Another vexing flaw in the FIFA World Cup Fantasy game

 

I noted last week that among the many irritating shortcomings of the FIFA World Cup Fantasy game website is the inability to deselect your captain. However, I had thought this only a minor annoyance, since you can change your captain by selecting another player to replace the current incumbent.

But I've just discovered a further wrinkle to this - one which has the potential to be quite damaging. In fact, it is a huge bloody booby-trap in the game design!

The dratted game won't let you change your vice-captain into your captain (or vice versa).

And that is something you're quite likely to want to do. Especially if you have - reflexively, as a result of always naturally doing this in Fantasy Premier League and other such Fantasy games... - made your second-best player your vice-captain at the start of the MatchDay.

Again, it is possible to get around this. You have to appoint someone else as vice-captain, to 'free up' your current vice-captain as a potential captain selection. The problem here is that, later in the MatchDay, you might be running out of players you can transfer the vice-captaincy to (although the vice-captaincy is utterly otiose in this game, it won't let you transfer it to a player who's already played).

If Messi should have a poor game today, I find I'll have to transfer my vice-captaincy to Nuno Mendes, so that I can take a chance on Haaland with the captaincy. But if Haaland also disappoints, I won't then be able to try my luck with Nuno Mendes as well.

I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't realise this sooner. It is actually a pretty huge deal. Since the vice-captaincy is utterly irrelevant in this game (it is inactive, unless you fail to make any manual changes to your team during the course of the MatchDay - and who's going to do that??), except in this maddening obstruction that it creates in freely circulating the captain's armband, we must get it out of the way - by selecting a vice-captain who plays at the beginning of the MatchDay.

Also... I'm going to have to set an early alarm tomorrow, so that I can get up in time to move the captain's armband to Haaland if Messi has delivered only modest points. Damn, this game is exhausting....

Mr Fate dons his taunting-hat again...

 

I like Mikel Oyarzabal, I rate him very highly. And Spain, despite their flakey start to the tournament, are still one of my favourites to take the trophy (though it's a three-way battle with France and Germany, I feel).

So, I made the Basque forward one of my three picks up front in my MatchDay 1 squad. 

And he had a dog of a game, fluffing a number of decent chances as Spain were held to a goalless draw by lowly Cabo Verde. Oh, woe!

So, of course, I dropped him. And in the next game, against the much more formidable-seeming Saudi Arabia, he's on fire and notches a 13-pointer (despite being withdrawn at half-time). Bugger. There is a lot to be said for sticking with players - especially forwards - through one or two disappointing performances.

Well, I swapped him for Messi. So, that might still work out for me. But I'm not confident. Luck is not my friend. If the great Leo blanks in this one - I'm sorry, everyone, it was my fault: I must have jinxed him.

Hoping for THE WORST....

With the mercurial Frenchman looking bang-in-form, and with a tempting-looking fixture (though it might turn out not to be a stroll in the park...) against Iraq up next for France, I decided I wanted to use my '12th Man' booster chip on Kylian Mbappé in MatchDay 2.

Alas and alack, that selection was not 'saved' by the game! (I already inserted a brief gripe about this into my review of MatchDay 1 a couple of days ago.) 

It might be that I was merely flummoxed by the perversely idiotic game design. Although the final 'Confirm' button on the Team screen is large and prominent - it simply shouldn't be there, and so you don't look for it, don't notice it. Activating the chips (and selecting captain or vice-captain) is carried out through a completely separate pop-up window; and that process appears to have been fully completed and confirmed when you close that window. There shouldn't be any additional step required to 're-confirm' the selection you've just made. And, if there is, there should be a bloody prominent pop-up notice on screen alerting you to this fact - and there isn't.

But... I had already run into this problem with the captaincy, so I am pretty sure - 80% to 90% confidence - that I had 'confirmed' this chip selection on the Team screen too. And I had seen Mbappé appearing as the extra man on my MD2 teamsheet. But the next morning,... this chip activation had disappeared again! And, since the new MatchDay had started, it was too late for me to try to activate it again. (This too seems harsh, unnecessary. There is no need for chip activation to be 'timed out' like this; you should be able to activate them at any time during the MatchDay - so long as the relevant player or players haven't played their game yet.)  It thus seems horribly likely that the FIFA Fantasy site is subject to the same sort of gremlins that beset the Fantasy Premier League site, that occasionally (probably when site-traffic is peaking) it will glitch.... and just 'lose' apparently saved team selections.

Now, with such an over-abundance of booster chips in this game, and since I don't really fancy the Final as an attractive option for playing any of them (except possibly... the 'Maximum Captain'?), I am faced with having to play a chip in every round from here on.

