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July 3rd, 2009
01:23 am - Old school
1. Wow, it's hot, especially when we can't ventilate this house nearly as much as we'd like, bearing the safety of our indoor-only cats who are far more adventurous than they are streetwise. We're having difficulty sleeping due to the temperature and that's having all manner of knock-on effects.
2. Few sporting tournaments take place anywhere as euphonious as Wimbledon, whose annual lawn tennis championships are in progress at the All England club. I'm not a particular tennis fan, but I've been enjoying this year's championship. It's certainly exciting that Andy Murray has reached the semi-final and has at least as promising a set of prospects as Tim Henman ever did. The only thing to grumble about is the rather fussy and slightly pretentious typeface used on all the electronic scoreboards, which I suspect is a new development compared to last year.
I'm particularly enjoying the developments in the infrastructure, though, and this year's event has two excellent developments. ( A roof, a court and the future. )
3. Recently, I enjoyed reading that the school I attended between the ages of 11 and 18 has been granted planning permission for a major new redevelopment. ( Read more... )
4. In Beavis and Butthead-style news, I was charmed to hear that MLB's Philadelphia Phillies have recently given a number of starts to 23-year-old pitcher Antonio Bastardo.
5. Please might I borrow a Windows XP Home Edition DVD from someone? I have a valid licence but no disc and need to reinstall. I am not ruling out installing some other OS at some point in the future, but need to extract years' worth of specifically formatted data from my Windows-only (?) mail application first. Mac OS X is not on the cards. I've used it on Meg's Mac; while I like it, I think we all know that, in the style of the British version of the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" campaign, I'm a Mark rather than a Jeremy.
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June 19th, 2009
11:16 pm - Puzzles, poker and pain
1. Tomorrow sees the US Puzzle Championship, used as the qualifying test to select the national teams for the World Puzzle Championships in the countries of most, though certainly not all, of the people reading this. Theoretically I think you were meant to have registered by yesterday - whoops - but I registered yesterday and was still directed to the puzzles. (But perhaps I'll be disqualified for late registration! Who knows?) This year's puzzles look really good; I haven't tried the qualifier for several years, but this year's look fun. They also look accessible; I don't know how many I'll be able to finish, but I feel like I have a shot at most of them. (The last few, which will go completely over my head, look really inspired.) Threepeating US champ ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) motris comments, as does test compiler Nick Baxter.
I'll be going in to the puzzles tomorrow "cold", but this test looks like it has a lot more to offer to more modest solvers - like me! - than previous years' tests do. If you've ever been attracted to the thought of taking part, this year looks like a really good one to try, even if it's your first one. Let Really Smart Guys, a lovely near-live blog written at the 2008 World Puzzle Championship, inspire you! Conversely, if you're frustrated by the annual puzzle championship schedule for national-class solvers apparently being one event long, the monthly-ish Oguz Atay Puzzle Contest is similarly very fine; I enjoyed stinking the place up in its fourth edition.
2. The World Series of Poker is in progress at the moment; in fact, it's about half-way through. Numbers are similar to those from last year; some tournaments are attracting more players than last year, some slightly fewer. My gut feeling is that it bodes well for the main event; while I haven't seen anyone quote an over/under for entrance figures and I'm not sure how the online qualifier numbers compare to last year's, I'd guess at about 7,000 - a little more than last year's 6,844 but below 2006's 8,773. The big story so far is that Phil Ivey has won two tournaments in the first half of the event; Brock Parker won two short-handed ("6-max") tournaments in quick succession and Ville Wahlbeck has impressed by so far taking first, second and third places in three of the five $10,000-buyin events he has so far entered.
3. Many people have observed the phonetic similarity of the name Johnny Marr, who plays guitar (for the Smiths, as it happens), to the French phrase "j'en ai marre", often translated "I'm fed up". However, "j'en ai marre" is just a sentence fragment; you would use it in the context "j'en ai marre de ((quelque chose))", or "I'm fed up with ((something))". There is a lovely bit of British English slang, "mardy", which could be translated as "fed up" in a similar way. (A BBC h2g2 author has more.) Accordingly, it's got me wondering whether the phonetically similar "marre de" and "mardy" might have some sort of linguistic link. Etymology or coincidence? (Or, alternately, perhaps someone doesn't like Tuesdays...)
4. ( Excel question. )
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June 14th, 2009
08:03 pm - A little light transport blogging
1. I have inadvertently dared huskyteer to ride a thousand miles in 24 hours on her scooter. (Perhaps it counts as a motorbike; I'm not sure if there's a continuum and where her vehicle is on it.) She is doing this as part of an organised attempt by the Riders Branch of the Royal British Legion. The ride takes place next weekend; she writes more about her attempt here, should you want to sponsor her. It represents the sort of craziness of which I approve, and sets me wondering how far you could ride in 24 hours if you were prepared to take advantage of the German autobahns. Someone with the mental stamina to keep going for twenty-four hours could probably cover in excess of 3,200 km (two thousand miles) if they got consistently lucky with traffic jams and roadworks, but about half the autobahn network is no faster than highways anywhere else in the world and the congestion apparently can be terrible.
This puts me in mind of other epic journeys; the closest Britain has to one involves wondering how long it might take to get from John O'Groats to Land's End, or vice versa, by scheduled public transport. (The significance of this particular journey is that it's conventionally regarded as the most north-easterly point of mainland Great Britain to the most south-westerly point. That said, there are locations further in each of the four major compass directions; see Dave Gorman's Sit Down, Pedal, Pedal, Stop And Stand Up tour, passim.) Without flying, Transport Direct makes finding the route almost disappointingly simple; the southbound journey can be completed in just over 21½ hours, by virtue of taking the overnight sleeper from Inverness that calls at Crewe, and the northbound journey takes a little over 24 hours because the connections don't fall nearly as neatly and you get stuck in Wick for two hours.
Transport Direct is so capable that it almost takes the fun out of trying to create the shortest routes, though if I were actually going to perform the journey then I think I would check its conclusions rather more thoroughly, not least to try to create some back-up plans in case of late running. (Or just buy an All Line Rail Rover and wing it for the rest of the way.) It's sufficiently authoritative-seeming to accept its conclusions at face value for the purposes of this purely academic exercise, though. You might be able to finesse the time a little further by checking different days of the week, or conceivably different times of the year. However, I don't believe it's smart enough to take advantage of scheduled flights, so I suppose the next task would be to try to create the quickest possible journey in either direction taking available scheduled flights into account.
2. National Rail have released a May 2009 map of the Great British rail network. It's deliberately geographically inaccurate, which is part of its charm, but still useful. (Sadly it only has two dots for little Pontefract's three stations, but there are so many other stations it misses out - for entirely obvious reasons - that quibbling about one dot for a small town is splitting a hair.)
3. London is probably the most interesting city to blog about for transport developments in my view, at the moment, but it's far from the only one with news. Manchester made a bid to fund a number of extensions to its tram network from the Transport Innovation Fund, but the bid (which also covered a number of other transport improvements) was conditional on the acceptance in a public ballot of a peak-time weekday road pricing scheme. The ballot rejected the proposal, but since then government funding (mostly local and regional) has been found to start work on some of the extensions. In Singapore, the first part of the Circle line of the MRT system has opened, a little like the East London line compared to the future London Overground loop. Extensions will follow in the near future; eventually Singapore's Circle line may become teacup-shaped, much like London's own Circle Line from December onwards.
4. ( Onto London as such; )
5. With a delightful URL, a Finnish writer reports upon his recent trip to a conference discussing Personal Rapid Transport: driverless automated podcars that can follow a number of routes along a track. (I've blogged about the subject before.) The conference discussed the state of the art; the first modern system(s?) - and the word "modern" here tips its hat to West Virginia - are scheduled to become fact, in infant but yet fully functional stages, within the next six months. The theory is lovely and it's always wonderful to see potentially disruptive technologies come to fruition. The logic is convincing and the omens are promising; we'll just see how the unknown unknowns pan out in practice.
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June 12th, 2009
03:46 pm - What are you playing at?
