Category: Sport

I thought I might try and get interested in sport at one point. It didn’t really work out.

#oneaday Day 937: The Olympics Are Closed

The Olympic closing ceremony finished not long ago, a little late, and now it’s back to normal for Britain until the Paralympics start, at which point everyone will suddenly get interested in sport that isn’t premier league football again for two weeks and then forget all about it when that is finished. (Incidentally, people, you can stop saying “don’t forget about the Paralympics” any time you want. They’re still quite a way off. I doubt anyone is going to forget they’re happening — and more to the point, I doubt the media will let anyone forget they’re happening, either.)

The closing ceremony was… well… uh… a bit poo, really. After the genuinely impressive spectacle that was Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony — noteworthy for its greatest achievement, which was stopping British people from being snarky for two whole weeks — the closing ceremony just couldn’t match up, and seemingly made no effort to.

This is nothing new for Olympic closing ceremonies, of course, which always tend to be a bit poo, particularly when compared to the opening counterparts. But this was just… bizarre, really. And not especially good. There was a lot of celebration of British music that wasn’t that good — Jessie J, Tinie Tempah, Taio Cruz (no, I didn’t know he was British, either) were particular lowlights — and some utterly sacriligeous bollocks in the form of Jessie J butchering Queen with her characteristic out-of-tune caterwauling. Apparently the Spice Girls were involved at some point, but since I had left the room to go for a dump as soon as a video of John Lennon came on whining his way through “Imagine” showed its face, I missed them. And I’m not sorry. The Spice Girls never were good live. They were, however, responsible for this .gif of David Cameron clapping on “1” and “3” (twat!) and Boris Johnson dancing like your embarrassing uncle at a wedding:

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the closing ceremony was the palpable sense of relief as 60 million British people all unlocked their underpants and let rip with one of the biggest waves of snark I’ve ever seen. Everyone was obviously backed up from two weeks of genuine pride in the country, the achievements of our athletes and the fact that holy shit you guys, we did an Olympics and it didn’t suck! It was obvious that everyone felt a lot better after ripping the shit out of the closing ceremonies, so it is, of course, entirely possible that the whole event was designed with precisely this in mind. In which case the whole thing was a wonderfully-crafted work of art that managed to get two weeks’ worth of clogged-up snark well and truly ejaculated from the British public just in time for us to go back to the humdrum mundanity of everyday life tomorrow.

Or perhaps it was just a bit poo, really.

Still, regardless of how it ended, the Olympics have been an impressive spectacle and it’s been nice to see people taking pride in athletes who obviously do what they do for the love rather than the money. There have been many comments over the last two weeks concerning the obvious differences in attitude between the (mostly) very sportsmanlike Olympians and the whiny, overpaid, spoiled little crybabies that are premier league footballers, and it’s true. I hate football precisely for the attitudes that are typically on display from the oafs who are at the top of their game, and there was not a trace of that throughout the Olympics… well, for the most part, anyway. Winners often appeared to be genuinely humble and proud of their victories, while those who missed out on gold didn’t tend to blame the referee, the other team, the other manager, the fans or anyone — they simply remained gracious in defeat and, in many cases, promised to come back fighting even harder at the next opportunity.

That’s the true thing that should be celebrated from these Olympics. The opening ceremony was cool, sure, and the closing ceremony was entertainingly bad, but neither of those two things are what the whole experience is about. It’s about taking pride in the sporting achievements of one’s country, and if it can even crack the jaded, cynical old heart of a curmudgeon like me then it’s truly something to be applauded.

#oneaday Day 930: Conditional Philanthropy

I will never understand people — particularly famous types — who are deliberately obnoxious, and who clearly get off on negative attention, conflict and repeatedly proving what an arse they are.

There are a number of people I can think of who fit into this particular category, but the one who springs most readily and frequently to mind is Piers Morgan, erstwhile editor of the News of the World and the Daily Mirror and presently dripping his own peculiar brand of slime over American television sets thanks to CNN.

Piers Morgan’s crimes against common decency are too many to enumerate, but his recent behaviour regarding the Olympics has drawn the ire of a number of people.