What's more, I now find myself crossing my fingers for a poor performance from Mbappé, so that I won't be left regretting how much this glitch has harmed me. (One wouldn't want to wish injury on anyone. But... perhaps a little soreness in the calf that forces him to sit out this one game???)

The awful design of this Fantasy game has strangely worked out in my favour once already. In MatchDay 1, I somehow wound up with my captaincy on Oyarzabal before Havertz - and didn't notice (because the bloody game doesn't tell you who your captain is). I was fuming when the Spaniard missed multiple chances and returned a blank. But as it turned out, that left me free to move my captaincy to Haaland - who, of course, delivered a monster 17 points. If I'd started with the armband on Havertz, as I'd intended, I would certainly have stuck with his initial return of 13 points (26, when doubled for the captaincy), and would have missed out on 4 extra points. I very rarely get conspicuously lucky with any of these Fantasy games; but there I did.

It is inconceivable that Dame Fate should rescue me from disaster like that twice in succession. A 20-pointer from M. Mbappé is surely incoming....

FIFA World Cup Fantasy is already starting to piss me off...

Is Haaland captain? It's anybody's guess! 

The tournament itself is shaping up just fine. Some of the 'minnows' have proved to be quite formidable after all. Some of the more fancied teams - Brazil, Switzerland, Holland, Spain - have stumbled embarrassingly out of the starting-blocks (and I'd bet that at least one or two from France, Argentina, England, and Portugal may do likewise!). Some of the more 'mid-tier' contenders like Morocco, the USA, and Australia have produced the kind of performances that make you start wondering how far they could go in the competition. And we've already seen some absolutely cracking goals. These first five days have really given us everything we could have wished for.

It's just a pity that visiting the FIFA website to check how we're getting on in the Fantasy game is such an utter pain-in-the-arse.

The UI design is beyond-awful, really some of the most perverse and inadequate I've ever seen. Why is the 'business area' of the display - where you're actually going to view your team and make changes to it - restricted to this tiny 'letterbox' that's only about 25=30% of the total screen area? And why is even that extensively cluttered and obscured with overlarge action buttons and annoying pop-ups? Because it was designed by cretins, seems to be the only possible answer.

Also, although order of appearance during the MatchDay is crucial for deciding who to put in the original starting eleven and when you might want to make substitutions, you lose the ability to select this as the main 'player attribute' to display when the MatchDay is in progress; it's there when you're making selections for the next round, but disappears when showing you the current MatchDay - so, you're left having to scroll through the fixtures at the bottom of the page to remind yourself who's playing when. Here, the default 'player attribute' is 'scheduled opponent': that I think I can remember; but the exact order and kick-off times of the games I need to constantly double-check. Why would anyone do something this daft and annoying???

The thing that's vexing me most is how bloody fiddly it is to select your captain (and vice-captain). Instead of having a small pop-up screen with just that option available on a right-click over the player, you get a huge, screen-filling pop-up that initially shows you almost nothing beyond the player's name. You have to scroll down to find the options. And often the scrolling function seems to freeze; so, you have to refresh the page in order to be able to do anything. And even worse, there's no reassuring confirmation of the choice that you've made; the pop-up screen promptly disappears again.

That fiddliness in the selection procedure is, in fact, only the second most annoying thing about this UI. The most annoying thing is that it's impossible to see who your captain is. For some unfathomable reason, the designers of this UI have chosen to make the 'captain' (and 'vice-captain') symbol into one of a plethora of tiny, almost featureless grey discs denoting various aspects of player status: a collection of obscure symbols, picked out against a light grey background in thin lines that are only a slightly darker grey. Even with the display size on my laptop screen ramped up to 200%, all of these symbols are utterly indistinguishable from each other. Again, it is a basic rule of UI design that icons conveying important information like this should be large enough to see and recognise easily, and clearly differentiated from each other by having distinctive shapes and/or distinctive colours and/or being placed in different parts of the relevant display frame. These bastards are all tiny and round and grey, and all in the bottom left of the player panels. It is utterly fucking ridiculous.

And oh, it does get even a little worse than that: when you click on a player to view his large pop-up details panel, it doesn't actually tell you whether you currently have him selected as captain or vice-captain; you just have to infer that from the fact that these action buttons are now 'faded out', presumably indicating that these options are not available to you. (But that could be because the player has already played his game, and thus can't have the captaincy transferred to him, rather than because you've already placed the armband with him. God help you if you've forgotten who your captain and vice-captain are - because there really doesn't seem to be any way to find out, other than by making the selection all over again.) And.... you don't seem to be able to deselect a captain by clicking on the player; you can only do that by appointing another captain in his place. Could they have thought of any way of making this more clunky and user-unfriendly???

