football's coming home

Of course, that is soccer, not American football. But as the line is from an English song, it says football.
Now, why do I write about soccer? It's not a game I like. 22 men running after one ball is a little stupid, and spending at least 90 minutes of your life watching that is downright crazy, in my opinion.
But you can't avoid soccer, at least you couldn't for the past weeks. European soccer championships - Europameisterschaft - is the word for what we experienced lately. And that was utter destruction. I don't remember Germany winning any match. It is only a slight reconcilation to know that all the other big, important teams didn't do much better. France, England - they all dropped out pretty early. We had Portugal and Greece in the finals, for heaven's sake. That is as if some weird Highschool Fottball Teams are playing the SuperBowl.
Greece is the new champion, sparking a new discussion in Germany. The German coach chose to retire after this non-performance of the German team. I think the problem is not the coach but the players, getting paid millions no matter how they play. Also, most German teams do have a lot of foreigners, so it is hard to find enough good players for a national team in the first place. Anyway, so Germayny hasn't got a coach right now. Started some kind of StarSearch for a new one. One candidate first said it was about time he was asked, as he was just the right candidate, but then he refused to do the job. I guess he thought about what it would mean to deal with these players. The other candidate is discussed wildly. He is right now coach in Istanbul, he had some trouble in Germany because of the cocaine they found with him - and the rest of cocaine in his hair proving that he had taken the stuff. So from the moral point of view, he doesn't look like a likely candidate either. But then there is Otto Rehagel - called Rehakles by the German mass media, supposed to remind people of Herakles. He is the coach of Greece. So the idea is, if he can make European champion out of Greece, he can make us world champion. Soccer World Championships are in 2006 - in Germany. Would be kind of nice if we would make it a little closer to the finals than this time. He has not said anything yet about whether he'll stick with Greece or might come back to Germany. In my humble opinion, only one thing can help Germany: give out German passports to all the people who play soccer in Germany. The guy who makes the goals for Greece is playing for Werder Bremen, a German team. The great French players are in German teams. Some soccer teams spend a lot of money on players, so they get the best and most expensive around the world. Unfortunately, they all stay citizens of their homecountries and therefore are not allowed to play for Germany in these international championships.
There was another reason why I chose that line from the song as subject today. Yesterday I came by one of the many pubs that set up TVs for guests to watch the soccer games. They had this line written in their window. Only they wrote comming, with double m. Everytime I see that, I want to go in and slap the face of whoever wrote that. English is the language everybody learns in school. And this is not a hard word to remember, is it? Maybe the misspelling is part of a general concept of making the German society more stupid han they already are.

snore

Well,I don't know whether I snore, but this is just to make clear that I am dead tired. But I need to stay awake to watch Six Feet Under.
I rode my bike to town today to go into the library and read some journals. I managed to get through two years of "Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie" (Journal for library science and bibliography). Yeah, it is just as boring as it sounds. OK, this might be a little too hard on poor journal. It is just that I'm not really interested in discussing the Balanced Scorecard for scientific libraries.
As an explanatory note to those unfamiliar with German library system: there is a huge difference between Öffentliche Bibliotheken - public libraries, where you won't get a lot of scientific literature, and Wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken - scientific libraries, like university libraries, company libraries, special libraries...
The ZfBB, the journal I mentioned, basically concentrates on the scientific libraries and the Scientific Librarians (that is a degree that requires you to have a degree in another subject first, the top level of librarian hierarchy in Germany). So none of that is really me. However, there were some interesting articles about the RAK and AACR2 (RAK are the German cataloging rules, AACR the Anglo-American). The discussion is whether Germany should switch to AACR2 or keep our own system, which is considered to be more flexible and practical - don't ask me why, cataloging is the most disgusting thing I can imagine in the whole library work. But no matter whether I like it or not, that might be a question in my exam, so I actually feel like I learned something.
But reading through all this and the biking kind of drained me. Maybe I shouldn't have tried to be as fast as that "professional" biker who passed me on the road. Maybe I shouldn't have myself get carried away by the music coming from my portable cassette player (more David Bowie). It is not allowed to listen to music when biking anyway, it's supposed to make you deaf to the noises from the street. Now, if some kid turns up the volume of the radio on Daddy's car, do you think they'll hear anything? So that rule is one I don't follow if I don't feel like it. Haha, I finally discovered the rebel side of me...