Tuesday, March 17, 2015

2018 World Cup Qualifying: Day 2

Today were the second legs of several home-and-away playoffs between the very lowest ranked teams in the Asian Confederation. The big news is that Bhutan, ranked lowest at 209th according to FIFA, defeated Sri Lanka to advance to Round 2.

India, Timor-Leste, Chinese Taipei, and Cambodia also advanced thus making Mongolia, Nepal, Macau, Brunei, and Sri Lanka the first teams officially eliminated from Russia 2018.

The second leg of the Yemen-Pakistan matchup has been postponed, to be played in a neutral location, following violence in Lahore where the match was to be played today. The first leg was also played in neutral territory due to security concerns in Yemen, who currently lead 3-1.

The six winners will be drawn into 8 groups of 5 teams each for home-and-away group play starting on 11 June.

Next up: CONCACAF begins first round play on 22 March with Barbados at home against U.S. Virgin Islands.

Friday, March 13, 2015

Qualifying for World Cup 2018 Started Today

Over in Asia, the 12 lowest ranked teams (according to the FIFA world rankings) played the first tie in a home-and-away playoff. The second legs will be played on the 17th, thus eliminating the first six teams from WC 2018.

The 12 matchups are:
India - Nepal
Yemen - Pakistan
Timor-Leste - Mongolia
Cambodia - Macau
Chinese Taipei - Brunei
Sri Lanka - Bhutan

Bhutan is the lowest-ranked team in the world at 209 and they defeated Sri Lanka away 1-0 in front of 3,500 stunned fans. 21-year old Tshering Dorji scored in the 84th minute to give his nation their first ever World Cup qualification win.

Macau and Mongolia will have challenging three-goal deficits to overcome in their second legs. The other teams are all still very much alive.

CONCACAF qualifying will begin on 23 March.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

St. Vincent Movie Review

Bill Murray has had a late stage career renaissance playing curmudgeonly irritated men whose bitterness and sarcasm masks some deep loss within. It started with Rushmore and found one of its greatest expressions in Lost in Translation. It reaches a nadir in Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent which has Murray playing the title character who is anything but a saint.

Vincent is a rude misanthropic angry man with a ramshackle house that’s falling apart, a car that isn’t doing much better, a healthy drinking problem, and a penchant for gambling as a means of increasing his debs and chances of getting broken kneecaps from his loan shark Zucko (Terrence Howard). Oh, and his best friend is Daka, a pregnant prostitute stripper (Naomi Watts, sporting a cartoonish Russian accent) whose employment options are limited to men who find her belly a turn-on.

A Walk Among the Tombstones Movie Review

Played in all earnestness as a tribute to the private investigator sub-genre of crime fiction, Scott Frank’s adaptation (which he also directed) of Lawrence Block’s A Walk Among the Tombstones is about as grim and nihilistic a treatment as you’re likely to see in a mainstream movie. The character Matt Scudder featured in more than a dozen of Block’s books and some of those have been adapted to the screen before. But Frank, who is no stranger to pulp fiction and mystery stories involving a tough PI (Frank wrote the screenplay adaptations of both Get Shorty and Out of Sight), doesn’t bother trying to reinvent the genre or to put a new spin on it. A Walk Among the Tombstones is effective classic mystery storytelling. It’s more hard-edged and just plain evil than any adaptation of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade ever was, but the hallmarks are there.

How'd I Do? 93rd Academy Awards Nominations Edition

I got 36 out of 43 in the top eight categories. That's 83.7%. Getting 19/20 in the acting categories made up for the fact that I went on...