For those unaware of what he has been up to, it started here:

And continued:

And continued…

AND CONTINUED…

Morgan, it is fair to say, had something of a bee in his bonnet over the fact that some members of the British Olympic team didn’t sing God Save The Queen after winning a medal. He appeared to think that this was incredibly important, and that it was worth putting down their impressive, world-beating sporting achievements for.

Then came the bribery and guilt-tripping:

Generous, non? Well, it could be argued as such, yes — he has no obligation to donate anything to Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, after all — but dig a little deeper and this whole thing just becomes a bit sleazy, really. By not donating a proportion of his undoubtedly vast wealth to Great Ormond Street simply because of an athlete not singing the anthem — not taking into account the fact that winning an Olympic event is probably a pretty emotional moment for any sportsperson — Morgan is implying several things: firstly, that his apparent philanthropy is, in fact, conditional, and secondly, that athletes who do not sing the national anthem after winning a Gold medal are somehow child-haters.

The gloating didn’t help.

Neither did the inconsistency:

Or the abuse:

Basically, there was just something incredibly distasteful about the whole thing. Morgan was clearly just trolling for responses, and he got them by the bucketload — and yes, I’m aware I’m part of the problem here. We don’t even have any guarantee that Morgan is actually going to cough up the £15,000 he currently “owes” Great Ormond Street.

He probably will, of course, because he then gets to look like the hero who donated £15,000 to a children’s hospital — and also gets to rub how much money he has in the peanut gallery’s faces, of course — but I can’t help thinking that it is for entirely the wrong reasons. If he feels that strongly about supporting Great Ormond Street, he should just donate the money, not hold his contributions to ransom based on something completely unrelated — something that could potentially make the non-singing athletes look like child-hating dicks in the hands of an unscrupulous (read: Daily Mail) reporter.

Morgan’s not making a point here. He’s simply waving his willy around in an attempt to make us all feel bad in one way or another. Don’t sing the anthem? You’re unpatriotic. Don’t have as much money as him? HAHAHA YOU’RE POOR. Criticise Morgan’s true motivations for this little exercise? YOU HATE SICK KIDS AND ARE A PIG-IGNORANT VACUOUS LITTLE TROLL.

There are several things that remain a mystery out of this whole thing. 1) Why is Piers Morgan still relevant? 2) Why are there people standing up for him? 3) Why does he have to be so fucking infuriating and get off on all this “controversy” he’s stirring up? He’s like that school bully who would just shrug off any insults you threw at him then punch you in the face and still, somehow, end up being the most popular kid in the school despite being the very worst kind of odious cretin imaginable.

Fortunately, this being the age of social media, at least one good thing has come out of this whole debacle: this JustGiving page aiming to make up the difference in donations that Morgan has refused to give due to athletes not singing God Save The Queen. It’s a lofty goal, but if the world can harness its hate for Piers Morgan to raise £14,000 for sick kids… well, admittedly that’s not the best reason in the world to give money to charity, but it’s sure better than holding the donations from your own incredibly deep pockets to ransom.

#oneaday Day 924: Hey Daily Mail, This Isn’t Okay, And It Isn’t Funny Any More

[Note: This will probably go without saying if you read the whole post, but the cartoon above obviously does not reflect my own opinions, and is a parody of what I am about to describe below.]

The Daily Mail has long endured a popular perception as the racist, old, slightly mad uncle of the British newspaper industry. Regularly spouting crap on all sorts of subjects and displaying astonishing hypocrisy on plenty of issues, The Daily Mail has always been sort of tolerated as a kind of national institution we’re all slightly ashamed of — and one that we all secretly enjoy getting comically angry at.

With some recent articles, however, I think it’s time that people actually started getting properly angry at the Mail. The first of these two articles is no longer available on the Mail website — presumably after a ton of complaints — but is by far the worst example of a Mail correspondent poking the fire with some frankly astounding racism. You can read the article via FreezePage here.

