Stanley Consumer Storage 014725M 25 Compartment Professional Organizer
Customer Review: It works as designed!
It kept things in their own compartments well. We used one for beads, and they stayed in place even when I shaked it up-side-down. We are going to buy 2 more.
Customer Review: Stanley 25 Compartment Organizer - Great Product
Stanley Consumer Storage 014725M 25 Compartment Professional Organizer
The Stanley Professional Organizer is a great product. This 25 compartment model has a variety of different sized compartments, including several sizes smaller than the one included with the 8 compartment model Stanley Consumer Storage 014708R 8 Compartment Deep Professional Organizer. They are both great.
This one is a little better for storage of smaller quantities of small parts. If you need to store larger pieces or need bins for large nubmbers of similar items (such as nails) you really should get the 8 compartment model instead. That goes as well for people using this for tech part storage.
I have plumber friends that also use this to store fittings. Just about every pro or hobbiest could find a use for this. In fact, there’s probably a million uses, and depending on your needs the other styles may suit you. All of these are really good so you can’t miss.
Love the durable feel, much better than most flimsy organizers I have tried. The compartments are all seperate, much better than the Workforce organizer which only has flimsy tabs seperating the areas.
I hope Stanley expands to this line of organizers because they are all really good.
Definitely try this.
Enjoy!
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Under Armour Medium Team Duffle
Large team duffle, hexagon ripstop and ballistic nylon, patented roll out mat, oversized pockets, wetdry tunnel pocket, neoprene handles and metal zippers.
Price: $39.99
Penn State University Sunshade
Protect your little passengers from the sun on the way to the big game with our mascot car-sunshades! What a great way to proudly display your team loyalty year round!
Price: $12.95
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer
The definitive book about soccer. With a new foreword for the American edition.
There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final.
In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer’s rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world’s most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer’s role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself.
Questions for David Goldblatt
Amazon.com: There’s a sentence in the middle of The Ball Is Round that to me sums up a great deal of the culture of football. After noting that Pel? had scored nearly a goal a game in over 1,300 professional matches–the sort of stat that would be on every page in a history of one of the major American sports but that is very rare in this one–you write, “This of course tells us nothing about all the goals he made.” What stories do football fans tell about their sport and their stars?
Goldblatt: Well, in America not only would you be banging on about Pele’s goal to game ratio but you would have been collecting statistics in a rational organized manner about his assists–a concept that had only entered soccer statistics in the last few years. The state of Brazilian football statistics during Pel?’s career would not pass muster in Cooperstown in can tell you. Bill James would have a nervous breakdown with hopeless state of the data base. Soccer fans tell a lot the same stories that Americans tell themselves, sagas, epics, heroic tasks, near misses, dramatic comebacks, tales of curious individualists and unshakeable teams, but they are told in a the idioms, genres, vocabulary, and head space of hundreds of different cultures.
Amazon.com: I have to ask the inevitable question: why hasn’t football–rather, soccer–ever taken hold in the United States (despite generations now who grow up playing it)? (And does the rest of the world care if it ever does?) I was fascinated by your comment in the American foreword that you recovered from finishing the book by ignoring soccer for half a year and only watching American sports. What did you notice?
Goldblatt: Contrary to the received wisdom I would say that soccer has taken hold in the US, if we look at participation figures amongst women and the young, and while MLS isn’t about to challenge the premiership or Serie A for money or glamour it looks like it is now established on a firm footing. If the game can just tap into the rising Latino communities of America it could be pushing hockey for fourth sport.
That said it would still be just number 4. Baseball, football, and basketball have now had over a century’s head start on soccer and between them created a wider sports culture–of expectations, tastes, and pleasures–that I think sometimes finds soccer incomprehensible ( what’s with the draws?) or distasteful (all that diving). Soccer had its chance in the USA in the 1920s and 30s when East Coast professional leagues were drawing big crowds but a combination of bureaucratic infighting, the Wall Street crash, and the lingering ethnic associations of the game killed it for two generations.
My time with American sports, which I should add is far from over, wasn’t planned. After the 2006 World Cup I just couldn’t watch any more soccer and there was an awfully big space in my brain where that used to go on. Moneyball by Michael Lewis came into the void and that took me to Jules Tygiel and the great tradition of baseball histories, Ken Burns’s long documentary which enchanted me (watched the whole thing in two days) and by the time I had read Roger Angell and stopped laughing, discovered Jackie Robinson, DiMaggio’s Streak, and the Shot Heard Round the World it was time to subscribe to NASN and watch the last two months of the 2006 season. If you like the places where culture, society, sport, and history intersect then you’re going to like baseball. I’m still working on hockey, in fact I’m still working on seeing the puck, and I’m trying hard to understand football–but I’m finding the helmets, amongst other things, a problem.
