By Tony Attwood
Goodness it is difficult running a blog during the interlull. I mean you try and enter the news desert with some good back up stories ready to roll, but even so you are dependent on some sort of news coming in to keep it all rolling along.
So I look for good news and bad news, in fact any old news, remembering that of course good and bad news all depends where you start from. The headline
Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger rules himself out of England job – ‘it should go to an English coach’
from the Daily Telegraph is good for me, and quite a few readers of Untold, but not so could for the aaa who want the man out.
On the other hand the headline
Yaya Toure’s Manchester City exile continues as Pep Guardiola eyes Arsenal defender Hector Bellerin
followed by
How football’s big beasts prey on rivals’ best young talent
from the same paper might please the aaa who want Arsenal to fail so that Wenger is replaced.
But I really, really, really don’t want Bellerin to go. Because of where I sit in the Emirates I get a sensational view of him moving up the field and crossing (normally in the second half), and I really do think this is a very special player.
Anyway we have the suggestion from a wholly unreliable source that Perez wasn’t badly hurt and is back in training while on the transfer front we have
Arsenal want to sign £52m-rated attacker but Man Utd also keen: Benfica attacker Goncalo Guedes
Chief confirms Arsenal’s approach for £75m hitman: Gonzalo Higuain
Cazorla replacement? Arsenal ready to sign La Liga playmaker – Isco
Have you heard any of these before???
OK let us try
Arsenal injury boost: Key able to return to training. Bellerin was hurt in training but is now better … it all relates to Spain’s Under-21 Euro 2017 qualifying win at San Marino. A tense, tough and very important match, I’ll warrant.
Keeping going…
“Monreal replaces Jodi Alba in the national side after the Barcelona full-back was injured 22 minutes in yesterday’s 1-1 draw with Italy.”
Meanwhile it is certainly safe to say that the internationals have been… well, unusual, thus far.
Neymar’s face left covered in blood during Brazil’s World Cup qualifier against Bolivia
and that is not to mention
Enner Valencia escapes in ambulance after being chased by police ‘over unpaid child support’
There’s a view of Manchester in the Guardian
Zorya chief: Manchester is a dirty city where men kiss in the street
• ‘I went out for a walk in the evening and there were masses of drunk people’
Disgruntled fans gather to demand that president of football association is sacked as hopes for a football revolution suffer a blow
The Mail even has a major transfer blow
Arsenal transfer blow! Gunners target Mauro Icardi signs new Inter Milan contract
Oh hang on I think I have just gone round in a complete circle.
Let’s hope for something better tomorrow.
Is Arsenal’s ticket policy really so awful? Compare it, perhaps, with Man U and Bournemouth
What organisations and what people really have the power in football?
There is no open window, but there are ten transfer rumours for Arsenal next January
Revealed: the psychological condition behind the anti-arsenal-arsenal
Referee Appointments and Results Matchweek 06 – with video evidence
Did you see this corruption overview in The Economist?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2016/10/bunged-up
Tony, you are scraping the proverbial barrel and I think you know it.
Until the next Transfer Window opens on New Year’s Day we will be assailed on all sides by innuendo, rumour and downright fairy stories.
And the present international interruption really doesn’t help.
My advice? Keep the faith and
remain calm. It won’t be long before the 15th and our welcome to the Swans. 😉
Eduardo Li (Costa Rica) has plead guilty to 3 charges of corruption in the USA case.
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Koscielny played the 90 in Frances 4-1 win over Bulgaria. He apparently did not kick the ball onto his elbow to score again.
Bulgaria’s goal was a penalty, and that was the first scoring. I don’t know if Koscielny was involved with giving away the penalty.
Andorra lost 6-0 and Gibralter lost 4-0. Christina got 4 goals for Portugal.
USA U20 played Holland. Maybe Zelalem played? I don’t know.
England U20 beat Germany.
Former Gunner Serge Gnabry scored in Germany U21 beating Russia.
Canada’s U17 Women lost to Venezuela. Bummer. No Gunners on the Canadian team (that I know of).
Gord thanks for the gibberish
Bloggs
I have no idea if you are thanking me, or slapping me on the side of the head. Please be more direct.
The maze of life and truth and all the rest of it !
