Saturday, Apr. 11, 2009 - 21:18

All kinds of enemas, remind me of soup

Watched today, and last night read, some of the coverage and journalism about Hillsborough, and it being twenty years since the disaster. Most seemed to strike a pretty fair, unsensationalised stance, which I thought was fitting.

Interestingly though, something that the BBC coverage said made me think - on one hand they were saying that the Liverpool supporters were angry that no-one had been made 'responsible' in that no charges had been levelled against the police, despite the mistakes they made. On the other hand it was stated that the tragedy was a disaster waiting to happen, and could have occurred at any other ground.

It was a massive shame, of course, and the errors of management by the police and the organisers were dreadful in thier consequence, but I can't help thinking that they were just that - mistakes which were exascerbated by the mass of supporters, delays in the fans getting to the ground, miscommunication and bad luck. All one can say is that the Taylor report and the reshaping of how we watch football.. it's been a positive to come from the deaths of the ninety-six.

As a result, indirectly, I was reading about other similar disasters - crowd panics leading to asphixiation, engineering disasters, natural disasters. All pretty interesting stuff, though you have to hope that importantly lessons were learned from collapsing walkways in hotels in the USA, Scandinavian oil platform sinkings, Victorian theatre child crowd crushes, huge domino effect explosions and fires on aircraft carriers, the Aberfan landslide and many more similar losses of life.

In some ways, one could argue that this afternoon's football results towards the bottom of the table were almost perfect as far as Middlesboro's slimmish chances of survival are concerned.

Boro themselves managed a 3-1 home win against Hull, and if they can continue getting points at home (and maybe get some decent surprise results against the likes of Arsenal and Man United) they may have a chance.

Elsewhere, most of the other teams around the basement were kept in trouble by virtue of Pompey drawing 2-2 with West Brom, Sunderland going down 2-1 at home to Man United, Newcastle and Stoke drawing 1-1, Blackburn going down heavily against Liverpool, and Bolton not yet secure after losing to Chelsea in a seven-goal thriller.

Spurs beat West Ham 1-0 and Wigan went down 4-1 to Arsenal in the other games, neither of which looks likely to have a particularly critical effect on the major issues in the top division.

Bit gutted to hear that Channel Five have dropped their coverage of MLB and NFL this year, as a cost-cutting exercise. I wouldn't have thought that buying in some broadcasts and having two blokes in a spartan studio twice a week would be that costly, but I suppose I dunno how much ESPN (or whatever) charge for the games. Just seems to me that such established programming filling so many hours might be less of a risk and less of a cost than a fair amount of 'novel' or original programming, but.. what do I know?

In Thailand, tom yum is usually made with prawns (tom yum goong), chicken (tom yum gai), fish (tom yum pla), or mixed seafood (tom yum talay or tom yum po taek) and mushrooms - usually straw or oyster mushrooms. The soup is often topped with generous sprinkling of fresh chopped coriander (cilantro) leaves.