ziasudra

I was way too incoherent yesterday to post about the charity football game held at Chinatown's Sara D. Roosevelt Park that I went to. Got out of work early (by my standards, anyway; I rarely leave before 5:30 nowadays) and headed straight for the park. Didn't get to go inside the soccer field but managed to snatch a decent spot outside the fence where I could actually see the happenings inside. That was quite a big accomplishment, for

ziasudra = short.

Of course, being short and on the wrong side of the fence meant what pictures I attempted to take turned out crappy. The camera was very good at focusing on the wired fence while blurring the people in the background, lol. But! I did take some pictures with (vaguely) identifiable athletes in semi-focus. And the fact that, at multiple points during the game, Steve Nash (!) and Jason Kidd (!) were running toward me (er... toward my general direction and separated by three rows of people and a fence) to within a five-foot distance totally made up for my lack of good-quality pictures. *g*

( A few pictures behind the cut: Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Thierry Henry )

Before I left the game, I asked a random guy in front of me who took a bunch of really good pictures if he could email some of them to me. He said yes, but that it'd take a few days before he'll get to it. I hope to wake up to awesome pictures in my Inbox in the very near future ;)

My overall reaction to the game?

asjklfdasd;jldioajksfdl

So much love. :D

Current Mood: bouncy

As seen in today’s issue of the Metro:

"[Steve] Nash and a group of all-world athletes, including Claudio Reyna, Thierry Henry and Baron Davis will be kicking off a caged soccer match at Nike Field at Sara D. Roosevelt Park this afternoon...

"...The 'Showdown in Chinatown' starts at 5:30 p.m."

Steve Nash!!!

Thierry Henry!!!

Other athletes who I don't know but I'm sure they're awesome!!!

Now, my question is whether "this afternoon" corresponds to "5:30 p.m." If it does, then sweet, 'cause I'll be able to stop by the park right after work. Even if all I get to see is a distant glimpse of Nash & Henry et. al., I'll still end up one happy

ziasudra.

Current Mood: hopeful

Argh! Stupid evening church service made me miss most of the U.S. Open finals :p Good thing I caught the very end and got to see Federer crowned as the first in tennis history to win three consecutive U.S. Open titles as well as three consecutive Wimbleton titles.

But as impressive as Federer was (is), the tennis highlight of the day for me was seeing this full-page ad dedicated to one of the tennis world's all-time greatest players, Andre Agassi (w00t!). I'll miss watching him play.

( The text of the ad says it well: )

Tonight's statistics:

R.Federer	6	4	7	6
A.Roddick	2	6	5	1

And on the women's tennis front, Sharapova won her first US Open championship.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Damien Rice -- Volcano

OMG, Zidane, WTF?!?

[ETA 4:21 p.m.] Okay, Zidane is red-carded, and Henry is substituted out. So who does the French team have left to lead the team? I guess the best tactic now is to hold out for a tie. Italy doesn't have the best track record when it comes to penalty kicks, after all. ~~Not that I want Italy to lose.~~

Current Mood: shocked

Brazil is in the spotlight today.

First, Brazil defeated Australia 2-0 and advances in the World Cup. Not the best game ever, Sports Illustrated calls it an umimpressive win over Australia. But you can still tell that the Brazilian team has skill, lots of it. And as for Australia, even though they lost, I believe they played well. Brazil will play again on Thursday, against Japan.

Brazil is also in the news for its 2.2 million GLBT march. BBC reports: Crowds celebrate Brazil Gay Pride. For pictures,

ptyx has a post about it here. As the pictures are about GLBT marchers, warning applies for GLBT content.

[ETA 12:33 a.m.: f;jklwad!!!!! Heat defeats Mavericks, 101-100! dsajf;kjl Go Dwayne Wade!]

Current Mood: nervous... for the Heat
Current Music: Mavericks @ Heat -- Game 5

Weirdest. World. Cup. Game. Ever.

Three sent off as USA deny Italy in World cup drama

USA tied Italy with a 1-1 game, only... it wasn't a USA player who scored. Italian player Alberto Gilardino knocked a free kick ball into Italy's own net. I can't imagine what kind of reception he's getting from Italian football fans right now.

Not to mention that the referees for this game were overly sensitive. Two red cards and a third after Eddie Pope got a second yellow card. A ton of offside calls. Then toward the end of the game? Hardly any calls at all. They couldn't even win sympathy points for being consistent!