I've been particularly annoyed about this over the past 24 hours, because I thought I had my captaincy on Havertz - who'd returned a very nice 13 points in the demolition of Curacao. But it seems the armband was with Oyarzabal - who had a dog of a game the next day. It would be very unlike me to make a mistake with the order of matches (I am quite sure I had planned to move my captaincy, if necessary, from Havertz to Oyarzabal, and then from Oyarzabal to Haaland); so, I am now worrying if this FIFA website is prone to the same sort of glitches we occasionally find in FPL, where team data suddenly gets lost or scrambled. I hope not; it is conceivable, I think, that I blundered because of the fiddliness of making the selection, and the near-impossibility of checking what selection I'd made.

And yes, oh dear, the next mistake definitely was my own fault. This morning, having reached the point where my original eleven starters had all played, I could cast out the low returners to make way for my subs. Yesterday, of course, I had been fuming to discover that Oyarzabal was - unexpectedly and unwelcomely - my captain; but acting in haste this morning, that unhappy fact again slipped my mind: I moved out all of my 2-point and 3-point players - not realising that bloody Oyarzabal was one of them; his total was displaying as 4 points, because of the phantom captaincy.

Hopefully, I can redeem myself with a decent captaincy return from Erling Haaland (or Marcel Sabitzer or Nuno Mendes...). But I've thrown away a least 1 point with this unfortunate Oyarzabal cock-up - and possibly a lot more through missing the expected captaincy return on Havertz. (Despite all this woe, I'm actually having a very decent MatchDay 1. I usually get off to a terrible start in Fantasy competitions, and often fail to make up the lost ground despite a much stronger performance from there on. This time.... it's looking like I could actually do pretty well overall, if I can keep this early form going. Mustn't get the hopes up too much! This is a game that punishes hope!)

[It looks as though some of these unfortunate UI problems might have been addressed already. The 'letterboxing' issue seems to have disappeared now. And the captain/vice-captain symbols are now a little more distinct, and displaying at the top right of the player box rather than the bottom left. And I have found that by cranking my display size up to the max 250%, I can just about make them out now; but only these two symbols, not the welter of other ones, they're still an indistinguishable mystery to me.]

Well, that was QUICK....

 

The advent of the World Cup nearly took me by surprise this year!

With the expanded format, I suppose it's starting about a week earlier than usual - after our domestic season, with its many 'international break' interruptions, now lingers a week or so longer than it generally did in the past... and we have European Finals extending into the week beyond that. We've had less than two weeks' break from football: barely any time for the participating teams to get in any warm-up friendlies (England's second one isn't until the day before the tournament officially begins!).

And yes, the opening games are kicking off on a Thursday this year (for the first time ever??) - what's up with that??!!

So, damn, we're barely more than two days away from the greatest sporting event in the world getting under way again. And we Fantasy Football enthusiasts have really had next-to-no-time to get ready for this. I am in a frantic rush today to put together my initial squad for the official FIFA World Cup Fantasy Game.

I am excited, yes - but also a little trepidatious. Trying to follow the unfolding drama from a timezone where most of the games take place in the middle of the night is going to be a royal pain-in-the-behind.

Home, sweet 'home'...

 

After a month or so on the road, I have arrived back in Cambodia (Siem Reap, for now).

I have spent most of the last quarter-century in East Asia, and nearly a dozen years now in South-East Asia. For the last six years I have been mainly based in the Lao P.D.R., which has many points of appeal; and I've spent a fair bit of time in Vietnam and Thailand, for which I also have a considerable fondness. But somehow,... Cambodia chimes with me that bit more than any of its neighbours. Arriving back here after a spell away - even stepping off a bus or a plane into the noise and stink and tumult of Phnom Penh - always feels strangely reassuring, comforting to me,... like a big warm hug for the soul.

And so it does again. I've been having a bit of a stressful time over the past year or two; and especially in the last few months. But now, back in Cambodia, everything suddenly feels all right again. (It isn't. But it feels like it, for now - and I'll take that.)

A beer so good they named the country after it...

The beer's pretty good too.

And.... WE'RE BACK!

 

My laptop suddenly died on me. Very suddenly - no warning signs of any distress in its operations: working just fine in the afternoon, then utterly unresponsive in the evening. 

The worst possible timing too! I'd just started a period of travelling in southern Lao: an area I'm not so familiar with, and where I'd be shifting locations frequently, with little opportunity to look around for possible assistance with computer ailments; small towns, with not much English spoken, and not much prospect of there being any decent computer shops anyway. The day before the catastrophe, I'd still been in the capital, Vientiane, which I know my way around very well, and where it should have been relatively straightforward to get a repair done - and/or buy a new laptop. (I almost invariably have a second as a back-up, but I'd just sold my older one, and hadn't yet had time to think about getting a replacement. It is particularly vexing that the defunct one is less than a year old, and has hardly been used. With careful management, I am usually able to squeeze at least 7 or 8 years of useful life out of these babies; I've never had one quit on me like this after such a short time.)

