Andy's Glasses

In the good ole days, boys used to go to football and gels would stay home and do their make-up, their nails, go shopping for a new dress. So that when their man came back from footy they’d be ready to go out. Her in her new finery and fresh from 5 hours of ‘me-time’, him drunk as a skunk, blood all over his shirt, with 16 mates in tow all in a similar condition and singing loudly.

The main difference, in fact, between the sexes was knowing the offside rule. If you didn’t know it, couldn’t define an ‘offside trap’, weren’t aware of that defender on the sideline just playing him onside, then you were simply ‘not a man’.

Its different today. Women can be seen at football matches. Sometimes looking a bit rough without their me-time, but they’ve made the effort. Most even know about offsides.

Whereas the English rugby team, the most manly of Herculean, gargantuan, testosterone-fuelled super-muscly behemoths ever gathered outside my mirror, were bamboozled by the Italian team’s diversionary tactics on Saturday because no-one on the England team, basically, knew the offside rule. I won’t bore you with the details. Because of the nature of rugby and its inherent violence, it is a wonderfully complex and rule-bound game. Even though it looks like total fucking chaos, everything is done within very very carefully defined parameters. What we call ‘rules’. And they are complicated. To avoid unnecessary death.

What Conor O’Shea, the Italian coach (well our coach is an Aussie, so why not??), had his team do was confuse the English. And for an entire 40-minutes it worked a dream. Our players kept asking the ref for explanations, for help. As he said, quite rightly, ‘he’s a ref, not a coach’.

England were totally frustrated by the tactic. Couldn’t play. The first half was an un-spectacle. Crowd booing (and they’re gentlemen at rugby, they don’t do ‘booing’). By the second half Eddie sorted his team out and normality took over for a comfortable win.

But Eddie Jones (who I dearly love) turned into Arsene Wenger (who I dearly… have some respect for). Moaning about the tactics, how they should be banned, the RFU should make this illegal, blah, blah, blah. Like Wenger bemoans any team who play Arsenal without trying to imitate their style. ” ‘ow can we play a tim ooo play long balls all de time? who are very physical? who do things in a way we don’t???” kind’a Wengerism. And that’s wrong. ‘Lower’ teams can do anything within the rules to try and influence the game, whatever the game is; sometimes its their only chance. A good tactical coach will exploit such things when, if played more ‘normally’, their team would get hammered.

Live with it Eddie. Just prepare the team should it happen again.

Spurs won a magnificent match, 4-nil, in the first half on Sunday and then stopped. But didn’t concede, didn’t ‘leave the building’. Great result. And Leicester won. With the style and grace that Ranieri gave them. Even though he was only there in spirit.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

Have you seen the pictures of the murder of Kim Jong Nam? Little fat Korean geezer. Strolling through Kuala Lumpur airport and a Vietnamese woman rubs his face with a cloth that we later find contained an illegal chemical weapon of death. As opposed to a legal one. Toxic stuff. Minutes later KJN collapses and is dead. Game over. The Koreans (northerners, obvs) want the body back ‘immediately!!!’ but the Malaysians refuse on the grounds that is, kind’a, like, a murder? So we, kind’a need to investigate. The cctv comes out and reveals all, along with analysis of the toxin. Murder by death. Presumably organised by his dear, beloved step-brother, K-J Un, emperor of all of North Korea.

Who have now demanded the body back and claim that the death was by ‘natural causes’. Because that’s how its reported back home in NK.

And that in turn is because they don’t have free press in NK. They don’t have free anything in NK, other than torture. The purpose of the press in that fine nation is to spread the lies that Kim Jong Un wants to have spread. To create a fictional version of his country that his population can actually respect and admire, with sufficient victimisation by ‘the West’ as required for sympathy. To say such a ‘press’ is a stranger to the truth is vast understatement. This is what all totalitarian regimes do, control the press. If the people don’t know what’s really going on then they’ll be happier.

