The Machine Girl (2008)

The trailer below will give you a feel for just how much blood is gushing around in this movie.

Most of it is the kind of ridiculously OTT gore that forms the essential ingredient of these low budget Japanese shockers, but there were moments when the contents of my own insides seemed to be dashing towards the exit.

Ami is just an ordinary high school girl until her brother is murdered by a gang headed up by the offspring of a particularly objectionable clan of ninjas turned yakuza. Her early attempts at revenge result in capture and the removal of her right arm. After escaping she hides out at a local mechanic's shop and it so happens that he has the skills to build her a new limb with several deadly weapons incorporated, most notably a chain gun.

The essential awfulness of such movies should never extend to the performances and the production work, as unfortunately it does here. Still, amusing enough for those with strong stomachs and a soft spot for the genre, drill bras et al.

Grade: B (-)

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #26

46m long and 15m high, this stunning gold-plated statue — the centrepiece of the Temple of the Reclining Buddha within Wat Pho — illustrates the passing of the Buddha into nirvana. The statue was added to the wat in 18232 to mark the Rama III restoration.

Mamalita's...don't take your best shirt

There are two places in the environs of San Bartolo's plazuela that the locals like to go on Sundays to partake of traditional Guatemalan grub. One is called Mamalita's, and the other...well, just don't.

With our appetites already somewhat blunted by the 'gastronomic' festival, we headed in that direction around one o'clock yesterday. To be honest this was already a little late, because Mamalita's is at its buzziest in the late morning (Sundays only). It's the closest thing to a local equivalent of Spain's pinxos /tapas culture — a place to have a beer and a few snacks before going home for the meal proper, typically consumed a couple of hours after what would normally be considered lunchtime.

This friendly, unsophisticated institution is perhaps best known for its enchiladas (Q10 each, eat-in), but I've never felt up to tackling one of these without a bib...or at least a tatty, desechable t-shirt. On this occasion we ordered some salpicón (shredded beef salad) and guacamol with tortillas to go with our litro of Gallo (above).

Much of the food we've been cooking this week has featured the native herb/weed chipilín. We bought a substantial quantity one afternoon at the market and spent much of the subsequent evening painstakingly stripping the leaves off the stalks. (They can leave a bitter taste.)

The last of it went into V's dish below: seared tuna in a parsley, lime and pepper sauce accompanied by pitta bread and a rice cooked in the pan with chipilín, corn, ejotes, broccoli, cauliflower, raisins and hierbabuena. She sprinkled fresh Italian parmesan over it...as she does with most things, while it lasts. A dash of smoky pimentón also went in, but only after the rice had been fried with the other ingredients. All went down well with Baltika No7.

Same old, same old

This weekend Antigua hosted a disappointingly lame gastronomic festival. V had warned me not to have a big breakfast yesterday because we'd soon be gorging ourselves on interesting Guatemalan goodies, but I already had my suspicions that it would be more enticing to people with cameras than those with plastic spoons.

We stayed about half an hour from twelve thirty until one. It had kicked off at midday and already things were getting disheveled and the cooks representing the various aldeas were apparently having difficulty keeping some of the concoctions warm in their earthenware pots.

V's expectations of discovering something unusual were not met. I can't imagine there were many people there who'd never tried a pepián or revolcado.

Given the corporate sponsorship, the prices were a bit silly frankly. In the end we paid Q20 for a rather miserly portion of pollo con crema y loroco, most of which went back home for the dog. It was essentially a boney piece of chicken covered in cream and butter with a barely perceptible aftertaste of loroco, accompanied by agglutinative white rice.

Some of the selections were very well presented, others less so. San Juan del Obispo made a superior effort it has to be said, and the chef (above) was happy to have his picture taken, unlike some of the viejas amargadas I could mention!

I sometimes despair at the quality of local 'gastronomy'. When people learn to cook here they simply learn to cook the stuff that everyone knows how to cook. A sense of what one might achieve given a little passion and creativity doesn't seem to form part of any of the courses taught here. (Indeed, one woman who had recently graduated as a 'chef' was critical of V for adding basil to her pasta once. Apparently la albahaca is for medicinal purposes only. Gnnngh.)

And it is such a pity, because given the availability of ingredients this could so easily be a gastronomic paradise. But the locals seem to revel in the rutinario, or perhaps are simply afraid to experiment, and most of the visitors don't seem to expect all that much (nor wish to pay for it.)

Anyway, as if by way of compensation we moved on to Mamalita's afterwards, where we knew we'd get some decent traditional fare. (More on that ragged little institution later.) And in the evening we much enjoyed Felipe's caldo de mariscos, which is actually a match for any old tom yam you might already be acquainted with.