In the end, USA played with nine players while Italy played with 10. The American players were all really tired by the end. (Why didn't Bruce Arena use the last substitute?) Goalie Kasey Keller made some great saves against Italian goal attempts, but overall, the game was kind of blah and very strange.

Now for something LJ-related:

dailycharacter is being featured on the LJ front page. It's a community that teaches a Chinese character a day. Today's word is 烘 (roasting/drying with heat). Pretty cool ^_^

Current Mood: weird
Current Music: Stanley Cup final game 6 -- Carolina @ Edmonton

It's been a week of two soccer/football games every afternoon and a basketball game every other night. Very exciting.

Football/Soccer
I don't know too much about soccer and have no particular team I'm rooting for (frankly, I'll be cheering for Italy as much as for the U.S.A. when they play on Saturday), so it's great to be watching many teams play each day. Admittedly, even I can tell that some teams play better than others. Take the England vs. Trinidad and Tobago game today, for example. Trinidad's only hope was to keep England from scoring, which they didn't, and had no real chance of making goals. Their defense was so thin that if I didn't know there were equal number of players on both teams, I would have thought that England outnumbered Trinidad in players 2:1. England, on the other hand, had good players in every position. Their teamwork was much more coordinated than Trinidad's, and there really wasn't any scare of them losing the game, just maybe tying with a scoreless 0-0. But they won anyway ^_^

As for the Sweden vs. Paraguay game, I felt really bad that Sweden scored at the very end of the game. I think the Paraguay goalie did a great job despite the scoring; he blocked many goal atetmpts in the 87 minutes before the shot was made. The Spanish channel (yes, I watch the Spanish channel for the World Cup because here in NJ the house doesn't get ESPN) showed a shot of the goalie on the verge of tears after the game was over. Sadness :(

And as a rule, I never get up early enough to watch the first game of the day ^_^;; This *might* change tomorrow since I want to watch Argentina play. But assuming Argentina will likely defeat Serbia and Montenegro, I might wait for the next round to watch Hernan Crespo play.

Basketball
Yay to the Miami Heat for holding down the fort and playing a strong home game! Now the NBA Championship is tied 2-2 in a best-of-seven series. The Heat's lead was as great as 24 points at a point, and held it till the end of the game. Now, this is the team that was behind by 13 with six minutes to go in the last game but turned the game around to win it in the end!

Dallas' Nowitzki was 2 for 14 in field goal attempts today. He seemed to have injured his ankle at some point in the second half of the game. I'm totally not rooting for the Mavericks, but to see a star player performing so off-color tonight was concern-worthy nontheless.

Final score, 98-74, Heat win. *g*

Current Mood: sporty
Current Music: Mavericks @ Heat, Game 4

Olympics
Women's snowboard cross not winning a silver, but losing a gold, wtf?!? I feel soooo bad for Lindsey Jacobellis. She's only 20, and this was the first time the Olympics had the snowboard cross event, ever. I find myself wishing that it's 2008 and Jacobellis finally winning a gold to shed herself of the "losing gold last-minute" image she now bears. It's unlikely, though, knowing how fast the champion turnover rate is for the X Sports.

On the other hand, Seth Wescott and girlfriend Tanja Frieden will both leave the Olympics with matching snowboard cross gold medals. I find that kinda cute :)

Field Trip!
So, today was the day 30 middle school kiddies went to the Jewish Immigration museum. It was chaotic, it was fun. The students were a lot more attentive to the tour guide than I expected, and I'm convinced that some even walked away learning something. Score one for middle school education!

The most fun part for me was herding 30 hungry teenagers into a McDonald's. Boy, can those kiddies eat! Well, the guys, at least. Some of the girls are getting to that health conscious age when they wouldn't want to eat anything (though boxes of fries still graced their tables). I had a filet-o-fish meal. Don't know why, but I've been craving greasy, deep fried slabs of fish lately.

So, at the end of the day, I'm alive, and all 30 kiddies are happy, well fed, and generally well. I'd be interested in taking them on another field trip again :)

[ETA: Philippines landslide... I have not words :( :( :(]

Current Mood: incredulous

1.
Michigan State at Ohio State, going into double overtime. Even up until the last 12 seconds of the game (of the second OT), the game was only one point apart. *heart races*

Final score: 62-59, MSU Spartans win.

