Michael Owen's a Tosser

Ah fuck it. Shit, wank, tits, farts and bum fluff.

Update: I feel guilty about calling such a model-professional and general all-round nice chap a tosser, I should have said cunt. No, really, I'm sure he's made the right decision for himself. Clearly the message that Benitez was sending out, with his previous statements and the size of the bid, told Owen that he wasn't really wanted at Liverpool. He'll still get a good reception from the Liverpool fans but having been signed for £17m and on a 4 year contract I think there's very little chance of him playing for Liverpool again.

Other stuff, as you hate it when I talk football:

I'm so sick with fever I've become delusional. I'm supposed to be going to Beijing tomorrow but I'm gonna cancel if I feel even remotely like this.

Because of my inactivity I've been watching insane amounts of UK TV from uknova. I finally watched Lost in La Mancha, the doc about Terry Gilliam's failed attempt at making Don Quixote. Surprisingly uninteresting. Really, the guy seems a complete loony toon, genius or not. It's not completely clear from the documentary the core reasons behind its failure, other than Jean Rochefort's medical condition. The manager in me wanted to dig further and really understand the reasons behind it. One of the core reasons was probably insufficient funding to begin with. There'll be a natural tendency of investors to limit their risk by not investing too much, but there's a point at which the investment is so low as to increase the risk of the project in and of itself. So, the investors are partly to blame, but Terry Gilliam is surely an experienced enough movie man to have recognised this and not to have promised everyone a Don Quixote movie for $31m when he knew he needed twice that much.

Again, from UK Nova: downloaded some prank-call recordings from Britain's Victor Lewis-Smith, who I only remembered from his Time Out column, but apparantly he does radio stuff too. A pretty tired genre, but this is remarkable for the sheer brutal and ruthless ways he treats his victims. Here's a clip with Hughie Green, an old British TV presenter v famous in the 70s but obviously down on his luck at the time of this recording, that is so cruel it almost made me cry.

[This clip has never been released commercially. I mention this because I know the G reads this blog. His job now is to torture in specially made torture chambers people who make illegal copies of his company's recordings, so he's not to be trusted]

Have gotten 5 (five!) calls from Chinese girl today. I only answered twice, didn't have the patience to explain I'm not going out tonight for the fucking FIFTEENTH TIME. I really must be sick though, cause sex has gotta be an absolute certainty with her but I'm not pursuing it. Tonight anyway.