So this morning I was resigned to having some serious timba trouble and to have no real idea what the root cause of it had been, but I appear to be in the clear so far (apart from the colic attack brought on by this post!)

Museum Pieces #1

Olmec jade head, from between 1200 and 400 BC. (British Museum)

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #25

This soup is completely out of order!

Local lipdub

200 out of the 396 inhabitants of Herreruela, a small community close to Toledo, perform a very Spanish version of Waka Waka.

The Book of Eli (2009)

I might not have held out much hope for this movie if I'd read the screenplay in advance, but this rather bizarre genre mish-mash — The Road meets Mad Max 2 meets Pale Rider meets...here comes a spoiler, Zatoichi — has benefited from a superior implementation. The cast is particularly stellar: Denzel Washington plays Eli, a 'walker' carrying the last copy of the King James Bible some thirty years after a war/solar flare event has re-primitivised things considerably (though there still seems to be some stockpiles of fossil fuels for those who prefer n0t to walk.)

Eli has been heading West for three decades, a fact that seems a little less absurd once the movie has delivered its big reveal. Gary Oldman plays the township headman desperately seeking a copy of the good book so that he can exploit its potential for manipulating the needy. This apparent recognition of the bad news aspect of the biblical message makes up in part for the fanciful Christian fervour otherwise emanating from this story.

Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour put in nice little cameos as an ageing couple holding out in what seems to be the last farm-house on the charred remains of the great plains. Tom Waits also shows up as a shopkeeper for whom KFC freshening wipes are a valuable commodity and Malcolm McDowell (uncredited) as the man piecing civilisation back together book by book, who has an unassuming little space on his shelf for the book of Eli.

Grade: B(+)

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #24

Statues of musicians, Sawasdee House cafe-bar, Soi Rambutri, Bangkok.

Possesion (1981)

Back in 1983 the New York Times movie critic Vincent Canby reported how Zulawski's cult movie reveals a familiar cultural divide: "One critic reported that the Cannes audience was ''traumatized'' by it. New York audiences may be reduced to helpless laughter." In other words, Possession will either be the most ludicrous film you have ever seen...or you are a pretentious European.

Now here's the thing. This movie shouldn't really have worked for me. In fact it shouldn't work for anybody, but I have a known immunity to the kind of spiritual upheaval that movies like The Exorcist supposedly induce. On a fundamental level, I can't take personifications of evil all that seriously. And yet, although far from traumatised, I was thoroughly entertained, and yes, to a certain extent, disturbed.

It appears that the actors were instructed to deliver their lines — more often than not apparently scripted by a committee of depraved psychotics with phrasebook English — at an emotional pitch fluctuating in and out of what would generally be regarded as normal. Every so often however there are little gems of more lucid dialogue which catch the attention, as if emerging from a neblina of nonsense. ("For the first time you look vulgar to me..." Sam Neil also spouts a lot of stuff about a dog that comes to die under the porch and yelps 'as if it's seen something real'.)

Something similar is going on with the plot. If ever there was one, Zulawski goes about losing it willfully almost from the opening. Yet most of the scenes still function to drive the narrative onwards, while many imitate the familiar tropes of the genre.

And this is against a backdrop of what I can only describe as histrionic symbolic overload. It's as if the subtext has stormed the Winter Palace of comfortable bourgeois meanings and basically ransacked the place.

If the words and actions are almost empty of meaning, the streets of Berlin we behold are almost empty....but tellingly not completely so. For instance, when Heinrich emerges from the apartment block bleeding, attentive viewers might spot another man running away in the distance.

It's true that Europeans of a certain age will tune into some of this visual suggestion a little more easily. Berlin itself was then the über-symbol of the darker side of European imagination, and cropped up all over the place in the popular culure of the time, such as in this tune from the Mobiles produced a year later. (An 80s aesthetic that was successfully satirised by Not The Nine O'Clock News. I suppose you could read Possesion as some sort of satire too! It certainly has instances of intentional comedy.)

Here the divided city provides a canopy under which Zulawski can connect a disparate collection of religious and poltical meanings. In particular it serves as the big daddy of the film's emblems of duality and duplication in this tale.

Now if it really were all a load of crock, I don't think I would have fround it so either so gripping as a viewer, or indeed interesting as a writer, because I genuinely think Zulawski was experimenting with a number of techniques here for telling a story in a tangibly outreageous manner.

Anyway, if you are going to watch it, seek out the uncut European version. The Yanks, in their wisdom, decided to lop off forty five minutes and rearrange the sequencing of some of the crucial scenes in the hope of creating the kind of sense that North American audiences generally appreciate.