As usual, this is essentially another post about games of various sorts. While Meg and I don't play all that many games with each other, we are pretty playful a lot of the time, and if we are sufficiently playful then perhaps we will ascend to coming back as kittens in our next lives. :-) Most of my blog entries refer to play in some way or another; I guess my last post was just an attempt to play at the European Election, or at least to play at being a predictor. Similarly, Iain played at being a minute-by-minute journalist with his European election UK-and-more results liveblog (and part 2) and, honestly, did a better job than the professionals. Sign him up! While I take my job seriously, I guess the differences between being an electricity trader and being a poker trader (a poker player who plays with other people's money; they keep most of the profits) aren't so big; we don't refer to participants in the market as players without reason.
1. This weekend sees the fourth annual Come Out And Play festival in New York City. All manner of city-sized fun, from the high-tech to the no-tech. I'm particularly delighted to see lots of "new sport" games, where the barrier to entry from a design perspective is very low. Many of them look a lot of fun to play, even though they would probably benefit from rather greater athleticism than I am able to provide. Blown-up video games are also wonderful, and this version of live-action Pitfall looks particularly great. All manner of puzzle events, as well, plus games played on subway trains. (Snakes on a plane? Werewolf on a train!) It looks insanely great and I look forward to reading more about it soon.
1'. Perhaps we can hope for some of the best designs to make an appearance at the Hide and Seek Weekender in London over 31st July to 2nd August. Will anyone reading this be going - hawkida, jvvw, perhaps? (bateleur has said he'll be running an interesting-looking game on the Friday evening...) I said I would go to this last year and I didn't, so I'm not going to make any promises this year. Honestly, it would probably take the confluence of a few happy coincidences for it to happen, not least a good mood. However, it all sounds wonderful, and I hope it is as good in practice as it sounds. I have a few potential reservations, largely out of a fear that you probably get the most out of it if you've been there from the start, and I fear my views on the interaction of stories and games may be unfashionable. However, I want it to be amazing fun, I want the people to be really nice and I want it just to be a case of "let your fears go, come with an open mind and let your hair down".
2. However, even if I don't go this time, it's heartening to see that it exists for people to attend; it's also heartening that the pervasive games movement is growing in the UK, only (at worst) a little behind that in the US. We know about the activities in London and Bristol (who have the Iglympics upcoming); it turns out - dog-whistle message here - that Birmingham is the next city in the UK to form a focus for the mystery-adjective games movement, with BARG being a monthly-ish meeting to play interesting games. Excellent! All it seems to take is someone with the spoons, confidence, chutzpah and resources to make the movement move; the source material (the games) are already in place. Some day the movement will make it to these parts; if Middlesbrough has a games club broad-minded enough for RPGs, CCGs, miniatures war games and board games, it would seem to be a likely place to start. (At some point, I'll start going back there again.)
2'. However, Birmingham has more than that; last weekend saw it host the third UK Games Expo, which is possibly even more impressively comprehensive still across many of the media we call game: not just RPGs, CCGs, miniatures and board games but also computer games as well. Again I haven't been, but this is partly because much of the action seems to take place in rather an expensive hotel. As with attendance in London: some year, perhaps. I'm not clear if the BARG people and the UK Games Expo people know each other, but they probably should. Ooh, and UK Games Expo features the Living Dungeon, which seems to be LARP without the scary role-playing bits that might form barriers to entry for the mundanes. (Big on puzzles, no rubber swords.) When it says "Inspired by the likes of Raven, Crystal Maze, Knightmare, and for those more experienced adventurers, The Adventure Game", my heart goes pitter-pat. Again: anyone potentially interested for next year?
3. You can barely see the seam in the segue from the last sentence but one to observing that the other day I discovered a Cyberdrome Crystal Maze in a mall in Dubai! This must be the first new one in, ooh, about fifteen years. Apparently the show was popular enough on the English-language expat channel for the attraction to be viable. Some slightly blurry photos towards the bottom show it's the real thing, and not on too tight a budget. This is simultaneously delightful, retro and potentially inspiring for the future - and to manage all three simultaneously is some going.
3'. But - but - combining a fantasy theme with an attraction where you run around an unduly fancy indoor playground with playing old-fashioned computer games, I may have blogged about this before, but Wizard Quest of Wisconsin Dells, WI looks like an interesting one-off. It's unclear whether it's intended to be the first in a series, but 5-wits' Tomb in Boston sadly seems to have been one and done, with even the plan to rotate games falling by the wayside, and even the awesome-sounding Négone hasn't made it out of Madrid. (Shed a tear, too, for all Peter Sarrett told us about Entros back in the day.) Interesting games at family entertainment centres don't seem to have cracked the business model yet, so perhaps the overtly non-commercial approach (frequently funded as any other art event) as espoused by the pervasive games movement might have to be what it takes - and that brings us back to 1 above.
4. Because sports are just games written large, I remain fascinated by the forthcoming United Football League, playing gridiron football from October 8th and quickly looking to expand outwith its initial US base. Taking on, or even attempting to establish counterpart status to, the venerable National Football League is probably the biggest challenge in sports league organisation going, unless the FOTA (Formula One Teams Association - but not all of the teams) teams do decide to split and start their own series. UFL Access is documenting the UFL's progress and now is a really exciting time in terms of lots of little announcements. It's all factual, and it's going to happen; the league is doing really well at making lots of wise little decisions and dodging the bullets that took down all the other major would-be NFL counterparts - and UFL Access is doing really well at documenting progress. The UFL is taking on a task so vast that there are still hundreds of reasons why they might not make it, but they're doing really well at making good decisions so far.
5. ( Condensing track and field athletics events into TV-friendly shows. )
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June 7th, 2009
02:13 pm - Today's thoughts
1. Several of you are going through rough times at the moment, particularly in terms of health developments. A blanket comment like this doesn't come close to cutting it, and I'll try hard to make the time to send you my warm thoughts while they're still topical, but do know I'm thinking of you.
2. Word of the day, or at least the word I've had going through my head since I woke up, is "escutcheon". It turns out that I didn't know what it means; I thought it meant something like "soupçon", or another way of saying "a small amount". Apparently it has a number of different meanings, none of which are even close to that, and some of which are not to be used lightly.
3. I work five minutes' walk (including a large and ever-so-slightly wobbly bridge) away from Stockton's main shopping centre. To give you a flavour, it features a Home Bargains, a Poundworld, a Wilkinson's and at least one or two more similar overstock stores. At work, we're quite keen on Dunkables, which are boxes of offcut, misshaped, broken and otherwise rejected chocolate biscuits. (Cookies!) I liken the fun of opening a box and discovering what's inside to that enjoyed by those of you who collect baseball cards, plus the biscuits are generally off-cuts of something at the classier end of the spectrum; you know, fancy selection box biscuits. The best pull I've had were biscuits that looked like Rocky (the biscuit, not the fictional boxer) but were made from "chocolate orange" chocolate. I didn't know anyone made those.
Similarly, on Friday, I bought a see-through bag of "Luxury Chocolate Misshapes" just because I liked the look of them, and they did indeed turn out to be genuine examples of rejects from some very famous chocolate box or another. (Without the wrappings, obviously.) Trouble is, I can't quite remember the original boxes well enough to tell if they were Quality Street, Roses, All Gold, Milk Tray or something else. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Black Magic, but...) There needs to be a web site which catalogues these offcut biscuits and chocolates for ease of recognition. Is there, or do I need to start it?
4. On another similar "does this web site exist - and, if not, why not" front, I'd like to use a web site which automatically ran the "What song are you listening to?" application continuously upon several radio channels and keeping a list of the last few songs played by each radio station. Ideally it would also feature links to the songs' lyrics at one of the million and one lyrics web sites out there. This is a web site which possibly even has a business model, unlike most web site ideas, in that at least it could fairly obviously feature affiliate links to buy the songs that you might just have missed.
5. I understand there is great science behind the concept of picking wines which will go well with different courses of a meal. By extension, it surely ought to be possible to use the same logic to combine non-alcoholic drinks and meals. Suppose you have decided that your four drink options for the day are milk, orange juice, Coke and generic off-brand sugar-free lemon-and-lime, but you don't want to have any of them more than once. (There's always water as a possibility too, I guess.) If you knew you were going to have (over the course of a long day) (a) cheese on toast, (b) my wife's particularly brilliant spaghetti bolognaise and (c) vegetable curry with rice, are there some general principles that can be applied to decide which drink should go with which meal?