Hence, I have been cut off from my blog here for nearly three weeks. My weekly 'Zen' bons mots are mostly prepared some weeks or even months ahead, and a few other shorter posts are also sometimes 'pre-baked'', but most of my content here is written 'live', in the moment, day by day - and there's been none of that since mid-April. I've missed TWO whole Gameweeks! Sorry.

While losing touch with the title race at such a crucial juncture has been vexing (no TV available to me either in these parts; although I did rather fortuitously catch a full re-run of the epic Everton v City game when I arrived in Siem Reap the other day), the enforced digital detox has been rather refreshing.

Alas, this externally imposed virtue of Internet abstinence seems to have been compensated for by a notable lapse in virtue in other areas of my life. (I blame the weather too: the rains have been late to arrive this year, and the whole region has been sweltering under a 40+ Celsius heatwave for the past several weeks - that does rather militate against trying to do anything very active...)  I have spent a fortnight mostly just sat on terraces overlooking the Mekong, steadily slinging back cold beers and Long Island Iced Teas....

A terrace overlooking the Mekong

Putting my feet up

A prize for anyone who can identify my exact location in these snaps!

 

Now, that idyll of rustic simplicity - a blissful recreation of a pre-industrial, pre-Internet life - is over, and I must return to my habitual grind. I suppose I'll start enjoying it again before long. But at the moment, I am still missing having all day to read a book....

Luck-o-Meter 25-26 - Gameweek 34/35

???????

Well, darn it - I was without Internet access (dead laptop, and travelling in some out-of-the-way places where the connectivity might often have been very crappy anyway...) or TV for a couple of weeks or so, and struggled to catch up with the football action I'd missed (mostly brief highlights on Youtube only, rather than any full games or analysis shows) even when I was restored to the delights of 'civilization'.

So, alas, I have missed to cover the EPL eccentricities of Gameweeks 34 and 35 in this 'Luck-o-Meter' series. Galling it is - but these things happen.

More 'new beginnings'

 

Today is the eve of the Buddhist New Year across the countries of South-East Asia, where I have been enjoying an idyllic 'semi-retirement' for the most of the last dozen years.

A few years ago, the Lao Brewery Company produced commemorative cans for its flagship Beer Lao brand reminding us all of the number of the new year in the Buddhist chronology; but they haven't repeated that useful notice again since. If Google is to be believed (which it generally isn't these days, on almost anything; just a few days ago, it was trying to persuade me that Arsenal were knocked out of the FA Cup in the 4th Round this year [by Wigan??!!] - and that was just the good old fashioned regular search function, not the demented new 'AI' version....), we are about to enter the year 2,570.

I'm in the Lao capital of Vientiane at the moment. I'm hoping it will be the quietest place to ride out the festivities. The water-fighting in the streets, a custom, I gather, only fairly recently exported from Thailand to neighbouring Lao and Cambodia, gets more protracted and boisterous each year, and quickly gets a bit tiresome if you're any older than 25; but the major hazard of this period - especially in this country - is the maudlin all-night drinking parties, usually with interludes of caterwauling karaoke at ear-shredding volumes, that break out everywhere over the next few days, and can make sleep (at least at regular hours) all but impossible. The good thing about the bigger cities in this part of the world is that almost no-one's really from there, they've just migrated from other parts of the country for work or study; and for big holidays like this, they all return to their original home for a few days or a week Thus, the big cities empty out, and can often be relatively tranquil at such times - at least, compared to most of the rest of the country during this frenzy of batshit-crazy celebration. I'm hoping that will be the case again. (Although the last time I spent the holiday here, we were still under the shadow of Covid, so that may not have been fully representative. The festival does seem to have become hugely more raucous across the region in the last two or three years!)

Anyhow, Sabaidee Pi Mai - as they say around here.

Or, in the local script,....  ສະບາຍດີປີໃໝ່

Or in Thai,  Sawasdee Pi Him  -  สวัสดีปีใหม่

And in Khmer,  Rikreay Chhnam Thmei  -  រីករាយឆ្នាំថ្មី

Now,.... I must sort out my earplugs and my rain poncho before braving the 150-metre dash to the nearest convenience store to pick up a couple of beers... It might be the last time I dare to go outside for the next three or four days.

