Branko's Weblog

A family of four returns from its prematurely interrupted ride through the polder and bikes straight into the bustling market. The mother leads and the father closes. They are all wearing brightly coloured rain gear, with the hoods drawn closely over their heads, making them look like mutant smurfs.

The rain is going rat-tat-tat on the leaves of the trees of Sarphatipark. Thousands of drops on thousands of leaves, like drums at a convention of monomaniacs.

Then wilful gusts of wind tear apart the clouds overhead, and suddenly parts of the street are ablaze in the sunlight. Pedestrians have to shield their eyes from the bright reflections in pools.

Near the park, a front door opens in a stately house, and a small child is let out. It starts stomping its rubber boots with joy in every puddle it can find, while its mother tries to extract a carriage from the house.

For the first time in weeks, the streets smell like streets.

There are those who moan that “this is not summer.” I don’t think I understand them.

Cowardice has so far been punished heavily at the European Football Championship. The cowardly Italians have been sent packing, the unattacking Germans took the first bus home, and tonight the ‘Italy from across the Channel’, catanacio experts England were shot out of the tournament with Portuguese class and temper.

Only one coward is left; his stupidity has protected him so far. It took Dick Advocaat sixty minutes of the match against the Czechs, but then it dawned on him: he was playing an attacking formation! No wonder the Dutch were leading. With all his might he barely managed to turn the match into a loss, by putting in his slowest, most defensive player.

Then, playing the Latvians, he put in four defenders. Yes, count them! Four defenders! The Latvians put in one (1!) striker, and Advocaat figured, hm, should four defenders be enough? Perhaps I should put in some more defensive midfielders? You can never play defensive enough.

Unfortunately, he had not told the Latvian coach of his plans, nor had he explained to his players that they should lose (or how), so the Dutch team miraculously won and went on to the next round.

The one overriding lesson of this tournament seems clear enough: attack, and you will progress. Defend, and you will lose. With Advocaat at the helm, it is doubtful that Oranje will survive five minutes against the Swedes. Lovers of the beautiful game will have to hope that Advocaat again proves daft enough to field an attacking side, and his asistants even dimmer (as usual).

If the bad weather is keeping you indoors, try and play Slouching towards Bedlam. It is an engrossing steam-punk text adventure set in a Victorian insane asylum where you have just been appointed doctor. But, are you that sane yourself …? Winner of the 2003 IF Competition.

Today, SpaceShipOne successfully reached the edge of space, making its pilot, South-Africa born American Mike Melvill, the first commercial astronaut. What’s more, SpaceShipOne is the first spaceship that took off horizontally, went to space and landed horizontally, not wasting any parts in the process (except, of course, fuel).

A couple of years ago I was talking to a lawyer for an article I was writing. I am not sure what I asked him at one point, but it must have been something along the lines of ‘how do you decide who is wrong or right?’ His answer, surprisingly, was that he first looked at what felt right. No legal filter, but a moral one.

Since then, when approaching a legal subject, I have caught myself several times trying to see if I could figure out what felt right for me. It is so easy to rationalize towards one’s dogmas and doctrines, that trying to find out what feels right is not as natural and straight-forward as it seems.

I was walking across a second hand book market today, and several of the national news papers had their stands there. It was the first time I saw them there. An employee of one of the papers offered me a copy. I declined, realizing that I had wanted a paper to read the football articles, but also realizing I would read it on the internet.

Now this is our national ‘Hicksville Bugle’, and of course it also requires registration. However, with Bugmenot, it has become very easy to circumvent that whole requirement. I do not begrudge the news papers whatever it is they are harvesting when they let you register, be it cash or user data or both or something else. I even feel that it is somewhat immoral to circumvent the entire registration process. And although I don’t like it, I cannot blame them for piggybacking their VPN onto the web. After all, everybody has a web browser. Not everybody is willing to install custom software for every newspaper they want to read.

However, as I noted a few days ago, I hate it that Google links to articles in these dailies. Google sabotages itself, and in doing so, it sabotages the web (that’s how important Google has become!). And somehow for me, these totally unrelated things cancel each other out. I project the immorality of Google onto the newspapers that require registration, I see these papers as accomplices, and as if by magic I don’t feel guilty about reading a paper that I was not meant to read.