The complete version features the seemingly endless scene below in all its gory glory (and in its proper place in the plotline.) Just before Isabelle Adjani's extended freak-out and subsequent expulsion of all kinds of unpleasant fluids, there occurs one of those inexplicable but powerful moments in the movie — and which V has singled out as her favourite — where the French actress, shot to resemble the Madonna (I think!) looks up at a carved image of Christ on the cross and squeals in a somehow disturbingly muted fashion.

Grade: B++

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #23

Tasteful t-shirt, Khao San Road, Bangkok.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #22

A detail from one of the 178 panels depicting the the Ramakien (Ramayana) epic in frescoes extending clockwise around the cloisters of Wat Phra Kaeo, Bangkok.

Three versions of the Ramakien survived the sacking of Ayutthaya by Burmese forces in 1767.

This Hindu tale, perhaps first written down in the fourth century BC, reached Southeast Asia via Tamil traders at the end of the first millennium.

Although Thailand's religiosity is considered part of the Theravada Buddhist tradition, the Ramayana story provided them with an bolt-on creation myth, as well as respresentations of spirits which complemented long-standing local animistic beliefs.

The basic narrative was retained, albeit transplanted to the culture and topography of Ayutthaya. Rama I (1736-1809), founder of the Chakri dynasty, supervised the composition of the most well-known Thai version, and it was during his reign that Wat Phra Kea0 was constructed.

Later on in Singapore I went to the Ramanaya Revisited exhibition at the Peranakan Museum which traced the impact of the poem's spread to Japan in the east and Iran in the west, while outlining how it was repeatedly indigenised to reflect local traditions and ethos.

The mask of Hunuman "messenger of Rama" (below) was produced in a modern workshop in Phnom Penh, Camodia around a decade ago. Hunuman is the son of the wind god and Anjana, a simian. Serving as a general in the army of the Monkey King Sugriva of Kishkindha, he becomes devoted to Rama and leaps across the sea to Lanka to help find the kidnapped Sita.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #21

Library train, outskirts of Bangkok.

'España, entera, se va de borrachera'

La marea roja, rojos mareados, toda España a arrojar!

It's all over now...for another four years. The super-talented favourites have won, a result that was as much a relief as a joy to behold. How could we ever have doubted them? Even Alan Hansen appeared deliriously happy with Spain's laboured victory. Todos al ritmo de Shakira.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people really. For now at least it will be 'crisis what crisis?' across Spain. It's probably also no exaggeration to suggest that this will be the most unifying event in that nation's history over the past hundred years.

We watched some of the pre and post match coverage on Spanish TV. A Dutch couple who were married yesterday in A Coruña were handed an orange shirt by the priest with the player name Van Aperder printed on the back!

Later we watched a gathering outside a seaside cafe in that same city watching the final on a large plasma screen. When Iniesta's goal went in a passing waiter threw his tray and all of its contents up in the air.

The final itself will be remembered for the Shaolin Soccer approach of the Naranja Mecánica. I lost count of how many Dutchmen hadn't been booked at the end of what was one of the most cynical tactical displays in the history of the finals. A stand out moment in this nervy match was Van Bommel running up to English ref Howard Webb after he'd just dished out another yellow card and gesticulating wildly as if to say 'that's enough, OK???!'

I will also always remember how Casillas broke down in tears after the deadlock was finally broken. One of those cynical Dutchmen even whacked the ball up from the half-way line towards the goal of the apparently stricken keeper in the hope of spoiling the fiesta before it had even really got started.

It was a good thing too that we had a few hours of football nonsense to keep us busy yesterday because it was the grimmest day of the year here in La Antigua...the grimmest of any year quizás.

It perhaps hasn't been the very best Mundiales. There weren't that many great goals, there wasn't a classic match (the third place play-off was bizarrely the most exciting) and, with respect to the undoubtedly wonderful, tweeting, golden-bollocked Diego Forlán, its outstanding star was a cephalopod. And we're surely going to be stuck with those blasted vuvuzelas for a while yet.

I've certainly had my fill of Guatemalan football commentary. Those guys just don't know when to shut up. It's as if they're commentating for radio: when not describing events on screen that viewers are perfectly capable of perceiving themselves ("balón que llega...") they're engaging in embarrassingly uninformed debates on collateral matters and often enough miss the build-up to an actual goal. And, worst of all, they're not even in the stadium, they're just watching it on TV like the rest of us.

If the commentary on BBC and ITV was ultimately superior, the punditry back in Blighty was persistently annoying. I'm not sure I'd really swap Alan 'I've been to the townships' Shearer for all those 'black continent' remarks across the Guatemalan coverage. Or indeed ITV's presumption that we all wanted Ghana to beat Uruguay for Canal 3's presumption that the reverse result was conspicuously preferable.