Going with the flow

Here's a funny thing: although I have a great fondness for the late Shane MacGowan and his songwriting,.... most of my favourite Pogues songs are in fact written by other members of the band. This one, a rather beautiful love song by banjo-player Jem Finer, is from their later era in the '90s, after the band had finally been worn out by Shane's looney escapades and had to sack him.

The Pogues have a special place in my heart because they rose to prominence - indeed they were, somehow, one of the biggest bands in the world for a while back then! - during the 1980s, the period when I was transitioning from high school to university, and then from university to 'the world of work' (ha!), that age when we tend to listen to music most, and be most affected by it.

Although this song was released on their penultimate album, Waiting For Herb, in the mid-90s, I always associate it with a rather earlier moment in my life (funny how the mind works!). Back at the end of the '80s, I was doing a teacher-training course in the north of England, and was attempting a long-distance relationship for the first time, with a devastatingly beautiful young woman I'd just met who was at art college in London. (I always seem to fall for creative types: actresses, dancers, writers, musicians...) And although she never stood me up at a bus station, as in the scenario of the song, there were a number of  times when hoped-for visits were cancelled, or when we had awkward conversations from a payphone at a bus station (one of the most readily available to me at the time, since I was living in a small village some way outside of my university town, and having to take a bus home almost every evening). Because of these associations, several years later, this became for me, retroactively, 'our song'.

The song is notable musically for being an instance of the use of 'Infinite Guitar' - a feedback effect that allows a note to be sustained indefinitely at constant volume, here producing a melancholy and haunting background. The device was apparently invented by a Canadian guitarist called Michael Brook in the 1980s, but it is most associated with his countryman, Daniel Lanois, who did a lot to develop, or at least 'popularise' the innovation. Also a talented musician and songwriter, Lanois became best-known as a producer, particularly for his work on a number of U2's most successful albums. He introduced the 'infinite guitar' gizmo to The Edge, who was quite besotted with it for a while, and used it most memorably on the hit single With Or Without You - which probably creates some additional resonance with this song. (I'd never been much of a fan of U2 or The Edge, but I got to meet him and hear him perform at a private music biz party in the '90s, and found myself very impressed: he is a rather cool dude, and a much better player than I'd realised.)

I particularly like the opening lines, repeated as chorus:

Listen to me, baby: Once upon a time....

My heart, it was an ocean,

But you swam against the tide.

It's a song about acceptance, about moving on - without enmity or regret. How many of those are there?? It might be unique.

It's a good lesson, for life - and for FPL. Sometimes - often, most of the time - things don't work out the way we want them to. We have to try to understand how these setbacks happen, without apportioning blame - to ourselves or others. And we have to learn to bear these disappointments with good grace - and summon the will to keep moving forward.

And yet, of course, I can't escape the conviction on occasions that the girl was wrong, that life is often wrong; that the tide of my feelings was 'right', and that the girl - and the world - would have done better to have gone along with my flow, rather than opposing it.

Yes, EVERYTHING can become a metaphor for me.  Life is a metaphor for FPL, FPL is a metaphor for life.... Life is FPL....

Forgive these idle musings. I am making rapid progress into a bottle of Tullamore Dew this slow Tuesday evening....

Facebook - a further rant

 

A couple of months back, I griped about Facebook having randomly locked me out of my account around Christmas time - this time, seemingly permanently. I am still locked out, and now fear this latest 'interruption of service' is going to prove irreversible. 

Hance, this blog's companion Facebook page remains inactive - and, indeed, it is 'blocked' from view altogether (I have no idea why...).  I don't suppose anyone's going to miss it, but.... My apologies, anyway.

I still remember my last password; but it is only intermittently 'recognised' and accepted by the site. And whether I am able to log in with the password or not, I am always required to go through additional 'authentication' steps.

I am usually challenged to retrieve a verfication code from my linked email account. Fair enough. You'd think that would be sufficient to confirm my identity and restore access to the Facebook account. But NO: I've done this countless times now, but further steps are also demanded.

I'm usually asked to try logging in from another device. But when I tried that, they still weren't satisfied, and demanded again that I log in from another device,... and another.... and another. I suspect they in fact mean 'another device recognised as having been previously used to log in to this account' - but they don't say so. I've only ever used one other device - an old, now rarely used 'back-up' laptop - to access the account; but that didn't work. Then I wondered if perhaps they meant a mobile device (smartphone, tablet....?), since that's what most people use for accessing Facebook these days. But I tried borrowing a friend's phone to retreive the additional verification codes and that didn't work either.

Then they started telling me they would send a verification code to my Whatsapp number. Even though I don't have one!

