I wrote a little about the LCROSS mission that was designed to search for water in the moon and the singing PM. While I’ve still not started composing songs about my projects, the preliminary results have been announced by NASA and there was water in plume, quite a lot of water and more than was expected.

The LCROSS launched a large projectile into a crater at the South pole of the moon that’s been in permanent shadow for billions of years. A second satellite following the first by four minutes analysed the dust plume for water. It’s a very simple experiment and was extremely successful.

The results indicate there may be considerable water, far more than was thought, in the form of ice crystals in areas that never see the sun.

Clearly this would make any manned mission to the moon easier as the crews would potentially not have to re-supplied with water or oxygen, as both could be extracted locally.

Next step is identifying where the water came from, there has been considerable speculation that it’s from comet impacts over the last couple of billion years and could contain some clues about the origin of the universe.

A very positive result for NASA and to celebrate they got their own Googledoodle

“The clubs welcomed the additional input into an ongoing process. However, they were of the opinion that bringing Celtic and Rangers into any form of Premier League set-up was not desirable or viable.”

So said the Premier League today.

Of the 20 Premier League clubs 14 voted against the proposal for Celtic and Rangers to join the League. I’m going to guess the only clubs in favour were those who felt happy they were not going to be relegated any time soon (United, City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and some other delusional former big club, maybe Totenham or Everton) and were not worried about loosing two places to the Scottish sides in a 36 team Premier-1 and -2.

Ultimately at the beginning of any year 10 or 12 clubs start the season with avoiding relegation to the Championship and the loss of Premiership money as job #1.

It seems that clubs have one chance in the lower division to come up before the combination of premier wage bill and Championship TV money (aided by the Premier League parachute payment) forces them to cut costs and compete on a more even footing.

Leeds, Coventry City, Leicester, both Sheffield sides, Reading and Ipswich have all fallen into this particular hole. Newcastle and West Brom seem to be taking this first year opportunity sitting in first and second with a little space between them and the rest. The third club relegated last year was Middlesborough, are they are just a couple of points out of the playoff picture.

The idea of Premier-2 remains alive. This has been talked about for a while and formally proposed by Bolton chairman Phil Gartside as a way to spread the TV money around, get a little more parity and reduce the spending gap between the elite and the rest.

If Premier-1 and -2 were to come into existence today Coventry City would be the 37^th placed club.

Another thing that I found interesting was no discussion of promotion/relegation with the Football League (current Championship, League 1 and League 2) that I could find. As they are a separate body anyway, there would be nothing to stop Premier-1 and -2 becoming a closed shop totally outside the Football League pyramid. If this were to happen it would be a change far bigger than bringing the two Scottish giants into the league.

Incidentally the TV money is astounding, the Premier League domestic TV and foreign TV deals combined are worth a little under $5 billion (yes billion) in round numbers. To put this into perspective this is more than Major League Baseball ($430 million/year), the National Football League ($3 billion/year) and the National Basketball Association ($920 million/year) combined.

“We have a government that has completely failed to make a cogent case for this war or convince us that it has a strategy worthy of the sacrifices being made.”

“There is a real chance we will lose this struggle in the bars and front rooms of Britain”

Lord Paddy Ashdown, former Lib-Dem leader and Special Forces soldier.

Public opposition to the war is real, in a recent BBC survey 64% of those polled said the war was “unwinable” and a similar number felt British troops should be withdrawn “as soon as possible”.

I’ve been listening to some British talk radio over the Internet this week and discussion has been of little else.

It’s been a particularly bad few weeks and tomorrow is Remembrance Day. So far this year 96 British soldiers have lost their lives.

Last week one of the policemen being trained by British soldiers to protect his own country turned on his tutors and shot dead five inside the training barracks, an increasing number of people are asking what we are doing in Afghanistan and whether it is worth it.

And the government is quiet; there no attempt to sell this as a necessary war and as Lord Ashdown this will be lost in the pubs and living rooms of the electorate.

In the background to all this is the fiasco of the August elections in which one third of the votes for President Hamid Karzai turned out to be fraudulent. Karzi’s opponent Abdullah Abdullah withdrew from a planned run-off last week has brought the election and all the problems with it to a close. He point is valid, the same corrupt officials in charge of the election, and another vote would be pointless, as the result will not change.

Lord Ashdown clearly spoke for the majority when he said: “We have a government that has completely failed to make a cogent case for this war or convince us that it has a strategy worthy of the sacrifices being made.”

