Can Arsenal win the Premier League this year?

I'm holding fire on writing a post about X-Men '97, because I'm waiting for the final episode, and I'm also only halfway through Shogun, and on top of all that, I don't really want to wade into politics (but ceasefire now, please), so it's a football post this week.

It's now been four seasons since anyone other than Manchester City won the Premier League, it's been seven seasons since a London club won it, and 20 seasons since Arsenal last won the title. I may not be a fully paid-up Gooner, but I do tend to prefer the red side of North London, and overall, I think it would be nice to see a different club run out as champions this year.

Around this time last year (actually a couple of weeks later, but with a similar number of games left to play), I wrote a post about Arsenal relinquishing the title race with a 3-0 loss to Brighton. Arsenal had two games left to play while City had three, but were ahead by four points. As of this writing, Arsenal has three games left to play and is a point ahead of City, which has four games left. If neither side drops any points for the rest of the season, City will win by two points, but if City draws a single game before then, they'll need Arsenal to slip up, because Arsenal has the better goal difference.

Last year was a bit of a weird season for Arsenal, because they roared out of the traps and were on top for most of the season. They were so dominant in the early stages that they actually built up an eight-point lead over City, squandered it, and then built it up again. The trouble is, they squandered it again at the end of the season, and found themselves overtaken.

This year, on the other hand, they've shared top spot with City for most of the season, and with Liverpool for certain parts. The team that's had a weird season has been City, which hasn't really fired on all cylinders from the start. Erling Haaland has been generally quite deadly in front of goal, but not as much as last year, and the team has suffered. The various podcasts I listen to talked about City's drift earlier in the season, as if they lacked a concrete motivation after doing the treble last year; I didn't quite agree, but when City started talking about doing a "double triple", it struck me that Football Weekly might have a point. It didn't help that City then crashed out of the Champions League at the hands of Real Madrid the next day.

But as both Football Weekly and Totally Football are at pains to point out every year, this is the part of the season where City always do the business. They're talented and professional enough not to let nerves get to them as they close in on the end of the season each year, even when they've been behind or when they've had competitors like Liverpool keeping pace with them and waiting for any sort of slip-up. So I still have to assume that City is best placed to win, unless they lose or draw any matches.

Arsenal hasn't seemed as brittle this season. They've lost five matches, versus City's three, but have lost fewer games against weaker opponents. Aston Villa appears to be the only team that's beaten them home and away, but West Ham and Fulham have also beaten them, but no team has beaten Arsenal by more than two goals (so far). They do seem to have strengthened since last season, with more attacking options from midfield and the wings than just Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and Martin Ødegaard - Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz seem to have done a good job for them in particular, especially recently.

It'll be interesting to see if City do slip up, because I think I'm not alone in watching for cracks in their armor. They've been extremely dominant since 2017-18, and Liverpool's 2019-20 win notwithstanding, are poised to have a period of sustained success like Juventus in Serie A or Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga. Everybody talks about how much more open the Premier League is than other big European leagues (and France), but that openness has meant only that City rarely ran away with the title - most years they've had someone nipping at their heels, only to lose at the final hurdle.

If Arsenal can maintain this lead, it'll be an impressive achievement. Arsenal may not be a poor team by any reckoning, or even really underdogs, but given how City and Newcastle are essentially sports washing projects, and how Chelsea's billionaire owners have been driving them into the ground, it's good to see a team with less expansive resources challenging.

Again, let's keep this in perspective - Arsenal is rich as fuck, but not like these more expensively assembled rivals. I hope to see them lift the trophy in May... and while I'm at it, it'd be hilarious if City ended this season without any silverware.

I can dream, can't I?

American Politics Has Too Much Tolerance for Nonsense

My brain is about 80 to 85% comic books these days, but I kinda missed the boat on posting about Episode 5 of X-Men '97, and now I'm stuck waiting until the end of the season. I could have written about The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, but decided it might be better to write about something else (although I'll get to Squirrel Girl at some point soon).

So you're getting a post about politics instead. Specifically the amount of foolishness that pervades electoral politics in our current age. I hinted at my thesis in a post I wrote last year, in which I wondered what the heck was up with Britain, but the main point for today is that American voters are oddly forgiving of absolute nonsense.

I should qualify that I'm mostly referring to, erm, one side of the aisle, though I do think that most establishment Democrats also fall for their own brands of, dare I say, malarkey. It's kind of built into the whole exceptionalism thing, which is why Britain seems to suffer from this malaise too.

