Return from hiatus: World Cup Controversies and more

Hello, I'm back from hiatus.

I have a lot of material I will gradually put up.

This past month, I wrote approximately 12 articles for helium.

My best read is probably this one about the World Cup controversies:

The United States (where I come from) is currently full of a lot of irate part-time football fans who are upset at being denied a goal in the 85th minute of the Slovenia match by the referee. Goals do get disallowed quite often (see Holland vs Croatia, 98, Italy vs S. Korea 02) but in this case, the referee did not give an explanation and replays do not show much of a foul to begin with. It's speculated that the referee ignored the pleas of players on the field for an explanation because he did not speak English. With the immense pressure that the US holds, FIFA is currently doing a probe on that particular ref and in the meantime, he gets to be the most hated man in America's 24-hour news cycle, because he was unlucky enough to make a bad call against a country that has more people and more media clout than any other country in the World Cup this year.

The Yanks are also complaining of a yellow card being called on a U.S. player who wasn't able to get out of the way of hand ball in time, but it should be noted that Australia lost a man (to a red card) and a goal to Ghana because the same thing happened to him in the penalty area.

At the same time, Mexico got the short end of the stick when a goal was also disallowed on Carlos Vela for being offside and they had to take a tie to South Africa. Even worse, South Africa had to endure a red card to their goalie for making a fairly legitimate tackle dooming the host country to suffer a damning penalty kick with the the backup goalie rushed from the bench into the net without any warm-up in between. Luck has a habit of working both ways like that.
Even as I'm writing this, more news is surfacing that the Brazilian striker Lucio Fabiano admitted that he handballed the second goal in Brazil's 3-1 win over Ivory Coast.

The fact of the matter is that soccer's a sport that's difficult for referees to make the right calls and they mess up a lot. This has never been anything new and although there might be a legitimate reason to reform FIFA's policies with regard to refereeing to ensure more accuracy with calls, nothing will change in the present and the World Cup because that's the way football works.

At the very least, South Africans, Yanks, Mexicans and citizens of the Ivory Coast can take comfort in knowing that they're in the World Cup and don't have it as bad as Ireland. Ireland doesn't even have the opportunity to cheer for their own team at the World Cup. The do-or-die qualifying match which put France through to the World Cup and denied Ireland its spot was the result of a referee failing to call a handball on Thierry Henry as he scored a goal. FIFA said they wouldn't reverse that call even though they acknowledged it was wrong.

Article can be found here

Also:
Basketball Player Profiles on OJ Mayo, Gilbert Arenas, and Brandon Jennings.

NBA Draft and High School Players

And lastly, for examiner.com:
How an Oscar for Tom Cruise Could Have Changed it All

Many more posts coming soon

Cool Web Sites on my GoogleReader

Recommended from my google reader:

Of course, let's start everything by clicking here where I get my revenue (I don't get revenue from this site).

Also, I wrote an article on best websites of 2008 for helium that ranks #1 (http://www.helium.com/items/1277927-hulu-tripadvisor-funnyordie-howcast-cracked-geni-websites-of-2008-digg-delicious)

Here in Idaho (www.here-in-idaho.com) and Que Sera Sera (Sarabenincasa.wordpress.com)-A pair of female comedians. One is a humor writer and one does stand-up and brilliant impressions of Sarah Palin that go on youtube. Benincasa also had a humorous series on choosing a religion. Here-In-Idaho's recent posts have included minutes of the hobo quarterly clown meeting as well as numbers from Geometry the Musical

Indecision 2008 (off Comedy central's site)-The comedy central blog that I believe was run by the Daily Show staff, still has snarky pieces on politics that are pretty funny. Includes a lot of clips to the Colbert Report and Daily Show

Atomic Gadfly (atomicgadfly.blogspot.com)-A guy who writes in detail about movies inspired by comic books. He has a lot of posts, for example, on who should be the next Batman villain.

Lifehackers - Tips for saving time in your busy day and simplifying life now that the internet has sort of made things more complicated

The Film Doctor (filmdr.blogspot.com)-An excellent analysis of film from someone who I believe takes a feminist perspective (I believe the author is a male, however0

Confessions of a Film Critic (http://maguiresmovies.blogspot.com) and The (Coolercoolercinema.blogspot.com)- Both these sites are really good for straight-up reviews.

Film Experience (www.filmexperience.net)-An incredibly prolific guy, Nathaniel Pfiffer, who runs one of the best Oscar-centered sites on the internet.

A.V. Club (www.theonion.com/avclub): 4 Features that are pretty cool:
1. The Hater-Ironically, this is another female comedienne (maybe women are funnier with the pen). She is hillarious if a little pessimistic.
2. Inventory-Some pretty well-drawn out lists
3. TV Reviews-They review most of the hist shows on TV episode-by-episode. Reading TV reviews is more of an immediate experience than movie reviews.
4. Random Roles-Usually appearing on the press circuit to plug their latest project, actors usually are only talking about the here and now when they're being interviewed. This interview format has the interviewer picking selective items in their filmography and inviting the interviewee (usually an actor) to just comment on it.

