Chalk Outlines on Sun-Cooked Concrete
This weekend I lived for pleasure alone. I staggered around London from market to barbecue and pub to picnic, leaving behind me an unbroken trail of suntan lotion. Anyone following me would have found themselves slipping and tumbling like a busted acrobat.
Despite swimming in factor 12 I was still mildly cooked by the time I arrived home on Sunday evening. I checked it on a Dulux colour card last night; my arms are now a shade of orange between umber and clay. And today the Evening Standard is shouting that the hot weather will continue for another ten days. This is fine by me.
But today has been less of a pleasure. We will skip past the commute to work during which I somehow caught a tube going in the wrong direction, and go straight to the chilling conversation I had this morning. It began whilst we stood at the window, idly watching people mill back and forth on the concourse.
“You see where you’re standing?” he said, pointing to a spot in the manager’s office beneath my feet.
“Yeah.”
“Someone bled to death there.”
Almost unconsciously I found myself retreating through the door.
“What? When?”
“Couple of years ago. A workman was on the roof and slipped, came plummeting through the roof and splat! Down onto the floor just there. Fell on a massive shard of glass and lay, unable to move or cry out, as the blood poured onto the floor.”
“Ye gods. I see they worked wonders with the carpet.”
“They had to redecorate the place. Pain in the arse when it’s a listed building.”
“Well. The workman should have thought of that before destroying the roof.”
“I don’t think he really cared by that stage.”
We left the subject there and went back to bitching about the weather.
There is no need to make the observation that we are obsessed with talking about the weather in this country, especially when it comes to putting together a newspaper. Or indeed a weblog. So much easier to stomach than blood and guts and shards of glass. Naturally the papers were basking today in the easy journalism of broken records associated with the weather...appropriate considering this is what these stories begin to sound like after a while.
More visibly, the photographers had once again located a pair of giggly 19 year-olds in bikinis. These girls appear every month or so, sometimes in a story about hot weather, sometimes exam results, sometimes binge drinking, and so on. Quite a coincidence, and the sweat on the male commuter’s brow this morning as he read his free paper was not a result of the heat. Some of the papers even found room at the foot of the page to mention the deaths and injuries resulting from the weather. But who wants to read about that when we have norks to study?
It is the silly season after all. Farmers are staging a demonstration today about popular usage of the word potato, Tom Cruise and fiancée Katie Holmes held a public press conference about their private lives and somebody has invented a lobster electrocution machine. Small, small beer. Even the Proper News is struggling with itself, trying to find hooks and new angles in the driest of subjects. Squabbling in Europe, for example. Chirac is...ah, what the hell. Google it. Save me the trouble of having to think.
Formula One, meanwhile, fell through the floor yesterday like a clumsy workman. But the body has been bleeding to death for years now. Yesterday all we saw was another knife in the wound...the spectacle of fourteen cars withdrawing at the start of the race on the request of Michelin. Apparently Michelin had brought a bunch of no-good tyres to America (a fact that damn near killed Ralf Schumacher), but were told that the track would not be altered to compensate for this.
I do not follow the sport and therefore cannot react on an emotional level to this. But the fans interviewed on television knew what to say. They cursed and bellowed and threw missiles onto the track. They said that the future of Formula One in America was now twisting in the wind; whether or not this is the case, there are many disillusioned fans who feel ripped off once too often by the rotten Ecclestone-led management. Even a cursory glance at the situation suggests that the sport has been destroyed from the top down and nobody in charge can be trusted to run the sport with any level of dignity.
One of the problems with the sport is nobody’s fault. Formula One is a multi-million pound sport that, nevertheless, is completely centralised. There is a single series of races a year and the personnel changes infrequently. If any part of the sport fails then the entire process grinds to an embarrassing halt, whereas with most other sports you would have to stab and keep on stabbing in many places before the beast collapsed. If one football match is abandoned those fans would be angry, but the sport itself would barely feel the wound.
This issue would not be relevant if the sport was managed well. And unlike Doctor Who, this particular Ecclestone is not about to regenerate into someone prettier any time soon. Ah, but we now find ourselves knee-deep in related arguments...about the increasing role of technology and the constant rule changes just to keep up. About track safety and trying to keep the race exciting. About the opaque nature of the management... It all comes down to one question; is this a sport that has become incompatible with the modern world where excitement and risk elimination fight like angry cockerels, and to hell with how well the sport is managed?
How should I know?
I like speculative questions. Statements you must back up, but these kind of questions are wonderfully doom-laden even when irrelevant or wildly out of context.
But anyone who dares play the devil’s advocate in my company will receive a black eye. Devil’s advocate is the easiest way of Cheating in Arguments, a subject I have examined before. In this case you are not so much cheating as forcing the other person to do all the work. The more questions you ask the sooner it will be before the other person lies exhausted on the floor and unable to back up some unimportant fact on which you challenge them... the result being that you claim victory on a technicality. Try this with me and you will find Occam’s Razor is more than just an abstract logical concept.
Well...since this whole thing has become detached from its moorings and has floated off into somebody else’s airspace, I should come to an end here. Or is this perhaps a gut reaction to the sudden thought that I have yet to come up with a point to this post?
