From the BBC:

Berbatov pledges future to Spurs

Dimitar Berbatov has confirmed he is staying at Tottenham, ending recent speculation about his future.

The 26-year-old Bulgarian’s agent Emil Dantchev has revealed renewed interest in his player from Manchester United.

But the Spurs striker insisted: “I chose to join Tottenham last season, now I’m staying at the club through my own free will. At least for now.

“There has been a lot of speculation but all I can say is the club’s board have decided to raise my salary.”

Just been over to Pat and Lal’s to watch The Departed* on their fancy Blu-Ray system**. Now, Pat’s right to point out that he can’t watch Matt Damon without thinking of this, but I still think, here is an interesting actor. In The Talented Mr Ripley and now in The Departed, he played two characters who couldn’t decide whether they preferred the truth or the lie they had so carefully constructed. More than that, in The Departed the Leonardo di Caprio character is conflicted because he is essentially good, while Matt Damon never lets us know whether his character has any such considerations. It’s not clear whether Sullivan has any loyalty, or any morals, or whether he is just more comfortable pretending. If anything, Ripley is even more amoral, and seems to be asking us whether we choose the more conventional lives we lead because we want to, or because we just lack his peculiar talent for deception. And in both films, his character is happiest when putting another act on top of the first, flirting or inveigling or slipping away from suspicion. He makes a difference of sorts, too: I can’t think of another major Hollywood star who would have played Ripley like he did, and I’m not sure the film would have got made without a star like him.

* Which doesn’t add much to the Infernal Affairs original except to say that aspects of American masculinity are seriously fucked up.

**Not sure I like Blu-Ray. It all looks a bit too sharp and over-saturated, like a Gilette ad. Or maybe that was just this film.

PS Here is a wonderful review of The Departed by the great Roger Ebert, who gets right to the Catholic heart of the matter. I love this line:

I am fond of saying that a movie is not about what it’s about; it’s about how it’s about it. That’s always true of a Scorsese film.

This one’s for Conor, who’s going to be there soon enough: strange maps has a great map panorama and lots of wonderful detail about the San Francisco quake and fire of 1906.

The quake lasted 42 seconds, causing severe damage. Ruptured gas lines (and the scarcity of water due to ruptures in those lines) caused city-wide fires that eventually were responsible for up to 90% of the total destruction. Additionally, since the insurance companies didn’t refund the actual quake damage, many people set fire to their own homes. The fires raged for four days and nights. By that time, 80% of the city was destroyed. Estimates of the damage range from $500 million to as high as $1 billion (equivalent to as much as $300 billion in 2005 money).

The army was brought in to control the fires (which they did with dynamite and even artillery barrages) and stop the looting. In all, 500 presumed looters were shot. Some destruction and loss of life occurred outside San Francisco, but the bulk of the 3.000 casualties were to be regretted in the Golden Gate city itself. Three quarters of its population of 400.000 were made homeless. Half of those fled across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, others took up residence in massive camps of shacks and tents at Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, among other places.

Some of those camps were still open in 1908, indicating the slowness of the rebuilding effort (the city wouldn’t be considered ‘rebuilt’ until the Exposition of 1915). Up until then, San Francisco had been the undisputed economic centre of the West Coast. Los Angeles profited from the diversion of trade, industry and population, and eventually overtook its rival to the north.

Here’s a map showing the general distribution of poverty and wealth in the area around my home in Lowman Road in 1898-99, when Charles Booth carried out his pioneering Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London.

Lowman Road’s on the left, and judging by the key was ‘fairly comfortable’ at the time, as I think it is now. Note also the concentration of ‘vicious, semi-criminal’ types in the bottom right of the map, which happens to be where the Arsenal stadium is now, further proof that some things never change.

From.

Appropriately enough, there’s some good Andy Warhol stuff on YouTube. Pick of the bunch is this:

I quite liked this and this too. And while we’re at it, here’s Lou Reed and John Cale singing about him.