MATCH DAY: London Calls... Again

90 minutes of boredom plus added time. That’s all the Happy One needed to sit pretty secure at the helm of the richest premier league in the world last Saturday. To be honest, the only thing worth writing home about that match was that Oscar assist that yielded the goal and sent Manchester United on a wild goose chase for the remainder of the night. Maybe it’s because I was glued to our own labour at the Wembley.

I did keep my promise to the Devils (albeit until the 75^th minute. After that, I knew a draw would only spell doom and gloom for we Gooners). I found myself celebrating with them on the bonoko goal they thought they had scored early into the game. I myself (oh bite me! This is not an English essay assignment)...I myself was surprised at how genuinely I wanted the Devils to take the three points. I foolishly believed that my beloved Arsenal had a chance at the big one if the Devils held the Blues progress but alas, who has ever trusted the devil and come out victorious anyway?

I had taken the foolishness a notch higher and thought that my beloved Arsenal would follow in the heels of the Man U win and also scoop three whole points from the blues come Sunday.  To bring the blue carcass home, the little mongrels at mid and bottom table would also take points (or a point) here and there and deny Mourinho the Happiness he came looking for in the Queens land.

Well, I am well reminded and corrected that Mourinho is not your average SAF or Wenger or Pellegrini or Brendan Rogers. He does not simply whip his horse all the way to the home stretch and then let the second or third jockey cross the finish line first.

 I am also well reminded, albeit incorrectly that the opium I was high on when writing the previous post SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE must have gotten to the wrong part of my brain. Blame the opium on my producer and fellow Gooner, baba T.

Well, I also blame it on love. You see, love makes you do foolish things. It clogs your judgement and prevents you from thinking straight. My love for Arsenal led me to all that error of judgement last week. It made me hop into bed with our enemy and yielded no results.

This post is a reality check. It will be devoid of influences from Love and Other Drugs.

Tyranny of Numbers

Numbers rarely lie. If I’m to invoke the little statistics knowledge between my ears, then the custodians of the trophy must already be in the market place looking for some blue ribbons and the engraver is already perfecting the curve on the C.  They need 6 points from 6 remaining matches to be crowned. That means Mourinho can pick a point from each of the matches and still mount the top podium. He can close the chapter with two consecutive wins then sleep through the other four. Whichever way you want to look at it, the odds are greatly in his favour.

My goon loyalty is in no question but I’m not expecting much at the Emirates on Sunday. The prof. Is quite optimistic with his current victory run but hey, it is home bound Chelsea we are talking about. The Happy One will bulldoze through, no doubt about it. 

I wish I was a magician but that’s not what I promised at the top on this post. I promised to be a realist. If I were to put any money anywhere, I would not put it where my mouth will be on Sunday, I would put it where Mourinho is...

The Pride Battle

Having waved the EPL trophy bye-bye, the pride battle now remains between us and the Devils. A battle for position two. There is no fundamental difference between finishing at position two or three but if you are a Gooner or a Devil, you know it means the world to finish on top of each other (stay out of the gutter please). 

 

The gods of football were well aware of this and they ensured that this pride battle would be decided the second last match when the two rivals meet. They already have the first half from Emirates. We really need to whip them at Trafford...

History Beckons at the Wembley

It was not a walk in the park as had earlier predicted but thanks to our golden boy Sanchez, we shall be going for a place in history at the Wembley. It took 120 minutes to dismiss Reading but that’s now water under the bridge. 

 I’m sure baba George, the Duke of Cambridge, will be in the VIP stands to cheer his club to victory but it will require more than royalty to stop the Gunners from  a successful FA defence. #ThisThingWeAreTaking.  I would have preferred Liverpool as these smaller teams can be a real pain in the nether but hey, Aston Villa, bring it on...

ION

One of these fine days, there will be more cameras directed towards the dugout area than towards the pitch. There seems to be more drama from the big five managers when they meet than from their teams...