Hmm... apparently some speculative questions are easier to answer than others.
Despite swimming in factor 12 I was still mildly cooked by the time I arrived home on Sunday evening. I checked it on a Dulux colour card last night; my arms are now a shade of orange between umber and clay. And today the Evening Standard is shouting that the hot weather will continue for another ten days. This is fine by me.
But today has been less of a pleasure. We will skip past the commute to work during which I somehow caught a tube going in the wrong direction, and go straight to the chilling conversation I had this morning. It began whilst we stood at the window, idly watching people mill back and forth on the concourse.
“You see where you’re standing?” he said, pointing to a spot in the manager’s office beneath my feet.
“Yeah.”
“Someone bled to death there.”
Almost unconsciously I found myself retreating through the door.
“What? When?”
“Couple of years ago. A workman was on the roof and slipped, came plummeting through the roof and splat! Down onto the floor just there. Fell on a massive shard of glass and lay, unable to move or cry out, as the blood poured onto the floor.”
“Ye gods. I see they worked wonders with the carpet.”
“They had to redecorate the place. Pain in the arse when it’s a listed building.”
“Well. The workman should have thought of that before destroying the roof.”
“I don’t think he really cared by that stage.”
We left the subject there and went back to bitching about the weather.
There is no need to make the observation that we are obsessed with talking about the weather in this country, especially when it comes to putting together a newspaper. Or indeed a weblog. So much easier to stomach than blood and guts and shards of glass. Naturally the papers were basking today in the easy journalism of broken records associated with the weather...appropriate considering this is what these stories begin to sound like after a while.
More visibly, the photographers had once again located a pair of giggly 19 year-olds in bikinis. These girls appear every month or so, sometimes in a story about hot weather, sometimes exam results, sometimes binge drinking, and so on. Quite a coincidence, and the sweat on the male commuter’s brow this morning as he read his free paper was not a result of the heat. Some of the papers even found room at the foot of the page to mention the deaths and injuries resulting from the weather. But who wants to read about that when we have norks to study?
It is the silly season after all. Farmers are staging a demonstration today about popular usage of the word potato, Tom Cruise and fiancée Katie Holmes held a public press conference about their private lives and somebody has invented a lobster electrocution machine. Small, small beer. Even the Proper News is struggling with itself, trying to find hooks and new angles in the driest of subjects. Squabbling in Europe, for example. Chirac is...ah, what the hell. Google it. Save me the trouble of having to think.
Formula One, meanwhile, fell through the floor yesterday like a clumsy workman. But the body has been bleeding to death for years now. Yesterday all we saw was another knife in the wound...the spectacle of fourteen cars withdrawing at the start of the race on the request of Michelin. Apparently Michelin had brought a bunch of no-good tyres to America (a fact that damn near killed Ralf Schumacher), but were told that the track would not be altered to compensate for this.
I do not follow the sport and therefore cannot react on an emotional level to this. But the fans interviewed on television knew what to say. They cursed and bellowed and threw missiles onto the track. They said that the future of Formula One in America was now twisting in the wind; whether or not this is the case, there are many disillusioned fans who feel ripped off once too often by the rotten Ecclestone-led management. Even a cursory glance at the situation suggests that the sport has been destroyed from the top down and nobody in charge can be trusted to run the sport with any level of dignity.
One of the problems with the sport is nobody’s fault. Formula One is a multi-million pound sport that, nevertheless, is completely centralised. There is a single series of races a year and the personnel changes infrequently. If any part of the sport fails then the entire process grinds to an embarrassing halt, whereas with most other sports you would have to stab and keep on stabbing in many places before the beast collapsed. If one football match is abandoned those fans would be angry, but the sport itself would barely feel the wound.
This issue would not be relevant if the sport was managed well. And unlike Doctor Who, this particular Ecclestone is not about to regenerate into someone prettier any time soon. Ah, but we now find ourselves knee-deep in related arguments...about the increasing role of technology and the constant rule changes just to keep up. About track safety and trying to keep the race exciting. About the opaque nature of the management... It all comes down to one question; is this a sport that has become incompatible with the modern world where excitement and risk elimination fight like angry cockerels, and to hell with how well the sport is managed?
How should I know?
I like speculative questions. Statements you must back up, but these kind of questions are wonderfully doom-laden even when irrelevant or wildly out of context.
But anyone who dares play the devil’s advocate in my company will receive a black eye. Devil’s advocate is the easiest way of Cheating in Arguments, a subject I have examined before. In this case you are not so much cheating as forcing the other person to do all the work. The more questions you ask the sooner it will be before the other person lies exhausted on the floor and unable to back up some unimportant fact on which you challenge them... the result being that you claim victory on a technicality. Try this with me and you will find Occam’s Razor is more than just an abstract logical concept.
Well...since this whole thing has become detached from its moorings and has floated off into somebody else’s airspace, I should come to an end here. Or is this perhaps a gut reaction to the sudden thought that I have yet to come up with a point to this post?
Hmm... apparently some speculative questions are easier to answer than others.
posted by Jamie at 4:07 PM
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