The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Friday, January 4

Hello, everyone!

It’s been a while since I rambled about a weird thought I had. Shall we?

Ramble of the Day

I was making a salad the other day, which is something I don’t love doing. I have nothing against salads, but I don’t particularly care for the process of cutting vegetables and then sticking them in a bowl and eating them. (I know there are plenty of ways to jazz up a salad, but I didn’t have much lying around at the time.) The time came to add some spinach to the salad, and I felt a sense of relief. Not only was I almost done, but I thought to myself: I like cutting spinach.

I told my younger sister that I thought this later in the day, and she thought it was weird. It totally is! I can’t help myself, though; I really enjoy cutting spinach. There’s a certain imperfection allowed, and maybe even preferred, when one cuts spinach. I’m no good at cutting things evenly, and never have. Maybe that’s why I like things a little bit uneven and imperfect, and perhaps a little bit messy, but I know that doesn’t really work with food. You don’t want things to be uneven, because you don’t want the items to cook unevenly. Spinach doesn’t really have that problem.

There’s the obvious thing about spinach never running into the issue of being unevenly cooked, but it’s a really smooth and simple food to cut. You just take a handful, plop it on the cutting board, slice it a few ways in the same direction, carelessly turn it 90 degrees, slice it again, and you’re done. It’s so smooth and imprecise and carefree. It’s the most casual cooking activity; it’s stress-free and hardly ever goes wrong. Perhaps it’s perfect in every way.

It takes a laborious task and gives you a moment reprieve. The taste itself hardly matters, though spinach is awesome. It is about that experience of ease that results in joy.

tl;dr: An ode to ... cutting spinach.

Links of the Day

A Chelsea fan has been banned from all football matches for three years and fined £965 after singing homophobic chants during the team’s match at Brighton last month.

The NASL’s anti-trust lawsuit against 15 U.S. Soccer Federation board members has been dismissed by a judge in New York.

UEFA chief financial investigator Yves Leterme said Manchester City could be banned from the Champions League after the club allegedly worked around Financial Fair Play rules.

Today’s longer read: Rory Smith makes the case for Manchester City’s David Silva as one of the most important players to play in the Premier League for The New York Times