What did I notice? Where do I begin? After barely thinking about the United States for three and half years the whole modern history of America opened up before me. That’s a work in progress.
Amazon.com: It’s hard to underestimate the density and breadth of knowledge that went into this book: politics, culture, and of course football, across the entire football-playing world (which is to say, the entire world). How did you research your vast topic?
Goldblatt: The Ball Is Round was, in retrospect, 20 years in the making. I had wanted to write a world history since I knew that such things existed. In a former life I spent a long time working on globalization and global history and then I made a global atlas of football, so I had plenty of background.
After that, I followed Phillip Pullman’s advice, “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.” I read a lot, followed my nose and other’s advice, scoured journals, libraries and old magazines, studied web sites, visited museums, stadia, and shrines, made contacts in a lot of countries, and begged, bought, and traded information and opinion–oh and I watched an awful lot of football.
There were trips to Scotland, Sweden, Serbia, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Greece, Tunisia, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina not to mention a lot of old games on video and DVD.
How did I write it? Fast.
Amazon.com: There is nearly as much politics in your history as football–among Argentines, for instance, Peron has nearly as many index entries as Maradona. Why did you not want to write a history only of the players and the games? What relationship do you see between football and politics?
Goldblatt: How could anyone write a history of just players and games and be true to the meaning of soccer? Milan Kundera defended the role of the literary critic by arguing “Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.” I would say the same of same of social history and sport. All sports trade on their histories, but tend to offer us at best the anodyne accounts of their own development and meanings at worst they are scurrilous cover-ups and concocted myth. Sport and its audience deserve better.
The relationship between football and politics takes many forms–it has been entwined with every conceivable political ideology and movement, every geographical unit and social division, and it has served authoritarian and democratic visions. In the end, football will take on and express the politics determined by our collective choices and struggles, the point for me is to remember that one has choices; to some extent we get the soccer we deserve.
Amazon.com: Has modern football become too big for itself, between the tycoons and the multinationals, the giant audiences and transfer fees, the corruption and the endless media coverage? Is there still space for the game?
Goldblatt: I went to see Manchester United last year in the Champions league–a 70th birthday present for my Mancunian father-in-law–and here at the epicenter of the global branding revolution and the foreign takeover and the rest of it I was privileged to see Carlos Tevez take the game by the scruff of the neck and force 21 players and 70,000 people to track his every move–electric.
Come to Bristol, England’s most underperforming soccer city (half a million people, two clubs, no titles) and tell me there’s no space for the game. No one is going to Bristol Rovers to be part of giant audience or a world shaped by tycoons and multinationals. But go they do, and to Bristol City too, teetering on the edge of the premiership and there I find a game that makes me laugh–soccer does pantomime and farce here–but surprises, thrills, and reminds me as part of a living crowd the one thing that writing a world history really drives home–”we are all just a drop in the ocean.”
Amazon.com: And lastly: who’s your favorite for Euro 2008?
Goldblatt: It feels really open–so I’m going with an outsider (like Greece at 2004)–Croatia.
List Price: $24.00
Amazon Price: $16.32
Used Price: $14.62
Customer Review: A book which I hoped would never end but I finished far too quickly
I’ve read a lot of books about sports in my relatively short time on this planet and while I have really enjoyed many of them and reread a few multiple times, this was definitely the first sports-related book I have ever NOT wanted to finish. Based on my rating, you can tell I mean this in a completely positive way: this book was easily one of the most informative and engaging texts I have ever had the pleasure of reading. The main point of this text is the history of soccer (or football, whichever you may prefer - I’m an American, so soccer it is), which is clear from the subtitle on the cover. Yet there is so, so, so much more contained within the roughly 900 pages that span the book’s binding. You have a lot of politics, great human successes and failures, stories of survival and disaster, as well as small passages that set you in a certain time and space where Goldblatt takes you to a scene important to the chapter or section. For a well-read fan of the game, the importance of this book lies in the first half of it, as Goldblatt starts from the very beginning, discussing ball games of the ancient world, moving to the late 19th century and the creation of the English FA and the FA Cup, the development of professionalism (both accepted and hidden) versus amateurism, and while he obviously takes the history all the way to the present, the first half of the book opens up a history of the sport that many know absolutely nothing about. Soccer in the first half of the 20th century is not a well-known history, one Goldblatt marvelously elucidates. For those who like the sport but know little about it, the book shows you how much there was to soccer before the advent of the Premier League, corporate sponsorship, and 32 teams in the World Cup. Goldblatt does a tremendous job of really digging into the social and political implications and uses of the sport in various countries, from the first world to the third. Perhaps the most impressive part is that this text is all-inclusive. You don’t just get a history of European soccer with a decent bit about South America and occasional mentions or anecdotes from Africa, North America, Australia, or Asia. Goldblatt delves into every continent’s history and relationship to the game, truly showing how soccer really is the global game. All in all, this is a fantastic read and I highly recommend it to anyone.
