I guess I didn’t realise it till now: the media are “professional thinkers who lead the nation’s intelligentsia.”

Well, that’s what I got from reading David Sirota’s piece, “Intelligentsia against intelligence,” in Salon, in which he criticises David Broder and Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post:

As leading opinion-makers, Broder and Diehl are paid to carefully ponder issues and then offer their considered thoughts. That’s not part of what they’re supposed to do—it’s what they are singularly employed to do. It’s how they earn their living and credibility—indeed, it’s their entire raison d’être. And yet, these leading lights of the intelligentsia are overtly preaching anti-intelligence, insisting the president must avoid taking time to think through his actions.

I worked for a major metropolitan newspaper at the beginning of my professional life, and I can assure you that while those with whom I worked displayed the usual amount of intelligence there was no one there I’d’ve considered a member of the intelligentsia. In fact, that applies to all members of the media I’ve met.

When someone says they’re honest that’s usually a warning to distrust everything they say and promise.

So when a member of the media claims that the media are “professional thinkers who lead the nation’s intelligentsia” . . . well, I have to treat that with equal skepticism and suspicion.

When it comes right down to it, believing in an “intelligentsia” is a lot like believing in Santa Claus.

Tony Perrottet in the New York Times takes a 200-year-old tour of gastronomic Paris, stopping off at two of our locals on Rue Montorgueil, right around the corner from where we stay:

I did track down the oldest remaining pâtisserie of Paris, Stohrer, whose 1730 shop a few blocks from the Palais Royal is an irresistible palace of sweet delicacies, with original lead mirrors reflecting a multicolored array of pastries and glazed fruits. . . .

I was delighted to find Au Rocher de Cancale still going strong as a lively lunchtime bistro. The florid exterior was unmistakably of the period, although a plaque noted that the establishment had moved from one side of the street to the other in 1846. No matter! It was lunchtime, I was famished, and the fixed-price menu was a decent 20 euros. In the upstairs dining room, I instantly spied a series of unique frescoes salvaged from the 1846 restaurant and preserved under plexiglass like archaeological finds from Pompeii. They had been discovered, the waitress told me, when the room was renovated in the 1980s.

Stohrer’s baba au rhum is the one by which all others are measured. Not too sweet (which is the usual problem) but still moist with rum. The Wife wasn’t too sure about this dessert, but one bite convinced her . . . and convinced her only to try it from Stohrer. Everything we’ve eaten from Stohrer, actually, has been fantastic, be it sweet or savoury.

And though we never ate at Au Rocher De Cancale, every late afternoon you could find us sitting outside, sipping wine, and people watching.

I can’t wait to get back to Paris next May.

Did Thierry Henry cheat? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.

Were Ireland cheated out of a spot in the World Cup finals?  Yes . . . but, there was still time left in the match . . . so . . .

Do I believe Henry when he says “it was an instinctive reaction”? Yes.

I have said at the time and I will say again that yes I handled the ball. I am not a cheat and never have been. It was an instinctive reaction to a ball that was coming extremely fast in a crowded penalty area.

As a footballer you do not have the luxury of the television to slow the pace of the ball down 100 times to be able to make a conscious decision. People are viewing a slow motion version of what happened and not what I or any other footballer faces in the game.

If people look at it in full speed you will see that it was an instinctive reaction. It is impossible to be anything other than that. I have never denied that the ball was controlled with my hand. I told the Irish players, the referee and the media this after the game.

Does he deserve to get kicked out of football—my heated recommendation on Wednesday? No.

I agree with Arsene Wenger who says the problem is “above Thierry Henry”:

Thierry Henry was the big loser in this story. If he had come out [at the time] and said it was handball, half of France would have said, ‘how crazy is he, not to get us to the World Cup?’ If he doesn’t say it straight away, he is also guilty. The problem is not Thierry Henry, it is above Thierry Henry. . . .

Football and sport in general is full of heroes who have cheated ten times more than Thierry. For me people who bought referees, who took drugs, they are the real cheats in sport. Thierry Henry has years of fair behaviour behind him and he today is singled out in the wrong way. . . .

What is terrible for the referee is that he gave the goal knowing something was not regular, yet he had no help. I saw him walk from the linesman to the middle of the park, thinking ‘I have to give that goal’, knowing it is not a regular goal. That is where football is guilty. . . .

The biggest anger for me is that we are still in 2009, sitting here where millions of people see what happened, one guy doesn’t see it and we can’t help him. Football is the most popular sport in the world and we are still having to endure these kinds of mistakes.’