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June 4th, 2009
03:28 pm - Who goes? Europe decides!
Today and over the coming three days, the 27 member states of the European Union will re-elect the members who represent them at the European Parliament, the body responsible for debating and voting on (generally EU-wide) legislation proposed by the European Commission. The elections in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands take place today. (Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, is lumped in with the UK, but the Crown Dependencies that are the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands ignore the election completely.) In England, elections will additionally be held for about 40% of the seats in county councils, district councils and unitary authorities. Additionally, a small number of elected mayors are defending their seats, and for the benefit of the rest of the world who don't get to vote, I may let you decide whether I have muesli for breakfast or steal some of Meggie's crumpets.
I'm not in an area where the local elections are taking place, so I'm most interested in the European elections. As well as the usual news sources of TV news organisations and newspapers, I've been following analysis from three particularly strong sources: Political Betting, ( Read more... ) UK Polling Report, ( Read more... ) and my old mate Iain's blog which I've plugged lots of times before, but it is really good and you should consider reading it. ( Read more... )
Without blinding you with unfamiliar names, the European election in the UK is conducted under a relatively proportional system. Generally:if one party gets twice as many votes as the other in a region, it gets twice as many seats. That's it. It gets slightly blurry when we're scrabbling around the edges of "one seat or no seats" and it's hard to work out the precise nuances of tactical voting, but it's really not designed to reward tactical voting - if sufficiently many people don't accurately represent their first preference, the result rapidly becomes unpredictable. To me, this spells "just vote your true first preference" and leave it at that. I don't claim it's the best voting system possible, but I still like it far more than the one we used in 1994. ( Getting into polling system geekery... )
UK Polling Report feature the most recent polls from each of the newspapers (which are, sadly, up to five days old) and also this last YouGov poll (from a beefy sample, plus YouGov methodology has relatively recently tended to be more representative in practice than the newspapers' interviewer-led polls). The Conservative party are clearly leading in voting intention with about 25%-30% of the vote and it's very close for second place on about 15%-20% between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party. While the Westminster government has been (more or less) either Labour or Conservative for about a century, when it comes to Europe, we don't have a 2½-party system so much as a 4.7511111-party system in England, with additional very strong players in Scotland and Wales. (That's made up of a half, a quarter and some crumbs.) With apologies, I will demur from blogging from ignorance about the situation in Northern Ireland.
The overarching political concern for the last month or so has been a sequence of revelations regarding MP's expenses. These have embarrassed politicians from across the political spectrum, though the biggest effect has been to continue to augment the antipathy towards "the system" at large. Betraying my leanings, I personally was a little more offended by some of the Conservative MPs' claims, but the court of public opinion broadly seems to have concluded that Conservative leader David Cameron has been a bit more effective than Labour leader Gordon Brown in dealing with the issue. Over the last day or two, a number of ministers have resigned, or at least said they would stand down at the next election. Of particular significance, the minister for Local Government stepped down the day before Local Government elections, which is clearly an embarrassment, not reflected in even the most recent YouGov poll; even the Chancellor is under pressure. Labour are in genuine danger of finishing fourth in "a two-party system".
While theoretically the point of the European elections is to try to ensure the European Parliament reflects the voters' preferences, many people seem to want to use it either to protest against the current Labour administration or to protest against "the system" by voting against the three major parties. (I wonder if there is a similar protest vote against the SNP Holyrood administration in Scotland or the Labour-PC administration in Cardiff?)
There is a degree of antipathy towards Europe at large, though in my view often poorly thought-out and sometimes borne of xenophobia. The Liberal Democrats are, broadly, relatively strongly in favour of European integration; the UK Independence Party, the British National Party and a number of smaller xenophobes are strongly against European integration and want to step back from protocol in place. The Labour and Conservative parties both have pro- and anti- factions and consequently have weaker views; I perceive Labour are pro-integration but not as pro- as they would like to be were it more popular, and the Conservative party are fairly explicitly against European federalism without going as far as proposing withdrawal altogether.
However, each of those parties ties up its position there with many other facets of policy. The BBC summarise the platforms here, but I could only recommend taking those as starting-points and then browsing the manifestos in depth of the parties that you might have been considering. You'll find that no party is completely unobjectionable, and no party is completely without merit. (Though several have very small lights hidden under very large bushels.)
Both the UKIP and the BNP include "stop mass immigration" in their platform, which is an automatic contention-killer for those of us for whom migrants' rights is a major point. (Yes, I did marry someone from another country because I was - and, still more than ever, remain - more attracted to her than to every single member of this country, thank you for asking.) While the BNP's manifestos have been deleted from Scribd - and if a "socially-minded" grey-hat has been responsible, that is not the public benefit that at first it might appear - the policies of "voluntary repatriation" and preference for Britons in allocation of housing and jobs are among the most distressing offered by any party. A leaflet of theirs said "It's not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness - it's common sense!" which follows a particular logical fallacy. While "opposing political correctness" need not be racist, when it isn't, it's very often homophobic or even anti-Semitic. Avoid.
The UKIP's policy on immigration is available, though outdated given that a points system, similar to the one they propose, has in fact been introduced. The policy of requiring adoptive citizens to be on probation for ten years, during which time they must not attract so much as a trumped-up parking ticket or face deportation, is abhorrent. The blanket statement that "The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights" is horrifying in a way that it wouldn't be if they were to say even as much as "The UK would withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, but don't worry, we'd put the ones we liked back in place".
Can't find the link after a quick search, but one of those political surveys once pointed out that as far-right as the BNP may be socially, economically they're extremely protective of their core constituents, and apparently that is not uncommon among the traditional Far Right. (Oh no, here we are.) Conversely, the UKIP do seem to be economically "every man for himself" in a way that even the Conservatives consider to be the unacceptable face of capitalism. (Scrap inheritance tax, cut corporation taxes, "introduce 'workfare' to get people back to work"...) All that and they're linked with climate change deniers as well. (I suppose every party of appreciable size has its loony wing, to use the term in its political sense, but most of the parties have the decency to try to distance themselves from the loonies.) For what it's worth, I judge those who I know to have voted UKIP or BNP harshly. (Can't say I have much time for UK First or the English Democrats either, and NO2EU - of the opposite economic persuasion - are oddly silent on immigration matters...)
Ugh. ( Among other minor parties... )
The issue of turnout is really up in the air. European elections always get relatively weak turnouts, with UK turnout being among the worst. It is unclear whether the current anti-establishment feeling will result in mass protest in the form of mass anti-establishment vote, or mass apathy. Conventional logic suggests the latter, but Political Betting reports that many of those willing to use BNP and UKIP for their protest vote are certain to do so, while the big three parties' (and Green, though surely based on a very small sample) supports may be less likely to come out. I don't think there's clear consensus on how turnout is looking based on the data so far today. I had a pet theory that people are more likely to vote when there's both a local and a European election for them to vote in, causing higher votes in some regions (where there happen to be more local elections) than others, but the data doesn't support this.
Even though voting in the UK takes place today, it takes place across Europe until Sunday; while the counting will start at some point soon after the UK elections close, no results will be declared until the last paper closes on Sunday night, so the big Euro-results show (and Iain's Euro-results liveblog) will presumably happen after 9pm UK on Sunday night. (I do hope there aren't issues with votes going astray between voting and counting, or between counting and reporting.) The local results will start coming out during the day tomorrow; accordingly, there's no results show tonight. I would have missed it anyway, by virtue of needing an early night before the day shift tomorrow.
As a parlour game, below I submit my predictions of how each region will turn out. "Just a bit of fun, just a bit of fun", as is associated with political polling presenter extraordinaire Peter Snow. (Albeit under completely different circumstances.)
( My predictions. They haven't changed since last night, honest; I just didn't get the post finished in time. Honest! )
Adding this all up, I get 22 Conservative, 15 Labour, 12 UKIP, 11 LD, 5 Green, 2 SNP, 1 PC, 1 BNP, 1 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 SF. ( Read more... ) These are my conclusions. What are yours?
Now get out there and vote!
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May 26th, 2009
10:31 pm - Take the National Express when your life's in a mess
Meg's sister latemodelchild came to stay for two weeks early in May, which was a lot of fun. It also meant that I've not been at this PC, being (as it is) in the room that was Sarah's bedroom. Consequently I'm way behind on everything, as usual. (And over a week later still than when I started writing this, as you can guess.)