Keep your midget hands of my Ralph Suit

Come here you portuguese dwarf

Get your tall french @$& outta here

there! Nimegusa.

#%%^&&*3#$@ @ #$#$%^&

Knock it off you two

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Welcome to London

It was just the other day on these pages, The Manchester Derby , when I admitted that hell would first freeze over before I wished any kind of good luck to Sir Alex Ferguson’s orphans. 

 

 

Well, hell must have hit absolute zero and come tomorrow, instead of dancing with the stars on the Bridge, I will be making a death Tango with the Devil. 

  (Stay with me earthlings. I deal with intelligent beings and I know you know that we are only talking football here. Yes?)...

 London hosts two important matches tomorrow and I will share my two cents on both of them below in no particular order of importance. The matches start within 10 minutes of each other from around 15:20 GMT.

Suffice to say, I’m a Gunner, born and bred, and my heart bleeds for Arsenal...

CHELSEA VS MAN-U: A Tango with the Devil

I had hoped this day would never come. A day when we would be required to keep our guns safely in the holsters for the Devils’ sake. You see, we Gooners never walk alone but when it comes to looking for partners to walk with, the Devils don’t even come close. But come this Saturday, we shall be sitting tight hoping that their recent form will manifest at the Bridge.

Allow me to crunch the numbers a bit...

 The next 6 points stand between Chelsea and the League Trophy. And the gods of football found it within their humour licence to line up two sworn enemies to stand between The Blues and the trophy.  We must now make a pact with the Devils to see if the league can be thrown back into a three horse race. 

 

 

(Poor Pellegrini; the way Liverpool are sniffing at their tail, even a Wenger finish is not a guarantee anymore).

We shall be pulling a Betrayal in the City tomorrow at the Bridge. You see, The Blues are our London cousins and they used to look up to us a few years back before petro-dollars found their way into the EPL and made them arrogant. Way before the Special One was fished in by the Russian tycoon, shown the door then fished back again as the Happy One, Chelsea were always our younger cousins.

Why must we dine with the Devil tomorrow? The Tyranny of Numbers come to play. If Manchester United walk away with the 3 points and Arsenal does the same the next weekend, then Chelsea’s lead will be slashed significantly. Their morale will dip significantly giving the remaining smaller teams they will be facing a real chance of dismantling them too. Arsenal in the meantime will continue with their stellar performance and have the coveted EPL trophy within grasp... 

Do you have any idea what this means for Professor Wenger?

 Every grand scheme has a caveat and here is ours. The gods must ensure the trophy comes to London. Where in London is the only headache we are seeking the Devils’ indulgence to solve but to London it must come. It’s Our Time to Eat

It is not the season for the Red Devils to start dusting their trophy cabinet yet. We just hope and pray that they can amass all the fire power from hell and burn the Bridge down for us tomorrow.

THE FA SEMI-FINAL: The Royals Must Die

Even as we count on our enemies to inflict pain and damage at the Bridge, Saturday night will also see us work to defend our territory. There is a way we play in the FA as if our very lives depend on it and for good reasons. It is the trophy that brought the almost decade-long drought to an end and stopped the ridicule of our empty trophy cabinet...

 It is the cup that will also put us in the orbit to History once again with a win. We are currently tied at the Top of FA Cup Success at 11 wins with...(yep you guessed it right)...the Red Devils. A full FA set will definitely shush our enemies who tend to think that our players are only good at making money while theirs make history...

First things first though...

 We have to get past Reading tomorrow and we are hoping Wembley will be another walk in the park. Forget the 12 goals thriller in the Capital One Cup in October 2012 when we lured the boys to the slaughter house with a 4-0 head start in less than 40 minutes then came back and showed them ‘who’s their daddy’ with a 5-7 at Madejski. We hope to dismiss them quickly back to their Madeski wakasomee huko this time round... 

 

 (So their ancestors in all wisdom thought of naming their team READING and their Stadium MADEJSKI? Who does that?!)... 