“The NHS did not deserve to be so disgracefully glorified in this bonanza of left-wing propaganda,” wrote correspondent Rick Dewsbury as the headline to his piece ostensibly focused on the Olympic opening ceremony. He then launched into a lengthy diatribe regarding the incompetence of NHS staff in the case of Kane Gorny, a diabetic who died due to neglect by hospital staff. A tragic case, sure, but hardly evidence that the NHS — regarded by many as a rather good aspect of this country — is worthy of “shame” as Dewsbury seems to believe.

Dewsbury’s article then continued on its rambling way, pausing to note that the athletes’ parade featured “banana republics and far-flung destinations nobody has ever heard of or even cares for” and later decrying the “multicultural equality agenda” that he found “painful to watch.”

“It was the absurdly unrealistic scene — and indeed one that would spring from the kind of nonsensical targets and equality quotas we see in the NHS — showing a mixed- race middle-class family in a detached new-build suburban home, which was the most symptomatic of the politically correct agenda in modern Britain,” wrote Dewsbury. “It is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family.

“Almost, if not every, shot in the next sequence included an ethnic minority performer,” he continued, as if this was somehow a bad thing. “The BBC presenter Hazel Irvine gushed about the importance of grime music (a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths) to east London.”

Yes, there was a lot of “multiculturalism” in the opening ceremony, but here’s the thing: the Olympic stadium is in the east end of London, which is a particularly multicultural part of an already very multicultural city. To deny that people with non-white skin live in London — and, for that matter, are capable of integrating with Caucasians — is blinkered at best, amazingly racist at worst. Britain as a whole is filled with a diverse array of people from all over the world, and to deny this is to deny what has become part of our national identity — something which the Daily Mail regularly claims to want to defend.

Let’s get one thing clear: this is Not Okay, free speech be damned. It is Not Okay for someone to write a piece for a national newspaper’s website displaying such flagrant disregard for certain parts of the population. It is Not Okay for someone to use their racism as a rather tenuous part of their argument against something which a lot of people believe is actually quite a good thing. It is Not Okay to speak of camera shots including “ethnic minority performers” in a disparaging tone, as if they had no right to be there.

And it is Not Okay to refer to a non-British Olympic competitor who happened to beat the GBR contender (who still won a medal) as “some bitch from Holland” — which is exactly what Jan Moir did in a separate piece — which also gave an undue amount of attention to whether or not certain athletes and presenters had had any cosmetic work done. (The piece is still up here; FreezePage here; a screengrab can be seen here if it does get pulled or ninja-edited, or if the FreezePage is unavailable.)

The Olympics are about the world coming together in peace and competing against one another in sporting events. It’s always touching to see competitors from “rival” nations competing with good sportsmanship rather than animosity, and the whole event is, by its very nature, inclusive and — yes — multicultural. To complain about a “multicultural equality agenda” and to refer to a foreign competitor as “some bitch” is just awful. It really is.

It’s obvious why the Mail does this, of course — to get hits. They know that people will get fired up and upset about these issues. They know that the articles will be shared across social networks with people making indignant comments — but they still get their page views and ad revenue every time it happens. It’s become a depressingly predictable trend that people have just been putting up with until now.

But it needs to stop. Whatever “comedy value” the Daily Mail’s flagrant racism once had — if indeed it ever had any — has no place in modern society. This isn’t “political correctness,” as Dewsbury would put it — it’s just common decency, acceptance and tolerance. It’s 2012. We should be over the “skin colour” and “horrible foreigners” thing by now. But sadly, it seems, some people really aren’t.

Screw the Daily Mail. It’s stuck in the past, just like that racist old uncle lying in his hospital bed, his bigotry tolerated because “he’s old” or “he’s ill” or “he doesn’t know what he’s saying”. Unfortunately, the Daily Mail knows exactly what it is saying, which is why this keeps happening.

It’s Not Okay. And it’s time that those of us with a sense of common decency about us should start speaking up a bit more about this rather than just laughing it off as we have done in the past.

#oneaday Day 921: Oimpylcs

I watched (almost) all of the opening ceremonies for the London 2012 Olympics (as it seems they must be called) and didn’t hate them.

I was surprised.