But what do I classify as guff, nonsense and malarkey? It goes beyond structural disagreements about economics. I do think that most conservative/libertarian economic ideals are built on fantasy, at best, as when the UK pushes through a bunch of unfunded tax cuts (as Liz Truss tried to do last year), or when entire financial sectors are given carte blanche to gamble with everyone else's money (as we saw with the savings and loan collapse of the 80s, or the subprime mortgage credit crunch in 2008).

Rather, I'm talking about some of the more outre behavior of the West's populist leaders. I've seen a number of variations on the idea that "I never thought the apocalypse would be this stupid", and it's hit home for me. I'm talking about conspiracy theories that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, or that the Uvalde shooter was a trans person, or that when Barack Obama told the people of Britain that Brexit was a bad idea, some dummies thought it was a set-up because he said leaving the EU would put Britain "at the back of the queue" for trade deals, and Americans don't say "queue", so he must have been coached by Remoaners, ergo and QED.

I could also go into the fact that people were setting fire to 5G masts during the pandemic, or that they were listening to some roided up idiot agree with his podcast guests that they should be taking an anti parasitic to not get Covid (which is, er, a virus), or that some folks were blaming the 2020 and 2021 wildfires on Black Lives Matter because they forgot that BLM can also stand for Bureau of Land Management... though I don't understand why the Bureau of Land Management would be setting fires.

(Don't try to explain it. If you give this theory any credit, you're stupid and I don't want to hear it)

(Also, I could list all the QAnon conspiracy ideas but we'd be here all day. Though I'm particularly fond of the idea that JFK Jr faked his death and that he was all set to make his return at Dealey Plaza a couple of years ago, where he'd immediately join Donald Trump's presidential ticket)

It seems to me that Americans are particularly susceptible to falling for nonsense. Part of it comes back to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which I haven't read but from what I know of it encompasses this idea that "they" are all out to get "us" and we need some demagogue to protect us. "They" could be communists, Black people, LGBTQ people, foreigners, or simply the favorite target of bigots throughout the ages, Jews (who are supposedly the ones behind communists and foreigners anyway). 

I get that conspiracy theories come from people feeling disempowered, whether politically, socially or economically. What I don't understand is why feeling disempowered means blindly swallowing every false and/or incoherent thing Donald Trump says. Trump is not exactly disempowered himself - he shits on a golden toilet and has a bunch of buildings with his name on them all over the world. He does and says some of the crudest things you can imagine, but a not-insignificant portion of American Christians think he's basically the Second Coming of Christ.

This is why I think Americans are particularly susceptible to nonsense. Nobody in Britain thought Boris Johnson was Jesus, or particularly smart - they just voted for him because he's an edgelord with an Oxford degree and they thought it'd be a laugh. Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni are deeply weird individuals (she's part of some Italian Neo-fascist strand that has built its identity on the radical agrarian society of Tolkien's Hobbits), but no one has built a quasi-religious conspiratorial framework around either of them.

Hell, Australians are probably the most naturally libertarian people I've ever encountered, but because the idea of a "fair go" is so ingrained in the national psyche, they found the political will to ban assault weapons after Port Arthur and have made great strides to attempt to atone for what they did to the Indigenous Peoples from the First Fleet through to the 20th century. Whereas in America, supposedly the land of the free and a place where "all men are created equal", we give undue attention to people who say that their right to buy assault rifles outweighs children's right to not be shot to pieces in school.

I don't know why exactly Americans fall for stupid and lazy arguments so easily, but I do know that this tendency is what underlies the big threats to our society. Trump may run around telling people that he should have won the election, but for some reason a lot of people are prepared to believe him, despite, or because, his arguments are so flimsy. If so many people are willing to disbelieve their own eyes on the say-so of the Party, at least the Party could come up with some lies that are internally consistent and not the deranged power fantasies of people who should know better.

Back to Australia

Just a couple of weeks ago I flew to Sydney for my sister's wedding. This was my first time visiting her there (the pandemic kinda got in the way), and my second visit to Australia and Sydney, the first being back in 2012. That time I only had a couple of nights in Sydney and didn't get to see much, but this time, apart from family stuff, I had about 10 days to rove around the sights and see what I'd been missing.