One amusing incident came in the packing stage, when latemodelchild (hereafter Sarah, for that is her name) had her white Apple power cord fall out of her suitcase and be tangled up on her white bedsheets. We did not discover this until we had waved her off on her train down to London, the first stage of her journey home. (( Incidentally... ))
Accordingly, we discovered Sarah was on her way to London - and, from there, the US - with only the power that was left in her computer to tide her through until she could next plug in. To make matters worse, she had some seriously long airport layovers planned, with movies to watch to pass the time. The times of her train down and of her 'plane the next day meant that buying a new adapter would be extremely unlikely, and also would require the international connection kit as well. Furthermore, surely no courier would pick up on a Sunday for delivery early on Monday morning. Given that Sarah is still new to travelling in the UK, it seemed unreasonable to make her come back for it; we would have to get the cord to her.
We briefly considered a twice-250-mile road trip, which would have been fun, in a £60-plus-of-petrol environmentally-unfriendly sort of way, but Meg had to work the next day. Taking a train without booking in advance would be catastrophic, though we might have got away with a £65 return on Grand Central. The only affordable vaguely-reliable timely option available was the National Express coach service: down in the afternoon, then the overnight coach back. ( Read more... )
At first I was looking at taking the direct service down (leaving 3:20pm, arriving 9:45pm) and taking the overnight coach back (leaving 11:30pm, arriving 5:35am) for £32 but sadly the last ticket on the journey down had gone. An even crazier Sunday-only route presented itself: Middlesbrough to Leeds (leaving 4:10pm, arriving 6:20pm), Leeds to London (leaving 7:10pm, arriving 11:20pm), then the overnight coach back (leaving 11:30pm, arriving 5:35am). This was still possible - and, actually, £3 cheaper - but it meant that I would be travelling to London for ten minutes. As layovers go, that doesn't leave much room for safety - but National Express are generally pretty conservative with their timings and traffic can be expected to be benign on a Sunday night.
You may have heard of people who participate in mileage runs; under some circumstances, flying 50,000 miles in a year on a particular airline is rewarded so much more than flying 49,999 miles that if you're even vaguely close to the 50k mark it can make sense to engage in needless flying, typically on the last few days of the relevant (non-calendar) year, to cross the barrier and gain the extra rewards. This would be my first National Express mileage run - though, sadly, without a Frequent Coach Traveller Mile in sight. (To be fair, Meg did something similar once when she left her MacBook in a London hotel, but at least she had a routing which gave her a night in London. You may also recall the saga of leaving an iPod in a safe in Spain... damn Apple equipment.)
( Trip report. ) It was only really the last leg which is making me say, if not quite "never again", "not by choice, please, for a while". And everybody sings ba ba ba da...
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May 7th, 2009
11:23 pm - Poetry
"Coo er gosh, look at him posting about poetry."
"Ever since he got his fancy new Dreamwidth, he's changed, you know."
"Yeah. He wouldn't have posted about poetry on his old LiveJournal."
Crikey. You tell me if I'm being pretentious, and I'll summarise a discussion we had on the last night shift about farting, or something.
So last week a new Poet Laureate was, I suppose, laurelled. The incumbent, Carol Ann Duffy, is (according to the BBC) the first Scot and the first woman to hold the position in its 341-year history. It is unclear to what extent there has been prejudice in the past regarding selection. The BBC suggest that she was considered and rejected the last time the position was available in 1999 not due to her nationality or her gender but due to her previous partner. I haven't seen any suggestions that the selection this time was anything other than meritocratic, which is long overdue as well as the way it should be. Good luck to her; while writing royal poetry is a tradition rather than a requirement of the Poet Laureate position, I think I'd rather have had the events in the lives of the Windsor family of 1999-2009 to write about than the events of 2009-2019.
She is not the poet about whom I write today, though. The BBC also responded to the announcement by getting seven other poets to commit a little poetry upon the occasion; sometimes a very little. Now I have to admit, probably with less guilt than I should, that my taste in poetry - such as it is - is rudimentary at best, the like of Edmund Lear's nonsense poetry and such. I can't say that I had encountered the work of Carol Ann Duffy (and I wonder whether the middle name is a given name like that of Jamie Lee Curtis or a surname like that of Ian Duncan Smith?) beforehand, to my knowledge; I only recognised one of the seven other poets, Lemn Sissay, and that was from seeing the side of the Hardy's Well pub on the Curry Mile in Manchester.
However, out of the seven poets' work on the page, the two poems that spoke to me most were the two from Anneliese Emmans Dean, who is a poet, composer, wildlife photographer and performer from York. Now two poems do not a "favourite poet" make, but they're a fine start. The standard philistine line at this point would be to disclaim my knowledge of art followed by "but I know what I like", but that's being lazy at best. I don't claim that this will be any more than the most superficial or rudimentary sort of analysis, but writing about things I like is fun, and writing about things I like outside my usual genres... makes a change.
The short piece is a goof on one of the translations of the Prayer of St. Francis, which will resonate with many of my generation not only as a famous prayer but also as a hymn from school. The notion that a Poet Laureate might celebrate a royal wedding with a limerick is delightfully silly, and concluding a relatively reverent tribute with a throw-away killer line as a parenthetical remark tickles my funny bone.
( It's the longer piece, On The Role Of The Next Century's Poet Laureate, that really did it for me. Longish, plus analysis, but worth it. )It's a fast poem. It's a fun poem. I love it, and I don't generally sit down to take the time to react to poetry, but it's hard not to be grabbed by this. While I wish Carol Ann Duffy a prosperous reign as Poet Laureate - and has anyone said whether or not this will be a finite ten-year appointment like Andrew Motion's? - I'll be keeping my eyes open for more here. If I can't have someone on my Friends list become the next Poet Laureate (and, for instance, myfirstkitchen - in another ten years, why not?) then Anneliese Emmans Dean is, at this early stage, first choice in my putative Fantasy Poets League team.
Unrelatedly, Meg's sister latemodelchild has come to visit for a couple of weeks! I'm really glad she could make it here, we're all having lots of fun - including our lovely, silly cats! - and I think my sister-in-law is really enjoying the trip too, but a knock-on effect of space concerns is that I regard myself as "not online much" for at least the next week and a half.
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April 25th, 2009
06:45 am - Bonus!
More frequent, shorter posts, you say? How about trying to keep to one topic per post and splitting things off which don't really need to be lumped together?
Bonus 1) Unrelated to football: Sky Arts are broadcasting Celebrity Grand Slam this week, every day until Sunday. If poker on TV is established, why not bridge? As much as rubber bridge may be played at the highest level for stakes which might make poker players pay attention, and as much as some lovely and fun people play the game, I think it fairly inherently has an all-business sobriety to it that freeform ramblin' gamblin' poker does not and the show plays with a fairly staight bat even when the players goof and gaffe. The decision to have celebrities rather than experts play is an entirely reasonable one, not least because all the players stick to one fairly simple bidding system rather than irregular monstrosities with strong, forcing passes and the like. The play heavily concentrates on the bidding rather than the cardplay, which seems strange to me, and even based on what I remember about bridge duplicate scoring I can't work out quite how their four-pair duplicate scoring works. Hat tip to Bother's Bar.
Bonus 2) The CiSRA puzzle competition has its first round of puzzles online already, with rounds two to five released daily from Monday 27th onwards. The hunt is for teams of up to four and is entirely online, very similar in pattern to the University of Melbourne's maths society's hunt, with hints released to earlier puzzles every day. It's a sound format and exactly the sort of thing that means there exists a puzzle hunt season, of sorts, for people not lucky enough to live in the very few puzzle-geek-heavy towns.
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April 24th, 2009
05:54 pm - Football news
All right, I've accumulated a number of links over the past months which I haven't got around to posting. At first I thought "well, I'll be able to clear them all in a single long post". In the spirit of trying to make more frequent, shorter posts, here is discussion of just three, all concerning association football.