A man is driving down the road and breaks down near a monastery. He goes to the monastery, knocks on the door, and says, “My car broke down. Do you think I could stay the night?”
The monks graciously accepts him, feeds him dinner, and even fixes his car. As the man tries to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound. The next morning, he asks the monks what the sound was, but they say, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”
The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes about his merry way.
Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery. The monks accepts him, feeds him, and even fixes his car. That night, he hears the same strange noise that he had heard years earlier. The next morning, he asks what it is, but the monks reply, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”
The man says, “All right, all right. I’m dying to know. If the only way I can find out what that sound was is to become a monk, how do I become a monk?”
The monks reply, “You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these numbers, you will become a monk.”
The man sets about his task. Forty-five years later, he returns and knocks on the door of the monastery. He says, “I have traveled the earth and have found what you have asked for. There are 145,236,284,232 blades of grass and 231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth.”
The monks reply, “Congratulations. You are now a monk. We shall now show you the way to the sound.” The monk leads the man to a wooden door, where the head monk says, “The sound is right behind that door.”
The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. He says, “Real funny. May I have the key?” The monks give him the key, and he opens the door. Behind the wooden door is another door made of stone. The man demands the key to the stone door. The monks give him the key, and he opens it, only to find a door made of ruby. He demands another key from the monks, who provide it. Behind that door is another door, this one made of sapphire. So it went until the man had gone through doors of emerald, silver, topaz, and amethyst. Finally, the monks say, “This is the last key to the last door.”
The man is relieved to no end. He unlocks the door, turns the knob, and behind that door he is amazed to find the source of that strange sound.
But I can’t tell you what it is because you’re not a monk.
Every time there’s an article about AW and England managers job, they always mention his £8 million contract with Arsenal, as if to imply he might not take the England manager job because of money. I wonder if the media mention the salary of other managers who are linked to the England job when writing their article or it’s only apply to AW?
Friend : ” Why are you so tense? ”
Man : ” I just fought with my wife. That woman just fights with me for no reason at all. ”
Friend : ” Why , what happened? ”
Man : ” We both were excited and about to start having sex … she removed her Top and jeans …. and then …..
I just asked why are you wearing your sister’s Bra…? “
The difference between CRAZY and STUPID
A truck driver was doing his usual delivery to a Mental Hospital. He discovered a flat tyre when he was about to go home.
He jacked up the truck and took the flat tyre down. When he was about to fix the spare tyre, he accidentally dropped all the bolts into the drain.
As he couldn’t fish the bolts out, he started to panic. A patient happened to walk past and asked the driver what happened.
The driver thought to himself, since there’s nothing much he can do; he told the patient the whole incident.
The patient laughed at him and said “Can’t even fix such a simple problem… No wonder you are destined to be a truck driver…!”
“Here’s what you can do, take one bolt each from the other 3 tyres and fix it onto this tyre. Then drive to the nearest workshop and replace the missing ones, easy as that”
The driver was very impressed and asked: “You’re so smart but why are you here at the Mental Hospital?”
Patient replied: “Hello, I stay here because I’m Crazy not STUPID!”
Gord …. eie
Brickfields
The monk joke made me scare the cat which was quietly snoozing when I guffawed.
I am off to count grass and pebbles
@ Gunnerjoe -October 8, 2016 at 10:38 am – Happy questing ! Am sure that with Google and Maps and modern what not , it’ll probably not take you 45 years !
But you do know that in case of natural calamities and other disasters, it’ll be all null and void and you will have to restart from scratch again ?
@ Robido -October 8, 2016 at 10:25 am -My apologies to poor old kitty . How many more lives does it have ?
Gord – I loved your post re Kos & Portugal’s goal scorer. Ignore the minion.
Mesut has picked up an assist for Germany, and Gibbs has been called up (to probably sit on the bench) for England.
The Ladies had an open practice.
http://dailycannon.com/2016/10/behind-the-scenes-at-an-arsenal-ladies-training-session/
According to Iwobi, the hardest working Arsenal player in training is Elneny. It would be interesting to look at his distance run divided by playing time statistics. I suspect he hasn’t had enough appearances for this data to be very good yet.