 Well I guess their first Reading lesson tomorrow will be “No sooner had professor Wenger shouted fire, than we were gunned down.”

Look at the prof. at the top over there.

He sure does look good at the top don't you agree?

It should have been me Up there?..Touche, cry me a river

 Tomorrow We Ride

#147: The Math of Infinity

I would tell you that I love you tonight
But I know that I’ve got time on my side
Where you goin'? Why you leavin' so soon?
Is there somewhere else that’s better for you?

What is [life] if you’re not here with me?
What is [life] if it’s not guaranteed?
What is [life] if it just ups and leaves?
What is [life] if you're not here no more?
What is [life] if you’re not really sure?
What is [life]? What is [life]?

Tell myself I wouldn't cry when you're gone
But I know it's easier said than done
Look at me, look at me choked up now
Try to tell you but it won't come out

What is [life] if you’re not here with me?
What is [life] if it’s not guaranteed?
What is [life] if it just ups and leaves?
What is [life] if you're not here no more?
What is [life] if you’re not really sure?
What is [life] if it just ups and goes?

The lyrics above are from the American Musical Drama Series currently ruling television ratings: EMPIRE. The series premier opens with Veronika Bozeman’s struggling to put some soul into the above lyrics when recording the song What is Love. 

  
After two unsuccessful attempts, Lucious walks into the recording booth and (coincidentally at the 00:01:47  time stamp) asks her to go back to when her brother was shot and she was asked to go identify his body...

I made my way recently to the Freedom Corner section of Uhuru Park to mourn and pay homage to the 147 young lives lost in the Garissa Terror attack. I couldn’t help thinking back to these lyrics and the emotions they conjure (only replacing the word LOVE with LIFE).

 While a lot has been said and done to mourn these departed souls, We can go deeper and really reflect on what their lives meant. What our lives mean and whether death in its essence is a finality. 

The social media fraternity refused to let 147 be dismissed casually as another number with #147NotJustANumber. Vigils and memorial concerts have been held both locally and abroad in solidarity with the families of the departed, the injured and the country as a whole. 

We must not forget them. We must not forget that we are at war with dark forces. Our enemies are smart, well equipped, informed and determined to go to any lengths to have their way. We must meet them and eliminate them with an equal if not better zeal and determination. 
  
The 147 souls were young and still in the process of figuring out their future. Personally, I am lost between mourning their deaths and celebrating their short lives. But I am a believer in infinity...

Once conceived, we all embark on an infinite journey…

 There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.  0.1, 0.11, 0.12…0.99999…A bigger infinite set between 0 and 2 and an ever bigger one between say 0 and 100… Some infinities are bigger than others infinities.

On that fateful morning, 147 for us ceased to be just a number.  It marked the beginning of the math of infinity.

Each of the 147 probably had a parent or two.

They had X siblings each maybe

Each had 1 or 2 or 3 or4 grandparents

An X number of aunts and uncles

An X number of cousins

Spouses and fiancés

An X number of comrades

An X number of friends

40 million plus fellow countrymen and women…

We can’t fully comprehend what each individual life lost that day meant to so many others left behind. There is no end (and probably even no beginning) to the math of infinity.

It is what we do with our infinities (BIG or small) that counts. The yardstick of quality is all the same whether you live to be a day old…an year old…twenty years or 100. Infinity is imprinted and enshrined in the lives you encounter and touch. 


 
 



It is the little joys you share with your loved ones. The discipline to not leave for tomorrow that which you can do today. The ability to free your soul of any hate or revenge. The motivation to live each day as if it was your last.

We pray and condole with the bereaved. Let them cherish the small infinities they shared with the 147 departed souls. 
 
We must all be vigilant and play a role to make our country safer. The government is us. Let us all govern the security dockets in our surrounding.

