Category: sport

A frankly ludicrous suggestion

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It wasn’t the most healthy of weekends, so I really should have done some exercise this morning. But my body was far from willing, and my mind was… also far from willing.

Still, with just three weeks until the start of the new season, and hopeful of a successful return to some footy 4 months after this, I lobbed on some running gear and headed outside. Needs must.

As per usual, a few stretches while my watch looked for satellites to track my run, and then a glance down at my wrist and… wait… my watch was suggesting a suitable training regimen for me.

Well, what it thought was suitable.

Apparently, my watch is supposed to learn from my fitness and workout routines and help me get more from my exercise. It isn’t a fancy pants model – far from it – but it does everything I need it to.
What I don’t need it to do is suggest a suitable training regimen for me, especially when it thinks (having been on my wrist from more than a year, nogal) that 21.0km at 5:45/km would be a good thing for me to do this morning.

Or any morning. WTF?!?!

This workout improves your ability to sustain high intensity efforts for longer.

it told me. (I don’t know why, but I read that in the calm, authoritative and mildly sinister voice of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which freaked me out even more.

That workout would improve my ability to sustain rigor mortis permanently.

I replied.

I ended up doing a (much) shorter, (slightly) slower run than my watch suggested. Just so I could see my family again and watch United at Wembley next month. You know, the basic pleasures in life.

I have switched the “suggest a workout” feature off now. It’s for the best.

Still, run done, and feeling good.
Onward (but not that far onward) and upward (but not that quickly).

A few things

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It’s been a while since i did one of these and my Pocket is filling up again. So…

It’s Springtime! (in the UK) and time to switch to BST. But this isn’t the correct way to put your clocks forward:

And this might work, but is also very confusing:

Pro-tip: Use a whiteboard marker and you can simply use a damp cloth to change the clocks back again in October.

Good news for me on this change is that evening football matches now kick off at a more reasonable time and so I can watch them and still get enough sleep (see below).

However, that good news is tempered somewhat by the fact that their Spring means our Autumn. And the weather has been doing its bit to remind us of the changing seasons. We’re losing 2 minutes of daylight a day in Cape Town each day at the moment, and we crossed the 12 hours daylight/12 hours nighttime line yesterday.

I was reminded of this Soy, Ginger and Chili salmon recipe today. I must cook it again. Today is all about the big boneless gammon joint on the hob, though. The whole house smell of cloves and all-spice (coincidentally also the name of the giant robot formed when all the Spice Girls zigazig-arred together like the Power Rangers). Delicious.

The future is bright: Sheffield United win the Professional Development League (North) for the third season running.

A fact made even better when you look at the whole league table:

LOL – mind the gap!

A Long Read about Long Covid here.

tl;dect (didn’t even click through) – risk of developing LC drops after a secondary infection (UK 4.0% to 2.4%), but that’s still not zero!

and just for reference, 2.4% of the UK population is one and a half million people. That’s a lot of potential cases, and a huge burden on individuals, families and the health service.

Covid really is just like the common cold.

I was out on a run earlier this week and was thinking about how I couldn’t even manage a staircase in the aftermath of my acute Covid experience. Things are clearly much, much better now, although it took over a year to get back to normality. That said: three things I have noticed post-Covid: I need more sleep, my lung capacity still isn’t what it was before, and my memory (which use to be very good) really isn’t as good any more. Especially on people’s names. Other random nonsense (phone codes, capital cities, song titles/bands) – generally fine. Names (famous ones or personal acquaintances) – nope.

Weird.

Stop stacking rocks on beaches (and elsewhere), say SANParks.

…The problem is that people are increasingly building rock cairns to leave their mark or symbol of their presence in a natural setting or for posting on social media. Therefore, when engaging in this activity, it is important to be mindful of the potential negative impacts on the environment, wildlife and other people’s experiences.

Moving rocks and stacking them can disturb the natural habitat of tiny creatures. On the rocky shore, these organisms, such as crabs, molluscs, and algae, depend on their environment’s rocks and other structures for shelter and protection. By moving or stacking rocks, we may inadvertently destroy or disrupt their homes, harming their populations. Similarly, rock stacking can also have adverse terrestrial impacts on insects and moss in wilderness areas.