And that journey, to a controlled press that is merely a government propaganda machine, like all journeys, starts with one step.

Which is basically the step taken by Donald J Trump when he banned journalists from organisations not ‘sympathetic’ to his Presidency from attending White House press meetings. Any newspaper of tv station that says things he doesn’t like or even just things he’s embarrassed about, like how many people turned up to his inauguration, get banned. Its his news or no news.

Meanwhile, at the other end of that fine nation; America, not North Korea, the Oscars were awarded. And once again, an alternative truth occurred. “THE OSCAR FOR BEST FILM GOES TO… LA LA LAND!!!!!!” (Uproar, cheering, speech-making, mum-thanking, God-blessing, blah, blah land) only to find about 5 minutes later that the real oscar was in fact awarded to Moonlight, not La La Land. Oh. Shit. Heads will roll. Not Warren Beatty’s, the one part-responsible for the announcement, his head’s already been totally reconstructed anyway. But what a cock-up. They need to fund that ceremony properly, spend a bit of money on it to make it run smoothly. Right.

Happy Monday

A xxxx

How wonderfully appropriate. Yesterday evening we went to the V&A to see ‘Revolution’ the story of the 60s. Not, like, all of it, just the good bits. The Beatles, sex, drugs, Woodstock, Vietnam, Ford Anglias, hippies, Lamborghini Miuras and untipped cigarettes. But of course, its heavily Beatle-fied because for many of US, they defined the decade. The Fab Four. Who… who… who… did…

What did the Beatles actually do for us? (Like the Romans in Life of Brian). I’ll tell you what they did, they grew their hair long and entertained us, that’s what they did. Oh, and almost literally, set the world on fire. They were, in pretentious talk: the apotheosis of the zeitgeist. Arguably a zeitgeist that they had initiated. At a time when the world was absolutely chock-full of teenage girls looking desperately for something to scream at. They needed to vent that pubescent overload in a very vocal and decibellish way. And here came four good looking guys (I’ll include Ringo in that because I love him) with a slightly rebellious, bad-boy-ish look who said: ok, come scream at us.

The Beatles didn’t invent music. Safe to say. Music has been around since Glenn Miller. Maybe even Beethoven. Maybe longer. General rule: if it ain’t on i-tunes, it didn’t exist. The Beatles were a massive spike in the continual evolution of popular music. They didn’t invent bands. Bands of all sizes had been around for centuries. They didn’t ‘bring music to the kids’ any more than Elvis did or the old ‘swing’ bands. Both of which were seen in their day as fairly ‘subversive’.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the Beatles. And they were my first love. But they weren’t alone. The basic light rock’n’roll format band had already evolved and they just wrote some brilliant songs that appealed to little girls, and little boys. They then produced a body of work which was quite magnificent, and I still love them. As do you. Everyone does. You have to.

Why its appropriate though, I read this very morning about a study by, in fact, an evolutionary biologist, who has studied music through his evolutionary lens and pronounced that the Beatles MUSIC was not actually as influential as that of other groups like the Stones, the Who, the Kinks. The rather ‘edgier’ bands of their day. Culturally, the Beatles had and have no equals in their massive, world-wide effect. But musically, apparently not so. BBC4, this coming Tuesday, 9pm, and you can see how Professor Armand Leroi makes himself the most hated man in Britain, if not the world. Because we’re all a bit protective of the Beatles. Our 50 year love affair has outlasted millions of marriages and even John and George.

Unfortunately, anyone who actually bought an original copy of ‘With the Beatles’ is the sort of person whose gonna forget to set the record for the program.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

A xxxx

You know that old saying that if you give millions of monkeys typewriters (old machine used to make words appear; like a word processor but better, clunkier, easier to make mistakes on; see ‘carbon paper’ section in History of 20th Century) for millions of years, one of them would randomly come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Unlikely, but its a ‘nalogy, innit. To show the possibilities of randomness.

