http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/living-with-music-a-playlist-by-nick-hornby/

…of dividing the world is separating those who can quote Dylan lyrics and those who can’t. Be honest: in which camp would you have placed George Foreman, former heavyweight boxer? But here’s George, interviewed in Dave Zirin’s excellent book about sport and the left, ‘What’s My Name, Fool?’

 “I was awakened by a young Anglo-Saxon boy from Tacoma, Washington, named Richard Kibble…..He would always play me Bob Dylan. I would hear those lyrics, “Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re walking ‘long the street/They’ll stone ya when you’re trying to keep your seat/ They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ on the floor/They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ to the door….”I hope I didn’t get that wrong…..I had a thing about those Bob Dylan songs, boy. “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”

I hope Bob’s seen that. He’d be chuffed, I think. 

My friend Tom Shone is knocking on doors in Ohio, canvassing for Barack Obama, and blogging about it here.

http://tomshone.blogspot.com/

Tom is English, although he’s been living in New York for a few years now; considering that we’re at war in Iraq and Afghanistan because of our relationship with the US, it seems only right that an Englishman is given a chance to affect the outcome of the forthcoming election. I hope he doesn’t blow it.

…or so ago – right around the time that my first book Fever Pitch was published – the atmosphere in our football stadia began to change. Hooliganism, at least inside the grounds, began to disappear, and, regrettably, the noise levels began to drop. This was an inevitable consequence of a number of things: the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster, which put an end to the vast, intimidating terraces where the most vocal supporters gathered, the drastic increases in season-ticket prices that forced out younger fans, and so on.  Because of the coincidence in timing, Fever Pitch itself used to cop some of the blame: according to some of the less rigorous thinkers on the sports pages, the publication and success of the book prompted a lot of middle-class sissies (because who else would read books, apart from middle-class sissies?) to push out the proper fans and take the game over. I used to fret about this – had my book really played a part in wrecking football?  But it seemed to me, even at my most paranoid, that in the end Rupert Murdoch’s money and an agonising disaster had had more to do with the change than I could claim credit for.

 At Thursday’s Arsenal AGM, Arsene Wenger seemed to complain about the lack of support at home games (although he was talking, specifically, about the dismal atmosphere – which matched the dismal performance – during the first half of the most recent match), and, after all these years, Fever Pitch got blamed all over again. John Cross in the Daily Mirror thinks that the Emirates “has become a place for too many corporates and the Nick Hornby brigade of ‘new trendy fans’ with the older, more vociferous ones being in the minority.” Fever Pitch was published in 1992, and the bulk of its sales took place between 1993 and 1995, when the paperback was published. I don’t believe that these “new trendy fans” really exist, or at least, not in the way Mr Cross seems to think. (The corporates, of course, clearly do – there are all sorts of boxes and Club Level tiers full of them.) But even if they did, how long do they have to attend games for before they’re no longer new and trendy? Because they must have been watching Arsenal for a minimum of ten years now. Reading sentences like that is like listening to mistrustful, small-minded villagers who won’t talk to “newcomers” because they only moved in twenty or thirty years ago.

  I am fifty-one, and I’ve been going to Arsenal for forty years; the average age of a Premiership spectator is, according to a survey a year or so back, forty-three. If football is to survive, then that probably needs to come down a decade or two, which means welcoming newcomers, rather than pouring scorn on them for not having been before. In most areas of life, converts are welcomed; that’s how sport and the arts stay alive. Not football, though. “Where were you when we were shit?” is the chant of the sneery tabloid sports journalist, and it looks as though it will stay that way forever.

…who have not been following the US Presidential election in great detail might be mystified by John McCain’s obsession with a man named Bill Ayers. Back when Obama was a kid, Ayers used to belong to the Weather Underground, the radical dissident group involved in occasionally violent protest against the Vietnam War; for the last twenty-odd years he has been a respected professor of education at the University of Illinois. Obama knows Ayers – they have sat on a couple of not-for-profit education boards together – which is why McCain and Sarah Palin have accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists”. It is, of course, a pathetic non-issue: if the Republicans are really so concerned about Ayers’ past and his political affiliations, they’d be better off voicing their worries to the University of Illinois, who seem happy to employ him to mould young minds – young minds which are then being sent out into the world to mould even younger minds.

 In the comments under an article entitled ‘10 Things To Know About Bill Ayers’ on Lynn Sweet’s  Chicago Sun-Times blog, one Obama-baiting correspondent unwittingly blows McCain’s whole ‘argument’: 

If Osama bin Laden suddenly became a professor of education would we now feel it is ok to associate with him? No! no one in their right mind would even speak to the man! How is this any different?

Can anyone answer that? Can anyone else see the difference between Osama Bin Laden and Bill Ayers, a man who faced no charges even when he gave himself up to the police twenty-eight years ago?

 I love the idea that Bin Laden might “suddenly” become a professor of education at an American university.  Wouldn’t the department smell a rat at some point – if not on receipt of his job application, then maybe during the interview? (“You seem awfully familiar, Mr Bin Laden. Have we seen you on TV?”) And surely his CV would have a few holes in it? Is it really so easy to enter American academia when you’ve been living in a cave for seven years? Best of all, though, is the huffy indignation in the penultimate sentence: “No-one in their right mind would even speak to the man!” That’s what would happen to Osama if he started lecturing in Illinois: he’d be sent to Coventry.  That would teach him a lesson.

Meanwhile. McCain happily refers to his countrymen as “my fellow prisoners”…

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0mBi7d6e5KI

…and nobody seems too concerned. If I were an American voter, I’d worry more about a seventy-two-year-old man who seems to have a real difficulty in accessing the right words under pressure than I would about Obama’s relationship with a university professor and author. 

…with Neil Hannity on Fox in the US a couple of weeks ago, Sarah Palin defended John McCain’s use of a phrase that is coming back to haunt him:

HANNITY: Senator Barack Obama yesterday was attacking Senator McCain for saying that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. Do you believe that the fundamentals of our economy are strong?
 
 PALIN: Well, it was an unfair attack on the verbiage that Senator McCain chose to use. The fundamentals that he was having to explain afterwards, he means the work force, he means ingenuity of the American people. And of course, that is strong, that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack based on verbiage that John McCain used. Certainly, it is a mess, though.

It was a typically Palinesque answer which managed to demonstrate both her ignorance (she thinks “verbiage” means “words”, unless she believes that “verbage”, which is what she seemed to say in the interview, is actually a word) and her baffling rhetorical style. That last sentence would be a losing concession, coming from the lips of most politicians.

Let’s take her defence at face value, and accept that “the fundamentals” means both “the work force” and “the ingenuity of the American people”. Why does he never seem to explain this? The Youtube clip below shows that he’s had plenty of opportunity. Why doesn’t he vary the phrasing sometimes? Get a little work force/ingenuity action going?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAKGyhiE7SE