photo by bluemoose

• The Wimbledon men’s singles final was pretty awesome! That was the first time in a while that I’ve seen Federer look weak, or for that matter so worked up about line calls. In the men’s doubles, the Bryan brothers lost! And in the women’s singles final, Marion Bartoli looked promising, but didn’t have her game together quite enough to overcome Williams.
• The Saturday newspaper amused me by having a relatively early article about new research that debunks (again) the silly urban legend that women speak more than men, followed a few pages later by some pseudoscientist author citing exactly that myth as part of a seminar. (In unrelated amusement, the research paper cites the blog Language Log!)
• Similar amusement can be had in tonight’s news, where we have on the one hand the IEA (formed after the 1973 crisis) warning of a possible new oil shock, and our dear PM on the other telling us to be patient with respect to the Iraq war. These couldn’t possibly be related, could they?
• Finally, and on that note, this imagined history is a somewhat-exaggerated but still-interesting read.

Wow, so Italy won the World Cup. I won’t even try to make sense of the massive outpouring of blog posts on the matter, but suffice to say that I’m not the only person to be suprised.
(With my couple-of-generations-removed Italian heritage, does that make me some sort of heathen unbeliever?)

Also last night: Roger Federer won Wimbledon. Again.

I swear that this man is increasingly looking unstoppable, at least when he’s off the clay. One day I might even be able to say “ahh, back in my day, we watched Roger Federer!” and the young ‘uns will know who I’m talking about.

(Oh, and Amelie Mauresmo did a reasonable job herself the other day, nicely complementing her Aussie Open win …)