my ships opinion

@pscentral event 05: from your decade (1990s)

World Cups: Italy 1990, USA 1994, France 1998 (x)

Disney: The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), Anastasia (1997), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998) 

Action Movies: Mission: Impossible 1 (1996), Rush Hour (1998), The Mummy (1999)

Chinese Dramas: TVB’s Journey to the West (1996), Princess of Returning Pearl I (1998), Princess of Returning Pearl II (1999)

Fans of Tunisia and Morocco celebrating in the streets of France during World Cup 1998.

Enjoy the World Cup Final! #inuyasha #Inuyasha #Qatar2022 #ArgentinaVsFrance #WorldCup #FIFAWorldCupFinal #FIFAWorldCupQatar2022 #QatarWorldCup2022 #Kagome #InuKag #犬夜叉 #かごめ #anime #ArgentinaFrancia #anime #AnimeArt #manga #animetwt #Fanart

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Women's World Cup Soccer Barbie Commercial (1998)

I FORGET ITS CIAO AND FULECO BIRTHDAY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CIAO (also Fuleco)

Sorry guys i only draw Ciao cause i don't had any time

June 1994

world's finest (1990) #3

[ID: Batman in front of a light blue background. He's shown from the chest up and in a slightly angled profile view to be facing the viewer instead. He's looking up at something off panel and has his lips parted. One side of his exposed lower face is normally white while the other side is stylized to have vintage Ben Day dots. END ID]

November 14, 2023

By Adam Elder

(BBC Sport) — On a Saturday evening in February 1990, many of the United States' finest footballers stepped on to A&M Studios' historic soundstage in Los Angeles.

A month before John Barnes would implore his England team-mates to "hold and give, but do it at the right time" in a studio in Berkshire, the United States team recorded their own rap - one they hoped would make the sport famous at home.

In a moment, some of Hollywood's biggest celebrities would walk through the door to join them.

The plan was to record a novelty music video for a star-studded jock jam called Victory. The track celebrated the United States' first trip to the World Cup in 40 years, long before any of these players were born.

Never mind fame, though. In 1990, making football a little less hated in the United States would have counted as a runaway success.

Americans mostly considered football a fringe concern - if they even considered it at all. Baseball, American football and basketball were the "real" American sports.

For most of the 20th century, football in the States was for "the others", to put it politely: expats, cab drivers, dishwashers, exchange students, leftists, intellectuals, Euro snobs and the like.

Still the US Soccer Federation was constantly thinking about how to grow the game.

Werner Fricker, the federation's stern but visionary president, had cannily realised Fifa's desire to wring American dollars out of the world's most popular sport. By 1988, he had guided the United States to victory over Brazil and Morocco to win the right to stage the 1994 World Cup.

But Fricker knew a World Cup in the States faced scepticism. He wanted to prove the hosts had a team good enough to qualify on merit.

He put up his own money to fund a push to qualify for the 1990 event. If the United States succeeded it would be the first time they had made the World Cup since Brazil 1950, where they earned their place via a second-place finish in a three-team pool.

"Werner refused to accept that qualification wasn't doable," said Kevin Payne, former director of marketing and national administrator for the Federation. "He knew what needed to be done, and that past attempts were amateurish."

Fricker made Bob Gansler the team's first full-time coach. A tough yet erudite German-Hungarian immigrant, Gansler's knowledge of American youth football ran deep.

The team picked by Gansler, many fresh out of college, had been raised during the North American Soccer League's Pele-led glory days and were a clean slate from past failures to reach the World Cup.

They had chips on their shoulders for all sorts of other reasons though.

Many of them were second-generation immigrants, their parents and family lives different from an 'apple pie' American ideal. They loved a sport that many around them reviled and yet there was no nationwide outdoor league for them to play in.

Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama. 1990 World Cup

I have to explain what is going on in the UK, because it is absurd.

So, this is Gary Lineker:

He's known for a fair few things over here. He was a very good (association) footballer, playing for England in the 1986 and 1990 World Cups, winning the Golden Boot in 1986, and managing to never get a single yellow card in his playing career. He played for Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, and Tottenham, before finishing his career in Japan. But if you aren't in your mid 30s, you probably know actually know him him for a couple of other things. The first is the role of spokesman for another Leicester icon, Walkers Crisps (which are sort of equivalent to Lays, but hit different), as pictured above. Despite being a notably clean player, he used to play a cheeky serial crisp thief. I don't think he's done that for well over a decade, but his ads were on the telly a lot when I was a kid and it's a bit like learning that the hamburglar was an incredibly clean (American) football player or something.

