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This paper examines the impact of the national sports lottery (toto) in 2001 and the 2002 FIFA World Cup for the Japan Professional Soccer League - J. League. In 2001 J. League attendances grew dramatically and were sustained in subsequent years, even though member clubs did not change many of their marketing strategies and chose to maintain a distance from toto. The evidence suggests that hosting the World Cup allowed the league to leverage the country's hosting of the event in order to generate long-term interest and attendance at J. League games. By contrast, toto appears to have had a short-term impact.

GIVEN the disastrous performance of our present government led by a pushy but limited Grantham woman, an official opposition fronted by a distracted, crumbling rebel, and the puffball growth of a Third Party spawned by Mogg and Levin in their erstwhile propaganda sheet, the silent screaming should soon be deafening.

ONE OF the first branch librarians I worked under was a man after my own heart. I shall refer to him pseudonymously as Bill Brown—which won't prevent those who knew him from recognising him. He was a decent, taciturn chap who had been gassed during the first world war. He took his time over things and took frequent swigs from a bottle of dark linctus to soothe his lungs.

MY EX‐COLLEAGUE Thrasher is not everybody's cup of tea. He's not his chief's, for instance, (but then, what deputy is?) and he's certainly not Miss Haha's. He's not even my cup of tea, although he writes to me as if our minds were as one.

I WOULD HAVE thought my ex‐colleague Thrasher the last person to break away from public libraries. He was not tempted in the least by information officer posts in the 1950's, nor by college resource centre empires in the sixties and he even refused a number of offers of licensed clownships at various library schools during the puff‐ball growth years.

IT WAS, so he says, the BBC Computer Test Match that prompted my excolleague Thrasher to write to me again recently. He went over the Cotswolds some years ago for an extra thirty pounds per annum and is now the deputy borough librarian of what he calls Bugsville. (He once described it as midway between Coronation Street and Till Death Us Do Part and not worth a series of its own.)

WELL, THAT'S what Thrasher said in his last letter to me: Colonel Sibthorp, the honourable and gallant member of parliament for Lincoln, was right in opposing the 1850 Public Libraries Act. His reasons for saying this—which he gives at some length and which I shall do my best to precis faithfully below— add up to a belief that it would have been better if rates‐supported libraries had never been instituted.

THE POSTMARK was smudged, but the date on the letter itself showed that it had taken some eight days to reach me. (A heart‐warming indication, as my friend Abe Silence would be quick to point out, of how the quality of life has improved for postmen.) The greeting was ‘Dear Old Mate’ and the address read ‘Somewhere in England’. Thrasher, in wartime humour, had struck again.

NEWLY‐PROMOTED Chief Librarian Thrasher had three main objectives. Number one was achieved at the first series of committee and council meetings after his translation: he was granted the title of Director of Book Services—and given a salary upgrading. Objectives two and three were to be pursued in parallel: to increase book sales and to reduce—eventually to nil—the level of library services.