Red card

Who uses it: Soccer referees
What it means: A penalty -- an actual red card -- that ejects a player from a game, either for one violent foul or after the second yellow card (warning)
How you can use it: When sending someone away.

I don't care about the World Cup. Those ads with Bono's voiceover, showing the world coming together for the World Cup -- what are those ads even for? Mastercard? ESPN? Budweiser? -- make me misty-eyed, but so does that Joe Don Baker ad for the Army, and I'm not joining the Army, either.

All the same, I like to watch people watching the World Cup. It's always fascinating to see people get worked up about stuff, and I highly recommend Bill Buford's Among the Thugs to anyone who wants to learn more about the football hooligan subculture.

My sister Susan said last night that she'd noticed a certain testiness in my recent blog postings. I admit this, and I'm not apologizing. You'd be testy, too, if you were coming into the second straight week of rainy days.

Tomorrow I'm going to a handgun class in Massachusetts, if the weather cooperates. I feel certain that will raise my spirits considerably.

What I Read This Week

David Feige, Indefensible. David Feige is a career public defender who spoke at Jen's conference last week. This is his first book, an account of one day in his life as a Bronx Defender that includes memories from his entire career. It's a compelling and frightening story of what happens to people who get caught up in the system, sometimes through no fault of their own. Anyone who expects to serve on a jury should read it.

Boileau-Narcejac, Maldonne. At least once a year, I try to read something written in a language other than English. This 1960s-era French thriller is archetypically noir, and a company like Hard Case Crime ought to consider publishing it in translation. Jacques Christen is a drifter and struggling violinist who agrees to impersonate a missing playboy in order to secure an inheritance. His pretense at amnesia seems to convince even the man's wife -- but his ignorance about the missing man's secret past may prove fatal. Wildly romantic, relentlessly bleak.

Casey Daniels, Don of the Dead. I needed something kind of mindless, and this was a nice break. Pepper Martin works as a tour guide in a Cleveland cemetery; after a head injury, she sees the ghost of a crime boss who was murdered thirty years earlier -- and wants Pepper to find his killer. Not my usual kind of reading, but entertaining for a rainy day.