Circular Quay at night

As a prelude, I once again sprang for a business class upgrade for the flight over, so I got to travel in style. I reasoned that, with my departure time at 11.50pm and a flight time of 14.5 hours, I really needed to be able to sleep. I'll say my thinking was spot-on - I stayed up long enough for dinner (a caprese and chicken coconut curry with noodles, plus dessert) but ended up dozing for most of the trip. This meant that when I landed at 9am local time, I was reasonably well-rested and able to hang out with my sisters for the rest of the day. Indeed, I'd say that I was blissfully free of jet lag for the rest of the trip, so... result?

Fancy dinner and legroom

The other big difference from my previous trip is where I stayed. In 2012 I was paranoid about catching my onward flight to Cairns, so I ended up staying in an Ibis Hotel near the airport, but this time I stayed in a place near my sister's flat. It turned out to be a great location: about 20 minutes' walk to hers, and five minutes to Green Square train station, which I used to get into town most days. There was also a little shopping precinct nearby, with cafes, restaurants and a supermarket (one of the restaurants was, of all things, a Taco Bell).

With the extra days compared to 2012, I had a lot more time to see the sights and to just walk around. There was some stuff that my sister scheduled, like going to see local A-League side Sydney FC play against Central Coast Mariners, but otherwise I was able to hop trains into town pretty much whenever I wanted.

My first evening at liberty in town was actually Easter Sunday, when I went looking for Chinatown. I don't think I found the "real" Chinatown, i.e. the place with Chinese gates, but I walked along a number of streets that had all the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai restaurants you could ever want. I also spent A$20 in an arcade, where I also got to enjoy a dance battle on Dance Dance Revolution, which is always a treat. I was tempted to try out a karaoke booth, but that felt a little too Aggretsuko (and about 75% of the songs were in Korean anyway).

They seem to be really strict about PDA

I made a couple of stops at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, enjoying the galleries devoted to modern Australian art and the ones for paintings by European artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I also took a morning to finally check out the Australian Museum, which I'd missed by minutes 12 years before. It was, as Bill Bryson writes in In a Sunburned Country, delightfully old-school, with room after room of stuffed animals and exhibits relating - sometimes in tangential ways, like the Irish elk skeleton - to Australia.

One morning was also spent at the Rocks, on the opposite side of Circular Quay from the Opera House. I caught the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Rocks Discovery Museum, as well as the Sydney Museum, which sits on the site of the first Government House. I'd have liked to check out the Police and Crime Museum, which is just up from the Quay, but it was closed until 13 April.

The rest of the time I was wandering around, looking for bookstores and nice places to eat. As to the former, Dymock's was reassuringly similar to Waterstone's, and I bought a couple of things there, though my favorite bookstore in Sydney is the Kinokuniya, pretty much for its enormous and well-appointed graphic novel section. I don't know what bookstore culture is like in Sydney generally, though it sounds like there are plenty of literary events and festivals; but the Kinokuniya was marvelous and I regretted not having more space to drag back a cartload of books from there.

As to places to eat, those are also varied and excellent in Sydney. I mentioned Chinatown, which had plenty of good places, but I also had loads of great Japanese, Thai and Chinese throughout my trip. The sushi was pretty much all high-quality - not as life-changing as in Tokyo, but invariably fresh and delicious. I even made it out to the Fish Market one day, where I sampled some tuna nigiri straight from the day's catch.

Another highlight was a family dinner at an RSL (Retired Servicemen's League), which maybe conforms most closely here to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Halls, but was actually quite different. It was like a combination of decent gastropub with casino attached, and the food and beer were nothing flashy but all went down nicely. To get in you need to register as a guest member, but apparently it's all a formality.

It struck me as I walked around the place that Australia is one of those countries that's made a place for itself in my heart, much like the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. I've never lived there, as I have in those others, but I could entirely see myself moving there... or I could, if it wasn't so damn far from everything else. Still, apart from the high house prices, it seems like a great, comfortable place to live, and I'd love to spend more time there. Indeed, in my last post about it in 2013, I talked about how great it would be to rent a flat there for a month and just enjoy it, and damn if that doesn't still sound like an amazing idea.

Now that my sister is married and settled on her partner visa, I was asking if I could use her as a reference to move there myself, but apparently my other sister has dibs on that. In any case, watch this space - maybe I'll meet an attractive Australian lady and get to move there with her?