Everton Win Piles the Pressure on Villas-Boas

Everton continued their impressive run of form at Goodison Park with a 2-0 victory over Chelsea, courtesy of goals from Steven Pienaar and Denis Stracqualursi as the visitors slipped out of the Champions League positions.

Everton’s home form has improved substantially of late following a remarkably poor first half of the season and their new found confidence in front of the Goodison crowd was demonstrated by their incessant harrying of a notably weak Chelsea back four. Liverpool were rewarded by a similar style of high-pressing play earlier in the season with a 2-1 win at Stamford Bridge and Everton’s opener was not too dissimilar from Maxi Rodriguez’s against Chelsea in November. Steven Pienaar was alert to Jose Bosingwa’s poor throw-in and sent the ball to Tim Cahill, Cahill’s touch then took a deflection off Frank Lampard to find Pienaar, who had anticipated the path of the ball and was now bearing down on Petr Cech’s goal deep inside the Chelsea box. Pienaar was able to keep his composure to despatch the ball into the roof of the net, taking only five minutes to regain the affection of the Goodison Park faithful following his return from Tottenham Hotspur.

Everton could has doubled their lead after Landon Donovan met Petr Cech’s aimless pass, though on this occasion Donovan lacked the poise to capitalise as his shot was hit straight at the Chelsea ‘keeper. Cech’s carelessness seemed to spring the visitors into life as they enjoyed a fifteen minute spell in which they dominated possession and looked likely to equalise. Daniel Sturridge failed to take advantage of Phil Neville’s ineffective headed clearance, though Neville redeemed himself by deflecting Sturridge’s effort for a corner-kick. Frank Lampard, returning from injury as Chelsea captain, squandered Chelsea’s best opportunity of the match as Juan Mata found the England international free inside the Everton box only for Lampard to drag his shot narrowly wide of Tim Howard’s goal. Everton resisted the visitor’s most fluent spell to finish the first half strongly. Again, the home side’s high-pressing game was effective as Ashley Cole’s anxious pass gave the ball away to Denis Stracqualursi inside the Chelsea box, though the Argentine’s tame effort was fired directly towards Petr Cech.

Ideally for Everton the start of the 2nd half was a largely uneventful affair as Chelsea failed to build pressure for an equaliser while the hosts looked composed both defensively and in possession. Everton sealed their win on 71 minutes with a goal that epitomised their performance. Phil Neville’s crunching tackle on Ashley Cole brilliantly won the ball before Landon Donovan gained control of the loose ball to send a precise pass towards Denis Stracqualursi. Stracqualursi’s newborn self-belief was exemplified as he shot without hesitation into the back of the net via Petr Cech’s weak glove to double the home side’s advantage. Everton were now cruising to victory and aside from Chelsea substitute Romelu Lukaku forcing an excellent piece of dogged goalkeeping from Tim Howard, the visitors looked resigned to defeat.

Goodison Park was again rocking following the final whistle as Steven Pienaar’s mixture of technical ability and work-rate took Everton up a notch in class whilst Marouane Fellaini controlled the midfield with ease in a classy performance from David Moyes’s team. It was Everton’s pressing play that made the difference though and credit must go to Tim Cahill and Denis Stracqualursi who constantly harassed the Chelsea back line to great effect.

One fears for Andre Villas-Boas’s job after Chelsea’s poor run of form and lack of quality versus Everton. To sack the Portuguese would be extremely harsh though when considering he has inherited an ageing squad dominated by players who have won numerous major trophies throughout their career and are lacking the hunger of, for instance, a Manchester City or Tottenham Hotspur. Surely Villas-Boas deserves at least another season to make the squad his own and to subsequently prove himself in the Premier League, though Abramovich’s track record with managers during his reign as Chelsea owner suggests that the current coach is now living on borrowed time.

Solitaire Blitz: hands-on with the next Facebook hit from Popcap

If any company can take one of the most widely available casual games on the planet and make it even more popular it's probably Popcap.

The creator of compulsive time-killing legends such as Peggle, Zuma and Bejeweled (which alone, has now shifted more than 50m units) has just announced its next Facebook game, Solitaire Blitz – a fast-paced variation on the classic Klondike solitaire derivatives available on just about every PC and Mac released since the early eighties.

As usual with Popcap titles, the simple premise is effectively a smiley-faced Trojan horse, delivering deep scoring and purchasing mechanics.

The game has a standard set up of seven feeder piles, from which gamers draw cards to create sequences in the four foundation slots at the top of the playing area. Here, though, the numerical sequences can go up or down in card value, so you're able to put either a four or six on top of a five.

