Since last Tuesday...

...I am in Toronto in Canada. Well, the cars here are huge!!! Plus in Toronto the traffic rules seem pretty much relaxed, in that in the majority of the cars the drivers were talking on their mobile phones; on the highway, on the city roads, everywhere.

Now that...

...Zidane has confirmed that his mother and sister were insulted by the Italian Marco Materazzi, a (rather lengthy) explanation of why this can lead to situations similar to those Zidane was led to can be read here.
I managed to read through most of it before putting it in my Google notebook for later reading, and tend to agree to many points. Here in Pakistan, or at least the part of Pakistan where I live, which is the city of Lahore in the province of Punjab, the nastiest insults have to do with a person's mother and sister as well.

So much...

...is being said about the headbutt from Zidane in the football world cup final last Sunday. Really interesting are the claims of the lip-readers, who have, perhaps predictably, identified different statements from the Italian which lead to his headbutting by Zidane. I have been wondering, however, which language did the Italian use? Did he use his native Italian, or did he speak French, or perhaps English. I would think Italian, since Zidane has played in Italy, so one can assume that he knows enough Italian. Plus its not unnatural to learn the swear words in any language before really coming to grip with a language.

So, the german...

...team is out of the football world cup. Last nights match was good, at least the first half. I would think that Italy played better than Germany in that time. The second half's game was typical european big-team defensive football: driven by the fear of conceding a goal. And if both teams are on the defence, then the game is not so interesting. Extra-time's 30 minutes were a lot more interesting, though there were hints of the fear-driven-football.
Let's see what happens today.

Well, I was wrong...

...to have written Zidane off. France's win yesterday against Brazil shows that Ronaldhino may be a good juggler of the ball with the feet, but when it comes to setting up a winning goal, Zidane still can do it better. Entertaining match it was, and luckily it was over within the 90 allocated minutes, since I was really struggling to keep myself awake towards the end.
The Portugal-England game was also okay, but better was the Argentina-Germany game.
Well, now the semi-finals are an all-European affair. But its funny how immigrant's (or their children) are the ones actually scoring the goals for their adopted countries. France's team all seems to be of non-European origin, except one or two odd white faces, and Germany's main goal scorers (Podolski and Klose) are also of Polish-origin.
The semi-finals are all late (starting midnight, Lahore time), so it means a few late nights in the coming week.