“She’s a maniac, maniac near the ball. And she’s reffing liked she’s never reffed before,” as the 80’s hit by Michael Sembello nearly had it. It’s been nearly seven years since co-commentator Ron Atkinson, thinking he was off air, explained to the commentator of a football match why he thought Ghanaian born French defender Marcel Desailly wasn’t having a very good match. His comments are too inflammatory to reproduce here, but some idea of their severity can be given by the fact that his career nosedived immediately afterwards, and has never recovered. Let’s just say that Ron Atkinson lost his job because he is what is known in some schools as a f**ing lazy, thick ninny.
I hark back to Ron, because sure enough, more television folk involved in the world of football have been caught in the trap of accidentally showing their true colours. This week it’s Andy Gray and Richard Keys of Sky Sports, though the form of discrimination is sexism this time. The Football Association had decided to field a female Assistant Referee, also known as a linesman (woman?) for Wolves versus Liverpool. So what did the dynamic duo make of Sian Massy?
Keys: Somebody better get down there and explain offside to her.
Gray: Yeah, I know. Can you believe that? A female linesman. Women don’t know the offside rule.
Keys: Course they don’t. I can guarantee you there will be a big one (offside decision) today… The game’s gone mad…
Curiously enough, they postcripted this by slating the female vice chairman (woman?) of West Ham. She had dared to complain about sexism in the game.
Keys: Did you hear charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Do me a favour, love.
If you are the sort of person to have pictures in your dictionary, there might well be a manuscript of that conversation between irons and irradiate.
In any event, Sian Massy had a good game, correctly deciding that a Liverpool striker who put the ball in the back of the net was narrowly onside and allowed the goal to stand. It’s a pity that comments from a pair of dinosaurs will add that much more pressure on her shoulders for future matches. Men who want to be officials are a bit mad considering all the stick and pressure they’ll suffer, and, at the moment, women doubly so. In this case, though, madness is to be respected.
The view that women generally don’t understand the offside rule is an accurate one. That is not to say that they are incapable- rather that they don’t need to know it. The majority of women don’t care for football. Anyone who has no interest or expertise in something can’t be expected to know intimate details about it. Expecting them to is like expecting Simon Cowell to know how to skin, gut and cook a narwhal. But if a woman has a passion for the game, then they’re going to know the rules of the game. It’s slightly surreal having to say as such in this day and age, but men and women are on a par intellectually- in fact they do somewhat better at exams than men.
I believe that within ten years, we will have learned to look past the fact that the officials of the game will sometimes have a different arrangement of chromosomes than those playing on the pitch. Not for being female, mind, but for being substandard. Then we’ll know that they’ve arrived, and can perform at a man’s level.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Ask no questions...
The WikiLeaks story is one that just won't go away, no matter how much the diplomatic corps of the U.S, Saudi Arabia, the U.K and friends may wish it to. Every day the steady drip drip drip of information brings us a new headline of a salacious communiqué, and with a grand total of 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables this may continue for some time. By this time next week, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the Americans are terrified of Sweden's far left appropriating the country's herring income and spending it on a dirty bomb. Those who would go out of their way to profess their love for freedom of information and a free press will say that this torrent of information is a godsend, that it is a privilege to be able to see the unadulterated psyche of a nation, and it probably would be if we were actually doing that.
We must remember that the information we are so gleefully consuming has been ferried between embassies and is the view of the people on the ground. It's true that the people who sent the cables are representatives of their country, but so too was John Prescott a representative of Britain, and we can't all agree on his Ginster's Pasty bill as it never even made it to the House of Lords. It also has to be borne in mind that the people sending these messages did not think for one moment that there was any danger of them entering the government domain. Now when I am on a night out with my friends, I will act somewhat differently than when I accept an OBE from Her Majesty. These diplomats may have views about people and countries that may or may not reflect their parent country's views, and they may not express them in public in order that relationships with these people and countries will carry on smoothly, much like relationships in people's day to day lives. If China asks the UK whether her bottom looks big in this dress, the UK will say no regardless of whether it does, although the UK might tentatively raise the question of how that dress might infringe on China's Human Rights. If somebody happened to leak all of my personal communiqués between my friends, I can't say that there wouldn't be repercussions. If somebody came out of nowhere and made it known amongst my red-headed associates that I belittle their skin tone and freckles at every opportunity, it would make life more difficult. Freedom of information is fine and all of that jazz, but governments, and people, very rarely have nothing to hide.
