2007 U.S. MNT Highlight Revised from US Soccer on Vimeo.

Happy July 4th.

“Barcelona have made a good financial offer and there is also the chance to play alongside great players. Yes, I am still under contract to Arsenal but it’s up to the directors to satisfy my demands or I’ll leave. You have to take advantage of the moment. If my good form has increased my value, my employers have to take account of that. Sure, the Arsenal fans want to see me scoring lovely goals next season. I have the same wish, too. But the career of a footballer is soon over. My good goals aren’t the only things I am going to enjoy at the end of it. I have to prepare for my retirement as a player, too. Even if you’re not scoring fine goals and you have money, you can enjoy a happy retirement. The time for preparing for that moment is now.” (NOTW)

He’s a greedy asshat and he has no interest in his own talent.

When Arsenal do sell him, I hope he is escorted from the ground by security, carrying his belongings in a cardboard box. I hope the press is called in to watch him kicked out the front gate. I hope Arsenal sue him for whatever signing bonus he received last summer. Then, they should sue him for damages. By speaking publicly about his desire for a move, he’s lowering his transfer fee. Then, they should sue Barcelona for an illegal approach. UEFA and FIFA are clearly not going to do anything.

What’s ultimately so dissapointing about this summer is that Arsenal won’t do these things. However, I’m glad that Wenger isn’t coddling Adebayor. Wenger has said that he doesn’t need to meet Adebayor because the stiker is under contract, and there is nothing to say. Well put. Adebayor simply doesn’t deserve a new contract, and if Barcelona or Milan won’t pay Arsenal’s valuation, I hope we bench him.

The worst case scenario is that Adebayor goes to Barcelona for £15 million and we can’t sell them Hleb. Best case scenario is that we sell them Adebayor for £30 million and Hleb for another £10 million. My guess is that Adebayor goes, probably for, at most, £20 million, and they don’t buy Hleb. Maybe they buy both for £30 million. And I don’t see us buying a replacement for Adebayor. Maybe Roque Santa Cruz at £13 million, or an obscure 18 year old French kid, but that’s it. Which is to say, we’re going to be a worse team in 2008/09 than we were in 2007/08.

The National Mall is kind of a mess. Hence, it’s a bit of a parlor game among DC metro development nerds to fantasize about its redevelopment. This is a classic argument for privatization, but this (PDF) article from Washingtonian is an excellent, comprehensive reconsideration of the Mall and its connection to SW DC. Worth your time, especially if you see the Mall as an important venue for intimidating foreigners with our national greatness.

I find it very frustrating that after much cajoling, I finally got a few friends to start using Twitter, only to see the service become almost unusable. I can’t remember the last time it wasn’t completely down or had important features turned off.

If all of that wasn’t reason enough to leave Twitter, the pending launch of the iPhone could be the beginning of the end. With its GPS capability, the new iPhone brings location-based social networking and microblogging within sight of widespread use. You can imagine a service that took the basic idea of Twitter and made it way more practical for real world use.

So as one transfer saga looks set to end — Samir Nasri is expected to sign for Arsenal tomorrow with £15.8m going to Marseille — another is beginning to simmer. There’s a lot of noise coming from Italy and Spain that suggests Emmanuel Adebayor wants a move.

If it’s true, it’s really disheartening. As Zach put it to me, Arsene Wenger plucked Adebayor out of Ligue 1 anonymity and molded him into a 30 goal striker. I’m not in love with Adebayor’s game, but even I can see that he is a top tier player who isn’t done improving. So it’s disheartening. And what’s really depressing is that this comes on the heels of the Nasri move. I actually think that swaping Nasri for Hleb is an upgrade. At the very least, it will produce more goals. But it’s hard to see us improving our striking options sans Ade.

Of course, there are plenty of really excellent strikers who could be lured to Arsenal, but I imagine it’s far more likely that Arsene will pocket the money and let Bendtner fulfill his potential. But just in case you’re wondering, I’ve ranked my preferences in plausible transfer targets:

1) Karim Benzema — The best striker in France, he still has enormous upside. 50/50 chances he becomes best striker in the world. Anonymous Euros
2) Roque Santa Cruz — The safest bet. Last year, was the fourth leading scorer in the Premier League without much help.
3) David Villa — Clearly, World Class. A little worried that he’d have trouble adapting to England, but Fernando Torres made the jump look easy enough. Villa lacks ideal size, but he’s entering his prime. Spectacular goal-scoring record in Spain.
4) Lukas Podolski — Had a tough year with Munich, but he has had a great European tournament playing out of position.
5) Mario Gomez — Opposite. Fantastic year with Stuttgart, second leading scorer in the Bundesliga, but has been anonymous in the Euros.
6) Klass van Huntelaar — He scores tons and tons and tons of goals in the Netherlands. Some of those types of players are hugely successful in England (van Nistelroy). Others are not (Kezman). Interstingly, he’s already 24.
7) Samuel Eto’o — World Class. But can his knees handle the Premier League?

To be clear, I think it’s very unlikely we’d sign anyone on this list. Last summer, we sold the best striker in the world and replaced him with the leading scorer of the Croatian First Division. Arsenal gets one big signing per summer, and Nasri is it.

If you ever wonder why we go through this every freaking summer, this is a pretty faultlessly argued piece that explains Arsenal’s Spanish problem.

photo credit: Squeezyboy

Perhaps it’s serendipity that The New York Times published an op-ed today by Dan Koeppel, author of “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.” I’m finishing up “Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World,” which pretty much echos everything in Koeppel’s collumn. Basically, the banana is disappearing.