But, I did happen across a RunnersWorld article about how far people run in various sports. Football was top at 7 miles, field hockey was second at 5.6 miles. I don’t think baseball is a sport, and they were listed at running a whopping 198 feet per game. I wonder how far the average chess player runs in a game? Gridiron clocked in with 1.25 miles (for receivers and cornerbacks).
I think Just Arsenal News is wondering if Wayne Rooney could start a new career as a groundskeeper at Wenger Stadium.
Guardian has a new blurb on corruption. I would say the prognosis doesn’t look good.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/oct/09/world-football-endemically-corrupt-player-transfers-agents
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There was so new news about the infant one at FIFA, and a 48 game World Cup. A fleeting thought was, FIFA wants to replace leagues of professional teams with constant, worldwide national games. With FIFA vacuuming up the majority of the money involved.
I am following up on a problem for my farm (where to plant some trees), which has nothing to do with Arsenal. Unless Wenger has a tree nursery somewhere. 🙂
Most people seem to have a jaded view of statistics. An example is the truism: there are liars, damn liars and statisticians.
Some people will selectively pick data so as to provide support for a specific argument. Actually, it is much more likely that they have chosen much more data than they present; what has happened is that they have deleted data which doesn’t support the conclusions they want to make. And then don’t count the deleted data, which has important consequences to confidence interval estimation.
I have mentioned many times, that temperature and pressure are examples of statistics. The temperature is some constant times the average kinetic energy of the molecules int he control volume, and the pressure is another constant times the average momentum. These values are quite well defined (and not subject to the statistical manipulation by charlatans) in part because the number of molecules in the control volume is usually quite large.
Anyway, I am wading through a text in computational fluid dynamics, and it mentions that similar averages (not as subject to the whims of charlatans) are the drag coefficient, or for things like airplanes, the lift coefficient.
One I’ve had on my own, comes from statistical distributions. Most people assume the Gaussian distribution for almost everything, even when it doesn’t make sense. They do this so much, they usually end up calling the Gaussian distribution “Normal”.
Most of the convenient probability distributions of nature possess a mean (an average) and a variance. People with good mechanical knowledge are probably familiar with the idea of resonance. Problems involving resonance may result in situations where the variance, or even the mean, is undefined.
Undefined variance sort of means the variance is infinite. Which means that if we were to generate data “at random”, the data could be anything physically possible.
An undefined mean in part means we do not have a good idea as to where the center of the data. It is only in part, because even if the mean is undefined, the median probably is defined.
And what this has to do with football (or anything else involving people), is that I believe some characteristics of man are drawn from distributions of undefined variance and possibly mean.
So who knows what is “normal”?
@ Gord – As by my own personal observations , I have noticed that the level of what we once perceived to be normal , has very drastically gone down .
Stupidity has alarmingly risen , while intelligence seems to be on the wane .
Could you plant a sapling for me on your farm and keep me informed of its progress ? You could always read some of my jokes (or comments ) to it as a growth inducer !
It’ll probably have a good laugh with this old joke !
A (fill in name of country ) tourist walks into a curio shop in San Francisco.
Looking around at the exotic curios, he notices a very lifelike, life-sized bronze statue of a rat.
It has no price tag, but is so striking, he decides he must have it.
He takes it to the owner: “How much for the bronze rat?”
“Twelve dollars for the rat, one hundred dollars for the Story,” says the owner.
The tourist gives the man twelve dollars. “I’ll just take the rat, you can keep the story.”
As he walks down the street carrying his bronze rat, he notices that a few real rats crawl out of the alleys and sewers and begin following him down the street.
This is disconcerting; he begins walking faster. But within a couple of blocks, the herd of rats behind him grows to hundreds, and they begin squealing.
He begins to trot toward the Bay, looking around to see that the rats now numbered in the MILLIONS, and are still squealing and coming towards him faster and faster.
Concerned, even scared, he runs to the edge of the Bay and throws the bronze rat as far out into the Bay as he can.
Amazingly, the millions of rats all jump into the Bay after it, and are all drowned.
The man walks back to the curio shop.
“Ah ha,” says the owner, “You have come back for the story….
“No,” says the man, “I came back to see if you have a statue of a ( fill in name of country ) politician in bronze!!”
( Apparently this was allegedly the method used by Tony and Walter to get rid of ‘them’ from this site !)