Peter Hooton's shoe, circa 1989. Still rather large.
My Pathetic Homepage was first created in mid 1995 so I could hotlink Glasgow Celtic photos, post scans of people shooting nautical flares at one another, tell people what to think about politics, convince them to buy my fanzine, and get dates. The first two succeeded wonderfully, the third got dull real quick, and the last two never came off at all. Ah the dreams of the springtime of my life!
Between then and now there have been several iterations of this thing. Most have been shortlived (the boredom thing). Most have been green in color. Most have featured a picture of Peter Hooton‘s rare original 1970s Stan Smith all green colorway I ripped out of a copy of The Face sometime in the mid 1980s.
Here’s a potted bio, for those interested.
Tommy Miles is an avid observer of Francophone West Africa, notably Nigerien and Malian affairs, as well as capitalism and anti-capitalist struggles worldwide. Once a PhD candidate in French colonial history at Columbia University, Miles decided he preferred life outside the stacks, and is now a dba and web based application developer in New York City. His other interests include the socialism, Glasgow Celtic, Adidas Kegler Supers, watching Europeans get in fights, collecting African commemorative Wax Prints, eating his vegetables, and keeping both his cat and his wife happy.
TOMATHON.COM has been the home of several incarnations of my blog since before the term “blog” existed. I began to break HTML and bore the world with my opinions in 1995, moved to tomathon.com around 1998, and hosted and developed — among others — a website devoted to anti-fascist football (soccer) supporters (“Rash Futbol”, which got a `1996 writeup in “When Saturday Comes”, of which I’m inordinately proud.), the online version of a print NY soccer fanzine (“Akitazine”), and more than a couple dozen football related, subcultural, and political websites using technologies from vanilla HTML, Flash, PHP, and implementations of WordPress, Drupal, PostNuke and other applications. This domain now includes the fourth incarnation of my weblog, focusing on the unlikely juxtapositions of football, fashion, and Francophone West African affairs, as well as single purpose statistical databases with PHP front ends, photo archives, half functioning old sites, and at least two websites hosted for friends. You can email “Tommy” at the above domain to find out more.
Reprint rights: This has, strangely enough, come up. All written content on this website is fully copyrighted from 1995 to present to Thomas (Tommy) Miles under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (cc by-sa)
CC describes this better than I might.
“This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.” See the full legalese.
This content may be republished for profit, but you may not claim copyright of this content, even though you can claim copyright of the larger publication and any marginalia or commentary. I prefer my full name and website address as credit, and a copy of the publication as a courtesy.
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All written content on this website is fully copyrighted from 1995 to present to Thomas (Tommy) Miles under <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0″ target=”_blank”>Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (cc by-sa)</a>
CC describes this better than I might. “This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.” <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode”>See the full legalese</a>. This content may be republished for profit, but YOU may not claim copyright of this content, even though you CAN claim copyright of the larger publication and any marginalia or commentary. I prefer my full name and website address as credit, and a copy of the publication as a courtesy.
With the miserable news from Japan taking a turn towards a science-fiction level of horror, I’m afraid I can’t get Mr. Burns of the Simpsons out of my head. In one episode, as his nuclear plant goes critical, Mr Burns is giving a phone interview to a local newscaster Kent Brockman, and happily lying [...]
Saturday the 12th of March will see second round voting in Niger’s Presidential elections, marking a return to civilian rule and the beginning of the Seventh Republic. It seems certain that front runner and PNDS-Tarayya candidate Mahamadou Issoufou will become the first President of the new republic on 8 April when the military junta that [...]
Here’s a fascinating new article on the history of Harlem activists A. Philip Randolph and Frank R. Crosswaith, and their involvement with the Socialist Party (riven by right and left factionalism) in the 1920s. It places them in contrast to Black Nationalism, but highlights the abuse they were willing to put up with at the [...]
As I write this, Saif Gaddafi is speaking to a Libyan people who have seemed to have already moved past his father’s regime. His late and desperate attempt to scare his countrymen into rejecting a revolution which has engulfed his nation touched one element with which, seemingly, those opposing him might agree. He blamed “crimes” [...]
The 31st of January saw Niger’s Legislative elections, combined with the first round of the Presidential elections. Results are not yet known, and the top two in the Presidential race will re-run on 14 March. Here’s some tools to follow it. The best immediate updates on the polls and count can be found at the [...]
As I’ll be spending most of this month tied to a TV or radio, I’ve so far noted one shocking fact: The South African World Cup is not riven by crime, corruption, shoddy workmanship, or terrorism. In fact, things are going swimmingly, the stadiums operations and infrastructure are beautiful, and the only deaths among the [...]
Hopefully by now everyone knows that parts of West Africa, especially pockets of Chad and Niger, are struggling with the worst food shortages since 2005. Alex Thurston reports that international humanitarian agencies, as well as increasingly concerned governments, are now worried that this crisis is more generalized than first reported (last September), striking areas of [...]
Jeune Afrique editor François Soudan has a biting new piece on the recent Togolese election. Noting defeated opposition candidate Jean-Pierre Fabre’s neologism “Africaneries” (for “African Inherited rule”, presumably) Soudan turns the tables of blame deftly. “For African oppositions, some of whom, in Guinea and Niger, have been reduced to military coups to break political deadlocks [...]
As I noted on the 10th of March, the CSRD junta in Niger has replaced all the civilian Region Governors with military men to administer local affairs during the transition. We now have the full list, and while I for one hate to see any military governing, a careful look at the men (all men) coming and going in Niger's Regions gives us an opportunity to examine what's going on behind the scenes, and what it augurs for the future.
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The headlines from Lome, Togo are tension inducing. For Togolese or those with family there, it must be excruciating. It appears that President and dictator's son Fauré Gnassingbé has been elected, while the main opposition leader vowed struggle: “We will launch a popular uprising until victory is ours.”
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Nigeriens were - are - undoubtedly pleased that the army stepped in to end a newly installed dictatorship. But criticisms of this so called "good coup" are beginning to appear even amongst its strongest supporters. With many months of transitional rule ahead, these whispers give us some idea of the problems the junta will soon face. 
One doesn't see much film, let alone color film, of colonial era African football. So you can imagine my delight when I stumbled across clips of a French colonial propaganda newsreel featuring the my favorite African club side wining a colonial cup final from 1956. 