Nico's Journal

YAY! Viva Espana! I'm very glad they won though I doubted they would for most of the game, they muffed so many attempts at goal. [dances] They're a lovely team who play a nice clean game, though this one wasn't. We will be having some of our chocolate World Cup tonight in celebration, though it seems a pity to break it.

Most of the game was very lack-lustre so I took pictures of the cats.

( Two photos of unimpressed cats and a feline goalie )

We might be out of the World Cup, but we left unbeaten! We didn't win any matches, but hey, we didn't lose any either and we were playing some major teams. In fact we actually did better than Itaky, hwo are out too, since they lost to Paraguay. :-) We did pretty well for a small country that doesn't play much soccer.

Man, the Italian coach for England, Fabio Capello, has that indefinable but very Italian style (which turns out to be Marks and Sparks). No shapeless training outfits for him and his team who all turn up in grey suits too. :-)

And now for the crossovery goodness. astrogirl posted a wonderful and very funny Doctor Who/Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fic for Multiverse5000, Does the Doctor Know Where His Towel Is?, all in perfect Guide style.

In honour of that, here's a brilliant fan-made vid, Doctor Who: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Daleks, narrated in an excellent Peter Jones-y voice. You may have to stop this to catch all the details, like the anagrams, the stairlessness of Skaro, the Mark Three War Bastard, and the teams Davros played for:

Skaro Orient: striker
Kaled United: right wing
Kaled Wednesday: midfield
Aston Villa (ha!): striker
Bunker: striker
Bunker: goalkeeper

We got a goal against Italy! And almost got a second one. Their goal was a dubiously awarded penalty--Italy have got diving down to a fine art--so I think we did bloody well considering.

As for that blatant and utterly shameless Cote d'Ivoire dive that succeeded in getting Kaka sent off for a slight tap on the chest (Keita falls, clutching his face in pretend agony) I do in fact have words.

It's time soccer used something like cricket's third umpire who makes the final decision based on replays if asked by the two on-field umpires. Dives and handballs are shown pretty clearly on the big screen at major matches; how hard is it for a "second ref" to do that, or even for a the ref and linesmen to actually look at the damned thing and see what happened? I hear that rugby players are fined or penalised for behaviour captured on camera (I don't watch rugby) but I'm told it's cleaned up the game a lot. Soccer could do with this. At the very least, the decision against Kaka could be reversed, but right now the ref has the final word and it's sometimes just wrong.

If you're interested in getting an invite to the multifandom Archive of Our Own, you can sign up to be sent one; just go to the site and click on "SIGN UP NOW". I did that yesterday, and they said I was in a queue and might get my invite by 20 November. However I got it today. :-) I haven't loaded up any fiction yet, and I do think the Hip Deep archive is a better and much easier place to find B7 fiction. However this will be a good place for me to post my non-B7 stuff, to find fanfic in other fandoms, and to provide another backup for my stories on my site and Hip Deep. It seems to have some very nice features like being able to save drafts, bookmarks, reading history, and subscriptions.

In other news, our soccer team (we have to say "soccer" here because "football" means rugby) has made it into the World Cup for the second time. Yay! :-D