Bit like Leicester City football club. They run around like typing monkeys for a hundred years, then one year, so randomly that at the start of that year their recent form had them made as bookies favourites for relegation, they won the Premier League. Stuffed Manchester United, laughed at the combined billions of Manchester City and Chelsea, showed Liverpool what never walking alone really does and demonstrated for Arsenal that coming 4th every year means very little. Their whole team cost £3.97. They were cobbled together at no expense off the building yards and scrap heaps of the East Midlands (and Algeria) and orchestrated into something way way beyond the sum of the parts.

And the true maestro who conducted that orchestra (to labour a metaphor to the point where I’ve actually started to feel a little nauseous), was Claudio Ranieri. The Tinkerman of former Chelsea fame. He took this star-less team of relegation-bound nobodies and forged them into nothing short of a miracle. He galvanised them. Created a team spirit that no other team could match, gave them a belief. And as most football matches are won and lost in the minds of the participants, Claudio did the impossible and gave these apparent no-hopers a total conviction to winning mentality.

8 months after lifting the League trophy Leicester have sacked him. Nah, he’s not good enough. We need someone who can win us things. Club’s going nowhere…

Ok, Leicester are looking perilously close to the relegation zone at the moment. Whatever Claudio fixed last year has definitely broken again. And I get that, I really get that. But this, I feel, is more sinister. ‘He’s lost the dressing room’. Footballing euphemism for ‘the players won’t play for him’.

Another of the game’s great malaises. Give a man a pound and he’ll buy an ice cream. Give him 50,000 a week and he becomes an arrogant tosser who suddenly believes he’s a genius, saviour and redeemer all rolled into one little package of sub-normal IQ. In a Bentley.

I can only hope that, whoever the new manager is, Leicester do go down, lose a bundle, get abandoned by their Thai owners with short-term memory issues and all these ‘sudden superstars’ end up playing for Macclesfield and busking outside Poundland to make up the mortgage.

Its nothing short of fucking shameful. Whether you agree with the manager’s decisions or not, you get paid a small fortune for giving your all on the pitch. Every game. Every minute. To do anything less is a dereliction of duty.

Shame on the lot of them.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

The word ‘regular’ has two specific definitions. One is ‘regular’, (doh) describing things of uniform shape, size or mode of operation. A regular polygon (maths 101). Something smooth-running, predictable… regular. The other means happening at the same time/place. Bowel movements. Very regular. Doctors note that with a smile. They love a bowel movement. My regular walk to work. Etc, etc, etc.

Then fucking Starbucks re-defined the word. Gave it a whole new meaning. That of a specific size. And because they have a zillion outlets in a trillion countries, ‘regular’ has now become a food size. Though not an absolute size. Only relative. And that’s where the problem lies.

I just went to ‘Eat’ to get my morning coffee. My normal place (little independent cafe run by Catalan Alfredo and his brother Jesus) has a broken machine. So I went next door. Eat being seen as a lesser evil than Starbucks, Costa, Coffee Republic, More Coffee Bollocks and all the others.

Big mistake. Or, possibly, regular mistake.

Because they’re stupid. And only do coffee in two sizes. Errrrr, big and little? Little and large? Humungous and pathetic? Elephant and mouse? No, regular and small. As if the big one is your norm. I wanted a ‘big’ and a ‘small’ for me mate. And glance up to check the terminology that I knew to be specific to this establisment. But I looked at the wrong board, the food one, in which they have ‘regular’ and ‘large’ and thus assumed that for coffee, when the geezer asked me ‘regular’? I said no, large… regular… big… and a small… regular… little… one…

Oh, so if its coffee, ‘regular’ means big but if its food, the same ‘regular’ means small. Oh, I, errr, get that. Ish.

Yeah, I was informed, they keep changing it. Ah, that certainly helps.

Here’s a suggestion; unless you’re going to the toilet, DON’T USE THE WORD REGULAR. Then we’ll all know what the fuck is going on.