Anyway, after the match Iker Casillas did the customary interview with his reporter girlfriend Sara Carbonero. She'd taken some of the blame for Spain's upset against Switzerland in the first group match ('distracting influence'), but each time they subsequently come face to face for a post-match chat, they'd both been unshakeably professional. But last night we witnessed what Marca.com has hailed as 'el achuchón más famoso de la historia.'

During the match yesterday every time Princess Letizia spotted herself on the big screen she looked as if she wanted to jump up and wave, or even scream "esto es la oooostia!" much to the apparent discomfort of her husband.

We're watching la Roja arriving at the Palacio de Oriente right now, all looking a bit the worse for wear. The cathedral bells are tolling in Madrid. (PS: even the little Infantas can hold the cup, so the argument that it can't be solid gold gains credibility.)

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #20

Another view of the Ayutthaya ferry.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #s 18 and 19

Monks praying inside the main bot at Wat Pho, Bangkok. The meditating Buddha image was rescued from Ayutthaya by Rama I's brother.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand # 17

Ferry, Ayutthaya.

Spain v Germany

Well, I was wrong to imagine that once again the Europeans would fail to thrive outside their own continent; though I was perhaps more on the money when I picked the Dutch as my dark horses.

The Latin Americans flattered to deceive in the early stages of this Mundial. They were playing the more exciting attacking football (Germany excepted), but none of them had actually overcome higher ranking opposition before they were eliminated.

The Germans go into today's semi-final with even their famous psychic octopus having deserted them. (Joachim Löw still has his lucky blue sweater though.)

Spain were the tournament favourites a month ago, but a succession of teams have demonstrated how easy it can be to thwart them simply by staying in their own half.

Therein lies the problem for the Krouts, who have reached this stage by counter-attacking against reckless teams with suspect back lines; and in the case of England and Argentina, teams without a professional defence in the normal sense of the term. Surely the same set of tactics won't work against the European champions?

This match has the makings of a classic. As for the final, those of us hoping for a blood and guts encounter are probably going to have to hope the Germans triumph today.

My earliest World Cup memories are of the latter stages of the 1974 tournament which were graced by the wondrous Dutch team of Johan Cruyff et al. Then, heartbreakingly, total football was taken down by the Germans in the Munich final.

Four years later the Dutch lost again in the Buenos Aires final to an Argie team that shouldn't even have been there: the junta led by Videla is widely believed to have bribed the government of Peru to make their team lose 0-6, thus permitting the hosts to advance to the final on goal difference ahead of Brazil. Cruyff didn't even turn up to that World Cup, in protest against the dictatorship and its practice of chucking people out the back of aeroplanes over the South Atlantic.

Now they've made it to the final once again, quite against the expectations of their own FA who have been desperately seeking new hotel accommodation this week. It's not a particularly loveable Holland eleven: they tend to win ugly as the Americans say. Indeed, in doing so they also tend to play ugly and in a number of notable cases, even look ugly. But with that win over the last of the Latins in the semis, Holland has now set a new record of 14 consecutive World Cup victories through qualification and the main event.

A Germany v Holland final would be tasty because of all the historical baggage, both on and off the football pitch...a proper hate match along the lines of Brazil v Argentina or indeed, Guatemala v Mexico.

Two years ago the Germans almost thwarted the Spanish in the final of Euro2008. On that day the Spanish needed Fernando Torres playing at his best to break the deadlock, something they are unlikely to be able to count on tonight. Their best hope is that the Germans refuse to imitate the approach of the other bus-parkers they've come across in South Africa and give them an open game in which their midfield can ticky-tack the ball around joyfully until David Villa pops up to score one of his super goals.

Holland are often referred to as the greatest footballing nation never to have won the World Cup, though the Spanish might disagree with that. In my lifetime the competition has only been won twice by a team that wasn't a previous champion: Argentina in '78 and France in '98, both host nations. Enough has been said about how the Argies achieved their first victory. The French didn't cheat, but they had some spectacular luck along the way. It would be nice to have a new name on the list of world champions next Sunday evening, but if the Germans end up winning, you'd have to say that they've done so on merit.

Mysterious fountains

Outside of the Middle East there surely isn't another nation more obsessed with creative water displays than Singapore.

The raining 'Welcome' message at the start of my clip greets visiors to Raffles Central. But I was far more fascinated by those improbable little arcs of flowing water on the exterior steps leading up to an Orchard Road mall.

Técnico berrinchoso

Diego Maradonna has made a number of press conference appearances he ought to regret, but perhaps none more so than this one which took place earlier in January this year when Argentina were due to meet Germany in a friendly.

Here we see Prima(er..Mara)donna walking out on the event because he considered the presence of Germany's — admittedly rather young — new star Thomas Müller to be an insult to his puffed up Argie self-esteem.

