Sunday arvo footy

Like "Gus" Gould, I love Sunday arvo footy - whatever the code. In this instance, it was soccer, as my Newcastle United Jets faced Sydney FC in a friendly at a sparsely populated Sydney Football Stadium. We'd already lost to the Sky Blues in this pre-season period, 0-2 at Port Macquarie, but were filling in for Chinese side Shanghai Shenhua (who reckoned that, missing their quintet of national reps, they were unable to field a competitive team). Could we reverse the previous result? Nope, but we did at least improve upon it. The rain-soaked, relatively incident-free match finished 1-1. Brosque netted a beauty for SFC before the break, damn him, while Song equalised for us in the second half with a somewhat bizarre lob over the keeper. Given how even the sides had been for the 90 minutes, I was satisfied with a draw - as were the diehard opposition supporters seated beside me, aka The M. Brothers.


L: "Tennessee Pusher" (2008) by Old Crow Medicine Show. Bluegrass with street smarts.

R: "Take A Girl Like You" (1960) by Kingsley Amis. Familiar with the majority of Martin Amis's literature, I was entirely ignorant of and mildly curious about his father's. Then I spotted this orange Penguin in an exchange. The clincher was the bookmark wedged a chapter shy of the end - a page from a desk calendar, dated Thursday, February 13, 1964. Forty-five years on, the infoverse demands closure!

W: Forthcoming fillum "Spread", about livin' off your looks in Los Angeles (loaner from a publicist who wants me to plug it); "King Of The Cage: Greatest Hits" (2001), which I picked up from Go-Lo for two bucks; the premiere of "Hulk Hogan's Celebrity Championship Wrestling" (2008) on FOX8; and British PM Gordon Brown's terrific speech "Wiring A Web For Global Good" on www.ted.com, as tweeted by Stevo Fry.