1) Arguably, pound-for-pound, the most interesting league in English(-ish) association football this year is the Blue Square Conference South, one of two parallel divisions that form the sixth tier of football, so five promotions away from the Premiership. Its all-but-certain champions are AFC Wimbledon, formed in 2002 when Wimbledon FC relocated 56 miles north to Milton Keynes. AFC Wimbledon started their existence by being accepted into one of fourteen(-ish) parallel ninth divisions, the Combined Counties League Premier, and look set for their fourth promtion in seven seasons. A sense of natural justice will arise only when AFC Wimbledon earn another promotion or two after that, meet the Milton Keynes Dons, whom Wimbledon FC have become, and finally vanquish them.
The other unduly interesting team in the Conference South this year is Team Bath FC, anomalous within the football system for being "a fully-fledged football club within the environment of the University of Bath, allowing players to combine full-time training with a university course". They play at Twerton Park, a ground owned by Conference South comrades Bath City, their natural local rivals. The rivalry is unfriendly in some places; some accuse Team Bath of unduly lenient academic standards, effectively spending considerable amounts of the University's funding in order to get extremely marginal students onto degree courses purely for to strengthen their football team.
At this point I would say "remind you of anyone?" with not so much a specific target as an entire tradition in mind, However, not least because Team Bath FC's success has been relatively modest and has not become a particular draw for the university, the University objected to putting so many of their resources into the football club that the football club's participation within the football pyramid is being concluded. Iain interprets the situation as: "Apparently, it's no longer permissible for clubs in Division VI to share their grounds with someone else"; Team Bath FC claim that the Conference administrators have declared them ineligible for further promotion and that is being used as an excuse to resign their participation. It's possible that the University have simply decided not to renew their lease of Twerton Park as a money-saving measure; Bath City are apparently set to lose considerably from the conclusion of Team Bath FC's rent payments for the facilities, and a merger between the two teams was apparently even discussed. The University of Bath will continue to enter a football team into inter-university competitions, though not the wider football pyramid as present.
2) The Times report that bookmaker Paddy Power apparently lost over £500,000 as a result of the recent 4-4 draw between Liverpool and Arsenal. Most major UK bookmakers let you bet on the correct score for each match; only about a dozen or so different results happen more than 1% of the time (with about half being one of 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 or 1-1) and so most bookmakers will offer 100-1 against any score you name outside that dozen. Paddy Power, as so often is the case, are the anomaly and often quote odds for 4-4 draws and hammerings of up to 10-0, quoting odds of up to 500/1. The 4-4 Chelsea-Liverpool draw in the Champions' League a week or so ago had apparently caused them to have to pay out £225,000, and the Times claim that 537 punters placed a total of £1,027 worth of bets on the scoreline repeating itself, causing a payout of £514,527. Paddy Power have a titular fictional character who occasionally blogs and claims one gambler managed to bet £25 on the first 4-4 draw and then another £44 on the second 4-4 draw, the latter bet apparently returning £22k to one punter, who can't have been doing badly if he was able to throw £44 around on 4-4 in the first place.
It's surprisingly difficult to work out what the odds of a 4-4 draw "should" be. The The Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation has a mighty archive, but I haven't been able to find a distribution chart for results across all competitive games. The similarly wonderful Statto.com (Statto! Statto! Statto!) provide limited score distributions broken down by league and by season, but don't break down the realtive likelihood of the less likely results and don't seem to give amalgamated all-football results. The closest I've been able to find is this database from which I could extract 21,538 results from international football matches from 1920 to 2001. Of those 21,538 games, only 26 were 4-4, so (making wild assumptions about distribution) 500/1 is not a generous price for Paddy Power to offer in the long run, albeit one with whopping variance that has caught them out this time. They have since tightened their 4-4 odds in for some games to a particularly chiselly 350/1 or so.
Paddy Power will be delighted for the publicity as much as anything else. They have a history of shamefully ingenerous 115%-125% books (compare with betting on the flip of a coin and charging £5 if you lose but only paying out £4 if you win) but remarkably generous publicity stunts, like paying out on bets that Stoke would be relegated after one game (noting that Stoke are now eight points clear in 12th place) and paying out on bets that Man U would win the FA Cup back in February (noting that Everton knocked them out in the semi-final last week). This means that some PP bets have got to be +EV, if you can work out which ones and avoid betting on the vast majority which aren't.
It's always tempting to wonder if there's any possibility of match-fixing to take advantage of these generous odds, but it sems unlikely; PP restrict themselves to 100/1 against on correct score bets in matches outside the top couple of divisions, because surely match-fixing at the highest level would cause ridiculous amounts of stink were it to be discovered. It's also true that the Liverpool-Arsenal game had a ninth goal deep into injury time, but it was disallowed for offside. Can't imagine Paddy Power having had nearly as much on 5-4 either way as on the 4-4 draw!
3) The chairman of Bolton is touting a plan to extend the Premier League from 20 teams to two 18-team divisions, absorbing Rangers and Celtic from Scotland and presumably 14 other yo-yo "too big to go down" teams from the Championship. This is a blatant grab at redistributing TV rights money in a way that will suit some teams better than others and its success or failure (for it apparently needs 14 out of 20 Premiership chairmen to agree) will depend on sufficiently many teams considering the plan to be in their interest. It's a bit like the puzzle about dividing gold among pirates. Actually, it's a lot like that puzzle, if not strictly economically equivalent.
Discussions about football reorganisation rumble on all the time, and I can't help wondering whether the notion of a two-division Premier League (which you'd think would be called the Premier League and, by logical extension, the Deuxiem League) is in vogue at least in part due to ongoing discussions over a parallel development in Scotland. Scotland like rejumbling and restructuring their leagues more than most nations; perhaps England is just feeling left out. (Incidentally, I've long wanted a football management game which simulated this aspect of sports business development, by virtue of the competitions in the game evolving over time. Haven't had one yet, though.)
BBC writer Chick Young gives a fairly standard defence of the argument against the Old Firm leaving, which makes a lot of sense. My view is that it's just a matter of time, though whether it's to an English Premiership, some sort of pan-European league or a putative Atlantic League remains to be seen. I'll only start to take such discussions of potential moves at all seriously if I hear that broadcasters are planning to make the move worth people's while, simply because TV rights are such a large proportion of the football business these days. One to look at seriously only about 6-12 months before the TV rights deals come up for grabs, or if there's a serious shift in power with pay-TV giants across Europe preparing to co-operate to make football dance to their tune even more than at present.
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April 17th, 2009
07:14 pm - Why I love Dreamwidth even before I have an account there, and why you might not
Blogging about blogging is the lowest form, as ever, but consider this a heads-up that I consider the omens point to Dreamwidth being a great, possibly the best, place to post for the next few years. Nothing lasts forever online, ( though... ) That said, Dreamwidth looks like it has the sort of momentum in its development and in its nascent culture that it may be as exciting to be a Dreamwidth member as it ever was to be a LiveJournal member, even at LiveJournal's peak. In short, I consider Dreamwidth to be cool in a way that I haven't felt for any other communication platform for the last few years.
Some of you have been reading about Dreamwidth ten times a day on your Flist already and others may not be familiar. The idea behind Dreamwidth is that some of the people who worked LJ once upon a time are producing their own LJ-like web site that, in theory, will benefit from LJ's strengths but will avoid the errors that made LJ suck. It is based on the LJ code but makes the changes that should have been made but never were because they would have broken too many other things. It's not a project arising out of a grudge against LJ management, though frankly that would have been motivation enough. It's not a fandom project, though it will be fandom-friendly. (And, er, non-fandom-friendly, for people who aren't fans of anything.) Most importantly, there will be people working on it, both the owners and volunteers, aiming to make the project better (for their definition of better, which can broadly be considered "more capable" and "more usable") rather than more profitable. The site is currently undergoing closed beta testing, though open beta testing is expected to start around April 30th.
There is a school of thought that the adoption of Dreamwidth will mean "just one more tab to keep open", and I can sympathise. In recent discussions, people have suggested they want to have a single place where they can keep track of everything, and that's not so unreasonable a request - after all, it's how many of us have been trying to use LJ for years. Indeed, I myself have argued (paras 8-10) that there's a social benefit to everyone sticking together on the one service rather than scattering to the four winds, back when GreatestJournal (or was it InsaneJournal, or uJournal, or Blurty, or...) was offering icons up the wazoo. I still do believe that. It's just that these days, I am so dissatisfied with LiveJournal's operation and so enchanted with Dreamwidth's promise that I will do what I can for the discussion I want to follow to all be happening over there rather than over here. The benefits of supporting the DW movement do seem to me to outweigh the costs of splitting the discussion.