Moral of the Story-The Ethicist's Randy Cohen who writes for the New York Times and tackles a bunch of reader questions and current events issues and argues the ethics of it. I don't know that there's a solid answer of right and wrong on matters but somehow he seems to make sense. He's looked at whether people have the right to post anonymously, whether Dave Letterman should have apologized to Sarah Palin, whether golf is a sport of the people, whether

The Movie Critics (http://movie-critics.ew.com/)-The two movie critics from Entertainment Weekly write some pretty insightful angles on films. They leave the movie reviews in the paper and write more interesting stuff on the blog. A very good use of when a blog can be about writing something extra beyond the print edition.

Deadspin (www.deadspin.com)-Sports news with a twist. The articles generally expose athletes' shallowness and faults rather than putting them up on a pedestal.

Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com)-I don't read it as much. I think it's hayday was clearly last year. It looks at present day culture and analyzes it as if an anthropologist were looking at it.

The Official Cracked Blog (www.cracked.com/blog)-Cracked's brilliant articles aren't available on google reader's feeds, but the blog is. A writer named Dan O'Brien writes outlandish love letters to people like Kristen Wiig, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Palin that you have to see to believe as well. Dan O'Brien also writes outlandish stories inserting himself onto the crew of the USS Enterprise and at Hogwarts. He also has another series of articles where he pretends he's a famous rapper and takes responsiblity for mismentoring Shaq and Kanye West among others.. Other hillarious articles are instructions on "punching Oasis in the face," psychological disorders of 10 video game characters, a book review of the holy bible, an imagined set of e-mails between Clay Aiken and Adam Lambert, the imagined first drafts of Indiana Jones and Transformers 2, an interview with Obama and McCain in the year 2012, and an imagined Joaquin Pheonix diary. In short, this is just really creative stuff.

Washington Post Metro and Washington Post DC Sports Bog-Written by Dan Steinberg for the Washington Post, firsthand accounts of the local sports scene. I also subscribe to Washington Post Metro.

Mark Cuban's blog (http://blogmaverick.com) and The Great Seduction (andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction)-Mark Cuban has a lot of insight on the survival of media in the changing face of technology. Similarly, Andrew Keen is someone I consider one of the smartest people on the planet for his views on the negative effects on Web 2.0.

Ball Don't Lie and Fourth Place Medal (available off yahoo sports)-The former is about the NBA and the latter is about Olympic Sports. Both are excellent sources. The NBA blog regularly links to the best NBA articles around the web.

I have a new writing job!

Thanks to my blogging efforts, I have a new job, I will be the DC Film Industry Analyst for The Examiner. Here is my inagural entry, right here.

Please click on that, if nothing else, because I get revenue through clicks.

Here are some other links, I found that I've starred through google reader. There is nothing I was triyng to promote, I just found them all to be interesting articles:

Too often the Oscars are about films that make it to the big stage and discard the ones that don't. Here is a list of underappreciated films:
http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=6053

The question is who would you chose to have breakfast with after the Oscars. I think I'd probably go with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon because they seemed so freaking excited. On the flipside, we could go with Alexander Payne (writer), or actors George C Scott or Alan Arkin who claim that winning an award means virtually nothing to them, to see how lackadaisical they are about it. Perhaps, Robin Williams because he'd always be fun to be around, or Robert De Niro because he's fascinatingly quiet and awkward in real life:
http://filmexperience.blogspot.com/2009/02/breakfast-with-faye-dunaway.html

This critic found Doubt funny:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/02/comedy_of_doubt.html

This was an interesting article about how every best picture Oscar campaign is seeking to dig up dirt on the other contenders:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/02/oscar_gold_diggers_of_2009_fol.html

Someone attempts to defend M. Night Shamylan. Good for him. I've watched 2 M. Night Shamylan films. I saw Lady in the Water and liked it. I didn't have a basis for comparison so the "not as good as his other films" argument held no water for me. I felt Lady in the Water was extremely imaginative even if it was filled with lots of plot holes. You had to simply watch it differently. The Happening, on the other hand, was disastrously awful:
http://atomicgadfly.blogspot.com/2009/01/twisting-in-his-grave-defense-of-m.html

Non-movie related: This is a weekly column by Fidel Castro that shows off his philosophical and scholarly side. I was unaware he had these:
http://granma.cu/ingles/2009/febrero/lun9/reflexiones.html

A good summary on the best picture nominees:
http://hokahey-littleworlds.blogspot.com/2009/01/nominees-for-best-picture-are_24.html

some recommended sites of film on the internet

For starters, us.imdb.com is pretty much THE WEBSITE for film information.

Filmsite.org is a non-profit site which is a virtual encyclopedia of film. It has a wide collection here of various compilations of the best films ever made:
http://www.filmsite.org/greatlists.html


79 Best Pictures is a project of two people (boyfriend and girlfriend) from the University of Maryland who plan to watch every Oscar selected for best picture over the course of a year
http://79bestpictures.blogspot.com/


Turner Classic Movies has a great database which has a more thorough synopsis of a film than you'll find on the imdb.com. If you want to skip straight to the ending
http://www.tcm.com/


Box office mojo is a great source for facts and figures from the box office and is pretty much the definitive database for box office stats. You can also play a game where you try to successfully predict the box office intake
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/

One of the best magazines that I used to read on the film industry crumbled recently and now it only available online, there are here:
www.premiere.com

If you're looking for goofs on movies, there's a fun one called
www.moviemistakes.com

There are about a million other ones too