, was released in the United States in October of 2008.  If you bought one, you’re probably still under contract – and the odds that your phone will run the new hotness are practically nil.  More to the point, if you bought a MyTouch 3G or a Motorola CLIQ, you have the same hardware and it’s probably under a year old, so your upgrade path doesn’t look too hot either.  Sure, Apple is doing a partial cutoff at 2 years, it seems (and an absolute cutoff at 3) but that at least sort of dovetails with the typical contract period.  But to say that anything over six months old is not on the list – that’s a sign of engineer thinking instead of, you know, human logic.

2) BEFORE VERY LONG.  Has to be said again, my Ninth Law: “you ain’t shit ’til you ship.”  (Which is why I’m not even commenting on Google TV, except to say that GOOG has done a great job of getting Apple-level attention for Microsoft-caliber vaporware.  How long for that Courier tablet?  Huh?  Never mind.)  See #1 – even if your hardware supports Froyo, I wouldn’t plan on running out and having this installed in time for your Memorial Day minibreak.

3) FLASH BETA.  Yes, it exists, and so far the early returns, running it on Google’s flagship phone, are: it kind of sort of works, not very well, chews through battery at a ridiculous rate, and the phone runs hot as a New Orleans whorehouse on nickel night anytime you spend more than a few seconds running Flash. I don’t know how often I have to repeat it, but I will: there is nothing about Flash as currently constituted that makes it suitable for mobile phone use.

All in all, it still looks like Android 2.2 is still the best thing going if you don’t want to go the iPhone route, but until the rubber hits the road, let’s not go assuming that this is the thing that’s going to give Apple the beatdown once and for all.  For some reason, ever since the iPhone 4 leak, the Intarwebs have decided that Apple is the new Great Satan and somebody has to rise up and stop them – except when Facebook is the Great Satan and somebody has to stop them.  And I have actually heard Google Buzz pitched as the Facebook alternative – presumably by people with no short term memory whatsoever.

There are no good guys out there, people.  You pick the level of intrusion you’re willing to live with.  And right now, I’m still willing to take “just works” at the expense of “I can’t make it run Duke Nukem Forever in a shell” – not to mention “cash on the freakin’ barrelhead” rather than “barter away information in exchange for free at point of use.”  Depending on what Apple is doing with MobileMe, though, all bets are off…