Now this diplomatic process of saying one thing whilst thinking another has been blown out of the water, and there are those who are jumping on the “this will change the face of diplomacy for ever” bandwagon, but not I. I am going to leap upon the, “This will change how diplomatic communications are handled for a while” bandwagon myself. Granted that 251,287 cables of information on goodness knows how many leaves of paper is a little less kinder to Mother Earth than the same number of zip files, but it's also a lot harder for one man to run off with. On a side note, how the hell can the government who spend $533.8 billion, a fifth of their budget on defence, be so shockingly careless with such sensitive information? The Alaskan voice of reason Sarah Palin is calling for Justin Assange to be hunted down and killed, like the rabid moose that he is. He is part of a rebel alliance and a traitor, but if she believes that, then there should be many other people's heads rolling connected with the whole affair, people who have at best been criminally negligent. I am not saying the same sort of cock up couldn't happen in the UK, mind. We seem to have suffered a similar spate of things like sending the benefit details of 25 million citizens on cds by second class mail (optimistic at best) and accidentally couriering laptops with the Trident codes to Lagos. The current WikiLeaks website (I say current because the cyber ninjas of many of the world's governments are constantly forcing them to change IP addresses) condones the leaks by saying transparency creates better society, and this may be true to a point. Government is essentially meant to serve the people, and should be held accountable for fouling up, and that if it's harder for them to lie, then all the better. However, if we and our governments were unable to lie, there would be either a lot fewer words spoken, or a much higher mortality rate.
We must remember that the information we are so gleefully consuming has been ferried between embassies and is the view of the people on the ground. It's true that the people who sent the cables are representatives of their country, but so too was John Prescott a representative of Britain, and we can't all agree on his Ginster's Pasty bill as it never even made it to the House of Lords. It also has to be borne in mind that the people sending these messages did not think for one moment that there was any danger of them entering the government domain. Now when I am on a night out with my friends, I will act somewhat differently than when I accept an OBE from Her Majesty. These diplomats may have views about people and countries that may or may not reflect their parent country's views, and they may not express them in public in order that relationships with these people and countries will carry on smoothly, much like relationships in people's day to day lives. If China asks the UK whether her bottom looks big in this dress, the UK will say no regardless of whether it does, although the UK might tentatively raise the question of how that dress might infringe on China's Human Rights. If somebody happened to leak all of my personal communiqués between my friends, I can't say that there wouldn't be repercussions. If somebody came out of nowhere and made it known amongst my red-headed associates that I belittle their skin tone and freckles at every opportunity, it would make life more difficult. Freedom of information is fine and all of that jazz, but governments, and people, very rarely have nothing to hide.
Now this diplomatic process of saying one thing whilst thinking another has been blown out of the water, and there are those who are jumping on the “this will change the face of diplomacy for ever” bandwagon, but not I. I am going to leap upon the, “This will change how diplomatic communications are handled for a while” bandwagon myself. Granted that 251,287 cables of information on goodness knows how many leaves of paper is a little less kinder to Mother Earth than the same number of zip files, but it's also a lot harder for one man to run off with. On a side note, how the hell can the government who spend $533.8 billion, a fifth of their budget on defence, be so shockingly careless with such sensitive information? The Alaskan voice of reason Sarah Palin is calling for Justin Assange to be hunted down and killed, like the rabid moose that he is. He is part of a rebel alliance and a traitor, but if she believes that, then there should be many other people's heads rolling connected with the whole affair, people who have at best been criminally negligent. I am not saying the same sort of cock up couldn't happen in the UK, mind. We seem to have suffered a similar spate of things like sending the benefit details of 25 million citizens on cds by second class mail (optimistic at best) and accidentally couriering laptops with the Trident codes to Lagos. The current WikiLeaks website (I say current because the cyber ninjas of many of the world's governments are constantly forcing them to change IP addresses) condones the leaks by saying transparency creates better society, and this may be true to a point. Government is essentially meant to serve the people, and should be held accountable for fouling up, and that if it's harder for them to lie, then all the better. However, if we and our governments were unable to lie, there would be either a lot fewer words spoken, or a much higher mortality rate.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Volcanoes- Do we need them?
Volcanoes- Do we need them?
It's been a good five months since Iceland's answer to Vesuvius started vomiting her guts up over mother earth, but the issue of volcanoes has not gone away. It's high time a journalist stood up and said what the rest of the nation is thinking. Why do we put up with volcanoes? What have they ever done for us?
