The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Friday, January 11

Hello, all!

I keep looking at pictures of Fernando Llorente quickly and thinking of André Villas-Boas. I have a problem.

Ramble of the Day

Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my relationship with food as a child. This has nothing to do with yesterday’s ramble, nor does it have much to do with the traumatizing elementary school cafeteria I rambled about about a year ago. I paid a lot of attention to other people’s food, mostly out of curiosity. There wasn’t much that my classmates ate that I didn’t — Go-Gurt was a common snack, and a bunch of my classmates always had seaweed snacks. Every now and again, though, there would be something that stood out to me that I really wanted to try.

What springs out in my mind is seeing a few of my teachers leaving containers of YoCrunch on their desks for them to enjoy during their breaks. For those of you that don’t know what this is, it’s essentially plain yogurt packaged with crunchy goods to mix in the yogurt, usually granola, Oreo pieces, or mini M&M’s. It looked so tasty to me, probably because I saw the M&M’s and assumed it was a dessert or something, though I never asked my parents to buy me some. I think I believed it was adult food, because I only saw adults eating it, and sort of worked with the idea that I’d try it when I was older.

My younger sister shared a similar story about wanting to try Trix yogurt, essentially a yogurt targeted for children. Like me, she didn’t ask for it, but there wasn’t a particular reason why. Regardless, she almost got her chance to have some when a student in her third grade class brought some for the class to share. Unfortunately, that student was a yogurt or two short, and my sister decided to be nice and give hers up. She still has never had Trix.

The funny thing is, though, now that we’ve gotten to certain points in our lives where we could just buy some yogurt ourselves and try it, we don’t want to. My younger sister doubts that she would enjoy it, and as for me and YoCrunch, I just don’t understand it. I’m not a big fan of the yogurt options out there and mostly avoid it, but from what I know about what yogurt tastes like, candy wouldn’t make it better, especially of the chocolate variety. I would know — I have tried to make many things better with the addition of chocolate, and regular yogurt doesn’t go with chocolate. It’s probably a bad use of chocolate, also.

This is ultimately partly a commentary on the way our palates change as we get older. We don’t really want to eat the things we ate as children — unless, of course, you were a subject of an article called “Men Who Eat Like Boys” that I once rambled about.

tl;dr: Yogurt related thoughts from childhood.

Links of the Day

A Las Vegas court has issued a warrant for a sample of Cristiano Ronaldo’s DNA in relation to the investigation of alleged rape committed by the player.

Southampton’s Charlie Austin has been suspended for two matches after admitting he made abusive gestures towards Manchester City supporters.

Julia Roberts won tickets to the 2022 World Cup at a charity auction hosted by Sean Penn last week.

Transfer roundup: Aaron Ramsey will join Juventus on a free in the summer after an 11 year stay at Arsenal

Today’s longer read: Jeff Carlisle interviews Gent’s Ben Lederman, the first American enrolled in La Masia, on the hardships that came with a rule change that saw him ineligible to stay in Barcelona and the sacrifices he and his family have made along the way for ESPN