One interesting aspect of the banana’s demise that Koeppel doesn’t discuss is its genetic weakness. You’ve probably noticed that the banana doesn’t have seeds. While certainly easier to eat, this is an evolutionary catastrophe. All the bananas we eat are clones, planted from cuttings. Or, as one magazine put it, the banana hasn’t had sex in 2,000 years. Its genetic structure isn’t being reshaped, which means one nasty virus can kill all of them. Which is what’s happening. Funny that.

I just finished watching the spectacular Netherlands-Russia game, which Russia won 3-1. The Dutch played beautiful, dominant football in the group stages, but Russia thouroughly deserved tonight’s win. Andrei Arshavin played the game of his life, and the Dutch were completely let down by their fullbacks. In the end, the Dutch proved themselves extremely Dutch, blowing it at one of the late hurdles.

There has been a lot of Arsenal transfer nonsense, but I’m going to avoid blogging about it until we get a concrete development. Until then, everyone should read this match report from the Guardian on the Croatia-Turkey match. It’s some of the best sports reporting I’ve read in a long while.

Spain and the Netherlands are playing really well. We’ll see if they implode. It goes without say that the Dutch are super likable and given their typical locker room turmoil, this tournament has got to be considered a success for the Oranje.

The tournament has been fun. Not spectacular, but definitely solid. Still, I think we need to give rest to the idea that the Euros somehow eclipse the World Cup. That argument states that the Euros are less dilluted by mediocre squads. That’s true — the Euros gives us more games between top 10 teams than the World Cup — but it hardly matters. France, the Czech Republic, and Italy are all in FIFA’s top ten, but they’ve completely forgotten to show up for this tournament.

Video is unruly. There’s network television and cable, HBO and Showtime, Vlogs and Vlogcasts, movies and video games. Each medium has its own gems that are worth watching, but each also has a lot that of useless noise.

iTunes and the AmazonMP3 store provide cheap, hassle-free ways to consume music. But video is more diffuse and more difficult to streamline.

I’m thinking about media consumption because it’s going to be a long hot summer. There will be lots election news to absorb and soccer games to enjoy.

I’ve got some raw components. The mission is to fashion into a modern media center. I’ve got my laptop and a broadband connection. I’ve got stereo speakers. I’ve got Netflix. I’ve got a nice television and a DVD player.

I face two problems: getting cable without getting cable, and gaming. For gaming, I’m considering an XBox 360 or a Desktop PC. (Eunice has a Wii, and will attempt this summer to buy a Wii Fit, hence my interest in the XBox). I don’t have, and would like to avoid getting, cable.

Television: I certainly don’t want to miss all the awesome stuff on, say, the Discovery Channel. After all, the world is just awesome.

However, there’s also a ton of crap out there that isn’t worth watching. The reason TiVo was so revolutionary was because it let you pare down the crap. Today, every cable provider offers a similar DVR service that lets you optimize your viewing. There is, however, an obvious flaw: you’re still paying for tons of television you don’t watch. And then you pay more for TiVo to pare it down. It’s like ordering three entrees and then paying someone to pick what food you eat.

A different approach is paying for what you watch. A la carte programming is an interesting idea with a lot of hurdles, many of which my former colleague Chris Wimbush could really speak about. That said, we have a de facto system of a la carte programming in the form of iTunes. They’ve got Discovery Channel, HBO, Showtime, the History Channel, and many more. But it isn’t perfect. If the channel doesn’t have a content deal with iTunes, you can’t get it. Also, at $2 a show, it ain’t cheap. A subscription model similar to Netflix would be way more cost effective for the consumer, but for now, it’s rough. Perhaps the future will see everyone use Sezmi, a new product that is also attempting this a la carte approach. The technology is a complicated mix of broadcast and download, but the idea is to deliver the content you want from across television and the Internet. It’s supposed to be all the choice of cable at half the price. It remains to be seen if this service, due to launch later this year, will succeed.

For now, I’m probably stuck using iTunes. Here’s hoping that Sezmi works, or iTunes adopts a more affordable subscription model. The huge problem with this, of course, is that cable is still the best way to watch stuff that needs to be watched live: news and sports. Incidently, these are the two things I’m most likely to watch on television. Hence, my dissatisfaction with relying on iTunes.

As for gaming, the dillema is that my MacBook can’t handle much more than Football Manager 2008. Even that can be a struggle. Games I’d like to play — and obviously, new games come out, but this just gives you a sense of my taste — include Grand Theft Auto IV, Madden 09, Call of Duty 4, Civilization IV, and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2. You know, games where I can play God or play with guns.

One option is to buy an XBox360. That doesn’t work for the turn-based God games, but those are the most likely to work — however painfully — on my laptop. The XBox360 also provides a lot of online features, like excellent multiplayer and movie rentals. It’s also more cost effective, but I can’t say I’m a fan of first-person shooters on a console. The entire idea of twin joysticks seems remarkably unproductive. My left thumb just isn’t that coordinated. The other option is buying a desktop PC and plugging it in the television. Desktop PCs are not as expensive as they’ve been in the past, but it’s also true that a gaming PC is only as good as its video card, and video cards get pricey. This option takes a large upfront investment, but would probably mean a better overall gaming expiereience. Other big downside: games come out way later on PC. Microsoft makes sure that XBox gets all the good stuff first.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about on my short summer vacation.

I have some great news. Or, if you like this blog, then it’s bad news. Due to the extensive client list of my new employer, GMMB, it’s full stop on all political blogging. I say it’s good news because 1) it’s nice to be employed at a place where my opinions are proprietary (and if incorrect, potentially embarrassing) 2) it’s hard to read guys like Yglesias, Klein, and Ackerman and even attempt what they do, and 3) blogging every day is draining!

All of which isn’t to say I’m stopping completely. I’ll still post thoughts on technology, Arsenal, and DC life. If you like those things, then please, keep reading, and continue to leave comments that make fun of me or extoll my many wonderful virtues.