2.
On another sports note, figure skater Michelle Kwan was named to the 2006 Winter Olympic team even though she could not compete in the U.S. Nationals due to an injury. The decision was made after the Nationals competition, by a panel of the International Committee.

A couple of Associated Press articles: Kwan gets trip to Turin, Cohen gets title, Decision to put Kwan on Olympic team shrouded in secrecy

3.
And on a totally unrelated note, check out my pokémon!

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: MSU vs. OH St

Happy Kwanzaa, December 26, 2005 - January 1, 2006!

Kwanzaa is a rather young celebration, established in 1966 by African American Ron Karenga. More information on Kwanzaa here, or visit the official Kwanzaa Web site.

Kingdom Hearts
I spent most of the day playing Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. The game's a year old; it was made in anticipation of the release of Kingdom Hearts 2 on PlayStation2 this winter. But the release date of Kingdom Hearts 2 kept getting delayed (latest: April 2006), so I have time to catch up on Chain of Memories before Boy Cousin gets the sequel in the spring.

Needless to say, I didn't do anything productive whatsoever. *g*

Goodbye, Monday Night Football!
Well, not the game itself. Goodbye to Monday Night Football's 36-year broadcast on ABC. Starting next year, ESPN will take over broadcasting Monday night football games. This is like the end of an American era. I'm not much of an American football fan, but I remembered knowing about Monday Night Football long before I became entirely fluent in English when I first moved to America. Football is an American icon. But no longer on ABC.

Short and sweet from ABC News: ABC Bids Farewell to Monday Night Football

And the game that the final broadcast covered: Patriots Surge to 28-7 Lead Over Jets. That's the third-quarter score. I'm pretty sure Patriots has snatched the victory.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: TV

I'm back in NYC, which means, among other things, that I now have channel USA! Men's quarterfinals going on right now, Agassi vs. Blake. I was out in class and at small group and didn't get back until the fourth set of the game. But as I turned on the TV... Agassi just served three aces in a row! *hearts*

While the game progresses...
Egyptian presidential election going on right now, but unless something completely unexpected happens, Mubarak is going to win. New York Times: Egypt Holds a Multiple-Choice Vote, but the Answer Is Mubarak. Times Online: Voters shun a pretend election.

Went to my first class today, The Anthropology of Intervention: Development, Human Rights Humanitarianism. Very interesting topic, especially given the recent disaster in New Orleans. What defines a crisis? Who determines who needs help (intervention)? Who has control (or should have control) over issues regarding development, human rights, and/or humanitarianism? What role does the media play in development and relief efforts? What role does the government play? Fascinating questions, these are. We started with probing these questions with the Hurricane Katrina case study (it feels so weird to call something so "real" a case study...), but will eventually move onto examples in the Middle East.

If anyone cares, the course description is behind the cut.

( Anthropology of Intervention... )

Okay, now back to the U.S. Open game I've been watching. A wild card in the U.S. Open, James Blake is a power player. He defeated Raphael Nadal earlier in the series, and won two straight sets, both 6-3, in tonight's game. He's also younger. Much younger. Twenty-five to Agassi's 35. Andre Agassi, on the other hand, has experience. He's also a very smart player. He knows that he's no match for Blake in terms of pure power, so he pulls out all his tricks: going close to the net, playing different swings, etc. And I must say, he's doing very well for a 35-year-old. The fight and stamina that he showed when he came back from losing the first two sets was amazing.

Fifth set tie-breaker! Final score: 3-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-6 (8-6). Yeah, Agassi!

So Agassi will play Ginepri for the semi-finals!!! Eeeeeee!

As I have never seen the legendary Agassi vs. Sampras match, tonight's match is close enough to a déjà vu, my time.
.

Current Mood: ecstatic
Current Music: OMG Heart Pounding

So many things that happened in the past day had me squeeing with joy, but I feel like such a heartless brute to be blogging about comparatively trivial things while the rest of the world is in turmoil: Katrina, the Iraqi bridge collapse and stampede—just to name the two recent big headlines. So I guess this is a disclaimer. My heart does go out for all the worldwide occurrences, happy tone of my LJ notwithstanding.