It's also relevant that most of us are now used to spreading ourselves over many sites in a way that we weren't, even just a few Internet years ago. I have accounts ( all over the place, just like the rest of us. )
So with this in mind, as soon as I can - and hopefully no later than when open beta starts, currently planned for 30th April - I am going to sign up for a Dreamwidth account and start regarding that as "home". I'm not going to stop reading you all over here, and I'm not going to stop posting things over here, particularly when I want to post content under Friends lock but want my Friends over here to see it. In fact, from the perspective of users over here who aren't over there, it'll hardly look like anything has changed. Culturally, though, I expect to regard Dreamwidth as my new Internet home and LiveJournal as just a mirror of it. Certainly I expect to give Dreamwidth the love that I had for LiveJournal in my first couple of years here, which has long since been frittered away.
This is all subject to change if something else proves to suit me better, of course, or if Dreamwidth proves sufficiently awful in an unpredictable fashion. An obvious problem is that Friends-locked posts will unfortunately work particularly badly when I Friends-lock in two different places and inadvertently split the discussion. This may be less problematic than only posting it to one of the two and requiring those on one to use the other. (Seeing my Flocked posts appear on both services is going to be annoying for some of you, I'm afraid, much like when we see people Tweet with a #fb tag and then see the Tweet pop up on Facebook as well. There's no good solution to this, other than my moving across to one or the other completely.)
All that on top of the fun of the username landgrab, of course, and watch me moan because I haven't upgraded my online home to prime username real estate yet. Sometimes people on my Friends list announce they have codes up for grabs, but these go in the wink of an eye rather than in "forty winks" - you really have not to snooze for more than ten minutes or so before you lose. Incidentally, ![[info]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/staffinfo.gif) denise currently subscribes to every new personal account during the closed beta period, so her profile lets you keep count of how many personal accounts there are (2,227 as I type, but who knows how many more by the time I post?) as well as all the usernames that have gone. That could be an opportunity for someone devious if they can work out how to use it.
Setting up at a new service will also give me a chance to reassess what I want my journal to do for me; I'm going to bring my userinfo up to date, it being a couple of years stale by now, and my interests no longer need be an attempt to get to exactly 150 forming a full A-to-Z. Hopefully I can get rid of some of my more encumbering notions of blogging as performance art and teach myself that it's OK to post shorter and more frequently. Hey, I've found my one true love through LiveJournal; I don't need (and certainly don't want) to have to go through that again. DW seems to me like a good opportunity for a fresh start and a chance to reinforce the relationships I have - and, no, this isn't a euphemism for defriending or deprioritising friendships with people who don't move.
Technically, currently the biggest advantage of DW is a feature I am unlikely to use in practice, the splitting of the concept of "friend" into "subscribe" (the "appears on your Flist" functionality of Friendship) and "access" (the "sees your Flocked posts" functionality of Friendship). I tend to think that people on LJ recognise that declarations of Friendship are not guarantees of full use of both aspects of the Friend functionality outside filters, and I'm sure that people will quickly make the same realisation on DW; we're going to filter as much as ever, whether or not we choose to use the functionality to make it explicit. (However, not at first; DW doesn't have filtering capability to begin with. It's high on the priority list, though.)
With all this in mind, bear in mind that I love DW to pieces. In the spirit of fairness - quite probably, fairness to excess, by presenting devil's advocacy that I think may overrepresent the opinion of a small minority - I'm going to admit that I don't think DW is perfect and I don't think DW is for everyone. ( Here are some of the reasons why DW may not be for everyone, but why these objections are not sufficient to put me off. )
The excitement I find in Dreamwidth is watching the development of the functionality and the culture, whose priority I perceive to be more about having a service that the developers themselves want to use and less about making money. Remind you of anything? Could my strong feelings just be nostalgia for the brad days of LiveJournal? Perhaps; after all, the Golden Age of anything is "just before you discovered it"...
Sidenote: the current raw LJ stats make interesting reading, with the newbyday figures being as strong as they have ever been. I don't think LiveJournal's going anywhere, days after its tenth birthday. However, look at the bottom of the stats page and the graph of age distribution. Can't help feeling that an awful lot of those "29-year-olds" aren't going to be legitimate somehow, and I wonder just how many of the new users might be similarly spam-scented.
Current Mood: excited
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April 15th, 2009
12:08 pm - Long-shot Prediction Game: the results
A shamefully long time ago, I proposed a multi-stage prediction competition pertaining to twelve moderately unlikely events which might or might not happen, with a focus on the last five months of 2008 and the first month of 2009. Now we're well into 2009, the long-complete competition is starting to get rather rancid. Let me put it out of its misery before the stench of pallor completely stinks the place out.
First, we determine which - if any - of the twelve long-shots did come to fruition, ( like so. ) Thus, in conclusion, one (1) of the twelve long-shots happened. The prediction part of the game ran over two rounds: the first round saw people estimate the number of items which would happen over the time period, and the second round saw people effectively wager points on each of the twelve propositions at community-defined, and community-refined, odds. ( So now let's find out who won! )
( Some brief reflections on the game. )
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April 1st, 2009
08:50 am - Rock'n'roll
Today seems like as good a day as any to post about a subject on which I post remarkably little: rock music. I post very little because I know very little. This is not one of my specialist subjects; if anything, it represents a considerable gap in my pop cultural knowledge, no pun intended.
Most of what I do know comes from listening to The Arrow, one of a small number of rock channels available to us on digital radio. I thought there were only two - The Arrow and Planet Rock - but a slightly fuller search reveals Rock Radio is a wannabe-national network with an affiliate here in the North-East. The venerable magazine Kerrang! has its own station as well, come to think of it.
There may well be scads of other stations available as audio channels on digital television, plus plenty of channels available over the Internet, of course, but in practice I don't go out and think "oh, I feel like listening to some rock music" - it's more likely to be the case that it's something on in the background on a night shift at work, with The Arrow being a fairly uncontroversial middle ground default option that we'd frequently listen to overnight back at the power station. (It was also a station that we could receive reasonably clearly, which was a rarer commodity than you might imagine. I can't immediately conclude whether being in the middle of tonnes of metal and industry would have been a help or a hindrance in this regard.)
Accordingly, here are thirteen songs that get played on The Arrow every once in a while, that I have worked out that I like. Now I know people can get almost territorial about their music, or about their music genres, so I'm not going to claim that these are classic songs, or even that these necessarily are rock music. (I'm not even sure that these are necessarily my favourite songs - for instance, I need to think about songs on a CD Meg kindly made for me, and whether they count as rock or not.) However, The Arrow played 'em, and I liked 'em. In no particular order:- Van Halen, "Jump" reminds me of this classic Flash movie about old arcade games. The big guitar solo is a highlight of both song and movie. The song's video can't be nearly as much to my taste as this.
- Supertramp, "Dreamer" often had a line or two of the chorus sung at the power station. An in-joke about steam turbines then followed. Even without that, it's still pleasantly ethereal.
- Meat Loaf, "Dead Ringer for Love" may strike the balance between grandiosity and tolerability best among ver Loaf's fairly ridiculous canon. For the longest time I thought the song concerned a dancing kangaroo, too. Sadly not.
- Red Hot Chilli Peppers, "The Zephyr Song" has rather fewer laughs to it than the others, but also some lovely vocal harmonies. Can't work out why it's about a zephyr and not a zither, though.
- REM, "Man On The Moon" is probably the only one of these to have featured in a gayparee lyric quiz. This scores tonnes of points for its subject matter and its sense of fun.
- Doobie Brothers, "Listen to the Music" - now I'm sure I was first introduced to this song by some sort of dance remix in, probably, the early '90s, and I'd love to hear that again if ever I could find it. The original is cute in its way, though.
- Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody", inevitably, again taking great benefit from its associations with a memorable film scene. It's fun to improvise lyrics to, very badly, as well.
- Foo Fighters, "Learn to Fly" is probably the best rock song I can think of to listen to on a transatlantic flight. I did this on several occasions when Meg and I were long-distance.