I mean, I wasn’t going to watch them at all. I have been guilty of Olympic cynicism in recent weeks — not helped by media coverage of the Games being predominantly negative. To be fair, if even half of the stuff regarding the overzealous branding nonsense is true, then yes, that is ridiculous and should be shouted about, but it’s easy to get caught up in and neglect to focus on the things that the Olympics are supposed to be about.

I don’t like sports as a general rule. They go on too long and the ones that are on telly are usually undertaken by people who are being paid far too much to, essentially, do what kids do on lunch break at school. But the Olympics regularly manages to capture my attention in a way that no other event — certainly not anything football-related — ever manages to do.

I attribute this fact at least partially to the number of Olympic-style computer games I played as a child — Summer Games, Winter Games, Decathlon, World Games, Track and Field, Olympic Gold, Arena — the list goes on. Most of them were responsible for the destruction of at least one joystick, and Arena did its damnedest to mangle the Atari ST keyboard with its inexplicably joystick-phobic control scheme. But they helped me to understand a wide variety of the weird and wonderful events that make up the Olympics — events which you tend not to see on television under normal circumstances. I attribute my knowledge of the fact that “skeet shooting” is a thing that exists to having played Summer Games, for example.

I remember the first Olympics I actually made an effort to watch — though not specifically what year it was, unfortunately. I want to say Barcelona 1992, but I might be making that up. Anyway, I was staying at my grandparents’ house with my parents (and my grandparents, obviously) and the Games just happened to start while we were there. I decided that I was going to Make An Effort to watch them. (Actually, thinking about it, I’m pretty sure it was 1992, because I vividly remember Queen singing “BAAARCELOOOOONA, such a beautiful horizon” at the start of every broadcast.) So I did. I made an effort to watch some of the “traditional” track and field events as well as some of the weird shit. It was quite entertaining, though I can’t remember the names of any of the athletes I saw or any of the medals that were won. I would be a crap sports fan.

But back to today and the opening ceremonies. I was ready to dismiss the whole thing after the faintly cringeworthy beginning section (particularly the gratuitous and unnecessary insertion of the Eastenders “dum, dum, dumdumdumdum dum”), but the “industrial revolution” section hooked me back in with men in top hats and an excellent soundtrack. It then lost me a bit with a distressingly awful “age of social media” section with gratuitously-overlaid “LOOK THIS IS FACEBOOK BUT IT ISN’T” fake status updates and a poorly-mixed (but otherwise solidly-selected) playlist of excellent British music. By this point, I was oddly hooked, so I didn’t even mind the interminably tedious parade of athletes.

Oh, also, there was a bit where James Bond skydived (skydove?) out of a helicopter with The Queen. (Okay, the skydiving bit clearly wasn’t The Queen. But the VT involving her and Daniel Craig was pretty neat.) And there was a lengthy tribute to the NHS, which the current government is doing its best to either get rid of or privatise. This was then followed by an army of Mary Poppinses battling a giant Voldemort. Yes, that happened. I think.

So yes, on the whole, the Olympics opening ceremony was what people tend to refer to as a “triumph”, shaky bits (and yes, I include Paul McCartney in that description) aside. There were some impressive visuals, an excellent soundtrack (helpfully listed over on The Telegraph) and a few cringeworthy bits. And also some mindblowingly bizarre sections. (The whole “tribute to children’s literature” bit was mildly terrifying and will likely give more than a few people some horrendous nightmares this evening.)

Well done, then, London. I don’t know if I’ll be watching any of the Games themselves, but having sat through that lot this evening I kind of feel a bit obliged to now…

#oneaday Day 893: The One Thing That Would Make Me Play a Sports Game

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I’m not a fan of sports, as I believe I’ve made abundantly clear on numerous occasions. Consequently, I’m not a big fan of sports-based video games either (though I am rather more tolerant of them than televised sporting events, largely because I get to interact with them and have fun with friends — but the point stands).