It's possible to start a game with the feeder piles already populated with cards, too – everything is manufacturered to produce a speedy, ultra-fluid game, in which experienced players zip cards about the screen like a Las Vegas croupier.

And this being a Popcap title, there are lots of little extras. At the start of a round, players can choose from a selection of boost options, allowing you to, say, start with a joker, or to place a mine under one of the feeder piles, which explodes all the cards when you reach it.

Also, the foundation slots can sometimes be locked, so you need to uncover a card with a key symbol on it, in order to open up and start that stack.

The whole thing works on a timer – the quicker you complete the round, the higher your score. Clearing a feeder line adds extra seconds to the clock, like reaching a check point in an arcade racing game.

Interestingly, this isn't the only arcade technique the designers have employed. If players manage to create a sequence of similar cards across the foundation slots (like having all royals) they get a score boost, giving the game a sort of fruit machine dynamic.

At the end of a round, successful players are given a range of cute little items that convert into silver which can then be used to buy new boosts and other goodies. Popcap accutaely understands the psychology of the casual gamer – trinkets, and the ability to share those trinkets – is the life force of the social game.

Solitaire Blitz is, as you'd expect, ridiculously compelling. The boosts and timer additions, which could easily have been intrusive, seem perfectly judged and carefully balanced to allow proper tactical play to develop.

The timer element adds a sense of frenetic action, and the streamlined card selecting process (you can just click on cards and they'll zoom up to the foundation area, or shake if they're unplayable) is slick and satisfying.

Monetisation is pretty subtle, but don't be fooled, it's there alright. Players can pay for extra boosts, for silver or for energy, which depletes as you play more rounds – a standard set of Facebook gaming systems.

There are also a range of differently designed decks to unlock or purchase, ranging from the aquatically themed "Captain's Wheel" to an Eiffel Tower option with Gallic flourishes.

Players are able to share items, and can easily compare scores with friends so there are co-op and competitive elements. I also love the fact that the score has been recorded by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – surely a musical first for a Facebook game soundtrack?

I've played for barely an hour, but already it's clear the Popcap formula of taking reasonably well-known gaming genres, boosting them with lovely presentation and adding in a deeper scoring mechanic, is in full swing.

It'll be interesting to see how the title fares against Zynga's lasting favourite Texas Hold 'Em Poker, which boasts more than 32 million monthly active users.

With Popcap's other Facebook titles, Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz, hovering around at the modest 3m monthly users mark, the EA-owned developer will no doubt be looking to make more of an impact with this one – especially as everyone with a computer knows how to play.

Rekindled prescribed burn cause of smoke

Smoke rising from Ashland's watershed early this week was the result of a rekindled prescribed pile-burn on the western flanks of Winburn Ridge.

A cloud of smoke likely will continue rising from the 94-acre unit today, but far less than the amount that billowed from the area on Monday and Tuesday, said Chris Chambers, Ashland Fire & Rescue's forest resource specialist.

South and southeasterly winds topping out at 40 mph re-ignited brush piles initially lit by U.S. Forest Service and Grayback Forestry crews on Jan. 27. As intended, the piles were reduced to a smolder by rain and snow during the week after the burn, but the unexpected winds were enough to fan lasting embers buried inside remaining heavy fuel.

"It's no real threat to anything, just burning up some of the excess fuel that needed to be burning anyway," said Chambers. "But we're concerned about the smoke. ... We'll definitely be reducing the amount of smoke."

Downed logs ignited by nearby piles are also contributing to the smoke, said Virginia Gibbons, Forest Services spokesperson, but they are well within the perimeter of a hand-scratched "checkline" surrounding the unit.

About 50 workers Tuesday mopped up most of what was burning, and will continue working to reduce the amount of smoke coming off the unit today, she said.

"They'll mostly be working to mitigate the smoke," said Gibbons. "The objective isn't to put it completely out."

The burning is part of the Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project, a partnership among the city of Ashland, the Forest Service, Lomakatsi Restoration Project and The Nature Conservancy. This year, because of stagnant air in December and much of January, AFR is behind on its scheduled amount of acreage to burn, said Chambers.

"We're looking towards more prescribed burning to be going on in the watershed this year," he said. "We just have to wait for that window, where the weather permits it."

The plan is to conduct controlled pile burning on 400 acres in the watershed before next summer, he said. So far, crews have completed about 150 acres, he said.

And burning will continue for the next few years, as Grayback recently was awarded a $50,000 contract from Lomakatsi to complete up to 1,500 acres of burning in the watershed.