I think there’s little doubt that the Hand of Gaul will issue in the age of video technology to the beautiful game. My biggest fear is that it’s going to be abused.

And speaking of buying referees, Arsene:

A match-fixing ring with more than 200 suspected members fixed or attempted to fix dozens of matches across Europe, including three in the Champions League, German police said on Friday.

No, this hasn’t been a good week for the beautiful game.

Human nature ruins everything it touches.

Like politicians across the world, Fifa boss Sepp Blatter and Uefa boss Michel Platini will do whatever it takes to get the results they want:

After the match, an angry [Robbie] Keane lambasted FIFA’s 11th hour decision to seed the World Cup play-off draw in favour of the big teams, which ultimately pitted the Irish against France, and the Ireland international claims FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his UEFA counterpart Michel Platini got the result they would have wanted.

“Of course it is an easy decision to do the seedings,” Keane told BBC Radio Five Live. “They’re all probably clapping hands, Platini sitting up there on the phone to Sepp Blatter, probably texting each other, delighted with the result, with France (getting through).”

The Tottenham Hotspur striker claims that when it emerged that established football powers such as France, Portugal and at one stage Germany could be involved in the play-offs, football’s governing bodies quickly went back on their initial decision not to seed the knock-out ties.

Keane said: “Germany had a chance of being in the (play-offs) as well. With two massive countries, there’s no way in a million years is there going to be fair draw.”

That these two bozos (Blatter and Platini) have yet to utter a statement regarding Thierry Henry’s blatant handball speaks volumes about their guilt. Like Henry, they, too, are cheaters.

This is a huge blow for the beautiful game . . . but like anything else beautiful, it’s so easily destroyed by self-serving politicians.

I used to have respect for ex-Arsenal and current Barcelona striker Thierry Henry. Not after today. He proved he’s as pathetic a cheat as Maradona:

I wonder what Frenchman and Uefa head honcho Michel Platini will have to say about his fellow countryman’s blatant cheating?

I’m English, but Ireland didn’t deserve to see their World Cup hopes get dashed like that.

A snippet of live commentary from the Times:

That is just incredible - France have just scored one of the filthiest goals in World Cup history. From a deep free kick they have two players offside and then Thierry Henry, not once but twice, handles the ball and pushes it to WILLIAM GALLAS who can’t miss from about a yard out. An absolute disgrace is what that is.

Henry should be kicked out of football.

The husband-and-wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on what draws us back to Russian novelists’ work over and over again:

I think there’s the phrase “the accursed questions” attributed to Dostoyevsky: What is the meaning of life, the existence of God, the mystery of death, the big metaphysical spiritual questions? Those questions were central to Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that they had all but ceased to be in Western European literature. The Russians were engaged in portraying a fully human destiny rather than one dictated by class, social position, personal ambition and so on—which is a vision similar to what we find first of all in Homer, as well as Dante and Shakespeare.  We thirst for that vision and are grateful to find it in the great Russians. The aliveness of Tolstoy’s heroes may come ultimately from the same wholeness of vision, which is not generalized and abstract, but deep in detail.

I had the pleasure of reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of War and Peace this year and I thank them for bringing “the accursed questions”—those we should be contemplating every day—to such wonderful life in my native language.

As mentioned here before, Christ never was in Christmas:

What is alarming German visitors is the realisation that, in many cases, they have been brought up with a variation of the Third Reich Christmas. Not the swastika baking trays or baubles shaped like Iron Crosses, but the revised lyrics of carols and the traditions that had been altered subtly.

“I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow,” said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer, after studying the exhibits at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne. “I didn’t realise that Christ had been excised.”

The Nazi version—removing lines about Christ and inserting a paean to snowy fields—remained in some songbooks and, outside churchgoing families, is the version sung by many Germans today. The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus. The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, who had the brief of changing the German calendar. Christmas was to be merged into a Julfest, a celebration of the winter solstice of light and of oneness with nature. It drew on pagan traditions and tried to squeeze religion out.

This is, of course, the time of year when the misinformed and meat puppets bray on and on about the politically correct brigade replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” and “removing Christ from Christmas.”

It pains me to say this (actually, I feel positively nauseous), but for once I support the PC brigade, though not for reasons of political correctness but rather historical accuracy.

Jesus was born on 11 September, 3 B.C.E, the beginning of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.

So, yes, let’s take Christ out of Christmas once and for all (“flee from idolatry”) . . . and please pass the Gefüllter Fisch.