Customer Review: The Football Bible
This is amazing, wide ranging work that tells the story of football (soccer) and places it in the social context of the times. It is a dense and scholarly work which covers a lot of world history and social class because football does not stand on it’s own as simply a game but it is much more important than life and death(to paraphrase Bill Shankly’s famous quote). Goldblatt is a very good writer who had me reaching for the Dictionary, who is able to synthesize the rich history of world football into a readable account. I appreciate the match accounts from great matches. I see this book as an companion to the excellent History of Football BBC series. The only drawback with this book is that it should have more photos
FIFA 08
Get closer to the action than ever before by learning to play like a real professional football player in FIFA 08. The new ?Be APro: Co-op Season? mode challenges you to master the same disciplines as a real professional football player?from positioning and tackling to reading the field and passing. Step onto the field with your created player and develop him into an elite player over the course of the season. Play with up to three friends playing all fixed to their players on your favorite club, complete individual challenges to develop your player attributes and win glory for the squad, while competing with your friends to develop the best player by season’s end. From the moment you step on the pitch, FIFA 08 gives you complete control of the action. New manual controls enable you to dictate the play with control over through-passing and crossing, the goalkeeper in one-on-one situations, and your defenders in order to quickly switch defenders and choose exactly who you want to control when defending. Plus, now it is more strategic to break down the opposition than ever before with new defensive and positioning logic that ensures players are in the right place at the right time, constantly considering the whole situation. You must manage your club to success by preparing for each specific opponent using new custom formations, creating the perfect formation and tactics. Assign roles and move players to the exact position in relation to teammates to undermine the opposition. FIFA 08 on the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system introduces Online Football Clubs that enable you to form your own group of like-minded football fans to take on all challengers online. Gain status among the online community by helping your Football Club climb the rankings! Create a Football Club and climb the ranks! Capture your best game moments in video files 30 leagues, 30 real stadiums and 14,000 players all accurately rec
List Price: $29.99
Amazon Price: $29.99
Used Price: $21.14
Customer Review: Still improving
FIFA has long been a fun game, but some have stated that FIFA was more arcade-style while its main competitor, Pro Evolution Soccer, was more realistic than FIFA. The people at EA Sports heard the detractors and have worked for the past couple years to make FIFA more realistic while keeping the fun intact. With this year’s game, they have made further strides in this pursuit. While FIFA still may be a step behind PES in terms of realism, it is now a very slight step. The main improvements in the newest installment of the game include a smarter AI, lower scorelines (which in and of itself makes things more realistic), formations based upon each individual team, an improved passing system, and new leagues and teams. The new passing system is perhaps the biggest change and it does take time to master, but once you do you can make pinpoint passes that were not possible in previous versions of the game. Also on the plus side, the graphics are still very good on the PS2 version and the game is still fun to play. I’ve been playing FIFA for a long time, but have never been enough of a gamer to play it on the highest level of difficulty so I may not be the best reviewer, but I think the game is more challenging than past versions as well. As for negatives, I have only two beefs with the game. One is that while the new, team-based formations are supposed to be based on fact, some are off. And I also wish that the user could customize formations a bit easier to move players around the pitch, but beyond that this is an excellent game. The second negative is that, again this may be perhaps I’m not a gamer, but the defenders on your team, whether you control them or not, are just awful. The computer’s players will run all the way from midfield to the face of the goal and you’re defenders won’t be able to stop them. This happens even on the lowest difficulty levels. It means that you won’t have many games where you win 6-0, but it also means you’ll give up some cheap, bogus goals. Even if you think PES is more realistic, FIFA is worth picking up and giving a try.
Customer Review: FIFA 2008
My sons had a lot of fun playing the game. They couldn’t wait to have it. Now they play whenever they are allowed to play.
The bubble gum that’s soccer fun.
Delicous milk chocolate spheres covered in soccer ball foils! There are approximately 70 soccer balls per pound. Each chocolate ball has a diameter of approximately 3/4 inch.
It’s the blue team against the red team in this exciting game of soccer. The huge stadium measures over 22″ and over 14″ inches wide, making plenty of room for a very large crowd! The spotlights are aimed down onto the field and the scoreboards show a score of 0-0. Suddenly the red team has the ball, the center takes a hard shot to the left, the goalie dives right, and the red team scores!! This should be a good game!