Only after much floundering around through various obstructive screens in the log-in process did I finally manage to stumble upon an option to send an additional verification code to my phone by SMS. Unfortunately, the phone number I have linked to the account is an old Cambodian one, which I now rarely use, and which I only top up intermittently to avoid having the number deleted; it isn't actually 'active' most of the time. I topped it up again to reactivate it, but.... for some reason SMS often fails to work on SMART Cambodia's roaming service (this is why I've actually switched my contact phone number to my Lao one for my bank accounts in Cambodia and Vietnam). However, I did try this again recently, and this time was able to receive the SMS verification code. Facebook still wouldn't accept it, still wanted to insist on yet further verification steps - that were impossible. What is this INSANITY?!

So, to recap,... Facebook doesn't want to recognise my password; it won't recognise the only two devices I have ever used to log into my account; and it won't recognise verification codes sent to my linked email or my linked phone number. And there is no other recourse available, no means of contacting them to complain or appeal against the suspension of access.

Why does anyone bother with this awful, awful, stupid, obstructive, perverse, evil service???   I am really quite glad to be rid of it.

A little bit of Zen (85)

“May you get all your wishes but one, so you always have something to strive for.”

Irish blessing

"And may the head on your Guinness be tight and creamy..."

GW  (Though he probably won't be expressing himself that coherently over the coming few days, what with being a Plastic Paddy and all....)

A nomad once more....

I've just endured a rather unpleasantly fraught few weeks (in the real world, rather than the relatively benign realm of FPL), after my batty landlady decided she wasn't going to extend my lease after all (though, of course, one generally assumes that this should be a mere formality; and we did appear to have reached an agreement in principle to go ahead on much the same terms as the past year, back in the middle of January), but dawdled about telling me, and - really - didn't give me any proper notice at all.

Suddenly faced with unexpected homelessness in a little over two weeks, I have had to scramble rather to.... sort out the next phase of my life.

And, since I didn't feel I had enough time to both househunt and pack,... I took this unpleasant surprise as a cue to revamp my life rather dramatically. Instead of packing up my life into boxes and finding another house to rent, I have.... sold (or given away) everything I own, and laid plans to hit the road. As of tomorrow, I shall be a vagabond again.

If I have one greater love in my life than football, it is music. My parents had quite an extensive and diverse collection of records (though mostly rather middle-of-the-road), and a wonderful old 'gramophone' in a walnut chest with which to play them. During my early childhood, I would sit cross-legged on the floor in front of this marvellous device, in utter rapture, for hours at a time. And one of my great favourites from those early listening sessions was this mid-60s hit by the country singer Roger Miller: King of the Road, a defiant celebration of the hobo life - humorous, and oddly inspiring. I often wonder if my love for this song hasn't led me astray in life. Not only am I unafraid of having no fixed abode, no steady income, and few personal possessions; I actually tend to view such a situation as a desirable ideal.

Just once a year - watching A FUNNY-SHAPED BALL

I noted at this time last year that, while I do not think it remotely bears comparison with the grace and artistry of real football, I do nevertheless have a longstanding soft spot for the American gridiron game. And I confess this weakness has become bound up with my other great moral frailty - an occasional fondness for drinking heavily at breakfast time (usually only on this one occasion each year, I promise!). I look forward to the Super Bowl every year because, when living in East Asia, the game gets under way for me at around 6.30 or 7am - and this is just such an exquisite time of day to crack open one's first beer. (With any luck, one of these - since I've finally tracked down a store that fairly regularly seems to have it in cans.)

Super Bowl LX (and I do love that they're doing their bit to keep Roman numerals alive!) is between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks tomorrow morning (in my part of the world). I have not the slightest shred of attachment to either team (and have hardly seen anything of the games this season!), so.... I will pledge my allegiance according to the time-honoured principles of random sentiment and playful rancour. I spent a very pleasant few days in Seattle back in the 1990s (although, true to the city's reputation, it did piss with rain most of the time), and I've had a bit of a soft spot for it ever since (though I've never previously taken an interest in any of their sports teams). Extra bonus points to the place for being the setting of Frasier!! And one of my old drinking buddies from my Beijing days is a diehard Pats fan - so, it will be fun to root against him during the game. (If I had the money, I'd flit off to join him for the event. He's going to be watching it in a beach bar in Thailand - lucky sod! Only a few hundred miles away; but in my current state of penury, it might as well be 10,000 miles....)

A little bit of Zen (80)

 

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery!

  None but ourselves can free our mind."

Bob Marley - Redemption Song

Today is 'Bob Marley Day' - his birthday providing a happy pretext for a worldwide party in celebration of the life and legacy of the great reggae musician.