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I think there’s scope for sports games to reach out to people like me and provide an accessible experience that I could enjoy — and potentially learn to be interested in the sport itself over time. I caught a glimpse of such a concept in practice today when checking out a Facebook-based game called I AM PLAYR, a rather nifty little game that casts players in the role of an individual player on an up-and-coming (and fictional) football (soccer) team. The game focuses on the life of the player’s character both on and off the pitch, splitting the player’s time between 3D training minigames, text-based matches punctuated by interactive 3D attempts on goal by the player character and full-motion video sequences with occasional moral choices to make. While the latter may sound rather late-90s CD-ROM in nature, it added a huge amount of personality to the experience and actually made me interested to play more.

The reason I don’t find sports games very interesting, you see, is that there’s no sense of narrative or drama. Sure, there’s an argument to be made for emergent narrative in sports games just as there is in abstract strategy games, but when I’m not interested enough in the source material I’m never going to become invested enough in the game to start thinking of things in emergent narrative terms. As such, it turns out that the very thing I needed to get me interested in playing a sports game was a story.

I AM PLAYR sees the player character following a number of off-pitch narrative threads alongside the season’s fixtures. We see the behind-the-scenes drama as the team’s lead striker who claimed he was fighting fit was actually receiving injections from the team’s therapist. We see rivalry between teammates — practical jokes, drunken nights out, ill-advised encounters with vapid glory-chasing women. We see the team’s manager trying to stay positive even as the drama unfolds within his team. And amid all this, the player character makes choices that determine how different characters react to him — including his girlfriend, who is more than a little concerned that his new-found fame will see him drifting away from her.

It’s a really neat system and made me feel far more attached to my character and the team than if they were simply a collection of stats and a polygon representation on a virtual pitch. I don’t know enough about how to play football effectively to be able to play a full match and win, so I’m grateful that the actual “sport” element of the game simply focuses on set-pieces and chances on goal, and then allows me to get back to the clubhouse intrigue.

After playing the game for a while I was struck with how rarely this sort of thing is seen. I AM PLAYR has high production values — all of the video is shot with real people on location, including some actual real footballers, for example — but there’s no reason a team couldn’t do it slightly more on the cheap with CG characters and text-based dialogue if the budget wasn’t there. So why aren’t more people doing it? I’d certainly play it, and I’m willing to bet there are plenty of people out there who have a casual interest in football (but not enough to play a full simulation of it) who would join me.

It doesn’t just have to be limited to football, either. This formula would work for pretty much any sport. You could have the motorsports game where you developed rivalries in the pit lane. The baseball game where you’re trying to follow in the footsteps of a childhood hero. The tennis game where you’re struggling to come to terms with your own anger management issues. (You cannot be… etc.)

There have been examples in the past — On The Ball from Ascon for MS-DOS computers springs immediately to mind, and apparently New Star Soccer for iOS follows a similar template — but I want to see more of this kind of game. They could be the catalyst to actually get me interested in a sport and be able to participate in a conversation come international tournament time, rather than simply wanting to snap off every England “car flag” I see.

The trouble with Arsenal, you see, is they always try and walk it in.

#oneaday Day 764: Sports Day

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Sports and me have never really got on. There are a variety of reasons for this but the long and the short of it is that said antipathy towards each other meant that 1) I was usually picked last for the teams in PE (when I wasn’t, it was usually Steven Finnegan instead) and 2) my body isn’t exactly a rippling temple of man-beef.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to get involved with sports over the years. I was in my Cub Scout football team, for example, a team so terrible we were sponsored by a junkyard. Our best result ever was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 20-0 to them. No, that’s not a typo. Twenty-nil.

Despite my ambivalence towards sport, I do also have some fond memories of various school sports days, particularly if it happened to be a nice day out at the time. I can’t remember a lot about primary school sports days, but secondary school sports days tended to be a pretty big deal, bringing most of the school to a standstill for a wide variety of track and field events.

My tutor group (the erstwhile 7FMQ, later 8QU, 9QU, 10QU and 11QU) were the very souls of apathy for the most part. There were certain events that people just plain didn’t want to enter, which would have put us at a significant disadvantage on the leaderboards (yes, this was in the day when it was still acceptable for school sports days to have “winners” and “losers”) had I not stepped in.