He apparently mistook the midfielder, who ran circles around his own players on Saturday, for a ballboy.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand # 16

Street lamps, Ayutthaya.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand # 15

In a courtyard set back from the infamous Khao San Road scene is the Tom Yum Gung restaurant which specialises in traditional Thai dishes of a surprising quality, given the area. I picked this rice dish cooked in a fragrant green curry broth in which Thai basil featured very postively.

Right opposite the restaurant's exterior patio there's a very smart coffee house and 'dessert cafe' called The Fabulous patronised by Bangkok's laptop-bearing gilded youth. Given that the iPad was yet to be properly released in Asia I was mighty impressed to be presented with one as my menu when I asked to see their selection of iced coffees.

Here's a little clip I found on YouTube which will give you a sense of the retro-tastic ambience in there:

Trip pic of the day: Thailand # 14

An unusually cadaverous image of the Buddha, one of 53 which sit in the cloister of Wat Benchamabophit in Bangkok. Supposedly 'subdued by fasting', this chap is a Thai-cast copy of an original kept in the Museum of Lahore, Pakistan.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #s 12 and 13

V is rather suspicious of the pre-prepared noodle technique that these pad thai stalls seem to practice, but the end result was always yummy.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #11

These things were effing delicious: barbecued banana with coconut wrapped and grilled in banana leaf.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #10

Supernatural chedi guard at Bangkok's Wat Phra Kaeo.

Britain rises to the TV challenge

In a gloomy, wet weekend that had its disappointments, a beacon of light was provided by the finale of series five of the new Doctor Who.

Complex ideas literally fizz out of Matt Smith's Doctor, indicating a pleasing determination on the part of new producer Steven Moffat not to pander to the Saturday evening lumpen-publikum like his predecessor. Ratings have dropped, but a certain carry on in South Africa may have contributed to this.

As someone who started watching Doctor Who as far back as 1971, I can honestly say that Matt Smith is by far the most inherently fascinating incarnation of the Time Lord yet. His comic timing is spot on. And Karen Gillan is also the strongest of the companions since Russell T. Davies rebooted the concept in 2005.

Even V is now hooked, and she used to regard catching up with the series as a bit of a chore. (Me too at times, I have to admit.) Now she can't wait for the Christmas special.

For so long British TV drama has lagged behind the output from across the pond. But now there are several multi-season shows from the BBC which are worthy of comparison, such as Survivors, which started off so terribly, but has pulled itself up to become one of the most gripping and well-written TV narratives in the UK.

The opposite appeared to happen with the now defunct US show Heroes which showed so much initial promise before declining into incoherence.

FlashForward (now also cancelled) had an interesting premise and also seemed keen to suck in audiences beyond the geek heartland, but its self conscious soapiness created a terminal inbalance in both plot and character. Viewers of Survivors can find more and more reasons to care about its characters (even the flawed Tom), but FlashForward's former stalwarts were surely struggling to give a hoot about its central FBI team and the various conspirators who rather conveniently tagged along with them.

The show that was supposed to herald a new era in sophisticated American TV drama was of course David Simon's The Wire, a series retrospectively praised recently in the LRB by Michael Wood:

"Part of the lure of The Wire, of course, is its drawn-out storylines. Not only are there multiple narratives in any given episode, but a single complex story threads its way through a whole season. This is a method that creates both a sort of viewing leisure, and an unusual, slow-burning suspense. Richard Price, the author of Clockers and Lush Life, who worked on several episodes, calls The Wire a ‘Russian novel of an HBO series’, and Simon himself is fond of this metaphor too, speaking of ‘a novel for television’ "

Multi-strandedness for the masses duly arrived in the form of Lost, which concluded with a bit of a splutter last month after six seasons. WTF? its loyal fanbase asked. What happened to time travel, the Dharma initiative etc. After so many possibilities had been opened and so few of them closed, the final set-down was the very one we could all have guessed back in 2004 without having to tear our hair out over what exactly was the matter was with Desmond.

This may in part explain why the writers had given the illusion (unlike those of Heroes say) of knowing exactly where the longer narrative was going at any one time. In the end I would rather they had focused less on creating new characters and themes in the final season and more on tying up the loose ends from the previous ones.

What was so impressive about Moffat's creative contribution to the new incarnation of Doctor Who was the way he weaved a series of threads through all the stories, his own and those of other contributing writers, and then properly tied them back in the concluding double-episode.

David Simon's new show Treme, set in New Orleans, is currently running on HBO. I watched the start of the first espiode and thought hmmm, this is a bit heavy.