In addition to being a hopeless Plastic Paddy, I am also somewhat of a Replicant Rasta (mainly as a result of a couple of very formative visits to Jamaica in my young adult life), and I generally like to make this date in the calendar one of my (increasingly rare) days of indulgence. For St Patrick's, we can go wild on the whiskey and the Guinness and the colcannon and then more whiskey; whereas on Marley Day, we look to rum and Red Stripe (or nearest available equivalent) and jerk chicken, and then maybe some medicinal herb*.... But on both days, of course, it's mainly about the music: Bob and Shane MacGowan have shaped my life... almost more than Lao Tzu and Epictetus.

[* Well, the esteemed Dr W.H. McIntosh assured me that it could cure my asthma.]

Facebook page (An Administrative Note)

When I launched this blog nearly 18 months ago, I set up a parallel Zen and the Art of FPL Facebook page.

If you've never visited it, you haven't really missed anything. I only used it as a platform to share links to posts here on the blog, and it didn't really include any 'original content' (except that in providing short introductory summaries to each linked post, I would occasionally frame its topic or purpose in a slightly different form of words than I had used in the original piece...). I was only using the Facebook page to try to gain a slightly wider exposure - to try to increase the blog's prominence in search-engine results, and perhaps to make it easier for folks to share any piece of mine that they happened to like.

I'd only just remembered to put a link to the Facebook page in the sidebar here a month or so ago....

And almost immediately I'd done that, I got shut out of my Facebook account... again.

Now, this has been happening more and more frequently over the last year. Indeed, just lately, I seem to have been getting 'locked out' once or twice a month! Most of these exclusions are rescinded within a day or two, sometimes after just a few hours; but more often I'm cut off for a full week; and, in the worst cases, once or twice for a month or so.

This latest interruption of service looks like being a particularly bad one - so, I've given up, for now, even trying to get back in; I'm expecting that I won't be able to regain access until at least the end of January.

Hence, there have been no posts on the Facebook page since just before Christmas. Indeed, at the moment, it doesn't appear to be visible any more - which may be an escalation over Zuck the Schmuck's previous persecutions of me.

Now, the loss of this rarely-visited-by-anyone page does not grieve me all that much. But I also maintained an FPL info page for my country of residence - which I saw as being a useful public service, and which put me in touch with a small community of fellow enthusiasts for the game. (That page still appears to be visible; but it's effectively now 'dead' since all posting rights seem to have been suspended.)  The loss of that second FB page galls me considerably.

The loss of access to every other Facebook page, however, and to my account details, my list of contacts, the messaging service - that is little short of a disaster.

In East Asia (and in many other parts of the 'developing world', I shouldn't wonder), Facebook is enormously popular. Most small businesses can't be bothered to set up and maintain their own website, so rely on a Facebook page instead; thus you can't readily keep abreast of openings and closings of local restaurants etc., special offers and promotions, special events like concerts and parties and such, without Facebook. The dratted site has also become the default option for setting up mutual support forums for various interest groups, especially among the expat community; so, you can't access 'buy & sell' groups, property rental listings, or general advice on how to deal with health issues, noisy neighbours, or whatever... without Facebook. And, worst of all for me, Facebook Messenger has become the preferred means of communication for just about everyone out here (I imagine there are alternative messaging services in the local languages of the region, but these perhaps don't support the use of English; so, anyone who wants to communicate with anyone else in English uses FB - not SMS, not even Whatsapp,.... Facebook!!); hence, when I'm shut out of my account, I can't contact my landlady or my visa agent or my doctor... or the handful of friends I have out here....  

Being cut off from all of that is not just an enormous hassle, it is potentially life-threatening. It is downright irresponsible of Facebook to shut people out of their accounts (without warning or explanation; and without providing any avenues for seeking redress!).

I hate you, Mark Zuckerberg, and all your incompetent minions! And most of all I hate your botlets of Artificial Stupidity which repeatedly judge me (oh, the irony!) to be potentially 'not a real person' - which is why I keep getting locked out.

TOO SOON!!!

Christmas has become strangely popular in East Asia over the last few decades - especially in China; but really, everywhere across the region.

The seasonal decorations started going up in my sleepy little hometown last weekend (and they'll probably stay up till around March!). And I got Whammed! for the first time on Sunday afternoon last week in a local supermarket. Come on, people, we're not even out of November yet!  Cruel and unusual punishment indeed!

I see the official challenge doesn't actually start until tomorrow, so I suppose I'm still in with a chance of survival. But the omens are not good....

Early wake-up

It is, somehow, an Iron Law of the Universe that, if you live in Asia, you are never more than about 150 metres away from some sort of construction project.

There is an unfortunate corollary to this Law - that if it's 7 o'clock on a Sunday morning, you are probably within 50 metres of someone using an angle-grinder....

