No Defence

The Aston Villa defender Joleon Lescott has infuriated already-upset Aston Villa fans by Tweeting a picture of a £121,000+ Mercedes-AGM S 63 Coupe just after a 6-0 home defeat by Liverpool less than 15 minutes after the final whistle.

We all know a car like that is well within a Barclays Premier League player's price range, but to advertise the fact directly after a heavy defeat?

More than a little insensitive, as the resulting on-line fans fury is testament to, but the ex-England international has surely made it worse by trying to claim that "the tweet sent out from my account involving a picture of a car was totally accidental. It happened whilst driving and my phone was in my pocket."

Now in addition to the suggestion of contempt for the ordinary fan, he either thinks that the world is full of gullible idiots or is arrogantly confessing to a serious traffic offence. So as someone who spends a lot of time driving in the West Midlands, I'm hoping that he's lying about the accidental Tweet as Lescott's phone would have had to perform the following all by itself...

• Phone unlocked
• Twitter app opened
• Icon to send tweet selected and pressed
• Add image icon selected and pressed
• Image from album selected and pressed
• Click to upload image into tweet selected
• Tweet sent

Not very likely is it?

Leading by Example

Only a day now to the big kick off and until there's some actual football for the media to cover at the expense of well, pretty much everything, the newspapers have been getting in the mood with some very odd "World-Cup related" articles.

The free newspaper in my hotel (I'm in Birmingham prior to a NSS conference) has got 32 pop stars to review the anthems of the competing countries. None of them are very complimentary, which as I'm familiar with some of their own stuff via my daughter's attempts at singing along to her iPod, is particularly ironic.

For example (no pun or play on words intended), Example — a singer, songwriter and rapper — doesn't like Argentina’s tune as it's "hard to sing along to and the words sound like something the Gallagher brothers might have written".

Having heard some of his stuff - second hand admittedly - I've looked up what I thought were the lyrics to a recent single, and had my suspicions confirmed.

His song All The Wrong Places contains this snippet of wisdom:

Like a rabbit in the headlights
Get your head right
Start a new life
Shiver in the moonlight

Not exactly worth adopting as any country's national anthem is it?
Not only does it not appear to have any consistency of phrasing of syllables, there's also a few substantial flaws.
Would any rabbit in the headlights even consider going to get his head right? The very nature of the phrase suggests that confusion and indecisiveness is presumed, and if the animal in question was in full command of its faculties then surely it wouldn’t be stranded in the headlights, about to get run over?

Equally, the idea that a rabbit seconds from becoming a stain on the tarmac is in any position to be embarking on grand lifestyle changes is at best optimistic. At this point in a rabbit's life it really is too late to consider the big questions.

As for shivering in the moonlight; it's hard to imagine a more pointless act in the circumstances. Mr Example really should be imploring Mr Bunny to get the hell out of the way. Anything else is pointless.

I agree that there are some very dreary national anthems out there, but it's hard to see how any of them could be improved by utilising Mr Example's lyrical insight.