I'm still following Dexter and True Blood because these are not only well-written but also a bit less up themselves than some of the aforementioned offerings. The writers of Dexter have certainly surprised me with their ability to keep up (and even extend) interest in this character and I'm looking forward to season five in September...though V's not a fan, largely because she hates voiceovers.

The updated version of V is also quite fun. It's a bit soapy like FlashForward, but the cast is much stronger and it seems to have a better (and simpler) idea about how it's going to generate the necessary dramatic tension going forward. It has yet to be scrapped by the network too.

It's possible that a whole generation of the best writers in America have moved from the silver screen to the LCD/Plasma screen, but the jury is still out on whether they have fully realised the potential which we all anticipated in the mid part of the last decade. But the Brits are now catching up for sure. And we don't have that annoying tendency to cancel shows before any kind of satisfactory wrap-up can be achieved.

Technology to the rescue?

It's not really clear that the result in Bloemfontein would have been any different had Frank Lampard's equaliser been allowed to stand. If England had come on in the second half and not had to chase the game, they might not have resorted to a that suicidal Chilean-style formation with almost all ten outfield players stuck somehere between midfield and the German back line.

On the other hand, most English people are being realistic: our team were pants across all four matches in this World Cup, and would more than likely have still been suckered by the Germans' well-conceived tactic of defending very deep before racing out in deadly counter-attack.

In contrast Mexico were surely robbed last night by the team led by the man my Bulgarian friend calls the 'hairy meatball'.

He can't understand why they even bothered staying on the pitch after ugga-wugga caveman Carlos Tevez's blatantly offside header was replayed on the big screen (accidentally and against FIFA regulations it seems). For a moment the officials looked conscience-stricken, yet were still unable to right this wrong under the current rules of the game. Mexico had been bossing the play up until that point and quite obviously went to pieces after it.

Now I've said here that controversy is part of the habanero-munching nature of the pleasure of watching international football, but some of the decisions at this Mundial have been just so completely bizarre (USA's disallowed winner, Kaká's red card etc.) that the competence of FIFA to run a tournament of this size and significance has to questioned.

The Guardian's Sean Ingle described FIFA as "football's answer to the Amish, but without the killer beards." They ignored all the calls for decision-assisting technology after the Henry handball saw France qualify for this World Cup at the expense of Ireland. But with this level of renewed public interest in the issue, can Sep Blatter really hold out much longer?

One thing is clear however (and can be resolved quickly and without technological aid) Mick Jagger should be kept away from all future England and USA fixtures.

Of my favourites only Chile and Japan remain. The latter might just make it to the quarters with their super-skilled pin-up star Honda, but you have to fear for the temerarious Chileans against a fully-reinforced Brazil today. Half the Chilean team is missing too thanks to the equally swashbuckling efforts of the ref in their last match against Spain.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #9

Fifteenth century elote-shaped prang at Wat Phra Ram, Ayutthaya. The temple was founded in 1369 on the cremation site of King Ramathibodi (1351-69) by his son Ramesuan.

This structure however was the result of later rennovation by King Borommatrailokanat (1448-88) and is decorated with garudas, nāgas and walking Buddhas.

Antigua's inframundo

There's something rather entertaining about the matter-of-fact way this Spanish TV panel discusses the espantos (and espantados) of La Antigua Guatemala:



They make La Llorona sound like a Japanese horror movie waiting to happen.

On a separate note, my American neighbour has just returned from a fact-finding mission to Tikal where he intends to return on December 23, 2012 for the end of the world.

Apparently he's not alone and some sort of event is definitely being laid on by the locals if not by the Almighty.

I wonder if anyone around here has considered just how many fast bucks are to made out of the credulous in roughly eighteen months' time. Guatemala should certainly position itself as ground zero.

At the very least there's an excuse for some serious end of Baktun cycle partying!

Jalea de Cacao

Don Willy dropped by again this afternoon (at half-time quite fortuitously) in order to drop off some of his exceptional jams.

The one on the left is his latest creation, not yet released onto the local market; hence the absence of a label. It's made from pure cacao, he told us proudly. His major concern remains that Guatemalans aren't famed for their love of chocolate, but his mixture is only very lightly sweetened and I think it will probably go down well here.

We were spooning it out of the jar and consuming it neat during extra time. Yum.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #8

Chedi at Wat Pho (Bangkok). The one on the right, the Phra Si Sanphet chedi, encases the remains of a sacred Buddha image.

Best Baristas

Guatemala might have failed to make it to South Africa, but over in London right now two Chapines have just taken first and second place in the Seventh World Barista Championships, which concluded on Friday.

And so, Guatemala's Héctor González is officially el mejor catador de café en el mundo.
(Thanks to Rudy for this spot.)

