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Will Cristiano Ronaldo grow a moustache? (15/02/10)

Football players are known to work as much on their style as they do on their football. Fancy hairdo’s and shinning earrings are household favorites. But what about moustaches?

Apparently, Portuguese football fans want their team to grow moustaches for the World Cup in South Africa. A Facebook group, started by 21-year-old João Carmona in 11 February to campaign for a hairy team, got three thousand fans in its opening day.

Adepts immediately started adding fake moustaches to pictures of Portugal’s football players. Ronaldo, Deco, Nani and company can now see how they would look like with a thick beer-filter.

The moustache clearly appears to be a Portuguese national institution. What would be ours? For all we know, Bekham’s hairstyle could be one of the Crown’s jewels.

“Sorry sir, we’re closed” (07/05/10)

When David Mitchell, Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne prepared for Chanel 4’s Alternative Election Night, they probably thought they would be the only ones involved in serious comedy.

Instead, a Monty-Pythonesque sketch was improvised in several voting stations across the country. At 22:00 hours, the established voting deadline, a still undefined number of voters were denied their right to vote.

It appears that our archetypal punctuality and respect for norms were taken to a new extreme and it is disparaging that a country that supervises elections in developing democracies incurs in such an explicit breach of voter’s rights.

In a general election that has copied Obama’s campaign from words to the dressing code, it is a “pity” that voters were forgotten. In the US, polling stations were open as far as midnight.

Even if polls were, yet again, wrong, it was obvious that there would be a considerable turnout in yesterday’s election. If the candidates aren’t exactly to blame, this incident nevertheless affects their legitimacy.

The ban is not to blame (16/05/10)

Since yesterday, a flight ban has been grounding most of Europe. The massive ash cloud that is currently being spewed by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull has turned the skies into the quiet place they used to be before planes were invented while here on the ground, a tremendous brouhaha is raising.

Passengers and their relatives, airlines and businessmen, are all starting to wail and mumble that “this isn’t possible” or “I am loosing so much money”.

This situation shows how much we have become used to “commodities” such as electricity, oil, internet or planes and how easily we crumble without one of them.

And, certainly, many things could have been done: why doesn’t the majority of companies have systems for video-conferencing? Why hasn’t the European Union agreed on a common railway system?

Of course, a volcano eruption seems a fairly unexpected event but it does show that we have very few back-up plans, and as a “union” the EU should be investing on a better transport system.

Let’s just hope the eruption stops quickly because I ordered some great DVD’s form the US.

::According to the Civil Aviation Authority, there were 216,193 commercial flights in the UK in February::