Happy caffeined Thursday. Eventually.

GIVE US OUR LANGUAGE BACK!

A xxxx

There was a motor race in Buenos Aires the other day. Just two cars, neither of them with a driver. The ‘Roborace’ was for electric driverless cars. One was fine, the other driver(less) crashed early on.

But this crash wasn’t because the cameras broke or the sensors failed or some technical glitch. The car crashed because, according to the scientists, it ‘lost its temper’. Had a tantrum. Got too aggressive, overly competitive and lost it on a bend, hitting the barrier at speed.

I mean, ‘driverless car crashes’ is no big headline, no major news item, the more they test them the more crashes they have. Its new technology, a paradigm shift, there’s much to learn.

But its why this particular car crashed that is rather interesting. And that was because it was basically too human. Too aggressive. Too much (digital) testosterone. Angry. That driverless was me!!!!

They take two identical cars, same engines, bodies, lasers, cameras, everything. But the different teams program the softwear themselves. And thus they each use reactive algorithms to emulate the ‘perfect’ driver’s response. These cars are programmed to take the racing line, when to accelerate to best advantage, when to use ‘drift’, all kinds of Formula Onery that is known. But then you need an ‘edge’. An advantage. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a race, just a procession. Bit like Formula 1 before Mercedes took it over completely. And that ‘advantage’ is when to push a little harder, when to just go for the lower percentage shot, to take a risk. Calculated risk, of course. Everything they do is fucking calculated, they’re computers. And this car crashed because they’d programmed it to be a little too human. It saw its chance, got pissed off with the other driver(less) and pushed a touch too hard.

The computer must have known that at such a speed on such a bend (think ‘bionic man with that heads-up, green digital display shit’) would just know that the centripetal forces in conjunction with the co-efficient of friction from the tyres, coupled with the added acceleration (or whateverrrrrr) would cause a problem. But ‘he’ did it anyway. (I have a convention; driverless cars are ‘he’, robots wot do cleaning are ‘she’. I see nothing paternalistic or chauvinistic in that at all.) Because ‘he’ was overly aggressive.

You know when you take out an ISA or a pension and they ask you your ‘risk exposure’? I want that with driverless cars, when they arrive. You want ‘the old lady with a hat’ model (20mph all the way, cautious, kind and considerate), or the ‘Andy’ version (shouts incessantly, always pushing, never fast enough, overtakes on the inside, ignores amber-ish lights…) that’ll get you there much more quickly, but you might die on the way.

Ahhhhh, changing world.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx

Sutton United began their FA Cup campaign in October, beating Forest Green Rovers in front of 751 fans and a dog named Keanu. They ended it last night against Arsenal in front of 5,000. And four dogs. Don’t know their names. Sutton’s ground, Gander Green Lane, only holds that number, even though they could have filled it 6 times last night. Oh, and Sutton are a million pounds richer for the trouble. A simply massive amount of money for that level of the game. While most of us Premier League fans wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 75 million (of other people’s money that we never see and generally resent), a million quid for Sutton is a once-in-a-lifetime event that will enable so many things that ‘big clubs’ simply don’t even think about. Things that just become minor, petty-cash type things that appear at the end of the annual financial statements. Like repairing the roof in the dressing room. Cleaning the artificial pitch. Getting some hot water in the showers.

Oddly, had Sutton won (if only) despite the massive kudos and pride and wonder of such an event, it would, ironically, have set up a meeting against the only other non-league team still in the competition, Lincoln City. Which, financially, and in terms of glamour, would have been something of a disaster. You get to the FA Cup quarter-finals for the first time in a hundred years and play a team no-one wants to see. However, didn’t happen. Even though Sutton were quite brilliant on the night.

What happened was that Arsenal won. Even though I didn’t want them to. I never want them to. But Sutton aren’t Bayern Munich. Not even close. Yet as everybody seemed to imply, that ‘anything less than 5 or 6 nil isn’t really good enough for Arsenal’, the mere 2-0 win they actually produced can in fact be viewed as ‘losing 3-0 to Sutton’. If you apply a kind of ‘handicapping’ system and, generally, wish to view anything Arsenal do as bad.