It's not enough merely to win

Yesterday, on the Guardian's World Cup Daily pod Paolo Bandini put his finger on the reason Team USA tends to wind the rest of us up so much every four years: if they win, they gloat, but if they lose, they don't really seem to care.

Still it was an American (and former resident of La Antigua) Gore Vidal who — though I'd hesitate to suspect him of being a soccer fan — came up with a sentence that surely encapsulates the essential thrill of the World Cup: "It's not enough merely to win, others must lose."

Thinking ahead to England's potential exit tomorrow in the last 16 stage, I'd have to add that it's not enough merely to lose, others must NOT win.

Anyway, if the USA does overcome Ghana today (cue gloat) it will apparently be the first time that they have won back-to-back World Cup fixtures since 1930.

Ghana clearly didn't expect to make it even this far because their government has had to announce the imminent repatriation of a thousand fans whose trip to South Africa they'd financed. But now, with the group stages completed, the budget has run out, and so West African support tonight will be somewhat depleted.

Owing to bandwidth issues it has been easier to me to follow the BBC's World Cup feed live online than ITV's. Several of my mates back in the UK have observed that ITV has come up with livelier pundit panels and better coverage all round.

Perhaps even more excruciating than Guatemalan commentators' persistant referrals to Africa as 'the black continent' (and to the Nigerians as 'the black eagles': they are in fact the Super Eagles) have been those little video reports on the 'real Africa' which the BBC has insisted on showing once the likes of Shearer and Hansen have worn themselves, and everyone else, out.

Ghana, however, really are known as the Black Stars.

Sit down, stand up

England might well have won the next game against Slovenia, but things weren't much more comfortable on the bench...especially for Capello's assistant Stuart Pearce, once known to fans affectionately as 'psycho', but here thoroughly out loco'd by his boss.

Pass the #%&# ball!

England's manager Fabio Capello here expresses sentiments we were all feeling during the match against Algeria, but with some rather Italianate gesticulations.

Trip pic of the day: Thailand #s5, 6 and 7

Tuctuc rides in Thailand offer a far more hair-raising experience than their equivalents here in La Antigua. These things go...

My round-the-world tour very nearly came to a very unfortunate end when the driver who'd taken me to some of Bangkok's less accessible sights chose to exit the Marble Temple's driveway without looking ahead, and (somehow) just pulled out of a head-on collision with another tuctuc entering it at considerable speed.

This ought to have been my last ride on these death traps, but my feet were so sore when I finished exploring Wat Pho that I decided to risk it once more rather than face the rather long walk back to Banglamphu. The video below resulted.

The fares for using tuctucs to get around the Thai capital are deceptively inexpensive. This is because the drivers are incentivised by various businesses around town (gem shops, bespoke tailors etc) with petrol vouchers, so there are usually a number of unscheduled stops on any visitor's journey.

Wimbledon's 'infinite' tennis match

It finally came to an end this morning, having lasted 11 hours and 5 minutes; the fifth set alone went on for 491 minutes. Between them Isner and Mahut had served 215 aces.

Mahut looked a little distraught, but then Tim Henman appeared an handed him a commemorative prezzie in a fancily wrapped box. Isner also got one. (No Frenchman was available apparently. They must all be in hiding.)

It was the least the All England Club could do as this marathon encounter has given The Championships a higher profile at a time when everyone — except the H.M. the Queen apparently — would rather watch the footie.

I suspect that when Henman himself is long forgotten, they will be bringing this particular match and its stats up during the summer broadcasts.

Elizabeth II missed it as she'd had more than enough tennis watching Andy Murray in her first visit to SW19 at this time of year since her Silver Jubilee year of 1977.

Meanwhile, I have decided to watch all future World Cup matches shown by ITV on their live online feed as I am getting pretty fed up with some of the Guatemalan commentators, especially that jowly one who uses the term la zaga every few seconds.

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Trip pic of the day: Thailand #s3 and 4

A bit of a foodie share this one. Having arrived at Bangkok's beautiful new airport deep into the government-imposed curfew, I decided that discretion was going to be the better part of valour and prepared myself for a night in the terminal's food courts.

Unlike Singapore's Changi, where the airport food is surprisingly dreadful, Suvarnabhumi offers a veritable emporium of Asian culinary delights. (Plus some Boots and Starbucks outlets for those who are that way inclined.)

I took up residence in one such eatery with my Netbook and ordered some 'spicy sour rice noodle with pork ball and ground pork', washing it down with a couple of jugs of Singha beer (served from what looked a bit like a Pret-a-Manger coffee machine).

Some very smart crockery this.

There were three American girls from Princeton at a nearby table who consumed so many litre bottles of Singha while they were there, that the restaurant staff gave them a box of chocolates after they'd settled their bill.

Forza Azurri anyone?

