Author: Newley

Hunter S. Thompson’s “Song of the Sausauge Creature” is a hilarious story about riding Ducati motorcycles.

Here’s a really convenient (and free) tool for creating text-based email newsletters.

Here’s some good analysis of Apple’s new ad campaign designed to convince unhappy Windows users that they should switch to Macs.

How did a ravenous Chinese walking fish end up in a Maryland pond?

Logophilia.com is a fascinating site devoted to recently-coined words. My favorite: “knee-mail.”

While we often focus on what’s wrong with America, Peggy Noonan says we should celebrate all that’s right with our country.

News from Burma: some auspicious white elephants have shown up, there might have been–or might not have been–a coup plot to overthrow the military junta currently in power, and the country is making some measured progress in their war on drugs (all links are NY Times; free registration required).

Nick Hornby’s take on the World Cup, “We Are the World,” is characteristically brilliant.

The current New Yorker contains a fascinating article by David Remnick. In “The Moralist,” he examines Lennox Lewis’s inner workings–and what his beating Mike Tyson means to professional boxing.

Ronaldo scored two goals yesterday, and Brazil beat Germany 2-0 to win their record fifth World Cup title. The Brazilian striker, who suffered from a mysterious illness before his team’s ill-fated ’98 final against France, has exorcised his demons.

And although he won the Yashin Trophy for being the Cup’s best goalkeeper, German shot stopper Oliver Kahn could not hold Rivaldo’s 67th minute shot; the rebound spilled to Ronaldo, who tucked it away for the game’s decisive tally. “I am fully aware that this is the only mistake I made in the seven matches of the World Cup,” Kahn said after the game. “That one mistake was brutally punished.”

So World Cup 2002 is over. Though the semifinals and the final were rather lifeless, the earlier stages of the tournament were phenomenal. Michael Davies, writing on ESPN.com, sums it up nicely: “…the truth is this was a World Cup of highs and lows, of positives and negatives, of yin and yang. It was a World Cup of karma, of settled scores and of reputations built over years undone in an instant. It was not a World Cup, on the whole, of unforgettable football. But It was a World Cup that has, perhaps, changed the landscape, the hierarchy of worldwide football. Or maybe it hasn’t. We’ll see in 2006…”