(By contrast, I felt incredibly guilty for downloading and reading the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy off the web, even though I own a copy of that book, but have it in storage somewhere, even though I gave numerous copies away to friends for birthdays, and even though Dutch law explicitely allows me to download books and films and music for private use.)

It seems that at least one person besides me reads this blog: Dick Advocaat started the match yesterday with a 3-4-3 line-up, with two mid-fielders particularly assigned offensive and supply tasks.

As soon as the coach noticed that this system works, he changed it, of course.

But until then (and even later, thanks to the great players of Oranje!), there were two teams on the attack, which led to what must have been the most beautiful game of football on this planet of the past five years.

Of course, loser-coaches like Advocaat will point to this match and say: “See how dangerous it is to play beautiful, attacking football? The Dutch did and they lost!” And they will gloss over the fact that the Czechs also played beautiful, attacking football, and won.

The thing is, for the cowardly coach it is much easier to explain away a loss in a match in which he played defensively and conservatively, than a loss in a match in which he took enormous risks.

What Advocaat does not understand, what goes against the grain and the core of his being, is that there are people who don’t care! They are not many, but you can find them all over the world: people who would rather lose beautifully than win in a mediocre fashion.

The Brazilians, the Dutch, and perhaps, on a warm day, when the sun and the wine sets their hearts ablaze, also the otherwise stoïc Czechs.

The Dutch know that you cannot keep a good thing down, that beauty will out one day. Until then, we prefer our heros to reap their glory on the field of honour, even if that means defeat.

Yesterday, I saw a beautiful match, with twenty-two artists doing what they do best. The memory of that match will linger far longer than that of the mediocre coach who is Grumpy the Dwarf.

The presentation of my proposed line-up was lacking, because of the limited ways this weblog software will let you create a lay-out.

So I took some fridge magnets, and hey presto, the Orange Fridge Magnet Football Planner.

Let me know if you’d like to see improvements.

How hard can it be? The experts tumble over each other with systems, yet they forget the simplest things.

Starting with 23 players: we’re not going to play three goalies, so that’s 21 players left: of these, several are either second-tier players (De Boer, Bosvelt, Zenden), have played too little lately (Kluivert) or have hardly ever fitted Oranje before (Seedorf).

That’s 16 players left; of these, only 11 can play.

Strictly speaking, Van Hooijdonk is also a second-tier player, but he brings many qualities to the pitch that none of the other players possess; for instance, he is always a threat in ’standard situations’.

Keeper: Van der Sar. Westerveld and Waterreus are good too, but there is no reason to deviate from the staple.

At this point, it is good to remark the weak point of the Dutch team: they crack down under the pressure that invariable occurs when remaining goalless during a match. This has been exploited lately by almost every adversary. The opponents of the Dutch tend to play very defensively, to the point where Oranje just gives up.

The upshot is that opponents generally play with very few offensive players. The logical conclusion should be for every coach that we can do with less defenders. The Dutch could easily play a 3-4-3 or 3-5-2 system.

Defenders, therefor: Reiziger, Stam, Heitinga.

The discussions about systems usually deal with the choice of playing with fast midfielders on the flanks, who can run to the opponent’s back line and the pass to a single forward, or playing with two strikers and a strong midfield. The latter choice is generally considered cowardly and un-Dutch, but the former choice requires the fast runners to pull this system off.

Robben is not up-to-speed yet (literally!) after an injury, and Van der Meyden convinced exactly only once against the Germans, when he gave Van Nistelrooij the assist that led to the equalizer, and that only happened after Van Hooijdonk had started spreading fear and panic among the German defense.

So, the less characteristic approach should be taken of having two strikers, which almost automatically should be Van Nistelrooij and Makaay. There are only a few mid-fielders in Oranje who have consistently shown they can supply forwards with goal-scoring passes, and score themselves off the rebound too. However, only Van der Vaart has shown that ability recently.

Once ‘we’ have scored the first goal, the Czechs will change their tactics and start a more offensive type of play. At that point, one of our midfielders needs to be converted to a defender, and the Dutch have only two candidates for that role: Van Bronckhorst and Cocu. The latter hasn’t played very well recently, so Van Bronckhorst it is.

The next person we need is a great playmaker, a tactician, somebody who’s the heart of the Stam-Van der Vaart axis, somebody who rules supreme on the mid-field. Unfortunately, Ruud Gullit has retired, and Zinedine Zidane already plays for the French.