And because none of us knows neither the time nor the hour of our own departure, let our lives speak so beautifully to all who we love and cherish so that when our time comes, there will be a forever within the infinity we shall have shared… 

Casual Bites, Wine and Onyis Martin’s Exhibition

‘Art is a lie that brings us closer to the truth’. It was the great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso who invoked this almost a century ago.  There was nothing untruthful though about the artistic display on Thursday the 9^th of April as we, the art lovers, converged at the Casual Bite in Westlands in the evening for an exhibition by Onyis Martin.

Onyis Martin describes his work as conceptual. You draw a meaning from his work based on your own life experiences. Beauty lying in the eye of the beholder kind of art. He uses mixed media and his work has a 3D feel to it that helps to utilize not only the sense of sight but also that of touch.

 
 The beautiful paintings had the predominant imagery of a bicycle (creatively embossed on the canvas using stove wick), shadows and a single vertical wick at the centre of the canvas with a knot on the upper end.

I can try hard to paint a picture here of what the multi-talented Onyis wishes to accomplish through his paintings but I am well aware that I won’t do much justice to his well thought of and executed medium. So allow me to quote a paragraph from his Biography

“Through his paintings, Onyis leads us into his own cultural world, a world in which the sacred and the profane constantly mingle, in which worship and domestic life are one and the same, in which every gesture has a pre-established purpose and in which everything has a meaning. Within that culture, everything is determined in advance; everything that occurs in the present can be explained in terms of the past and has to be ritualized so as to be integrated into everyday life, which is itself a ritual. As we walk into his paintings, we have to look deep into our own souls for it awakens sensations and feelings, which we, caught up as we are in an inhuman[e] and artificial world, thought were lost forever.”

Well, imagine such poetic beauty collected from contemporary subject matter and beautifully translated with paint on canvas and, like a neurosurgeon on an operating table, you will have managed to pick a piece of Onyis’s brain... 

 The evening was not short of networking opportunities as the art lovers mingled freely with wine glasses in hand and bitings laid out on every table. The new Director of the Italian Institute of Culture, Ms Francesca Chiesa,graced the occasion in the company of several other Italian art enthusiasts.  

It is also only right to mention Luca Berardi, who was the ‘oldest’ art lover of the evening at 11 years of age.

 The young man, himself an upcoming author and an animal rights crusader, was quite a delight and already knows what he wants to do with his life. You can check him out on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook as well as on www.yarhkenya.blogspot.com  

Such a beautiful outing wouldn’t have been complete without some music to our ears. As the guests settled down from the exhibition, some poetry and music was in order.

 

First on stage to dispense a dose of poetic justice was Mtheto Hara with a piece he had specifically written for Onyis’ exhibition. 

He breathed more life to the paintings as only he can, then quickly settled back to his traditional theme of choice: LOVE.

 

Then came the soft-spoken but powerful Kelvin Kaesa who opened with an emotional and beautiful poetic tribute to the Garissa Terror Victims. There was strength and healing power in that particular performance.

Next was Winnie Kamau with four songs on relationship hurdles and forgiveness. We were warned against being concerned much with the speck in our brother’s eye at the expense of the log in our own before we joined her in a rendition of the ever redeeming Redemption Song by Bob Marley.

Steve and Alfred of Yabadoo Kenya closed the entertainment chapter. 

Their first song Lifestyle was all about what we want while my favourite, Gaucho was about this over-protective girlfriend. Bus Station and Umenishika ka Gava are also part of their creative production.

Two intensive hours of food for the body, mind and soul were brought to a close with a word of appreciation from Giorgio Berardi, the Project Manager at CEFA. 

The whole evening was made a success by facilitation from this wonderful institution that has endeavoured to give training opportunities and exposure to artists from multiple disciplines through a two-year journey. All the artists of the night are beneficiaries. The project has the support of the European Union, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and the Arts, the Italian Institute of Culture, Alliance Française, and Goethe Institute.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF Humphrey Odero www.oderophotoz.blogspot.com