The article has a (terrible) picture of Agulhas National Park in it. So this is a local thing, close to my heart. And when the kids were younger, we did used to do this from time to time, albeit that our towers were built near the low tide mark, ready to be knocked down as the waves came in, and never for social media purposes.

Anyway. No more. Stoppit.

Lastly for today: a new way to filter flights on flightradar24. This is the update that everyone as crying out for. And it works. From being a very cool tool, its now also massively powerful. You can now get it to do whatever you want (and even more if you pay for a subscription). A lot of the features are in the free Beta version at the moment, but it seems to be stable and full rollout isn’t likely to be far away.

Not for me, volume 7: Padel

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I’ve never been into trendy things that are trendy because they’re trendy.

Trendy things that are trendy because they are good or useful – sure. Solar power would be a great example of that, right now.
But if you are just doing something trendy solely to be trendy – well, that’s not for me.

Step forward padel: the latest trendy thing to hit the monied white people of South Africa.
In Cape Town, you may have seen Mountain Biking fill this niche. And then there were E-Bikes.
Remember the Tim Noakes Cookbook?
How about Hot Yoga?
Fedoras.
EMS BodyTec fitness.
Crapft Beer (or Gin).
There are many, many examples.

Padel is a cross between beach bats, tennis, pickleball and squash, and it is EVER so trendy right now. And it’s almost exclusively in that demographic that I have mentioned above.

I have friends who play padel. But it’s not for me. And I feel that that decision was vindicated when I saw the (hastily built, always full) local courts being used by at least two gentlemen wearing fedoras.
Case rested. That’s not sporting gear, that’s trendy for the sake of being trendy gear.

They’d probably ridden there on their E-Bikes.

And then I was served this ball-achingly awful ad on Facebook for Padel bats padels, which just sums up the whole thing:

So many issues here.

seventy-Four different Examples of Capitalisation. Never a good Start.

Released on 23 February, but “designed to celebrate the holiday season”? Which holiday season, exactly? Shrove Tuesday?
And “a little pre-taste of the summer collection”? Mate – this is the Southern Hemisphere. On the 23rd February, summer is less than a week from being over.
How pre-taste do you want this? 9 months?

Variate is a noun, not a verb.

“wintery Smoke Pine Greens” – absolutely ideal for a little pre-taste of the summer collection.

As an aside: never smoke a pine, by the way:

“When considering total emissions, particulate matter from smoldering pine wood and needles was by far the most mutagenic of the samples assessed, and thus potentially more carcinogenic.”

Mutagenicity and Lung Toxicity of Smoldering vs. Flaming Emissions from Various Biomass Fuels: Implications for Health Effects from Wildland Fires

And then the weird elevation of “a papaya smoothie” as some sort of aspirational goal for the hue of sporting equipment.

But after that, well, they’re just taking the piss, aren’t they?

Our Collection continues to draw its inspiration from Sci-Fi movies translating the current world we’re living in, where people spend their time between the physical world and the virtual metaverse.

I don’t even know what that means.

I love a good Sci-Fi movie translating the current world (we’re living in).

But no, the people you are trying to appeal to are spending their time between the padel court and the next occasion they go to the padel court. This intermediate time is spent in the physical world, describing their last padel game and arranging their next one.

No-one is spending any time in the virtual metaverse, because:

the “metaverse” is a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality and augmented reality headsets.

And no, I don’t know if you can play padel there.

As with many of these fads, padel will last for a while (durations of these things vary) while shrewd individuals and companies pivot and invest to make a quick (and big) buck (e.g. Osaka’s [above] domain is actually osakahockey dot co dot za, but that old curved wooden stick staple is nowhere near as trendy and money-spinning as padel) and will then die out.

But with the equipment (padel, racquet, ugh… whatever) starting at a few thousand Rands for a bit of moulded plastic:

…it’s clearly for the few, not the many.

Thankfully, it won’t be around for long.

Please remember to recycle your bat on the way out.