Gordon Browns case is not being helped by the apparent indecision of the Obama administration over the request for more troops by the US General in charge of the NATO led force in Afghanistan. The request was made in late August and no decision seems to have been made.

The British PM clearly has to react to public opinion and Friday is giving a speech at the Royal College of Defence studies. He has to convince that the sacrifice being made in the hills of Afghanistan along with the billions being poured into a corrupt government make Britain a safer place.

Freddie on the Houston game.

Mandatory gratuitous Ljungberg ab shot for Heather…

After the ratification of the Lisbon treaty by the Czech Republic Europe has taken another step towards a United States of Europe by adopting the first EU constitution.

The upshot of this is it’s time for the first so called “European President” to be appointed as the EU becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

I find it rather ironic that it’s the Czechs that were holding up the ratification of the treaty that gives more power to central government, after all it all worked so well when Chamberlin secured peace in our time in 1938 by giving precisely the same country to Germany to stop any further aggression.

The Czech president was looking for guarantees from the rest of the EU that there would be no flood of claims on Czech property from ethnic Germans who were expelled from the former Czech Republic in the aftermath of the Second World War

But I digress, the front runner to become president of this collection of squabbling states with little more than geography and a couple of world wars in common is Tony Blair.

After such impressive performances in his last two jobs as Prime Minister and then as Middle East peace envoy (who visited the Middle East once in two years) his Tonyness seems an interesting choice. The endorsement of a potential President Blair by Gordon Brown (just an incompetent PM or the most incompetent PM?) and Silvio Berlusconi (a man who has also endorsed fraud, immunity from prosecution and heavy hints at tax evasion) really only adds to the growing farce around Blair’s candidacy.

Tony promised the electorate in the UK votes on the Euro and integration, neither of which he delivered.

My favorite quote is from David Miliband who said the EU president needs “Star power” and a “candidate who can stop the traffic in Beijing and Moscow”. No, Europe needs a political leader with ethics, respect and an ability to bring people together. Star power and ego have nothing to do with it.

The Tories have of course been scoring political points like it’s going out of style, but that’s not been difficult recently with Gordon Brown unable to keep his party in line. European spokesman Paul Francois said  “The British people do not like the Lisbon treaty and if it was used to impose Tony Blair as European president without the British people having a say, it would only underline the treaty’s complete lack of democratic legitimacy,”

After the Tory government of the late 80’s and most of the 90’s it would be difficult for the UK to become less pro-European. After all Labour were pro-EU (at least compared to Thatcher), but somehow Blair and Brown have managed it through ignoring both the electorate and the rest of Europe.

Nil-nil in a very tense game. It was interesting to see two sides so determined not to give anything away. The pace was frantic at time and a lot of players looked nervous.

The crowd was awesome, a great atmosphere and today I can hardly speak I’m so hoarse. It was a fantastic night and I’m slowly working my way through the beer list at Elysian Fields pregame.

Ljungberg had a great game and everything that went well ran through him. Unfortunately Montero looked a little out of sorts, the couple of chances that came to him he took very well, the best was in the second half when he made the best of a very good half chance off a precise through ball from Ljungberg. Alonso, Ianni and Jaqua all stepped up and had their best games for a while. Ianni had a great game and was effective at both ends of the pitch.

Once again there will be complaints about the officiating, with some justification. It was a very physical game and the man in the middle seemed to loose some control of the game mid way through the first half. He was inconsistent and that made it hard to have a flowing game. For example: the ref had been playing advantage and allowing the game to flow all night, untill Nate Jaqua was bearing down on goal after a great pass through the defence that was called back.

Having watched the replay it’s difficult to see how Onstad got off with just a yellow. It’s hard to see how that’s not a red, I assume Montero’s yellow was for simulation, but it seems disproportionate.

Houston played a very conservative game, happy to maintain possession and try to hit on the break. This will certainly change in Houston where the home team has a perceived advantage and they need to be more positive in looking for a result.

The Sounders have done well against this style of play (Columbus, DC, Galaxy and Toronto come to mind) and are very capable of taking the tie in Houston.

Now it’s all down to a one game playoff in Houston. The Sounders away form has been nothing short of superb during the second half of the season. After yesterdays game where neither side was able to really control the game shows the predictions of this series being to close to call were correct. It’s just going to take a single mistake to decide who is going through to the semi final.