I’m not sure why I stepped in, given that I knew full well I was crap at sports, was not very good at running and wasn’t particularly agile. Therefore, you may be thinking, it would be somewhat foolhardy for me to enter both the 800m race and the high jump, but enter them I did, and I learned a number of things. Firstly, that I was surprisingly quite good at high jump, and secondly, that I was very poor at pacing myself when running — something which I still struggle somewhat with today.

The problem stemmed from the fact that I had never even considered running a long(ish)-distance race before, so I didn’t really know how they worked. As such, I was off the starting blocks like a fucking rocket and exhausted by the end of the first lap. This gave the rest of the pack, who had been pacing themselves somewhat more modestly, ample opportunity to catch up. I don’t think I finished last, to my credit, but it certainly wasn’t very far off. After the race ended, I went back to my tutor group’s area of the field, lay on the floor and didn’t move for a very long time.

The thing that sticks in my memory about that race, though, is not the fact that I ballsed it up so spectacularly. It’s the fact that for once, the rest of my tutor group was rooting for me. I spent a lot of my school days feeling like something of an outsider thanks to my awkward social skills, my weird accent, my crap hair and my forehead and nose’s tendencies to flare up with greasy zits. I was a geek and someone who did well, too, which made me pretty much the polar opposite of “cool”. Thankfully, barring a few exceptions, I was mostly left to my own devices to hang out with my equally geeky friends (most of whom had better hair than me) but this meant I didn’t feel a particularly strong sense of camaraderie with the rest of my tutor group.

Until that day. I heard them cheering for me as I ran past them on the first lap, and staggered past them on the second. And when I finished, far from being admonished for my poor pacing, I was congratulated and praised for getting out there and giving it a shot. It was a surprisingly special moment that’s stuck with me over the years. And while in short order things went back to being the way they had always been, for those few short minutes when I was on that track, I meant something. I was cool.

#oneaday, Day 37: Sportyballs

I don’t get sport. I never have, and I suspect I never will.

This is not through lack of trying. I used to play football (soccer, for our American readers) with my local Cub Scout pack when I was a kid. We were sponsored by a scrapyard and our best result was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 21-0 to them. This convinced me that football (soccer) was Not My Game.

Early in my #oneaday career, I decided I was going to attempt to get into Formula 1. Cars racing around tracks is more appealing to me than sweaty men running up and down a pitch. But I found myself not caring enough to keep up to date with it. And forgetting that races were happening. And finding myself thinking there were many, many things I would rather do than sit passively in front of the TV for hours at a time. (One of which was sitting in front of the TV with a controller in my hand, which at least is a bit more “active” entertainment.)

My wife enjoyed football (soccer), so back when we were still together, I picked up a copy of FIFA 10 in an attempt to try to understand what was so appealing about it. I played it a bit, got destroyed 21-0 in an online game and was convinced for the second time in my life that football (soccer) was Not My Game.

I find myself perpetually bewildered by people who discuss the sports team they support as if they have anything to do with it. “We bought that striker person for a bajillion pounds,” they say, substituting “that striker person” and “a bajillion pounds” with an actual player’s name and an actual amount of money respectively. “We had an amazing result,” “We’re top of the league”. I just don’t get it. I don’t even show that much loyalty to my RPG characters. They’re still “they” to me.

And today, apparently, is something to do with a superb owl. (Thank you to whoever posted that joke in my Twitter feed while I was writing this.) There seems to be an assumption that everyone will be supporting either the Packers or the Steelers, which may be true if you’re an American, but I have no idea who either of those teams are or where they’re from. I could Google them, but to be honest, I really couldn’t care less.

I guess it’s just a different form of nerdery; one that is more “accepted” (for want of a better word—perhaps “embraced” is more appropriate) by society at large than video gamery and gadget-joy. I can talk for hours about my character builds in Final Fantasy XII and the makeup of my team of Personae from Persona 4 but I wouldn’t know where to begin if someone started a conversation on the batting average innings goal difference of the Packersteelers bowling out for a duck’s ludicrous display.