The second thing Gary is widely known for is having presented Match of the Day, the big football program on the BBC, the sort-of state broadcaster, since 1999. He is, incidentally, very well paid for this (though with a consensus that he could get even more if he went to one of the non-free-to-view broadcasters because he is very good at the job). He also has a twitter account. And political opinions. So, the UK government has got itself dead set upon doing heinous stuff that will totally somehow work to prevent people who want to come to the UK making the perilous crossing of the Channel (between England and France). By heinous, I mean "openly advertise that they won't attempt to protect victims of modern slavery" stuff. It's very obviously using a legal hammer to victimise a marginalised group of people in order to win votes. And, uh, I should clarify that by "legal" I mean "using the passage of laws" - the policy is, in addition to all the other ways it's awful, probably incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the UK's international law obligations. Gary, top lad that he is, objected to this. On Tuesday 7th March, he made a quote Tweet of a video of the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, bigging up the policy, he wrote "Good heavens, this is beyond awful.". This got a bunch of backlash from extremely right-wingers, and then he made the tweet that really got him in trouble (with right-wingers): "There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?".

Now, I am not actually subjecting myself to watching a video of Suella Braverman bigging up a cruel policy to say whether the specific comparison of the language to 1930s Germany is accurate. But needless to say, Ms Braverman was amongst the many figures on the right of UK politics objecting to Gary's rhetoric. And here's the part where a fact about the BBC comes in: it is nominally neutral and impartial (and so, of course, is routinely accused of bias from all sides but particularly the right-wing), and has something of a code for its contributors to this effect. Now, that code has previously been applied to Gary Lineker, over a comment about whether governing Conservative Party would hand back donations from figures linked to the Russian regime. But it generally hasn't been applied too strongly to people like Gary, whose roles have nothing to do with politics (such as presenting a "here's what happened on the footie today" show), on the basis that, well, their roles have nothing to do with politics. However, when directly asked about whether the BBC should punish Gary Lineker for his tweets, government figures basically went "well, that's a them problem". But a couple of days passed, and it seemed like Gary's approach of "standing his ground because he did nothing wrong" was working and everything would die down. He was set to get 'a talking to' but not much more than that. The Conservative right, after all their fire and fury earlier, had gotten bored and moved onto something else. And then, on Friday 10th March, the BBC announced that he would be suspended from hosting Match of the Day this weekend. But it could still go ahead, because there are, like, other hosts! Except, well, funnily enough, when you take a beloved figure off air, for making a fairly anodyne tweet, no one wants to be the scab who actually takes up the role of replacing him. Gary's two co-hosts, Alan Shearer and Ian Wright, said that they would not appear without him. People who (co-)host Match of the Day on other days followed suit. The net result is that Match of the Day is currently set to air without hosts, BBC commentary, or global feed commentary. And the solidarity shown to Gary Lineker, over what is very flagrantly actual cancel culture and an attack on freedom of speech (the logic implied is that institutional impartiality requires that no one say anything too critical of the government ever), has continued to grow. The BBC has pretty much been unable to run pretty much any live sports content today, and has resorted to raiding the BBC Sounds archive to fill the sports radio channel. And, as of 17:30 on Saturday 11th March, the situation shows no signs of improvement, though some are calling for the Chairman Richard Sharp, who is separately facing corruption allegations, to resign (yes I linked to the BBC itself there, there is nothing, nothing, the BBC loves more than going into great detail about how much the BBC sucks).

Qatar at World Cup pinnacle after years of Mideast turmoil

Qatar at World Cup pinnacle after years of Mideast turmoil

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Hosting the World Cup marks a pinnacle in Qatar’s efforts to rise out of the shadow of its larger neighbors in the wider Middle East, where its politics and its upstart ambitions have brought both international attention and regional ire. The road to the tournament — and Qatar’s increased prominence on the global stage — has been fueled by the country becoming one of…

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‘Filippo’s Game’ is up on bookshop, if intrigued.x

What the fuck is Jesus up to in Good Omens season 3?

This is a question I've been thinking long and hard these past couple of days and I have some THOUGHTS SO. Buckle up.

Aziraphale and Crowley watching the Crucifixion (Good Omens, 2019)

First off. The answer to the question posited is relatively simple. What is Jesus up to in GO3? With s2's ending in mind and with the hints we've gotten for 668: Neighbor of the Beast over the years, we know he's descending to Earth to initiate the Second Coming. And that Aziraphale would probably make that happen - or do everything that he can as Supreme Archangel to sabotage it.