- Europe, "The Final Countdown" has a spectacular and very silly guitar section. I think this caught the imagination, at the time, of lots of very young people when it first came out, and I am no exception.
- The Who, "You Better You Bet" sounds like it ought to be by Meat Loaf to me, but in a good way. Maybe Meat Loaf on a very good day.
- Focus, "Sylvia" is a rare instrumental that got played on The Arrow and provided a really lovely change of pace. Given that The Arrow has no DJs announcing the songs and we can't get to the web site, finding out what this song actually was presented a real challenge.
- Ram Jam, "Black Betty" is politically very incorrect, I suspect, but I heard it first as an instrumental used for a chart countdown. (Some of you may know where.) Considering that I regard myself as liking guitars less than many, there are quite a few songs on here because of their guitar parts.
- The J. Gelis Band, (Angel in a) "Centerfold" is just plain silly fun for its singalong na-na-na line, plus has a self-indulgent false finish. One! More! Time!
I think I've demonstrated why I don't post about rock music very much.
Current Mood: tired
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February 9th, 2009
10:34 pm - The Damned United
Young man! There are many things I want to do before I start writing a LJ entry about something new, but sometimes you just have to reorder your priorities and strike while the iron is hot.
Arguably the most interesting thing to happen in English-language sport today (Felipe Sco-who?) is the announcement of firm detail from the fledgling United Football League, an initially US-based competition in professional American Football. Skip the official site, though, and get all your information from UFL Access, a well-informed and very well-written fan site with a vibrant web forum. I'm not normally a big web forum person, but have enjoyed this one.
The inaugural "premiere season" of the UFL is rather smaller in scale than people were hoping. Initial plans for eight (or later six) franchises, each owned externally, have been put off until 2010, with the investors they have attracted concentrating their efforts on a short season with home-and-away fixtures between four teams and an eventual play-off. The official press release names the four teams as Las Vegas/Los Angeles, New York/Hartford, Orlando and San Francisco/Sacramento; it seems likely that the split-site teams will play two of their home matches in one location and a third in another. Adding further cities still is not impossible, though the number of 2009 teams shall be four. (Five is right out.) In 2010, there should - could? - be sufficient investment to revert to the original plans for external ownership, one city per franchise and so on.
I posted about the UFL three posts (and three months, sigh) ago. It continues to fascinate me mostly at the level of geeking out about sports organisation, plus new ventures are always fascinating, plus taking swings at the NFL is always admirably ambitious, even if this one turns out to be a swing and a miss. Whether the UFL makes it or not, it will resolve the question "Can you found and fund a sports organisation in the style of many 21st-century technology companies?" The people on board have significant Wall Street and Silicon Valley experience, plus there are enough smart cookies on the football side to avoid inauthenticity. Oh, and the leader of the new investment group is the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the USA's House of Representatives.
The UFL faces many difficult challenges. While arguably the time to strike a new venture is now while so few of them are breaking ground, investment has been scarce and starting from a four-team basis will make the uphill struggle even longer, littered with corpses of other pro football ventures after the NFL extracted the juiciest parts. It should be a very entertaining ride, nevertheless, even if the web forum is as much of an attraction as the entity itself. (For much of late '07 and early '08, I was struggling and failing to write an article for here claiming that the proposed AAFL had hit written all over it and being negative about the UFL's chances...) The lead writer, Nation Hahn, is very good at what he does; probably the best starting-point is his two-part primer (part one, part two) of the UFL's first 21 months. His personal blog is fine, too.
Being sappy and egotistical, I wish him well at least in part because I recognise some of myself in him - or, more precisely, choose to project some of myself onto him. ( Let me tell you about my wonderful first job. )
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December 3rd, 2008
09:43 pm - The "BBC Sports Review of the Year" post of the year
The Credit Crunch has Media pressures have forced a change in the Modern Pentathlon, that most idealistic (and militaristic) of twentieth-century Olympic confections, arguably reducing it to a quadrathlon. Specifically, the shooting discipline has been subsumed into the running discipline, which will now form a run with shooting interludes. The Biathlon, competed in the Winter Olympics and elsewhere, sets the precedent by illustrating that ski-ing and shooting can be combined into a single event that is not without considerable charm. A running-and-shooting biathlon seems a strange mix, though, but this is probably strange just through unfamiliarity. Well worth a try, but I'm not clear how this can be considered an improvement over the traditional "five"-inspired definition of a pentathlon. As ever, I would be delighted to be educated otherwise.
Changing subject somewhat, I do like the "Hurricane sprint" format of Nordic combined events, where time penalties (for competitors not finishing in first place of the first event of the competition) are replaced by distance penalties, but it must be awful logistically. I hadn't really thought about the consequences of people racing around with loaded weapons before, on the grounds that cross-country skiers are sufficiently gentle and sufficiently handicapped by their motion that they can reasonably be trusted to look after their armaments. Running around with loaded weapons, though, is somehow much stranger - almost like it's an event that should take place at the World Police (and Fire) Games and nowhere else.
The BBC have announced the shortlist of ten for the Sports Personality of the Year award this year, along with the nominations that generated the ten. To me, this is a stronger indicator of impending Christmas than the first mince pie. I analysed the 2006 contest, the perpetually wonderful and perpetually owed-nineteen-e-mails Iain analysed the 2007 event. ( Here are my thoughts on the 2008 line-up. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/cold.gif) festive
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November 30th, 2008
11:38 pm - "It’s the sport of kings, better than diamond rings"
I have reason to believe that there will be a particularly interesting development in world sport on Monday as there may be the announcement of significant new information about a new American Football league in the US, the strangely-titled United Football League. (What torn-asunder things are being brought back together?) Despite the name, the organisation represents the most significant challenge to the dominance of the National Football League for some time. Since about February, I've been following UFL Access, rather a good blog about the foetal league, and lurking within its forums. The smart money is on the league starting with six teams, and Sports Illustrated have suggested they are most likely to be as follows: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Orlando and - possibly - Hartford, CT.
( On the history of professional American Football and the business of professional sport in the US, with reflections about the role of tradition in sport. )
Current Mood: optimistic
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November 25th, 2008
09:54 pm - Singing and dancing
bookshop made a great post - not at all an infrequent occurrence - only the second part of which I intend to tangentially address today. (If the post in question becomes locked in the passage of time, no harm; hopefully this is sufficiently tangential not to require context.)
Polls before post-amble, if you please:
Poll #1304281 Does "ars gratia artis" mean that those who shake their booties necessarily have great booties to shake?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllPlease confirm or deny:
View AnswersIn the next year or two, by conventional definitions, I expect to perform some art: I expect I will sing, dance, play an instrument, act or somesuch, for the benefit of an audience.
   21 (50.0%) I would like to participate in a non-performing art group: I would love to sing, dance, play an instrument, act or somesuch, in a group that explicitly did not put on performances and merely did so for the fun of the activities.
22 (52.4%) The provision of spurious tickyboxes in LJ polls continues to represent the state of the art.
26 (61.9%) As a child, I tended to disapprove (or, even now, I tend to disapprove) of my parents singing and/or dancing.
( The backstory. )
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/artistic.gif) not quite sure where I'm going
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November 5th, 2008
05:00 pm - Where were you when...?
Like so many others, Meg and I are very tired today after staying up well into the night to see the results and the speeches. It was worth it and we are overjoyed.
In my lifetime, I can remember this sense of political euphoria once before: May 1st, 1997, when Tony Blair led the Labour Party to a landslide victory. It was a crushing defeat for the Conservative Party that had won four consecutive elections. Tony Blair proved to be far from a perfect Prime Minister, but the Labour Party administration was such a breath of fresh air, and such a change, from what had gone on previously that that was our moment. I have happy memories of a wonderful party in person that night; I will have happy memories of a wonderful party online last night. (However good President Obama turns out to be, he'll be so much better than the alternative in just the same way as Prime Minister Blair was.)
Now the difference between Labour and the previous four terms of Conservatism may or may not be bigger than the difference between Obama and the previous eight years of Bush, I don't know; we shall see, in time. It's not unreasonable to quantify the Obama change as being a more dramatic one by virtue of ending centuries of Presidency by one skin colour; it makes me wonder whether Margaret Thatcher becoming the UK's first female Prime Minister in 1979 was felt to be just as dramatic a change, at the time, by those who loved what she stood for.