Each to their own, I guess. Just don’t expect me to even try a little bit to join in with such a conversation. I’ll see you at the bar.

#oneaday, Day 310: Don’t Be Hatin’

Somehow I don’t think that anyone who is reading this blog will fall into the category that I’m about to talk about, but I’ll direct this at everyone generally just in case.

Have you used any kind of expression involving the word “haters” recently in a non-ironic sense? I have one simple request to you: stop it. You sound like an idiot.

I don’t know who was the first person to decide that posting something along the lines of “I don’t give a fuck about the haters” (or, more accurately, usually “i dont giv a fuk abt da haterz!!!”) was a great idea and made them look Deep And Stuff™, but it’s a plague on far too many people on the Internet, many of whom are clearly desperately wishing they were from a socioeconomic and/or ethnic group other than their own.

The latest person to come out with some such bullshit was none other than British Formula 1 racing driver, Lewis Hamilton, who earlier tweeted “To those of u who care, thanks for ur support, am on here for u. To all u haters…I jus don’t give a fuck haha” [sic]. The tweet has since been removed, suggesting one of two possibilities: 1) McLaren got in touch and told Lewis to stop pretending to be 50 Cent (who tweets nonsense like that all the time, but inexplicably occasionally censors himself when he says “shit”) or 2) the tweet wasn’t by him in the first place. Either are entirely plausible.

But let’s assume, for the sake of rantitude, that it actually was Hamilton. Twitter promptly exploded at the fact that a high-profile sports personality who normally came across as a nice, if rather boring, young man on television knows the “fuck” word. Some people even seemed to think that his “taking a stand” like this was somehow admirable. I thought it made him come across as a bit of a cock.

The thing is, in my experience, any time I’ve seen anyone coming out with the “screw u haterz” nonsense, they are desperately insecure and usually spoiling for a fight. Perhaps they like to post unpopular views, troll forums or simply act like a complete penis online. Never once have I come across someone who posts in full sentences and understands what punctuation is who has said “I don’t give a fuck abt da haterz” or similar.

The knock-on effect of this is that it causes people like me, who put a lot of stock in the written word, to judge the people who say this sort of thing, perhaps unfairly. Nine times out of ten (I made that up) the people who post things in this manner online are white middle-class teenagers who desperately, desperately wish they were a street-smart hip-hop gangsta, yo, preferably packing a piece. (I feel extremely middle-class and very English just typing those words. Oh well. Fine by me.) Quite why they want to come across as a “thug” (their word) is beyond me.

So, then, consider it a warning. If you start talking about “haters” and your indifference towards them, I will judge you. And it will not be a favourable judgement.

And Lewis Hamilton? If that was you tweeting that nonsense, I now think you are a cock instead of simply a moderately boring person. Guess I’m a “hater”. At least you don’t give a fuck.

#oneaday, Day 161: Shouting and Screaming

So England went out of the World Cup today. I’m not going to gloat about that, my feelings on football are well-known and well-documented. What I did want to speak about was how the whole experience made me feel as an outsider who wasn’t watching it and could only hear things.

I was terrified. There is nothing else that you hear in relatively “everyday” life that matches the ferocity of someone shouting at football. When it’s the World Cup or even a European tournament and England are involved, you know who’s watching it, because you can hear something which sounds remarkably like a Spartan army blaring out of their living room. Combine that with those stupid vuvuzelas which everyone claims to be playing ironically and you’ve got a not-terribly pleasant noise for a mild-mannered gent such as myself.

Couple this with the sheer rage shown by people over a disallowed England goal (fair enough, from what I could see from reports after the fact) and you have a large proportion of a nation already fond of binge drinking and casual violence set to explode.

All credit, though, after the match happened, I didn’t hear much in the way of shouting, screaming or violence. I didn’t even hear that many police cars go past. That said, the vast majority of the fans would have been further into the town centre, which is a little further away from me. You could not have paid me to walk into town after the match had finished. Maybe I wouldn’t have been assaulted, shouted at or anything. But it’s a risk that I wasn’t willing to take.