It started going right shortly after the franchise was awarded, this was a different type of ownership group because they listened to the fans when they announced the name of the team.  This was followed up with the signing of Schmit, Ljungberg and Keller.

The fans responded by buying 22,000 season tickets.

A good foundation, but as the national media kept reminding us we were an expansion team whose stadium will be filled with latte sipping soccer mums.

I think we kinda disproved those theories during the opening game against New York… The atmosphere was incredible and the win convincing.

There were some high points. We won the cup, we saw Barcelona come to town and put on a clinic, we showed we can come from behind to get points when it mattered and ended the year the way we started it, with three wins.

The team matured in front of us and it kept getting better and better. There were a few down moments, the game at San Jose was just atrocious, giving three goals up against DC at home was another. As a fan you suffer through these moments, they give

Tonight is the first playoff game. And it happens at home in a sold out stadium, under the lights on national TV, against a very good team that we’ve beaten twice this year already.

As a sounders supporter these are the nights that are important, win or loose this where our team history is written. This is why we buy season tickets.

A quick read through the ECS forum shows a lot of pumped up people. This is going to be fun, it’s going to be loud and I will be giving my full 90.

Jean Todt is taking over from Max Mosley as head of the FIA, I’m really not sure there will be much of a difference. Todt spent a lot of time separating himself from Mosley, especially after Mosley endorsed him prior to the FIA election.

Todt is a former WRC codriver and has successfully run teams in rally, F1, sports cars and cross country raids. His racing resume is not in question.

I do believe he’s as qualified as anyone for the position. I don’t think too many people will argue that part of it, based on history it’s claiming to be the candidate of consensus that’s a little difficult to understand.

He does not exactly have a history of working together for the best interest of everyone and creating harmony. As Ferrari and Peugeot boss he was known for being the only “Non” in the room when it was not in the best interest of his team, no matter what it meant in the bigger picture.

As a team manager went to the extent of taking the FIA through the courts because they banned group-B rally cars after a number of fatal accidents. Peugeot had invested heavily in the series and wanted the class to carry on; he felt Peugeot were being punished for the indiscretions of others as no one had died in one of his teams cars.

Todt is one of the true masters of talking for hours with out actually saying anything, he will running one of the most political organization in the world. It was once said (Nigel Robuck perhaps?) that when the FIA politics get going it makes the houses of parliament look like a kindergarten.

Interestingly Todt talked a lot about having commissioners run the various FIA world championships (WRC, F1, touring cars, endurance racing and so on) and the role of the FIA president would be confined to the strategic direction of the organization. I’m not sure how far he will actually be able to distance himself from F1. Under Max the president and F1 were closely connected, but the appointment of someone both Todt and the teams can work with to run the sport would be a good start to actually putting some space between himself and Max.

Max was the lawyer for the F1 constructors and drafted the first Concorde agreement that ended the so called FISA/FOCA was in the 80’s and stopped a breakaway F1 championship. He really was intimately linked to F1 over every other series. I do like the irony that the threat of another team run independent series was at the heart of his replacement of FIA boss.

As we loose a character in Max, the sport gets another of its grandees back. It could be good, it could go bad, but it won’t be dull.

I am going to start with a little history, it’s relevant to the rest of this post. The Act of Union 1800 merged Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland and created the imaginatively named United Kingdom. The monarchy and government were in London and that’s how it was untill the Anglo-Irish treaty partitioned Ireland in 1921.

Because of political instability, occasional famine and opportunity there was a significant emigration from Ireland to Scotland in the 19^th and early 20^th century and settled in East Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 1876 the Irish in Edinburgh formed Hibernian FC, a few years leter Celtic FC were founded in East Glasgow, both clubs have very strong Irish and catholic identity.

A couple of years earlier Ranger FC started play in Glasgow, originally the club had no particular religious or ethnic identity, they just wanted to play football.

In the late 1800 Rangers and Celtic became the two biggest clubs in Glasgow and the rivalry grew. Around the turn of the century Rangers took on a more and more protestant identity, untill the club and religion were almost inseparable.

Clearly this is more than a regular sporting rivalry, there is a complex history that’s a mix of politics, religion, bigotry and occasional violence that have come together to make it so much more than just a game. The clubs have made moves to keep the worst of the sectarianism out of the grounds, but they also get the importance of the religious divide to the rivalry. A game at either club had a tremendous atmosphere and any football fan should make the trip to Celtic Park or Iborx for a game, it’s quite an experience.