So now Arsenal get to play Lincoln City. And ya know what; its hard. Because the pressure on Arsenal is simply so massive its just an assumption of ‘by how many’. And teams, particularly lowly teams with absolutely nothing to lose nor fear, can play their little, darned and holey socks off for those 90 minutes (plus extra time and penalties if necessary. No replays now). Because its a ‘funny ole game’. And Lincoln will be thrilled to be playing it at the Emirates. Who cares about home advantage when you get a hot shower after the game?

Spurs saw off Fulham on Sunday. Wonderfully. Harry Kane recovered sufficiently well from last week’s scare that he scored 3. And we now face Millwall in the next round. Everyone hates them and they don’t care. And there’s actually no reason to hate Millwall. They’re just a nice bunch of neanderthal south London thugs with swastika tattoos and Stanley Knives. What’s to hate?

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx

I’ve seen two movies this week. Its pre-Oscar time so all the good films come out together. What are you gonna do? So in the week we saw Lion and last night, Hidden Numbers. Both are ‘true stories’. Ish. Both are great films, good to watch, well acted. The main difference is that Lion is, so you believe (and its a movie; its all about what the watcher believes, not what the reality was. You watch Terminator, you have to ‘believe’), pretty much the story of what happened to a little Indian kid who gets lost, and Hidden Numbers is the ‘based on true story’ of the group of previously unheralded black women who were scientists actively involved in the NASA space race (no pun) in the early ’60s.

But really the main difference was that Lion was a British film, or maybe an Aussie one, I’m not sure, and thus let’s the story speak for itself. Because it is a remarkable story of remarkable people and (so I ‘believe’) needs no additional or extra drama or distortion or ‘alternative truths’ to embellish it. Whereas Hidden Treasures is Hollywood. Its their tribute to these quite amazing women who stuck two fingers up to the prevailing sexism and massive racism (NASA was in Virginia where segregation didn’t end til the post-Kennedy years) inherent in their society, to firstly achieve academic excellence and then to actually get employed in such a white (in all senses) collared world. Its a heart-warming and wonderful tale of, here, three brilliant and wonderful women. But Hollywood is never content with mere facts, even when they often bring tears to your eyes or a flutter down your spine. Hollywood wants schmaltz. And it wants to spread it on really thick.

And thus creates certain scenes that you just know are embellishments to some degree. Bits that as well as making you go ‘oh wow!’ also make you think ‘oh, really??’

What’s even more interesting is that throughout the 50s and 60s a lot of America practised ‘segregation’, in which blacks and whites had different schools, different buses and, as they made a point so great about in the movie; different toilets. Enforced by law. Different restaurants and, the inevitable consequence, way different opportunities in education and employment. Yet I remember nothing much spoken against this in Britain. Whereas South Africa, who employed exactly the same system but called it Apartheit instead of segregation, were banned from international sports, boycotted by all trade partners, made a pariah state. As well they deserved to be. But the Americans we overlooked.

Go see both movies. They’re good. Really good.

Happy Sunday. Spurs just beat Fulham 3-0 in the Cup and I’m happy as Larry. Whoever he is.

A xxxx

I have issues with property developers riding roughshod (a strange and bizarre expression that I’ve never previously used, but may indeed use again) over planning departments, ignoring the wishes of the communities they’re so ‘benevolently’ re-building, those who really don’t want to move out, to be rebuilt, to be involuntarily ‘up-graded’. Because ‘old world’ has a charm. It generally has character, it has some history, it is comfortable and hence comforting.