Regarding Katrina, especially a few articles about the New Orleans mayor:
EXTENDED RESOURCE LIST HERE.
Washington Post—After the Deluge, New Orleans' Mayor Nagin Stands His Ground
MSNBC—New Orleans mayor blasts federal response
WWL Radio (transcribed, not official or affiliated with WWL): Interview transcript with Mayor Nagin
BBC—Rescue effort falls short -->

A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City.

"But by 2003, the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war."

I have no idea whether Katrina damage could have been prevented even if all federal money went into flood control. But reading this was very sobering.

For those of you in the New York City area, you might be interested in a post of mine over at

hpkatrinarelief, the biggest (as in most number of members and watchers) Katrina-focused LJ community I could find to date. Details here.

OK, now onto Ziasudra's RL updates...

( My Interview... )

( U.S. Open! )
.

Current Mood: gleeful
Current Music: Boy Cousin playing the piano

Time flies. It's been three months since my copyediting stint, and two months since the last time I worked with my middle schoolers. *misses them muchly*

The new thing on the horizon for me is—an interview on September 1, with Dime, a basketball magazine!

I'm excited about this, though I'm also a bit worried. I don't know how much they expect me to know about basketball going into the interview. I mean, I like basketball and all (lol, I'm sure you lot have noticed), but I'm a fan, not a commentator. I don't know Coach A from Coach B, Manager X from Manager Y. But I'm excited nonetheless. ~~Not only because if I get the internship, I can drop a class and replace it by taking the internship for credit.~~

And while we're on the subject of sports: U.S. Open Begins Today. My uncle got tickets to a game. *envies* I'm not following it too closely yet, since it's still the beginning of a two-week tournament. But I'm rooting for Agassi and my newfound favorite Nadal, and it'd be nice to see Davenport coming back to win some matches too, even though she's not pinned to win the series. Speaking of whom, Agassi is playing right now, on Channel USA (which I don't have *sobs*).

Here's an interesting article from the L.A. Times about the different emphases on men's and women's tennis: Winning is Federer's Style, After a Fashion.
.

Current Mood: sporty
Current Music: Cartoon Network, hee!

Roger Federer wins the Western & Sourthern Financial Group Masters, part of the U.S. Open series, defeating Andy Roddick 6-3, 7-5

I’m thinking about booking tickets for the U.S. Open, since Flushing Meadows is only a subway ride away. But the available tickets I can reserve through the Cornell Club are on bad dates, and I’m not sure if I can afford tickets without the group discount.

I wonder if

sunnydlita can hook me up with any insiders info? *nudges*

In the event that I do have enough spending money for tickets… anyone interested in going with me?
.

Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: T.V. -- tennis

Rafael Nadal defeats Andre Agassi this afternoon to snatch the Roger Cup in a three-set game: Nadal, then Agassi, then finally Nadal. Final stats: 6-3, 4-6, 6-2.

Nadal was good. Extremely talented and ever so dependable in returning the ball back to the other side of the net (a difficult feat in playing hard court tennis), this 19-year-old Spaniard earned his title fair and square.

Although one must wonder: if unseeded Paul-Henri Mathieu hadn't outed Andy Roddick in the opening round, so that Nadal defeated Mathieu in second round in straight sets (6-4, 7-5), what would the finals game look like? Would it have still been Agassi vs. Nadal, or perhaps Agassi vs. Roddick?

Hmm... I can't seem to find any articles on the win to link yet. Am I too fast for the Internet sports news?!? Heh, probably not, but my news sources are mostly American and British, and the Roger Cup is hosted in Montréal. Maybe that's why.

Or I'm just incompetent at navigating the espn Web site. The only thing I found is a picture with the caption: "Rafael Nadal is one win away from his first hard-court title." Old news by now.
.

Current Mood: disappointed (me = Agassi fan)

Post-Game Squee

Star Athletes Are Coming to Town...

Federer Wins US Open

Headbutting?

Brazil, Brazil, in the news

USA vs. Italy

Sports Rambling

Snowboarding & Kiddies

Aaand the results are...

Kwanzaa, Kingdom Hearts, and Football

AGASSI WINS!!! (at 1:15 a.m., that is)

September 1 Happenings

Ball Games and Internship

ATP Tennis Tournament

Rafael Nadal Wins Roger Cup

Profile

January 2011

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags