Shining Wit

Football vs Cricket, Long vs Short Game

2012-02-01T06:08:00.000-08:00

There's an argument that cricket is the slow game, played over days, more nuanced. Football is more immediate.

But I think it's flawed.

YES those points are true if you assess the game as from start to finishing whistle.

BUT that's not really what supporters are about.

90mins of football is just one over in cricket to the fan of the football league.

To them the game is played with every transfer of a player, every sore throat that stops someone training, every morale sapping tabloid scandal. Football is the longer game! The bit on the pitch is just the busiest bit.

The Referees a Banker

2012-01-31T23:53:00.001-08:00

At school the boy studies hard. No one is surprised when he gets his a-levels and goes to Uni. When he gets his degree the grunt job at the bank seems a natural progression. Good money for a graduate too. Every one is pleased for him.

Learning and working hard - leads to a series of promotions and sideways moves, climbing the corporate rungs. Responsible for ever more people on the lower rungs, and the upkeep of ever grander titles. Eventually, the top echelons are his.

The 50yr old schoolboy runs the show.

Continual learning, continual growth, and some hard work... make him responsible for thousands of people... generating huge profits. The boy's done good!

His responsibilities command a huge salary, and a huge bonus when growth is achieved.

But the public don't like it. We all have an idea "what we're worth". We won't seek earnings beyond that. If you're earning £30K and you see a job ad for £60K you don't even look to see if you could do the job! AND WE STRUGGLE TO ACCEPT THAT OTHERS SEEM TO BE WORTH MORE because they aim higher.

You can scapegoat the banks as the cause of the downturn, but that's just naive.

You can criticise the internal mechanisms of a finance system you barely understand just because the numbers seem so much bigger than your perceived personal worth.

You can strip someone of a title..

You can bring the pressure of the masses to make it hard for a successful person to earn well.

But will you ask the tough questions? If a knighthood was given undeservedly who screwed up? The recipient or the teams of people who got "services to banking" that wrong?

It all looks very ugly to me. "Isn't the boy working hard and doing well for himself?" transitions into "how can anyone be worth that much?" and we don't notice the point of change.

Envy, jealousy, and the need to claw others backwards in the mistaken idea that the action of pulling them backwards somehow propels us forward.

When it's done, when the finger pointing is over, the scapegoats sacrificed... Where are you?

Still in the same shitty job, moaning about bigger bills and tiny pay rises... Expecting more and more for the same task. Mistaking longevity for added value. Watching those lottery numbers. Sharing the opinions you read in the paper during the first coffee break of the day.

Whilst we focus on the easy populist noise, we change nothing at all.Sad. Ugly. Dangerous.

Arrogance, Religion, and Respect.

2011-09-25T18:11:00.001-07:00

So let's get something straight. You can be a Nobel laureate and if you're religious I'm still going to think you're weak minded. A view that has had me labelled as arrogant recently. As if my feeling like that implies I consider myself superior. Which is not the case more than it is. You see, I can admire someone for one reason, yet be sickened by another. I can admire a nurse for their compassion but be sickened by their racism for example. Complexity is not a vice. So I can think you're an idiot for crediting your successes to something divine, whilst admiring those successes none the less.But being called an arrogant athiest made me think. Is there anything more arrogant than someone with faith? To dismiss the knowledge of generations of thinkers, just on the basis of something you learned to believe?

Todays tech wonders...

2009-02-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

I wonder what my boy will marvel at?

One Xmas, perhaps 25 years ago, my Dad marvelled at the tanks bouncing blocks off of walls in the immensely playable "Combat" that shipped with the Atari 2600.

In the Commodore64 I was a space trader exploring a huge space that couldn't possibly fit inside that tiny machine. (OK so Fibannacci played his part... but when later in life you find out how it's done it only brings greater wonder at the ingenuity of those B&B boffins.)

At Uni a friend had a PC with its own hard drive. We could write our essays and make them pretty. Without tippex. He shared it with us.

A while after starting work I was allocated a brick of a phone to stay in touch with the office. It worked whenever the roads went over the crest of hills.

In the mid 90's a Leicester firm showed me this thing called Yahoo. For a fee they'd give me a phone number my computer could call, and then I could look at pages of information. I actually asked the guy "why would I want to do that?" and didn't sign up for a month or so.

I upgraded from 33 to 56 - and marvelled at only 2 mins per MB.

My brick got smaller and worked in more places.

In 2000 I got broadband and considered a Psion to run my life. Decided to pass.

In 2010 my phone handles all sorts of communication. Live video, photo, documents, spreadsheets. My calendar, everything. In one small block. I can sit in my car, and use my phone to run every aspect of my business, from sales to production. It even lets me play Sonic the Hedgehog.

I went to the cinema, donned some glasses to watch Avatar. An average plot but in an environment like no other I've experienced. The entertainment genre moved forward again.

Games consoles using wands that record your movement, and soon a games console that simply watches your movement for its controls. Next Windows will become "Boxes" and you'll work in three dimensions without a mouse.

Every era has its wars, it's disasters, it's crises. But there was only one wild west, one age of steam, one industrial revolution, and I've been lucky enough to experience the information age.

Last year, a man who saw further than most left us. But Arthur C Clarke left us three laws:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I wonder what my boy will marvel at.

LIfe? Don't talk to me about life.

2008-05-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

I turned 35.

If I leave the house before 8.30am or get home after 6.30pm my little boy misses his dad, and my wife gives me hell about it.

If I work 12 hrs a day I can just about keep my company going, although I can't keep all my customers happy.

There aren't 12 hrs between 8.30am and 6.30pm.

I can live with my wife giving me hell, but I can't handle my little boy missing me.

We want the best for our kids and that means moving to a bigger house in a better school catchment area.

We make ends meet now but the mortgage on the new place is twice as high, as are many of the other associated bills.

To make more money the company has to do better which means it needs to grow, which means better performance and probably more of my time.

I struggle to say sober for 24 hrs and for the first time in 5 years I'm craving cigarettes.

BUT

My house didn't fall down around me when the earth shook.
My house didn't blow away or wash away in a typhoon.
No one I know contracted something nasty.

My point....

Is there a scale of stress and upset... and everything.... or are there many perspectives? (or is there just one perspective and many self important people who don't get it - myself included?)

One person worries about whether not buying that second bottle of Moet makes them look tight in front of their friends. Another person worries that the water they've carried from the river carries a disease that'll kill them. I worry my boy is upset at not seeing me cause i'm working. Someone else worries that their child's AK47 might jam whilst they're in a shoot out with other guerrillas...

We start. We survive. We are. We create more starts. We end.
What we do with the rest seems to be up to us.

There's nothing wrong with going through life focused on the mundane and trivial - but surely we should all be intelligent enough to recognise that's what we're doing when we're doing it?

The Tombliboo Over-Acting Insult...

2008-01-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

FULL STORY: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/coventry_warwickshire/7189882.stm

Mr Blake plays a Tombliboo. A cuddly little fellow, who cleans his teeth, bashes a piano, and says both "Tombliboo" and "ee". An actors dream job I'm sure.

"Earlier, Mr Blake told an employment tribunal in Birmingham he had been abused and injured when the suit caused him to fall over. He told how he had been signed off work by doctors with injuries and was then sacked by the company. "

Lets get this right... your living is made dressing up as an inarticulate foam creature and cleaning your teeth with a four foot toothbrush. How small must you feel when a doctor signs you off work with injurys sustained wearing the big foam suit? How dumb must you be to hurt yourself wearing all over foam padding? Surely, he must have been sacked for being such a donkey?

"Mr Blake said he fell in November 2005 after a camera in his suit failed, meaning he could not see. Mr Davenport (company rep) said it was "over-acting" which caused the fall."

Surely Mr Blake should consider another profession? First he's hurt himself whilst wearing all over padding, and now the production company exec says that he over acted. Tombliboos make huge exaggerated gestures for little kids to watch. Their toothbrushes are 4ft tall! How bad an actor are you when your face is hidden, your body surrounded by foam, your script is to ham it up, make bold clear gestures etc... and you manage to over act?

Tombliboo...? The man's surely a muppet!

Complete and utter...

2008-01-14T15:52:00.000-08:00

My local MP's a bit wet. I was therefore amused to hear that a recent comment by him was commented on from the benches, and now he's complaining about unparliamentary language. That's right... the words are the problem Mr Baron!

The official record of Parliamentary proceedings is to be changed to remove a swear word attributed to Armed Forces Minister Bob Ainsworth.
As Tory MP John Baron debated troops' kit shortages Mr Ainsworth was reported to have muttered "absolute bollocks".

President Dumb W Phukwhit

2008-01-13T15:44:00.000-08:00

Mr Bush said spreading freedom and democracy was the best way to defeat radicalism.
America and its democratic allies would prevail over extremists like al-Qaeda, he said, because they have "freedom and justice written into our hearts by Almighty God... no terrorists can take that away".

Is there absolutely no limit to President George "W for Anker" Bush's dumbness?

We'll beat the people with that other imaginary friend because our motives were given to us by our imaginary friend. This guy runs a country! Scary!

get yourself some help.

2007-12-03T08:40:00.000-08:00

Many with religious beliefs find it difficult to understand why anyone who professes no such belief would pay any interest to religion. Why not just leave each to their own? But surely it shouldn't be so hard to understand.

For someone who holds the athiest viewpoint, the notion of any part of society gaining special treatment as a result of supernatural beliefs is irritating. The idea that a witness in court would be asked to swear to tell the truth "before God" is comical. The idea that a school assembly should include the "Lords Prayer" is horrifying. But these reactions must seem bizarre to anyone who has grown up to accept such behaviours as "normal".

Now consider how something like this looks...

A teacher is locked up for 15 days because children in her class named a teddy bear Mohammed.

It sounds a bit daft to most.

How about this then...?

There are protests in the street with people calling for the sentence to be increased, including the chant that she be put to death by the sword.

Just to remind you.... this is because children named a teddy bear Mohammed.

I've seen people being interviewed on TV weighing this one up. Is it wrong, is it right... etc THEY HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS!

Who in their right mind can EVER under any circumstances think it is ok to lock someone up for NAMING a TEDDY BEAR anything? It's just a name - it's just a word - it's just a TEDDY BEAR. If you have to even for a moment consider whether the naming of a TEDDY BEAR should be something that can lead to a custodial sentence PLEASE GET YOURSELF SOME HELP!

Perhaps you're one of the fence sitters who'd say something like "the teacher should have been more sensitive to the religious views in the region"... thinking that you were being right and proper, sensitive and PC. BUT what does "sensitive to the religious views" mean in this instance? It means "the teacher should have had the good sense to avoid the insane actions of the irrational nutjobs in the area in the same way she'd avoid a dark alley for fear of rapists" In an ideal world you wouldn't have to, but it makes sense not to put yourself at risk. So say it how it is... this isn't about being respectful to someones beliefs, this is about being scared of institutionalised insanity.

Is there any point at which being "sensitive to the religious views of others" doesn't mean "avoiding irrational responses for an easy life". I wonder.

Last week I was summoned to the front door to find two suited men offering me The Watchtower. I explained that I was more than aware of who they were. These were perfectly nice, everyday people. I asked them if they had children. One of them said yes. I asked him whether, if his child was in an accident and losing blood to the extent that it was a transfusion or death, he would let the doctors save his child. His response, "it's something I've spent many hours thinking long and hard about." My response - "and that's why I am not wasting any further time talking to you - you're dangerous to others."

IF you think that there's something in your belief system that means it's ok to let a child (who hasn't chosen that belief system) die rather than let them be saved GET YOURSELF SOME HELP!

2007-11-06T16:48:00.000-08:00

"IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NOTHING. WHICH EXPLODED."

I love that phrase. It's a notion I've heard trotted out as proof that science can't explain everything by those ignorant enough to think that science believes that it can explain everything. It's as misguided as the "they used to think the earth was flat" comment as to how science can be wrong. For once and for all - science, or specifically the scientific method, tries to present the best hypothesis ACCORDING TO CURRENT EVIDENCE. If new evidence comes to light that proves a hypothesis wrong good science accepts and amends accordingly. There's little point in arguing with those who present a scientific viewpoint, if you don't understand what a scientific viewpoint is.

To highlight this, I refer you to Prof Dawkins "The God Delusion". As probably the most outspoken and well known athiest in the UK, he talks about a scale of athiesm, from 1 to 9 where a devout believer is a 1, and an absolute non believer is a 9. Dawkins rates himself an 8. He's prepared to accept that evidence could come to light that proves his hypothesis that God is a man made delusion to be wrong.

Before I start this blog...

If you are offended if someone questions your beliefs PLEASE don't read this blog. I don't want to offend ANYONE. Please remember, I don't agree with the very notion of blasphemy, I don't hold any God or text to be "sacred". So it could well be that in my posts I might comment on God(s) or books that you hold in high regard in a negative way. If that sounds like it'll upset you, please read something else.

Ok then...