But I wanted to examine on how Jesus might fit into Good Omens' overall narratives and established themes - about morality and humanism and free will, and. I'm just saying, there are A LOT of fascinating routes they could do for his character.

(Disclaimer as usual: this is a theory that I obsessed over when I was stuck at the cemetery during All Souls' Day and must be treated as such. In no way am I insisting this should be how canon events must happen. I am just doing this for the funsies.)

The THING about Jesus if you situate him in the world of Good Omens (with the assumption that most of the pop culture Christology mythos associated with him remain intact) is that in this context he very quickly becomes: 1. Adam Young's narrative foil; and 2. an Aziraphale parallel.

Now, the first one is obvious. Of COURSE he is Adam Young's foil, duh. Adam isn't called the ANTICHRIST for nothing. Brought into the world just for the sole purpose of ending it. However, when the time comes for him to fulfill the Will of his Satanic Father, Adam flat out REFUSES.

Both the book and the show attribute this to Adam's human upbringing. He was raised as a human, and because of that he has the trait that the book uses to DEFINE human beings: free will. At the end, Adam had the AGENCY to reject the destiny planned out for him.

'Adam stood smiling at the two of them, a small figure perfectly poised exactly between Heaven and Hell.

Crowley grabbed Aziraphale's arm. "You know what happened?" he hissed excitedly. "He was left alone! He grew up human! He's not Evil Incarnate or Good Incarnate, he's just… a human incarnate—"'

- (Good Omens, 1990)

That is NOT what happened to Jesus.

Adam Bond as Jesus in Good Omens (2019)

Like Adam, he was raised as a human -- being a human incarnate was his WHOLE DEAL in Christology. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us... yada yada yada.

UNLIKE, Adam, though, Jesus wasn't able to REJECT his Destiny of Dying Really Horribly and Painfully on the Cross. Narratives in the Bible also made it clear that the Crucifixion was NOT his Will, but that of God's. Like... him begging to be spared from torment but ultimately following God's Will is such an important event entire devotional practices are made out of it.

"39 And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt."

- (Matthew 26: 39, KJV)

We get a glimpse of that in s1ep3 of Good Omens, too:

"JESUS

(muttering through the pain)

Father, please . . . you have to forgive them . . . they don’t know what they are doing . . .

Crowley, in black, comes up next to Aziraphale.

CROWLEY

You’ve come to smirk at the poor bugger, have you?

AZIRAPHALE

Smirk? Me?

CROWLEY

Well, your lot put him on there.

AZIRAPHALE

I am not consulted on policy decisions, Crawley."

- (The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book, 2018)

SO. Here we have the character of the Christ whose free will and agency had been STRIPPED from him in the guise of a "noble sacrifice." He comes back again on this Earth to fulfill another "inescapable destiny."

Aziraphale and Crowley need to stop him. The solution the Good Omens narrative offers to "inescapable destinies and systems" (both in s1 and s2) is for the character to realize they have the freedom to choose their own fates. It happened with Adam, and it happened with Gabriel, and perhaps it will happen to Jesus.

(At this point my sister frowned and said: "Are you telling me you think Aziraphale and Crowley are going to help Jesus realize he has agency and that him Dying on the Cross for the 'Great Plan' was kinda fucked up actually?" which sounds crazy when you put it like that BUT NEVER SAY NEVER BABIE.)

Because that brings me to my second point: if this all happens, Jesus becomes an AZIRAPHALE parallel.

In the same way Anathema is an Aziraphale parallel and Sergeant Shadwell is an Aziraphale parallel. Here is a character stuck in a suffocating status quo. To save the world, he needs to know he can escape that status quo and decide for himself. In the same way Anathema has to learn how to stop being a descendant or Shadwell to stop being a Witchfinder, or Gabriel to stop being an Archangel, and Adam to stop being an Antichrist, perhaps Jesus has to learn he can stop being... Well, the Christ, as well.

And this, of course, supplements Aziraphale's journey of letting go of the idea of being an idealized vessel of God, so he could finally enjoy the freedom of personhood and choice on Earth, with Crowley.

Or they could turn Jesus into a cackling villain who Aziraphale and Crowley need to kill in season 3, and I'd probably eat that up, too.

Fiat Panda Italia 90, 1990, by Maggiora. A special edition of the Fiat Panda produced in an edition of 40 vehicles to mark Italy’s hosting of the Football World Cup, with a landaulet-style folding roof.