Scheduled as an amuse-bouche before the main course that is the NFC Championship game, this will be the first English league match to be broadcast live on a major US network and follows on from the (relative) success of Fox’s live broadcast of the last two Champions League finals.

Just as those two games saw some basic attempts to explain the game to novice viewers, to make the unfamiliar seem familiar, Fox has felt the need to bring in a friendly face to explain the beauty of soccer* to an audience that is, perhaps understandably, more interested in the Giants taking on the 49ers. Clearly there’s no need to merely settle for as eloquent an analyst as former USA international Eric Wynalda when you can have the thoughts of this famed sports pundit.

Yep, it’s old Captain Bastard himself – Piers Morgan. Network chiefs in the US seem to be viewing Piers Morgan as a polymath. Not only has CNN been wheeling him out during the recent Republican primaries under the mistaken belief that he can provide searing political analysis, Fox is now working on the misapprehension that Morgan’s constant goading of Michael Owen on twitter is the work of a mind filled to the brim with sporting insights -  to think I didn’t push him into oncoming traffic when I had the chance.

*For those British readers who get all het up when I use the term “soccer” rather than “football”, please note I do so for the following reasons: 1) on a blog of this nature it avoids unnecessary confusion; 2) “soccer”, as detailed in a previous post, is not an Americanism; 3) the usage of soccer is frankly not that unusual back in the UK as evidenced by Gillette Soccer Saturday hosted by Jeff Stelling and if it’s good enough for Jeff Stelling then it most certainly is good enough for me.

“I’ve only got a twenty. Do you have any smaller bills?” asked the wife this Saturday as we found ourselves sat on the side of I-205 while traffic sped past us.
“No. Why?”
“For the AAA man when he comes.”
“Wait, we’re meant to tip the AAA guy?”
“We’re not meant to, I just thought that we could. So do you have anything smaller?”
“Of all the things I’m worrying about at the moment,” I said casting a glance at our car’s blown tire, “tipping the AAA guy, when he finally decides to show up, is not one of them.”
“So you’ve got nothing smaller then?”
“No, no, I have not.”

Resting Places and Starting Points

“In my father’s house.”

“…and Lord Beauclerk was bowled out by a ratcatcher.”

A grand old flag

Clueless Immigrant’s survival guide to the Super Bowl

Same lyrics, different melodies

A Clueless Immigrant’s Christmas

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At St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, I stopped and looked around its graveyard. A large stone tablet lain across a family grave told me that I was stood before the final resting place of Prince Lee Boo, the son of Abba Thulle, King of Palau, an island archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. In 1783 a ship of the East India company, the Antelope, was wrecked just off Palau. Those members of the crew fortunate enough to survive the wreck, including the ship’s captain, Henry Wilson, were, under the instruction of Abba Thulle, treated well by the people of Palau. Abba Thulle was impressed by the Englishmen’s technology, particularly their firearms and engineering skills. As the Englishmen crafted a vessel on the island to replace Antelope and which they intended to sail to China on, Abba Thulle asked Wilson if his second oldest son, Lee Boo, could return to England with him.

Leaving Palau, Lee Boo travelled to China and then on to England. During the long journey he charmed the Englishmen with his natural good humour. In England he was given a room in Henry Wilson’s home  in Rotherhithe and lived as one of the family.

 Two months after Prince Lee Boo’s arrival in London, he stood transfixed, one of a crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand who watched as Vincenzo Lunardi, along with a dog, a cat, and a pigeon, conducted the first balloon flight across the city. He met also with the poet George Keate who with the publication of a book on Lee Boo’s life would dictate the nobel savage narrative by which Lee Boo would be remembered – that of a charming curiosity. Only five months after his arrival in London, Lee Boo contracted smallpox. On the 27th of December, 1784, aged probably around twenty, Prince Lee Boo died and was buried in St Mary’s.

Though the precise spot is not known - there is no ornate family grave, no headstone to read - in this graveyard lies Christopher Jones, a merchant sailor, who was buried in St Mary’s in 1622. A resident of Rotherhithe, Jones captained and part-owned a ship that he moored in the Thames, only a stone’s throw from St Mary’s. In 1620, Jones’s ship, an old wine vessel that had mainly seen service importing claret into England, was contracted to take 102 passengers, mostly English Dissenters, to North Virginia. Here in the shadow of St Mary’s, Christopher Jones unmoored his ship, the Mayflower, and began to sail it out towards Southampton. There he would be joined by the Dissenters who he was to take to the other side of the world and leave them there so that they could start a new society. Perhaps Jones struggled to understand these pious men and women. Perhaps he was threatened or bemused by their zealous belief that the parish of St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, where Jones had had his children baptized, and England, where he was to return to be with his family, were all irredemable in God’s eyes, or perhaps he was simply happy to fulfil his contract to sail them out of the Old World and into the New, just as Henry Wilson would later sail Prince Lee Boo out of the New and into the Old.    