And sometimes, as in the case of Manchester, that ‘old world’ is just a shit-hole that really wants burning to the ground and starting all over again. Which is precisely what Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs are trying to do. They’ve arranged funding for a fantastic new project, hotels, loads of flats, an upmarket area of bars and restaurants, all around two massive towers. Looks fab. Looks modern, affluent, charming and somewhere you’d want to go. Unless you’re from greater Manchester in which case it looks like ‘hell’. Or like ‘London’. Same difference. Who wants clean and functional when you can have Coronation Street?

The project, should it proceed, will knock down the Manchester Reform Synagogue. Oh My God. And it is my God. Except my God’s not the reform one, he’s more traditional. But they’ll build another, better, bigger, brighter one. For those who care. And they have to knock down some dirty old sleazy pub, called The Sir Ralph Abercromby. And people get really funny about pubs. Really protective and disproportionately sensitive. In an area that probably boasts 55 other drinkeries within a 3-minute walk. “Ahhhh”, they say, them locals, “but this pooob was featured in’t tv progrum, wunnit? ‘Bout them 1970s coppers”. As if being a back-drop for a third-rate drama gives you a blue plaque status. They used that particular pub because it was so shitty and hadn’t been cleaned since 1970, hence the authenticity.

We had all this when they first proposed the redevelopment of White Hart Lane. In my beloved Tottenham. And quite frankly you absolute HAVE to be a Spurs fan to have any positive feelings about the Tottenham area. Because its just horrible. No redeeming value in the entire high road. Just nasty, dingy slums. But at a mention of changing things, all of a sudden that kebab shop (one of 43), the one that was shut down by the health inspectors 17 times last year, was suddenly a ‘national heritage site’ and couldn’t be demolished. The half shop selling mouldy fruit was once visited by Barbara Windsor, hence has a Royal Appointment protection order. And so on.

Sometimes change is a bad thing, and sometimes, its really really good and positive. Start the demolition of Manchester today. All of it, preferably.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx

I love science. And most of what happens under that rather large and disjointed umbrella generally gets my approval. Because science works to understand the physical world, to explain it and, where possible, to harness it for our benefit. Hence the motor car, space travel, replacement hips, IVF and cling-film. And I realise that, particularly in the genetics field, there are many and great moral issues that come about. Frozen embryos, stem cell research and, the old favourite, animal testing. Not sitting a giraffe down to answer questions on geometry, but using animals to test products. But morality aside, science expands our knowledge and our world. Hence the ipad upon which these words are writ. And if a dozen lab-rats died so that my new smartphone holds its battery charge for an extra 14 minutes, then God bless those dead rats. But…

They want to build a mammoth. A wooly mammoth. Extinct for 4000 years, this massive (size of a small house/large shed), hairy elephantine thing is to be (new word alert!!!!) “de-extincted” by scientists. They’re gonna make one. Not with Lego. There’s barely enough Lego in Scandinavia to build a full-size mammoth, so there gonna use the DNA they have from old fossils plus, and this is the important bit, stuff from an elephant. You can’t build a dinosaur because although there’s loads of fossils, the DNA is degraded over time and there’s no close relative still living. Other than in the metaphorical sense of ‘dinosaur’ and Westminster is full of them. But you need the real thing. So an elephant, 99% mammoth, is used and the other 1% tweaked for extra mammothness. Fantastic. Order one now!!

And as I read this I thought: why the fuck would you do that? To watch it die? After a particularly fruitless life (well, unless you count the 87 tons of fruit a day you’d have to feed it) of loneliness and having (literally) no mates, in any sense of the word. It would be an exhibit. A freak. Or it would be hunted by ivory poachers. Its nothing but a vanity project for the geezer in charge to show it can be done. At least the lab-rats died for a cause. Animals die to feed us; I have no issue with that either. But just to make one because you can?

Whereas the Dodo was, apparently, exceedingly tasty. Which is why it became extinct in the first place. Make me one’a them. Roasted with shallots and mushrooms.

SAVE THE MAMMOTH… or, rather, DON’T SAVE THE MAMMOTH… you know what I mean.

Happy Friday

A xxxx