pots and tots

Dear Friends, thanks for checking in.

I'm still fiddling with the format and font. I'd like the color scheme to be orange, blue and white, and generally gray. I hope to have things looking better by Friday. Go RSA!

It seems that teams are experiencing some pre-tourny troubles as well. In addition to the injuries experienced by British and Ivory Coast stars, the New Zealand team failed to carry off its first practice in South Africa yesterday. Reuters reported that the NZ team, (rather unfortunately, in post-apartheid South Africa, named the 'All Whites') cut training short when "smoke from a surrounding township made a full work-out a threat to the players health."


Apparently,


"Impoverished households use wood fires and paraffin to keep warm and to cook and the smoke left a low white blanket wafting over Sinaba Stadium...," which is the All Whites' training field, located near a township outside Johannesburg. The team chose the site "....as it was identified as the best facility near the upmarket Serengeti Golf and Wildlife Estate" where the team is housed.

Get ready for a lot of this from the international press;

"The immaculate turf and good seats in the stadium are in stark contrast to the litter and run-down homes outside."

(I'll post links to actual urls when I learn how---help Mercury!)

In any event we'll have lots of time to examine the 'shocking' poverty and dismayed discoveries of divisions of wealth in RSA. What I want to discuss today is Fifa's provokative contention that the World Cup is based on GEOGRAPHY and RANK, which as I said yesterday I find very suspicious terms.

Take geography: The thirty-two teams are drawn from four 'pots' that allegedly represent three geographical regions, as well as one pot based on Fifa's ranking (the 'seeded' pot).

Here are the four pots: you tell me if you can detect any kind of geographical logic to The Order of Things:

Pot One: (Host and top 7)

South Africa, Brazil, Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Argentina, England.

Pot Two: (Asia, North America and Oceania)

Australia, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Honduras, Mexico, United States and New Zealand.

Pot Three: (Africa and South America)

Algeria, Cameroon, Cote de'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay.

Pot Four: (Europe)

Denmark, France, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland.

The groups are constituted from a draw of one team from each of four pots for eight groups.

Clearly, the geographical imaginations that serve as the foundational assumptions of the 'pots' go a long way to organizing the production of the 'rankings.'

More tomorrow, unless I am called to California to attend to family crisis. (Games are on at 4:30 AM PST---gr0an)>