During 2010, Lomakatsi workers thinned and piled many of the units scheduled to be burned.

The objective of the project is to help reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire and improve the overall health of the forest, Chambers said.

Stadium staff track down lost property

Hundreds of phones, wallets, passports and mismatched shoes are among piles of lost property collected after Wellington's annual sevens tournament.

Westpac Stadium officials turned their boardroom into "lost property central" in the tournament's aftermath as they launched the mammoth task of trying to return the items to rightful owners.

A handful of staff will spend hours receiving queries and matching them to the piled-up and categorised items, which even include six passports.

Staff arrived yesterday morning to a full answerphone of messages and more than 40 emails.

Finance assistant and temporary lost property sorter Pauline Lyon said spectators would be surprised to hear how much work and sorting through "horrible", smelly wet bags went into reuniting them with lost property.

Drunk people sometimes reported their lost property and often left incorrect contact details, or they slowly caught on to the fact they had lost something days later, she said.

Often staff were supplied with extra details like a camera being "the one with Mickey Mouse photos on it".

Missing pieces of expensive hired costumes were highly sought after, like a leopard skin cap lost by a Flintstones cartoon Bam Bam impersonator, but not found in the stadium, Mrs Lyon said.

There were fewer discarded sunglasses this year – thought to be due to a lack of sun on Saturday.

Helen Majorhazi, responsible for "marrying up" phones with their owners, is fighting a battle of battery depletion.

There were many ringing all day on Saturday and staff used the opportunity to get the owners' details.

But for those with a lock on their phone or no personal details listed, staff could do nothing until contacted.

After about a week, unclaimed items of any value would be given to police. Everything else will go to charity after a couple of months.

Westpac Stadium marketing manager Steven Thompson said this year's haul was actually smaller than in previous years, which was probably linked to less drunkenness.

"To be honest it was a lot lighter. In terms of behaviour, it was a quieter sevens, which is good."

The Costume Company manager Gemma Freeman said a lot of costumes had been returned muddy and wet, and missing accessories.

Feathers fly as down piles up

Japan has banned all Australian poultry products and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore have cancelled Victorian-origin poultry imports to protect their own poultry industries and their population from the dangerous bird flu virus. This includes not just meat but also feathers, or duck down, a lucrative by-product for duck farmers.

Luv-a-Duck is a specialist duck meat company and the largest duck farmer in Australia, slaughtering 100,000 ducks a week. It sells to Taiwan almost all the feathers from the five million ducks produced each year on its 30 farms in Victoria's Wimmera.

From Taiwan, the feathers travel to China, where they are made into high-class duck down doonas, pillows, sleeping bags, gloves and ski jackets.

With each duck yielding about 100g of down, 10 tonnes are collected each week from Luv-a-Duck's specialist abattoir at Nhill.

"It's a mountain of feathers," said Mr Millington, who is also president of the Australian Duck Meat Association. "And it's a very expensive, high-value product; if we can't sell our feathers to Asia, it represents a real loss for us."

Also affected are the 5000 ducks -- including feet, wings, giblets, livers, hearts and tongues -- that the firm sells as export duck meat into Asia every week.

While meat and offal products can be sold domestically or to the Middle East, the duck down mountain is too huge to offload locally.

Only one local manufacturer, Melbourne's Purax Feather Holdings, buys feathers from Luv-a-Duck to turn into Australian-made luxury duck and goose down doonas and pillows -- and it buys by the kilo, not by the tonne.

"We order six bales at a time, which is about 600kg a week; so we probably wouldn't be much use in moving the extra 10 tonnes a week that they now can't sell to Taiwan and China," said Purax manager Steve Katsios.

The sweeping bans -- which Mr Millington said were an overreaction to the low-risk avian influenza detected at two duck egg farms near Melbourne -- extend permanently to all ducks slaughtered while they are in place. This means Luv-a-duck, whose farms are nowhere near those affected, cannot even sell feathers that are currently piling up to Asia once the ban is lifted.

That represents the loss of a container filled with high-value down -- worth many times more than the same weight of wool -- shipped every fortnight or three weeks from Melbourne to Taiwan.

Mr Millington said the excess feathers would now have to be mashed and crunched down into bird-feather meal, a high-protein ingredient of pet food with about 5 per cent the value of down.

About 25,000 ducks on two Golden Duck Farms at Gisborne and Mickleham, on Melbourne's northern outskirts, have been destroyed since the outbreak was detected 10 days ago.