The projected resolution of California 8 and Florida 2 is, of course, bigoted, regrettable and offensive, but folk's wonderful words of hope ring true. Defeat prejudice? Yes, we can.
Current Mood: Yes, we can. Now, let's.
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October 27th, 2008
04:38 pm - One Man Mindzine
For about nine happy and lucrative months, followed by another nine or so increasingly unhappy and decreasingly lucrative ones, my job was to be part of a team that updated the Mind Sports Olympiad's web site. In the sort of business plan that made sense only during the first .com bubble, most of our effort was spent working on the Mindzine, an online newspaper of mind sports news. I like my current job, but the MSO team was great and working with them was an even better job still. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people whose bills the site did not pay, and the Mindzine is history. Had I a clone - or, better still, many clones (and I'm sure I've had this feeling of deja vu somewhere before) - I'd love to contribute to a continuation of the Mindzine concept. Well, probably for one day only, I shall, and I shall have no editors telling me to blue-pen my ruder remarks.
The headline must be the World Memory Championship held in Bahrain at the weekend. Local coverage reports that the wonderful Ben Pridmore beat over forty competitors from four continents to regain the title he first won in 2004. (Accompanying it is US$10,000, which is worth considerably more in pounds sterling now than it was when Ben set off for the event.) The official site was reasonably good at updating with results event by event, but gave up towards the end of the second of three days, so I don't know the final scores. I also refuse to link to said official site because its header contains copious egomaniacal pictures of people, some of whose behaviour I consider to have been weak-minded, greedy and disloyal - and the perfectly nice Dominic O'Brien, too.
This is an excellent result - truly, the real winner is the sport of memory itself - as Ben is, I have long contended, a lovely bloke. He has a delightful blog which shows his self-effacing and whimsical nature off to a tee. Ben gains 150 cool points from me for, frankly, really not taking the whole memory thing too seriously, and another 150 cool points for not only having an avowed passion for furry web comics but also cheerfully sharing his own. (Including his slashier work.) I am delighted that Ben won; I'm sure he won't take offence at me saying that it's wonderful to see that an exceptionally talented and sufficiently hard-working amateur (which is intended as no slight; lest we forget, the word amateur is derived from the Latin verb amare, to love) can beat the professionals who aren't nearly as much fun. The campaign to have Ben Pridmore win a nomination for Sports Personality of the Year starts here.
In Chess, the world championship match between Viswanathan Anand of India and Vladimir Kramnik of Russia continues today, with the tenth game in progress as I type. The match is to be held over the best of twelve games, with tie-breaks if required, so 6½ points required to win the match; of the nine games so far, Vishy has won three and drawn six to lead the match 6-3 and Kramnik needs to win the last three in a row to even force a tie-break, though he has promised to fight to the end. The Week In Chess has commentary updated frequently and you can follow through to other sources of live commentary out there, some even free.
Staying with chess, the European Club Cup took place in Greece last week and was scarily strong. Out of the 32 players in the world that FIDE rate at 2700 or more, 22 of them played in the event. Top seeds URAL Sverdlovskaya ended up beating the other 63 teams, with six match wins and only one defeat. I'm guessing that Sverdlovskaya is the team location and URAL refers not to the mountain range as much as the motorcycle manufacturer of the same name. The only match they lost was against second seed MIKA chess club of Armenia, who wanted to play like Bob Fischer, but his brain was too mad. (I could play black! I could play white! I could play pawn to e4! Could be in zugzwang, could take en passant, could take a Grandmaster draw...) Ahem. Next up: two weeks until the Olympiad, the national team competition, which may be a shade stronger still. Russia start favourites, as usual, but only finished sixth last time.
Swiftly onto puzzles, where the 17th World Puzzle Championship takes place this week in Minsk, Belarus. having been changed from an abortive hosting bid by Lithuania four months ago. You can see the instruction booklet (.pdf) and, man, do the puzzles look imaginitive, in the usual WPC fashion. Hopefully there may be people keeping us up to date in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) worldpuzzle, but I wouldn't count on it. I look forward particularly to learning about this year's play-off format and seeing if we have another ninth-to-first climber like Pal Madarassy, from Hungary, last year.
The UK team is sadly missing some of the usual suspects, but Steven Barge justifies his place as top UK finisher in the US Puzzle Championship used as our qualifying test. (George Danker came 6th of 19, Simon Anthony 7th and Ken Wilshire has extensive WPC experience.) Wei-Hwa Huang (who approaches Pridmore-like levels of loveliness and blogs as onigame) is the man on form; Thomas Snyder (motris - also apparently lovely, though I have not yet had the pleasure of verifying this loveliness in person) reports on having just lost the US Sudoku Championship to him in an exciting final. The usual suspects - Ulrich Voigt, Niels Roest and many others - will likely loom large.
Earlier in the month we had the World Mind Sports Games, another attempt to stage a multi-sport festival like the Olympics, except for mind sports. As is traditional for such things, the home nation swept many of the gold medals; part of this reflects China's massive talent, part of this reflects the presence of Xiangqi - Chinese Chess - as a discipline (oddly enough, China went 5-for-5) and part of this makes you question just how international an event it was after all. I suspect that the Chess event was rather less world-class than the rest, not least due to the existence of the near-simultaneous European Club Cup, but the other four events look as definitive as hoped. England won a gold medal and two silvers, all in bridge; our national women's team beat all 53 opponents, with our national open and world under-21 teams coming second out of 71 and 18 respectively. Damn fine show!
One particularly interesting WMSG participant was Joanne Missingham of Australia, who made it to the quarter-finals of the Women's Individual Go tournament. Sensei's Library: "Born in Brisbane, Queensland on 26th May 1994, Missingham moved with her family to Taiwan when she was four years old, and started to play Go at the age of six. Two years later she passed the amateur 1-dan milestone. In 2005 she moved with her family to San Diego, California, USA; In April 2008, she moved to Tianjin, China, where she studied with Wu Kai until her promotion to professional shodan in July 2008." She's already representing Australasia in open tournaments and is clearly on the fringes of world class. (Students of go prodigies - specifically, the one who came to MSO 4 in London in 2000 - might care to compare against the progress of Liao Xingwen, born just three months earlier and now pro nidan.)
The American Go Association made far too little fuss of the hidden jewel in their crown while she was Stateside; born to Australian and Taiwanese parents, Joanne is likely to be the public face of Australian go for years or decades to come. As nobody has claimed Google-dibs on the phrase "the next Rui Naiwei", let me do so, as knowingly ridiculously presumptuous as it is to compare a 14-year-old new pro with the first woman 9-dan. It's almost as if the universe recognised the lack of a strong female lead in Hikaru no Go, Umezawa ("Go Go Igo") Yukari apart, and provided a real one. Remember, though, she's fourteen, so I suggest Joanne No Go would be a no-go.
Going back to the World Mind Sports Games, the International Go Federation had a really interesting daily blog. Of particular interest to me is this quote: "In response to a question from a British reporter, he urged people to work for Olympic recognition of mind sports, similar to the recognition gained by the paralympics, as a key step toward holding another World Mind Sports Games after the London Olympics and Paralympics in 2012. He added that if London decided against this, another city was already fully prepared to host the event." At this stage, I'd bet small money against London hosting in 2012. It's all down to sponsorship; while the Chinese-language WMSG homepage suggests success in finding sponsors, I'm not as confident that London might. Should the International Mind Sports Association remain as puritanical about restricting themselves to four mind sports and only grudgingly letting Xiangqi in as a fifth, it may well essentially be their loss.
Endgames: link of the indeterminate time period is New in Go. The Mindzine used to have Go coverage that was second to none; New in Go has one of our two sources putting out general interest stories to give the best English-language coverage of Oriental Go around, as ever it was, but this time without having to worry about the audience focus being on mind sports in general rather than go in particular. The London Games Fridge Fringe takes place this week, with a live-action '70s arcade game making a pong around Spitalfields over the next two days. Operation: Sleeper Cell has just broken its most recent Cancer Research UK fundraising barrier; fans of "microfilm" and/or "bespoke leather" should hie themselves to the forum forthwith.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/pleased.gif) delighted for Ben
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October 8th, 2008
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![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/indescribable.gif){kind=small}
both hopeful and very scared