Wake up and smell the roses

As one of my friends would say, if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck. So while the US may not want to use the “R” word, one of the world’s largest investment banks falling to its knees begging for mercy has to count as a clue.

The sad thing is, people seem to be caught up on semantics. Investors in Bear Stearns, people visiting Hawaii or any of the 80,000 people that lost their jobs in March alone (the highest monthly fall in the US for 5 years) must surely be amazed that there are still question marks over whether the US is in a recession.

I wouldn’t like to even start to consider the number of hours that Fox, CNN and others have spent debating this point, or for that matter, what it will take for it to be finally recognized for what it is. A recession isn’t the end of the world and may actually shake the US out of its daydream, but for that to happen, the focus has to shift from labeling the problems to solving them.       

Show a little respect

Evoking so much emotion and passion gives sport a certain responsibility. In English football, this has typically been shared across players, managers and the clubs themselves, but with the chequebook changing the balance of power, the clubs’ owners now have the ultimate responsibility as their actions have a domino like effect on everything else.

This is playing itself out at Liverpool, which happens to be my  team. After dominating in the 70s and 80s, we fell behind rivals and in effort to keep up, went looking for new investment. It arrived last year in the form of two US gents with sizeable bank balances, but little respect. Steeped in history, it would have been advisable for the new owners to swot up on what football means to Liverpool fans.

Undermining the manager is one thing, but then discussing it in public is something else. This isn’t rocket science, these gents even own sports franchises in the US, but for some reason they don’t seem to understand.

Could they be getting it confused with American football? Have been watching the US variety and while the two games are not without their similarities, the fans involvement, passion and intensity is not comparable to the global game. Think about it for a minute, it has even triggered wars in certain parts of the world.  

Liverpool is not a franchise or a business; it’s a football club. Yes, the players’ shirts carry sponsorship, yes it sells its TV rights and yes, it has to make the books balance, but importantly, it’s not part of a game that’s defined by its business model. Instead, it is the most successful club in a sport that has an inseparable role in a country’s history, even causing a break in WW1.

Maybe news of the fans uniting to try and buy the club back might help them understand how much people care, but if they cant hear the Kop, then they probably want to get their ears checked.

You don’t say

It has been said many times before, but the more I think about it, the more apparent it becomes; in today’s world it is not what is actually said, but what isn’t that really counts. 

Slightly drunken conversation last night got me thinking about this a little more. Since I moved to the US, I have been fascinated by the way people communicate with each other. Now I am not going to go down the usual well-trodden stereotype route, partly because I now live here and partly because there are always exceptions, but all the little differences have caught my attention and made me think again about what is lurking between the lines.    

 

It’s funny really, as often the most pertinent points are left out. We all probably know people that are experts at this, but the closer you look, the more it manifests itself in almost every interaction you have. Whether at work, home or anywhere and everywhere in between, the information that people chose not to convey can be very telling.

As this post is straying into the deep end, I am not going to go too much further down this path. Instead, I am going to ask you to help me keep an eye out in a “Where’s Wally” kind of a fashion for what’s not being said, and see if we cant fill in some of the missing gaps on future posts – think quote of the week, or something along those lines.

To lighten things up a little, lets take our hats off to the master, as lets be honest, no one has a way with words quite like him

P.S. To get us started, try out the word search and let me know how many countries you can find…