The one available player who approaches Gullit both in psychological make-up and ex-haircut is Van Hooijdonk. ‘Unfortunately’, he is also a real striker. I doubt he would be happy on the midfield.

The other player that springs to mind is Seedorf. I removed him to the bench earlier, because he is too self-willed and hardly ever fits the Dutch type of play. However, from time to time he has shown that when asked, he can fit himself for a role he doesn’t like. So lets bring him back from retirement and place him behind Van der Vaart (if need be, they can switch position during play).

That leaves ‘our’ flanks relatively understaffed. Reiziger and Van Bronckhorst can run up and down the field when required, but of course cannot keep doing that the entire match. For these vacancies, Van der Meyde is the logical choice for the right flank. Although he put in a mostly appalling game against Germany, he has also shown that with the right amount of distraction on the mid-field, he can shake loose his direct opponents.

That leaves only the second hard choice for this match (and the following ones): Sneijder or Robben? The former has shown again and again that he has a fantastic touch; Sneijder is a great ball-placer. However, with Van der Vaart and Heitinga in the line-up, there are already two players for strategic free- and corner kicks. My preference is therefor for Arjen ‘Speedy Gonzales’ Robben, who can almost do the same things that Overmars could when he played at Arsenal.

There, that wasn’t too hard now, was it? I don’t understand why Advocaat looks so grumpy all the time. This is fun!

Once more, from goalie to Ruud:

                Van der Sar

 Reiziger      Stam          Heitinga

                      Van Bronckhorst

Van der Meyden   Seedorf        Robben

           Van der Vaart 

          Makaay     Van Nistelrooij

Space dot com calls it the Cosmic Woodstock: on Monday, June 21, in the Mojave Desert, USA, Scaled Composites will try and fly a plane called SpaceShipOne into space horizontally for the first time. What is twice as exciting about this, is that Scaled Composites is not government funded: this is a privately owned company participating in the space launch ‘race’.

Horizontal take-off and re-usable space craft promise to bring down the cost of space faring drastically (as long as the American defense ministry does not dictate the other features of the space craft, as with the US Shuttle).

Currently, the Russian space agency charges a tourist approximately 20 million US$ for a nine-day trip. It is estimated that the actual launch of a Soyuz space craft costs 60 million US$, and the craft has three seats. Launch and flight costs of a craft like SpaceShipOne are likely to be in the area of hundreds of thousands of dollars, not dozens of millions. For comparisson, the launch of a Space Shuttle is said to cost around half a milliard dollars.

The launch is scheduled to take place at 6.30 Mojave time, which should be 15.30 Amsterdam time. CNN is said to provide live coverage, although I don’t know if the US state propaganda broadcaster will do that for the entire planet.

The Hicksville Bugle is a valuable member of the Hicksville community–or at least, so the Bugle’s editors kid themselves. The editors don’t continuously crush beercans against their foreheads, nor have they slept with their under-age cousins within the last month, so they are doing OK.

The Bugle buys a lot of syndicated stories from freelance writers. I know this, because I use Google News to read news stories from across the anglo-protestant world.

So on the one hand, you have Google, a multi-billion dollar world-wide company, with perhaps billions of users, and on the other hand you have … the Hicksville Bugle. Which of the two would win a spitting contest, you think?

The Bugle has had a web site made. On that website, you can read their syndicated stories, or at least you could, if the web developer had not convinced the editors that it would be really nifty (or swell) to install a registration system. That way, the Bugle can find out who the average reader would prefer to have sex with: their under-age wife, their under-age cousin, or their favourite sheep, Flossy.

Google News also had a web site made. Google has a very simple business model: stay on top by letting visitors find the stuff they are looking for on the web.

Here’s how that works on the spiffy Google News website: I punch in a couple of keywords, and get fifty pages of results. The first forty of these pages contain links to the Hicksville Bugle and its cousins. If I click on them, I get taken to the papers’ registration pages. The useful links are burried deep within the search results. Google apparently believes that appeasing the four members of the Bugle’s staff and management is a much better thing to do than to please their visitors.

As for why they would believe that, I don’t know. So far, Google has been doing a lot of things right, so we should give them the benefit of the doubt. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of Brin and Page having been promised access to Flossy.