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If you want to stay discombobulated, don’t forget you can subscribe to Culturally Discombobulated using the email subscription button on the right hand side of the screen. Or, if you are a real masochist, you can follow me on twitter at @C_Immigrant or at @awindram.

A young woman leaned in close to him and politely answered his inquiry about her plans for Thanksgiving.
“Well,” she whispered conspiratorially, ”my main plans are for Black Friday.”
Black Friday? It was a term he was not familiar with. It sounded ominous. The knowing intonation with which she spoke alarmed him. Had he inadvertently stumbled upon a grand conspiracy? Was Black Friday, he wondered, a revival of the notorious Black Hand? He had his suspicions. The woman might be a nihilist – he was suspicious because of the scuffed shoes she wore. Was this Black Friday some dissident group she was involved in? She must have mistaken him for a co-conspirator. Or perhaps she was not a political agitator but a foolhardy soul dabbling in the black arts? He vowed to dig deeper into this Black Friday and discover what malignant intent it had.
“So,” he asked, ”what happens at Black Friday?”
She smiled. “Mayhem.”

In this almost empty coffee shop three elderly women, lifelong friends perhaps, crowd round a table and converse over iced tea. They talk at length about their new pastor, about his energy and his youthfulness. They talk at length about angels, about their unwavering belief in them and their experiences of them. The loudest of the women, her hair an unconvincing shade of red, starts to talk about her youngest granddaughter, about how she’s as sharp as a tack, but hasn’t she started asking the trickiest of questions. The red-haired woman confides to her two companions that she has spoken with their youthful and energetic pastor about how to respond to these questions.
         For instance, she tells the other two, only the other day the granddaughter had said, ”Grandma, why do we have to go to Church?” 
          She was, she freely admits, flummoxed by how to answer, but then she remembered the pastor’s words. “Aw, sweetie, that’s a matter of faith.”
          Yesterday, she continues, when she was driving her granddaughter home from school the girl had asked, “Grandma, why do we call trees trees?”
          She once again patiently said to her granddaughter, “Aw, sweetie, that’s a matter of faith.” 
         In the almost empty coffee shop the three women gently laugh at the ridiculous things that children say, take a sip of iced tea, and start talking about angels again.

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If you want to stay discombobulated, don’t forget you can subscribe to Culturally Discombobulated using the email subscription button on the right hand side of the screen. Or, if you are a real masochist, you can follow me on twitter at @C_Immigrant or at @awindram.

“These Americans represent the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.” Harold Macmillan

“We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ* as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”  Harold Macmillan in a letter to Richard Crossman

Macmillan, who like Churchill had an American socialite for a mother, often framed the Anglo-American relationship patronisingly as Britain playing the role of Athens to America’s Rome.  It could, as seen from Macmillan’s letter to Crossman, be both a highly paternalistic and highly cynical view of  how Britain’s superiority as perceived by Macmillan could be used to manipulate US administrations. While only the most deluded of Little Englanders would today feel that the UK government is capable of machiavellianly manipulating the US for its own ends, a feeling of superiority can still be found in some of my compatriots. Their reasoning often goes like this: While our political and economic influence has diminished, our cultural influence carries on.

And what is our real cultural influence over this new Roman Empire? Well tonight in homes across the new Roman Empire, the New Romans are able to wallow in their decline while watching the latest cultural offerings from the New Athenians. In the morning they can watch Jeremy Kyle, Reading’s finest, scream at young black men on his tabloid talk show. In the evening they can watch Simon Cowell laugh as Paula Abdul screams when a mentally disturbed man exposes his flabby self on stage while trying to sing a Lionel Ritchie song. Tomorrow they can watch Gordon Ramsey faux-vomit after eating a crab cake. Beware of the New Greeks bearing gifts – cos it’s bound to be shitty  TV.  

*Allied Forces Head Quarters

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If you want to stay discombobulated, don’t forget you can subscribe to Culturally Discombobulated using the email subscription button on the right hand side of the screen. Or, if you are a real masochist, you can follow me on twitter at @C_Immigrant or at @awindram.