Feeling THANKFUL?

I've long had a peculiar fondness for the American holiday of Thanksgiving - largely because I've so often been able to celebrate the occasion with American and/or Americophile friends, and a few times even in America.

This year, alas, I shall probably be making do with a turkey sandwich on my own. And maybe I'll make myself a pumpkin cheesecake for a sweet treat tonight...

Anyhow, a Happy Thanksgiving to any American readers who may stumble upon this obscure corner of the Internet (probably looking for content about the Fantasy version of their own gridiron game - the one that rather conspicuously involves very little playing of the ball with the foot....).

[And apologies to any Canadian readers who feel overlooked. But you're probably used to it! I am well aware that your version of this holiday falls much earlier, on the 2nd Monday in October, as I lived in Toronto for a year-and-a-half in my youth. However, that holiday never embedded itself in my psyche, even when I was a resident in the country. You Canucks are not so, um, culturally assertive as your American cousins, I suppose.]

For some reason, Linus's pitiful obsession with The Great Pumpkin - an autumn-themed deity of his own invention - was always one of the things that most resonated with me in the classic 'Peanuts' cartoons. This superstition of his was actually associated with Halloween, but it is Thanksgiving, with its own emphasis on pumpkins, that always recalls it to my mind. 

Linus, of course, was convinced that The Great Pumpkin would appear only to him, if he created a pumpkin-patch that was worthy of the demi-god's attendance; and he'd wait patiently every year, full of expectation - but it never happened.  In much the same way, we FPL managers convince ourselves that, if we only take enough care over our selections, one day The Great Gameweek or The Great Chip Play will manifest itself only for us.  Like I said, pitiful.

Again with the metaphors, Mr Wade?

To pod, or not to pod....?

I have a little bit of a 'following' (dread word!) on some of the FPL forums where I comment most frequently, a small coterie of discerning readers who actually appreciate and enjoy my observerations (on football and on life, as much as FPL). And a few of these have even exhorted me once or twice - perhaps only in jest?! - to launch a podcast,...  to provide a more 'readily digestible' version of some of the more useful content from this blog (where I know that, in pursuit of clarity and thoroughness, I usually end up being too long-winded for modern tastes). I have been considering it.

In fact, I had thought that last week would be an especially opportune moment to drop an initial episode: I should have had a bit more time to prepare material over the international break; and it was looking like a particularly intriguing gameweek, with a wide open field of possibiliies for the captaincy (I had quipped online that there were probably "at least 20 more promising options than Haaland this week"; and indeed, 17 players did better than the 8 or 9 points which I think would have been the Viking's best reasonable expectation for the gameweek, and another 20-odd did about the same; but since he actually blanked, 99 players outscored him!!); and there are many intriguing problems approaching (the midwinter fixture logjam, the extra transfers being doled out for AFCON, many managers still having all or most of this year's extra chips to get rid of, and so on....). Gosh, yes - it was an unusually rich week for FPL discussion.

Ultimately, perhaps, there was rather too dauntingly much in the way of possible topics to choose from. And I didn't have much free time (friends visiting, job opportunities to chase, another big writing assignment to take care of....). Heck, I haven't even got very far with the first item on my Preparatory Checklist, which was shopping around to find a good, FREE online hosting platform. Then I realised there's an awful lot of background noise in my house (I've learned to tune most of it out, after so long of living in Asia; but I'm right by an intermittently busy road, there's a house under construction just a stone's-throw away, and my neighbours' kids are often quite exuberant... It's A LOT.); so, I probably can't muddle by with the onboard microphone on my decrepit old laptop, I'd have to shell out for a semi-decent mike & headphones set.

So, I think, if this ever happens, it won't be until after the holidays - sometime in January, at the very earliest. And quite possibly never.

And I'm really not sure I want to do it anyway. I am an intensely private person, and I don't like to reveal anything much of my true self online (the name I use here is only an alias; the many names that I use online are all aliases, always). I certainly wouldn't ever want anyone to know what I look like; and knowing what my voice sounds like is only a very small step away from that - to me, it feels similarly invasive, similarly compromising. And I am avowedly anti-narcissistic: I have absolutely no expectation that anyone should enjoy the sound of my voice, nor any desire for people to pay attention to me. (I do this blog and the forum comments primarily because I really enjoy writing [I've often made my living from it], not with any ambitions of becoming a large-scale 'influencer'.) 

I am intrigued by the challenge of trying to get to grips with a new medium of communication. But I confess that it is one about which I know next-to-nothing - which will doubtless be something of a handicap to my early endeavours!

Any advice, encouragement, or discouragement on this plan would be gratefully received!