(c) Guardian

So United started the season with a comfortable 3-0 victory over Newcastle. During the summer there has been loads of talk (some well made arguments, but mostly rubbish) what should United do with the aging Giggs and Scholes, and where to deploy Rooney. Most questions are still unanswered, but one shouldn’t count Scholes out of any formation or game from now on.

Against Chelsea in the Community shield he was simply outstanding and showed why Fabio Capello really should have done more to get him to the World Cup. But it was one of, right? At his age, he couldn’t produce that kind performances week-in-week-out anymore, right? Then comes the opener for the Premier League and there he is – pulling the strings, controlling the tempo, pressing Newcastle’s midfield out from the position, and simply doing his magic all around the pitch. At the age of 36 nobody shouldn’t probably be surprised though.

The formation for United was a traditional 4-4-2 with Rooney and Berbatov up front and Nani, Valencia, Fletcher and Scholes in the middle. I doubt that we will see this from United too often, especially in the Champions League or against more difficult opponents away from Old Trafford. As the World Cup showed, you really need two defensive central midfielders to counter the opposition’s attacking midfield when that team is playing 4-2-3-1. And after the World Cup it is easy to argue that we’ll be seeing it even more this season than during the last.

But it was all Scholes against Newcastle as the chalkboard below shows. Nothing should still be taken away from Fletcher or Berbatov whom both really showed promise for the season to come. Maybe this is the season Berbatov really takes off in the Manchester and perhaps Fletcher can step up a level even after the brilliant last season he had.

by Guardian Chalkboards

And if that chalkboard doesn’t make you jump into the Scholesy bandwagon, perhaps the highlights will..

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Soundtrack: Tom Waits – Jack and Neal

“If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers.  For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy.  For others, the decision will be a hard one.  To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience.  We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history.  What we don’t know, though, may be just as important.  How would making such a decision change us?

Setting aside the direct material changes initiated by opting out of the factory farm system, the decision to eat with such deliberateness would itself be a force with enormous potential.  What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?  Tolstoy famously argued that the existence of slaughterhouses and battlefields was linked.  Okay, we don’t fight wars because we eat meat, and some wars should be fought— which is not to mention that Hitler was a vegetarian.  But compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.”

Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals

Soundtrack:

If you have been in prostitution, you do not have tomorrow in your mind, because tomorrow is a very long time away. You cannot assume that you will live from minute to minute. You cannot and you do not. If you do, then you are stupid, and to be stupid in the world of prostitution is to be hurt, is to be dead. No woman who is prostituted can afford to be that stupid, such that she would actually believe that tomorrow will come.

-Andrea Dworkin

Soundtrack: Alanis Morrissette – Hand in my pocket

Diego Forlan

A month of football has gone by and we have witnessed some of the best and worst moments you can imagine in football. The true football romantics must feel blessed that Spain were able to win the final before the penalties, and it is no surprise that they are having a strong foothold in the team of the tournament too.

I have always got great pleasure to name my favorite starting XIs, whether they are the teams of the World Cup, best left footers XI, best foreigners in Premier League XIs or whatever you can imagine. So it is time for the team of the tournament in World Cup 2010.

The tactic will be 4-2-3-1, which was widely used in the South Africa with a great success.

Goal: Iker Casillas (Spain) It is impossible to name anybody else after the man of the match performance in the final.

Right defender: Sergio Ramos (Spain) Sergio Ramos’ displays in the tournament made Jose Mourinho to abandon all his thoughts of pricing Maicon out from Inter Milan.

Left defender: Fabio Coentrao (Portugal) A marauding left-back who Benfica will really struggle to hold on after the tournament.

Centre-half: Carles Puyol (Spain) No-nonsense defender whose combative performances gave the Spain the defensive cohesion needed to play their own game.

Centre-half: Diego Lugano (Uruguay) Elegant, composed, spirited and whole-hearted displays pushed Uruguay further than any had believed before the tournament. Was sorely missed in the semi-final against Holland.

Midfield: Xavi (Spain) Xavi is at the moment quite simply a better footballer than anybody else.

Midfield: Bastian Schweinsteiger (Germany) Discovered his best form right from the beginning of the tournament and made the German team tick.

Right attacking midfielder: Andres Iniesta (Spain) Won the World Cup for the Spain. And even though he wasn’t on top of his game during the tournament made the Spain’s game look easy in the times when there was no space or time.

Left attacking midfielder: Thomas Muller (Germany) One of the brightest newcomers this summer. Had his breakthrough season with Bayern during the winter and rose to prominence in the national team during the tournament too.

Attacking midfielder: Wesley Sneijder (Holland) Got an average Dutch team to the World Cup final.

Forward: Diego Forlan (Uruguay) Probably the best player in the tournament, even if not quite as good footballer as Xavi.

Not too many suprises, but then again, it is the team of tournament so I don’t think any of the names should a surprise. On the bench would be sitting Samir Handanovic (Slovenia), Philip Lahm (Germany), Juan (Brazil), Anthony Annan (Ghana), Arjen Robben (Holland), David Villa (Spain)

Diving in: Carles Puyol dives in to send a crashing header into the top of the Germany goal and send Spain into the World Cup final to face Holland Photo: AP

Neutrals and football romantics have got their wish come true. The World Cup final will be played between two teams that possess their own strong football identities, have always believed in their own style, but have never won the World Cup before.

First Netherlands came through the challenge of Uruguay and last night Spain won Germany 1-0, in a game that had all the ingredients to become one of the all time classics, but  Germany failed the expectations and wasn’t able to match Spain’s midfield dominance. Schweinsteiger, Khedira, and Ozil were simply outplayed by Xavi, Iniesta, and Alonso. And that left Germany to rely on their counter-attacks, which were never coming, because such was the composure in the Spanish midfield. Spain has also now won all their second round games with a smallest margin of 1-0. But make no mistake, it is not catenaccio they are playing. Quite the opposite – they are really starting to make art of not conceding. (More about this later)

“Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ’A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.” 

“To be successful,” Rove explains, “an attack must be perceived as both fair and relevant, backed with credible evidence, and launched at the right time.” The half-truth here is “credible evidence.” Rove means evidence that only appears credible, evidence that sprays fast enough and drips far enough to resist removal from the popular mind even when the whole truth comes out later on.

Just starting to read Ohio’s Kingmaker: Mark Hanna, Man and Myth and then the latest NYRB brings another must to read in Karl Rove’s memoir - Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.

If you are still undecided whether to spend next 600 pages with Karl Rove make sure to read NYRB’s piece, The Curveball of Karl Rove. The book will sure shed light to many things that have been in the headlines during the last decade and open up Rove’s special relationship to George W. Bush that is actually often compared with Hanna’s relationship with McKinley. And as Rove is also an admirer and student of Hanna’s career, (e.g. Billionaires for Bush. The Nation. July 21, 2003. ”It’s not for nothing that Karl Rove describes Mark Hanna as his political hero”.) the two books probably create interesting parallel if read together.

Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage (August 6, 1991)

The war has changed, the society has evolved, but we are the same.

Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life, but it didn’t seem so then. What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don’t know how to tell you how complicated that made my life. Freezing and burning and going down again into the sucking mud of the culture, hold on tight and move real slow.

…

I saw a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang River where the press centre had been, where we’d sat smoking and joking and going, ‘Too much!’ and ‘Far out!’ and ‘Oh my God its gets so freaky out there!’ He looked so unbelievably peaceful, I knew that somewhere that night and every night there’d be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too. And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.

pp. 261-262

Getty Images

José Saramago died Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87 years.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it’s the citizen who changes things. I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I’m a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn’t exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.