We remember so fondly our Italia 1990 team (indeed one might say that Bobby Robson's boys changed the profile of football in English culture) not because of their mediocre performances in the group stage, their subsequent near-run-things against Belgium and Cameroon, but because of their glorious failure in the semi-final penalty shoot-out against old foe Germany.

For that reason I'm glad England have drawn the Germans again in the last 16, and that, should they somehow overcome them, they could then have to renew hostilities against the Argies (and Diego Armando Maradonna in particular).

Of such fixtures is a Mundial made, not comparatively insipid match-ups against the likes of Ghana, where there's not much more at stake than pride and a prolongation of the footballing fiesta back home.

The World Cup is the greatest sporting event on Earth. And what a contrast it makes with the noble yet ever so pompous and fascistic ideals of its only real competitor, the Olympic Games. For in spite of FIFA's rather tedious 'Fair Play' anthem, we all know that this is sublimated world war, an arena where it is acceptable (in fact downright pleasurable) to express the kind of xenophobic sentiments which would be completely unacceptable in any other circumstances.

It has been fascinating to watch the Americans starting to catch the bug in 2010. For one doesn't have to be a loyal week-in week-out soccer fan (I'm not) to appreciate the naughty pleasures of this tournament.

Of course they still tend to labour under one or two misconceptions, such as the notion that things would be somehow better without controversy (cheating, poor refereeing etc), for these things are surely fundamental to the intensity of the experience. Yesterday when England played Slovenia I chuckled as the Chapin commentators surmised that the German ref was being biased in England's favour, while their equivalents in the UK ranted that the opposite was in fact the case! (Really, a German referee. Only someone over here could imagine the existence of some sort of pact of European solidarity on the football pitch.)

Andrew Leonard's article in Salon suggests that Landon Donovan's late winner against Algeria will help America transcend the culture war which has broken out since the Jabulanis started flying in South Africa. Let's hope not, eh?!

The very idea that international football can somehow foster lets all get on together, multicultural values is of course complete nonsense, and both the left and the right in the US should quickly disabuse themselves of it. It's a silly doctrine that briefly gripped the French after their win in 1998, and just look at them now.

If this was universally understood to be just a 'sport', why would politicians take such a keen interest?

Anyway, Donovan produced one of the great World Cup moments to send the USA through and to the summit of Group C; deservedly so, because they produced a lot more excitement than England across the three games and were denied victory against Slovenia by the kind of 'erratic' decision we love so much.

David Beckham's place in the pantheon was guaranteed by a similar late intervention. England were down a goal in injury time in their final qualifying match against Greece for the 2002 World Cup, a scoreline that would have denied them top spot in the group, and thus condemned them to a play-off. Up stepped Beckham for one last free kick...



Or perhaps it's his sending off against Argentina in 1998 that most grabbed our attention? In the World Cup you're either a hero or a hate-figure (as Wayne Rooney is discovering) and it's best not to wish for the alternative.

Talking of hate-figures, Italy is down a goal to Slovakia as I write and heading for bottom of their group behind New Zealand. Yes, that's New Zealand, whose squad features at least one part-timer who works in a bank. I took this pic of Italian ex-pat preparations for the great spectacle in London last month. How I'd like to be hanging around outside Bar Italia in Frith Street this afternoon; just for a bit of therapeutic gloating, you know. (It wouldn't be such a bad place to be if they make some sort of heroic late comeback either.)

The sound of one hand clapping

I've always had a great deal of sympathy for the intuitions that underlie the teachings of Buddhism. I listen and I think hmmm, there's something in that. Sure there are loads of platitudes, but these are accompanied by a batch of startling profundities.

En cambio....when the basic Christian myth is set out: that some charitable Jewish bloke, whose mother incidentally was a virgin, sort of engineered his own execution by the Roman occupiers of Judea so that everyone afterwards could have a chance of eternal life, I listen and I think hmmm, huele a bollocks.

This rectangular rock garden at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto is one of Japan's greatest and most recognisable treasures. It measures twenty five metres from east to west and ten metres from north to south, and consists of fifteen carefully placed rocks set within equally carefully raked gravel. It's the late fifteenth century work of a painter and gardener called Saomi and is considered the quintessence of Zenniness.

Usually only fourteen of the boulders are visible from any given angle, though one can know one has attained enlightenment the moment one also sees the fifteenth. Anyway, it was hard enough for me to get a view of the garden which didn't also include una molotera de turistas, for the most part deep in contemplation of Saomi's mystery.

The walls around the Zen garden were made from clay boiled in oil, so that a peculiar surface patina would emerge as the centuries passed.

Nearby there's a wash basin (Tsukubai) for the tea room, featuring the inscription 'I learn only to be contented'.