By beating Wales 19-16 in a close game, South Africa earns a place in the finals next Saturday where they will play England. New Zealand will play Wales on Friday for third place. The game today, like the other semi-final, was largely a defensive one with just one try scored by each side, the other 21 points coming off seven penalties. While this makes the game less scintillating than attacking rugby where a team passes the ball back and forth across the field in successive phases until a try is scored, defensive games also have their own appeal and you get to see some superb kicking in the try and penalty conversions by both sides.

Since both England and South Africa won largely with their defenses, that may portend a defensive game for the final too. But whatever style of play emerges, it is expected to be a close game.

Here are the highlights.

England beat New Zealand, the winners of the previous two World Cups in 2011 and 2015, in a stunning upset in the current World Cup, winning 19-7 in a defensive, forwards-dominated game, with each side scoring only one try, all the other points coming from penalties. New Zealand had beaten England in 15 of their last 16 exchanges.

I wrote before of the pre-game haka ritual of the New Zealand team, part of the psychological battle, and there were plenty of interesting comments to that post discussing the meaning and purpose of the haka and how teams respond to it. Apparently, the English team had decided on a different way to respond.
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England will play New Zealand on Saturday while Wales will play South Africa on Sunday. Of the four quarterfinals matches played last weekend, three were blowouts, with England, New Zealand, and South Africa easily defeating Australia, Ireland, and Japan respectively by margins of over 20 points.

The one nail-biter was between Wales and France where France was ahead for almost the entire game and had a 19-10 lead at the 30-minute mark before Wales fought back and ultimately won 20-19, the last try scored just about seven minutes before the end of the regular 80 minutes of play.

At the 4:00 minute, France missed the conversion of their first try, a kick that players at this level could be expected to make. The ball hit the vertical crossbar and fell back onto the field. The missed two points was the difference between victory and defeat.

English bookmakers are favoring New Zealand to win the championship (5/6), followed by South Africa (10/3), England (9/2), and Wales (10/1).

Here are the highlights of the Wales-France game.

All the group matches have been completed in the World Cup with the top two teams from each of the four groups moving on to the next quarter-final knockout stage. On Saturday, England will play Australia while New Zealand plays Ireland. On Sunday, Wales plays France while Japan plays South Africa.

A major typhoon Hagidis hit Japan during the tournament forcing organizers to cancel some matches and treat them as drawn games. Whether this might have affected the group results is hard to say. Intransitive discussed the implications of the cancellations
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A metaphor is often used to conjure up a visual image to illustrate an abstract idea in a concrete way. In his essay Politics and the English Language (1946), George Orwell wrote that when someone mixes their metaphors, it is a sign that they are merely cobbling together words and phrases that sound good to them without paying attention to what they are saying. Matt Taibbi has hilariously highlighted the many occasions when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman does this.

But a few days ago, I came across a real doozy of a mixed metaphor by someone described as a former senior Trump administration official who was explaining why Senate Republicans were unwilling to step out of line and criticize Donald Trump. The official said, “Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion. They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously.”

My mind immediately tried to imagine zebras holding hands and jumping together, though how that would enable them to escape a marauding lion was not clear to me.

I cannot imagine that even Friedman would descend to such depths.

Today came the news that Brigid Kosgei had smashed the women’s marathon record that had stood for 16 years by a massive 81 seconds, with a new time of 2:14:04. What I found interesting in the report was this little item.

Some will also point out that Kosgei was wearing the Nike Next% training shoes, which have been estimated to give between 60-90 seconds of performance benefit over other shoes.

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Parallel parking, when done by a skilled driver, can be a thing of beauty. Some time ago, I reproduced some instructions that I found on the internet that guarantees perfect parking every single time. I have followed those instructions and found that my success rate is much higher than it used to be, though not 100% since sometimes I have to pull out and start again.

But I have to humbly bow before the expert in the video below who squeezes into a space that I would not have even dreamt of trying to get into.
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Earlier today, I got this email.

Hello,
Where are you presently?. I need your help for something very urgent so please get back to me via email as soon as you get this message.
Thanks

The signature line was that of an old friend of mine from Sri Lanka and with her correct professional affiliations and degrees, and the return email address was the one I had for her in my address book.

But I am cynical enough to suspect scams and although I had not seen this one before, I looked it up and sure enough, it was one.

I quickly emailed my friend’s brother to tell him to inform his sister by phone that her email account had been hacked. He wrote back that that had indeed happened and unfortunately his own daughter had fallen for the scam and given the scammer some information though not much. My friend in Sri Lanka and her niece (and who knows how many others) have now got to go through the tedious business of trying to stem the damage.

I am just passing this on to alert others that one should never respond to such emails or give information without contacting the sender and confirming that this is genuine. If email is the only means you have to reach your friend, then you can reply and ask them to give you information that a scammer could not possibly know.

Given the extremely high cost of housing in some of the major metropolitan areas in the US, there has been a spurt in the tiny house movement, where very small available parcels of land are being used to build tiny homes, some as small as 120 square feet. There are even TV shows that feature these homes. These houses are quite ingenious in how they maximize the use of space.

On the surface, this option looks appealing for people who like to live a minimalist lifestyle. But it does have its drawbacks, as this person recounts about her own experience in living in a 240 square foot one. She was forced into this option because of high rents rather than it being a lifestyle choice.
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This video of a deer crashing into a hair salon has been all over the internet.

My question is why the deer decided to do this. My initial idea was that it was angry about a bad haircut it had received earlier when its fellow deer started laughing and pointing at it. But this news report suggests a different motive:

The buck ran to the break room at the back of the shop, came back out and hit a mirror, then ran out with an iron caught on its antlers, Heredia said.
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Although the buck ran through the shop thrashing its antlers, it caused little damage other than to the front door and window, Heredia said. “It’s crazy It didn’t break anything,” she said.

What that deer really wanted was that iron. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt, probably because deer do not have second amendment rights to own guns.