This is all background to where I’m going. In last weeks Sunday Times Graham Spiers wrote an interesting piece about Ranger and Celtic leaving the Scottish Premier League and joining the English league pyramid.

I don’t feels it’s quite as inevitable as Graham Spiers does, but it’s a move that makes sense for what are two of the best supported clubs in the world, and today money is what makes world football go around.

Financially it’s a no brainer, the SPL clubs are getting just under $4million a year from TV, while Premier league teams get closer to $70million. Then there are the so called “big games”, currently they play each other three times a year. In the EPL they will have a full stadium every week.

There is some football precedence for this that sets a precedent. FC Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are Canadian teams play in US football leagues. Cardiff and Swansea both play in the English leagues and Wellington (New Zealand) play in the Australian top tier.

I’m sure the most vocal opponents will be the smaller Premier league clubs, a pair of which will be displaced from the big money top division into the championship to make way.

The Scottish league is in a financially perilous state after the collapse of Sentana last year, and loosing the big pay day clubs get when they play Ranger and Celtic will not make it healthier. However I can’t think of a country that has as many nominally professional clubs as Scotland, and a little thinning of the heard as clubs go part time will be painful, but ultimately may benefit the game in the longer term.

How they would join the Premier League is another question. There has been some talk about the creation of “Premier 2” to make two 18 team divisions. If this were to happen then the inclusion of the Scottish giants becomes fairly straight forward. Of course the formation of Premier 2 depends on TV money, and this year the Scottish teams have seen how quickly that can go away.

As ever some clubs will miss out on the payday that premier league TV money brings, today Coventry City would be one of those teams on the “Premier 2” bubble, add two more clubs and admission to the top tier become more difficult again for the Sky Blues.

I can see significant positives for Rangers, Celtic and the English clubs they would play. There are negatives, but ultimately TV money will decide which way it goes. If “Premier 2” happens then I agree with Graham Spiers that we will see the old firm playing in England, I think it’s more difficult to pull off if the structure does not change.

I’m interested in seeing what happens next.

Formula-1 is hardly a sport known for surprises and this year has thrown them up left right and center. Honda withdrew from the sport after investing untold millions of euros and sold the remains of the team to Ross Brawn, who promptly went out and won both the drivers and constructors championships less than a year later.

On reflection Hondas decision to quit looks like one of the worst calls in a business that has a rich history of poor decisions by the money people.

The engine decision came late and caused a huge compromise as the chassis and gearbox design were already complete and designed for a Honda engine. Weight distribution was not perfect and the deal for Mercedes engines was not done untill December, but after a couple of mediocre efforts the aero was better than anyone else, and by quite a margin.

The car ran for the first time three weeks before the opening race, then it won six out of the first seven grand prix.

Clearly having the very good Mercedes engine over the uncompetitive (but I understand lighter) Honda made a significant difference in how fast the car was, but there was also a huge step forward in how good the chassis and aero was.
Ross Brawn as chief engineer has won nine constructors championships with three teams (Benetton, Ferrari and now Brawn), but this is the first without Michael Schumacher.

He arrived at Honda too late to do much about the 2008 car, but in 2009 it was his show. I get the impression from friends that he lets the engineers and mechanics get on with what they are employed to do. He leads and directs the team, removes the roadblocks and does not micro manage. It was put to me that “(Ross Brawn) created an atmosphere where we could do our job, be creative and be judged on results, not adherence to the plan”.

This is similar style to Ron Dennis, he knows what’s going on and allows people to show what they can do. He’s clear what does not work, but incredibly supportive, loyal and allows his people to succeed.

Next year is going to be challenging, Alonso and Ferrari are expected to be very competitive after an off year. McLaren came a long way during the second half of the year and with the F1 silly season in full swing have been rumoured to be talking to Jenson Button about joining Lewis Hamilton in what could be a phenomenal package on a number of levels.

Brawn on the other hand have a lot going for them, a big name sponsor is close to being announced and Mercedes have indicated they want to buy into the team. I’m told that McLaren is not exactly delighted by that prospect, but have been told their position with Mercedes is secure.

Under new rules next year a supplier may supply up to three customer and one works team. This year McLaren were the works team, Brawn and Force India had the customer deals. If Mercedes were to buy into Brawn it would seem to make the proposed engine deal with Red Bull (Brawn’s main contender this year) rather unlikely.