I’m not too upset by this. Arsenal won the league and almost won the Champions League without a superstar like that.

I like the idea of incremental improvements by slightly raising the floor and also slightly raising the ceiling. Also, ensuring every player who joins is one who is going to 100% have the mental strength that Arteta looks for.

You ate at the onion.

Yes, then (as expected) the companies passed on the cost to their customers.

If there were a competitive marketplace, retailers would be offering refunds to their customers or putting on huge deals so that annoyed customers didn’t switch to a rival retailer.

But, when Amazon has some massive chunk of the market, what happens if they piss off a customer? What are they going to do, go to the mall? The mall closed a long time ago.

One day when he was 18 or 19, still near the start of his journey, Héctor Bellerín got a call from Mikel Arteta inviting him round. He remembers asking lunch or dinner but this was neither. “When I arrived that afternoon, he was sitting with a financial adviser and they started to ask: ‘How much do you spend on this?’ ‘How much do you spend on that?’.

This was when Arteta was just his teammate. That’s pretty amazing.

I said: ‘Thank you.’ He said: ‘If you do the same for a teammate one day I’m happy.’

It sounds like Hector took that to heart and is doing that role for his teammates now.

I wonder if these kinds of life lessons were some of the off-the-field stuff that Norgaard provided last season.

It was really nice seeing Bellerin again. I’m really glad that his post-Arsenal career has gone well.

I was trying to figure out when he last played for Arsenal and who he knew. His last season was 2020/21 when Auba was captain and he was vice captain. The players who were already there at that time were Gabriel, Gabriel Martinelli, Saka, Reiss Nelson.

Interestingly, I saw him talking a lot with Ben White early in the tunnel before the match. But, as far as I can tell, White joined after Bellerin left. Yes, Bellerin spent one year on loan at Bettis before joining permanently, but it doesn’t seem like White and Bellerin played together.

Anybody see the drummers on the field getting soaked by the sprinklers?

I’m assuming Bellerin? His locks are beautiful, not sure about the moustache though.

Blondies? Pound cakes? Cheesecakes? Honestly, none of those appeal to me. They all seem like such bland treats.

Vanilla is a good flavour enhancer. I love it as an addition to something like a chocolate mousse or an egg nog. But, on its own it’s as exciting as white rice, or spaghetti without sauce.

The disease caused the decease.

Yes, ISO-8601 is objectively better than YYYY/DD/MM or MM/DD/YYYY or other strange formats. But, because it isn’t the most widely used format, it can be less efficient when there’s no danger of MM/DD vs DD/MM confusion.

If person A is talking to person B and they’re from the same culture, some culture-specific version like DD/MM/YY might be easier for them because it’s what they’re both used to, even if it is objectively inferior. But, if person A is talking to person C who is from a different place/culture things get more challenging because if the day of the month is 12 or under, it’s hard to distinguish between DD/MM or MM/DD. Even if person C knows that person A comes from a place that does DD/MM, they don’t know if person C used the native DD/MM format they’re used to, or translated it to them to MM/DD because person A was trying to make things easy for person C.

One of the advantages of the hyphens in ISO-8601, aside from them working with files, is that hyphens in dates are less common than slashes, so if someone sees 1212-11-12 they’re more likely to understand that it’s an ISO-formatted date. If they see 1212/11/12 it might be a MM/DD date or a DD/MM date.

But dd-mm-yyyy is better for day to day daily life usage

Uh, no.

Sure, that all makes sense. But Chelsea has many of the same problems. They were champions more recently than Arsenal, and were Champions League winners. They’ve somehow made of business of selling players who weren’t good enough to play for Chelsea for tens of millions. In the 2025/2026 season they made 300m euros in player sales. They’re somehow even getting tens of millions from clubs outside the Premier League who are notoriously stingy.

The fitness issues I can understand. If a player can’t play for Arsenal because they’re injured too often, it will really limit the number of clubs willing to cough up a big transfer fee to sign them. But, just because a player isn’t good enough for Arsenal shouldn’t mean it’s hard to sell them. There are plenty of clubs that are full of players that aren’t good enough to play for Arsenal, and many of Arsenal’s rejects would be important players for them. For some like Reiss Nelson or Fabio Vieira there should be a bidding war. Maybe the transfer fee won’t be that high, but there should be a lot of interested clubs.

To Apple’s… phone?

Wow, you’re so emotional. One protest on one day. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong their protests were an ongoing thing for more than a year until they were interrupted by the COVID pandemic. The German anti-AFD protests started in January 2024 and are still ongoing, more than 2.5 years later.

You haven’t “shown me to be wrong”, you’ve misinterpreted what I said and then got all butthurt. The rest of the world doesn’t respect the US because the US protests were one and done, and didn’t actually change anything.

The “boing” part should really be the sound of parts falling off.

Does “August 3rd” sound unnatural to you?

In spoken conversation it doesn’t really matter. In many contexts you could probably just say “Want to go on the third?” and the person you’re talking to will understand you mean August the third of this current year.

As for why it’s better:

1. It’s in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don’t understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
2. Speaking of things that don’t understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses “T” to separate the date and time, it doesn’t use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.

Oof. The first few seasons were good, but it was pretty weak long before it hit season 8, let alone its final season 11.

It makes me wonder if the problem is that Arsenal is bad at finding people who want to buy players, or if it’s bad at convincing players to leave. If it’s the first one, then the sales team isn’t good at their jobs. But, maybe the club creates such a positive environment where players feel like family, that they don’t want to leave even if they’re not going to play.

The library is still there. The books are still free. There’s no charge for admission.

Admittedly, the card catalogue is now covered in slop, so it’s a bit harder to find things. But, everything’s still there.