On Gary Lineker

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Right.
Before we begin: the T&Cs. Because I know that this post is going to annoy some people, and if it does, I really do want to it to be for all the right reasons. So…

This post is NOT about:
The rights or wrongs of the UK Government’s new policy on immigration.
The rights or wrongs of the opinions of Gary Lineker on said policy.

There is enough stuff out there about those things, and I’m not even providing a link to anything about this story, because this is a political thing and so the views out there on this are completely polarised and will either strike you as “spot on” or “bullshit hate speech” depending on your political stance. It’s not difficult to google “Gary Lineker”, click the “News” tab, choose your site, read the article and then either applaud or rage. Have fun.

My point is rather more about Gary Lineker’s contract with the BBC. Contracts are important things. Gary Lineker wouldn’t get paid for his Match of the Day work if he didn’t have a contract. But it’s a two way street, because equally, he wouldn’t have to turn up for his Match of the Day work if he didn’t have a contract. But he does turn up and he does get paid, so everyone’s happy*.

The thing is, because he’s working for the BBC, Gary Lineker earns more than £1,350,000 of taxpayers’ money each year. Is that reasonable? IT DOESN’T MATTER – that’s not what we’re discussing here.
But when he signed the contract to allow him to be paid that amount of money, he also agreed to abide by the BBC’s guidelines on social media use. Is that fair? IT DOESN’T MATTER – that’s not what we’re discussing here.

The fact is that the two-way contract street says that yes, he gets paid, but no, he can’t share his political opinions on social media. And by signing that contract, he tacitly said that he was ok with not expressing his political opinions on social media, as long as the BBC paid him £1,350,000 to present MOTD.

And because it’s a two way street, and no-one has got you at gunpoint signing anything, you always have a choice:
Don’t like the terms of the contract?
Don’t sign it.
Don’t present MOTD.
Express your political opinions freely on social media.

But also, don’t get paid £1,350,000 a year.

You can’t have your cake and eat it.

And so, whether you agree with the Government policy or not, and whether you agree with Gary Lineker’s opinions or not, is completely immaterial here. He clearly broke one of the terms of his contract, and, just like you or I or anyone else who is lucky enough to have a job might expect if we broke one of the terms of our contract, his employers have taken issue with that. But are they right t… IT. DOESN’T. MATTER.
Stop bringing your emotions and politics into a simple black and white issue.

The upshot of this is several-fold:

  • There will be no MOTD presenters or commentators this evening, and the BBC viewers will instead have the international PLP feed – including Jim Beglin. Eish.
  • The BBC will be pronounced by both political sides as biased. (An aside: the fact that one can look at such polarised political opposites both complaining that the national broadcaster is prejudiced against their particular viewpoint actually indicates to me that the BBC is doing quite a good job of being impartial.)
  • Gary Lineker will either back down (nope) or he will have to leave the BBC and be seen (by some people at least) as some sort of martyr for free speech. But…
  • The more likely outcome will be that the BBC (and/or any other employer watching this and not wanting all this shit coming their way) will surely make their contracts clearer and more restrictive when it comes to this issue, thus “stifling” “free speech” even further.

Personally (and again, this is without prejudice towards this case – this goes for each and every one of them), I would love it if the opinions of celebrities and TV personalities weren’t given more credence and gravity simply because of their public status. It’s ridiculous that because Matt le Tissier had a somewhat successful career as a footballer in the 80s and 90s, we should somehow pay particular attention to his views on vaccines. It’s pathetic that because Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar for her acting ability, we should consider her as some sort of expert on nutrition.
Happen to be a minor celebrity because you were the keyboard player for a 90s band and you have several qualifications in particle and quantum physics? Then that’s fine: you tell us all about the universe. But tell us about it because of your academic qualifications, and not because you came up with the riff on the band’s big hit.

The Gary Lineker issue is clearly very emotive and multi-factorial. But while there are many difficult conversations to be had around each of those matters, it seems to me that him clearly choosing not to obey one of the terms of his contract with the BBC is probably the most simple thing to grasp of them all.
Equally, how that breach of contract is dealt with shouldn’t be complex at all, but given the inevitable outrage from the all-knowing public, it almost certainly will be.

* I know, I know.