Several thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, anarchists are rioting in Toronto. Canadians don’t riot. They certainly don’t set fire to police cars and smash shit up. I can’t even begin to imagine how frightening the experience must be for them if I don’t want to leave my house while a bloody football match is going on. I’ll confess to not having paid much attention to the news for the last few days as I’ve had a huge amount of other things on my mind, so I’m not even entirely sure what the riots are about. I could look it up but it’s terribly late. Whatever they’re about, they’re still fucking riots. Those are never good, right?

It’s been a funny day all round really. It’s kind of passed me by, almost. I wrote my articles from my trip earlier, so those should be popping up online very soon all being well. Suffice to say they will be all over Twitter, Digg, N4G and the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox when they are up.

And then tomorrow? Who knows. Each new day is a mystery right now, a face-down card waiting to reveal whatever Fate is going to throw me next. Technically it’s after midnight now, so I should be able to look at the card. But I tend not to find out what it is until the most inconvenient moment.

God-dammit.

#oneaday, Day 56: Phhhwwwwwweeeeeeooooooowwwwrrrrrr…

I watched a Formula 1 event all the way through from qualifying to the end of the race this weekend. And I enjoyed it.

Sport on TV is a funny thing. Lots of people watch it, yet sitting staring at it on TV seems to somewhat defeat the object – particularly when it comes to physical activities that anyone could have a go at, like football. Admittedly, your average lads’ kickabout in the park doesn’t have quite the finesse of a Premiership match, but at least you don’t have ten thousand braying idiots in the crowd to contend with.

I’ve always had a certain interest in motorsport, though. I wouldn’t call myself a petrolhead by any means since as far as I’m concerned, cars run on black magic. But I appreciate the aesthetic of a nice car, I enjoy driving and I’ve always enjoyed the vicarious thrill of a driving game on the consoles, particularly as they have got more and more realistic over the years. Formula 1 is motorsport taken to its natural extreme, and to watch it on TV is probably as close as most of us will ever get to actually taking part in it.

Critics of the sport say “it’s just people going around in circles”. To them I say “No! NASCAR is going around in circles. Formula 1 has wiggly bits.”

Yes, most motorsport by its very nature involves completing circuits. And the competitive nature of racing teams sometimes means that the cars are so evenly matched that it’s very difficult – if not impossible – for any overtaking to happen, barring driver error. However, today I saw that this is clearly not the case. Firstly, the qualifying sessions were done with the cars optimised for getting the fastest possible lap times. That means minimal fuel and the best tyres for the job. The race itself, though, demanded that 1) the cars be fully laden with fuel and 2) they started on the set of tyres they qualified on. This meant that success in qualifying was by no means a guarantee of success in the race itself – and indeed, the first few laps of the race were a good five seconds slower than the fastest qualifying laps thanks to the extra weight of the full petrol tank, meaning that as the race progressed, any slight differences in weight between the cars could mean the difference between holding on to a position and losing it to someone slightly lighter.

Where things got interesting was, inevitably, when things started to go wrong. Sebastian Vettel, the German driver for the Red Bull team who took Pole in qualifying, had his car develop some sort of difficulty partway through the race, meaning that his comfortable lead he had built up for many, many laps suddenly disappeared and eventually he dropped way back into fourth position. That must have been heartbreaking, but damn, if it didn’t make it interesting to watch as he struggled to maintain his lead with two Ferraris snapping at his heels like angry red dogs.

There have been criticisms of this year’s new rules in F1. I haven’t followed the sport enough to know quite how much difference they will make, but I’ll be interested to see how the season develops. I’m also secretly satisfied I’ve found a sport I’m happy to sit and watch on the TV and will be able to talk about with other people. My long-standing distaste for football means I’m often left out of sporty conversations – as at times here in the UK, it feels like there is no other sport – but I know for a fact that at least a few friends and acquaintances follow F1. Plus if I want to be all nationalistic about it, I only have two names to remember instead of the bajillion monosyllabic gorillas that make up the England football team.

Anyway. Today’s Grand Prix was most enjoyable. I’ll be in the States while the Aussie one is on, but I feel that I’ll be following this season with some interest now.