Coop de Grace

Nice touch from the SFL to commemorate the untimely death of Davie Cooper
at next month’s League Cup Final between Motherwell and Rangers– two
of the three teams he played for, and ten years to the week since he
collapsed and died of a brain haemorrage on the training pitch at the
age of 39. Coop was probably the last true Scottish football great, and
certainly the most outrageously talented player ever to grace a
Motherwell shirt in my lifetime. (Reputedly, while playing in an Old Firm
match for Rangers, he stuck the ball down on the penalty spot in front
of the Celtic fans during the pre-match warmup, strode up to it
confidently and, with unusual inaccuracy, hit the crossbar with his
attempted conversion. While the Celtic fans were going wild with glee,
he retrieved the ball, put it back on the penalty spot, and proceeded
to hit the crossbar with pinpoint accuracy another three times in
succession. Apocryphal or not, it’s exactly the sort of thing he could have done…)

He was born and lived not far from me (well, before I left home
anyway)… in his amateur days, he played for a team coached by my
French teacher, and his funeral was held at my local church
quite an event in itself for an unassuming wee place, with the streets
around lined with fans of many Scottish teams, and the mourners
including the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, and current Scotland coach Walter Smith — how he could do with another Davie Cooper these days.

Weekend

I was thinking of writing something about Sideways, which Julie and I went to see at the weekend, but Michael Jordan (no, not that one) seems to have summed it up fairly well. Rarely have so few interesting things happened in a movie between a couple of mildly amusing bits.

Also spent a bit of the weekend writing some screen-scraping scripts to automate my production of the irish Setanta listings for the indispensible Digiguide. The
detailed information for each programme on Setanta’s website is
unfortunately contained in a Javascript popup that you can’t get at
with wget, so I thought I’d acquaint myself with AppleScript
for this part of the task (the rest is just relatively simple sed and
awk magic). Several hours of experimenting and googling later,
though, I never did find a way to tell Safari to save a webpage with a particular filename in OSX 10.3.8 (and it seems I’m not the only one)– it just doesn’t seem to work as intended. I ended up doing it with UI scripting instead, which works, but isn’t terribly elegant.

Ryansurance

I usually go on the defensive when people are quick to slag off Ryanair‘s
customer service– if you’re only willing to shell out a few coppers
for your flight, it’s a bit rich to go looking for compensation or
overnight accommodation if it’s a few hours late or cancelled, or moan
when they charge you for every ounce of overweight baggage. (Fates
which have never befallen me on any of the dozens of Ryanair flights
I’ve taken, I have to say.)

I did find an insidious little addition to their online booking form
last week, though… a “purchase insurance” checkbox, checked by
default, that when unchecked changes your country of residence from
Ireland (or whatever) to Other. ‘Oh, I need to change that back to
Ireland’ you think, only to notice (if you’re lucky) that when you do,
the insurance checkbox is checked again.

Even if you work out that it’s perfectly acceptable to leave the
insurance box unchecked and your country of residence as “other” (you
have to enter it in an unconnected box as part of your address further
down the page anyway), you get another ‘We really think you should
purchase insurance from us’ popup before you’re allowed to continue to
the next page. All rather intimidating really.

Woo Hoo!

After a fifty year gap, Motherwell reached this season’s League Cup Final last night, with a typically-nailbiting performance over Hearts… Marc Fitzpatrick‘s 120th minute extra time goal seeing us squeak through 3-2 (and him sealing his Fir Park immortality), having thrown away a 2-0 lead with five minutes of normal time remaining.

Hopefully Dundee Utd can see off Rangers tomorrow night, to set up a repeat of the classic 1991 Scottish Cup Final… but somehow I doubt it.