Volcanoes have been long in the public consciousness, from the Beatles' song "Oh-bla-di, Oh Lava" to the Tommy Lee Jones film "Oh Dear, this Molten Rock Seems to be Dissolving Me in a Macabre Manner". It is rather difficult to find a positive reference to them in popular culture though, Tom Stoppard's "Kilimanjaro and Krakatoa are Kool, Yeah?" notwithstanding, and most literary minds agree that this is an ironical piece. There are liberal apologists for these foreign bodies out there, though, and thank God that they are foreign. The Britons had the good sense to settle down away from continental ridges where volcanoes become rather chummy with their bastard cousin, the earthquake. But soft, lest we be distracted from the current point, which is ignorant lefties. Anyway, these wishy washy socialist commie loving liberals might say a dormant volcano is essentially a mountain with the top cut off. I don't know about you, but I think it's bad enough that you can fall down a mountain. The added hazard of plummeting into one doesn't bear thinking about. These uncouth Bolshies will also have it said that would say that the land near active volcanoes is particularly fertile, and on this score they are right. I tend to find this somewhat tempered by the tendency for active volcanoes to chunder lava all over the opportunistic farmers nearby, or choke them with poisonous ash if in a particularly playful mood.
It isn't just people within a fifty mile radius of these odious lumps that are in danger either, so the view that leave them alone and they will leave us alone is ignorant at best. If an eruption is serious, it could cause tsunamis up to 100 feet tall. In fact, volcanoes actually utilise all the classical elements to make us more aware of our mortality- the quaking of the Earth, the Firing of the rock, the poisoning of the Air and the aforementioned tidal waving of the Water. These things are angry, but you simply can't reason with them. It took one improbably spelt Icelandic volcano to bring complete chaos to European air traffic. But here's the thing. Eyjafjallajökull is actually near it's bigger brother, Katla, and every time Eyjafjallajökull has decided to remind the world it exists, Katla has soon followed suit. The fallout from Katla would make Eyjafjallajökull's efforts seem like ash being tapped from a cigarette. We must take action now. Seeing as we have a Government with the balls to admit it's fun having a nuclear arsenal, we should surely unite with the other nuclear powers of the world and end this threat. America, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea and perhaps Israel could join us in the atomic obliteration of these monstrosities. And we'd let the nearby inhabitants have some prior warning, just one more courtesy that the volcano wouldn't extend. I hate volcanoes, and so should you.
It's been a good five months since Iceland's answer to Vesuvius started vomiting her guts up over mother earth, but the issue of volcanoes has not gone away. It's high time a journalist stood up and said what the rest of the nation is thinking. Why do we put up with volcanoes? What have they ever done for us?
Volcanoes have been long in the public consciousness, from the Beatles' song "Oh-bla-di, Oh Lava" to the Tommy Lee Jones film "Oh Dear, this Molten Rock Seems to be Dissolving Me in a Macabre Manner". It is rather difficult to find a positive reference to them in popular culture though, Tom Stoppard's "Kilimanjaro and Krakatoa are Kool, Yeah?" notwithstanding, and most literary minds agree that this is an ironical piece. There are liberal apologists for these foreign bodies out there, though, and thank God that they are foreign. The Britons had the good sense to settle down away from continental ridges where volcanoes become rather chummy with their bastard cousin, the earthquake. But soft, lest we be distracted from the current point, which is ignorant lefties. Anyway, these wishy washy socialist commie loving liberals might say a dormant volcano is essentially a mountain with the top cut off. I don't know about you, but I think it's bad enough that you can fall down a mountain. The added hazard of plummeting into one doesn't bear thinking about. These uncouth Bolshies will also have it said that would say that the land near active volcanoes is particularly fertile, and on this score they are right. I tend to find this somewhat tempered by the tendency for active volcanoes to chunder lava all over the opportunistic farmers nearby, or choke them with poisonous ash if in a particularly playful mood.
It isn't just people within a fifty mile radius of these odious lumps that are in danger either, so the view that leave them alone and they will leave us alone is ignorant at best. If an eruption is serious, it could cause tsunamis up to 100 feet tall. In fact, volcanoes actually utilise all the classical elements to make us more aware of our mortality- the quaking of the Earth, the Firing of the rock, the poisoning of the Air and the aforementioned tidal waving of the Water. These things are angry, but you simply can't reason with them. It took one improbably spelt Icelandic volcano to bring complete chaos to European air traffic. But here's the thing. Eyjafjallajökull is actually near it's bigger brother, Katla, and every time Eyjafjallajökull has decided to remind the world it exists, Katla has soon followed suit. The fallout from Katla would make Eyjafjallajökull's efforts seem like ash being tapped from a cigarette. We must take action now. Seeing as we have a Government with the balls to admit it's fun having a nuclear arsenal, we should surely unite with the other nuclear powers of the world and end this threat. America, Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea and perhaps Israel could join us in the atomic obliteration of these monstrosities. And we'd let the nearby inhabitants have some prior warning, just one more courtesy that the volcano wouldn't extend. I hate volcanoes, and so should you.
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