The official Wimbledon sitehas some of the coolest stats and geek-info you could ever want about tennis. Serving speeds, percentage of points one, number of outright winners/unforced errors etc. in each match.
Magic stuff.
Geek news – Live8 RSS feed from the Beeb
Should the words 'Big Brother' and 'Role Models' appear in the same sentence??
From the BBC News site,
“Reality TV show Big Brother portrays role models with values that inspire its viewers, the chief executive of Channel 4 has said.”
OK, Andy Duncan is a christian, who was talking to a christian group about C4’s religious output. Surely this is just bollocks? I don’t think Andy has anything to defend from the point of being a christian – I’ve never really thought about it from that point of view – but to suggest that there’s anything ‘wholesome’ about BB is clearly rubbish.
The contestants this year in particular have been chosen because they are likely to get hammered, show their boobs and hopefully start shagging at some point. They weren’t chosen because that posessed any qualities that people aspire to…
Why do Christians always come out with this nonsense? If he’d just said ‘look, I might be Chief Exec of C4 but I didn’t start the station, and there’s only so much I can do to change it. It’s a commercial station, and BB brings in huge revenue from the ads – I couldn’t cancel it if I wanted to. However, if I want to have any kind of positive influence here, I’m going to have to put up with broadcasting the odd hour of drivel now and again, OK?’
It would be more honest…
(oh, and in Tennis news, Andrew Murray has just taken the first set in his second round match… it’s looking good.)
Tim's out…
By and large, I’m not a sports person at all. Just don’t get the competitive side, don’t care about the teams, find it absurd when people talk in terms of ‘we won’ when they had nothing to do with the game etc.
However, I do have a soft spot for tennis. I don’t generally care who wins, I just enjoy watching it.
Having grown up in Wimbledon, the Wimbledon tennis tournament has more interest for me than any other sporting event. For one, it just looks nice – people in white running around against a green background, making graceful movements and playing strategically is just fun to watch, like a goldfish bowl or a really cool screen saver.
The more tennis I watch the more I can get drawn into the mythology of it, so I’m slightly sad that I’ve just watched Tim Henman get knocked out by Dmitry Tursunov in the second round. As those of you watching it or listening to it will know, this is the first time that Tim’s gone out of Wimbledon in the first week for 10 years – that’s a pretty impressive record! He has been the great hope of British tennis for all that time, and it would have been a lot of fun to see him watch it. Fortunately Tennis doesn’t seem to suffer from the same xenophobic rhetoric as many other sports that Brits compete in (I once wrote an article for Third Way magazine about football fundementalism), so supporting Henman seems more like a pro-Tim move than a pro-Brit move. I have very little desire to support the English in any of their sporting ventures…
Anyway, Tim’s out, but it was a fantastic match, hats off to Tursunov. Of the Brit contingent, Andrew Murray is the only one still in. Oh, and Raphael Nadal was knocked out today as well – lots of seeds disappearing!
Soundtrack – Vikki Clayton, ‘Looking And The Stars’ & ‘Live’ (singer/songwriter, who sings with Fairport Convention – lovely stuff)
Who's still buying it
So The Crazy Frog ringtone is still at number one??????? Who’s still buying it?? It was mildly diverting when I first heard it months and months ago. By the second time it was annoying, by the third time i was contemplating calling Amnesty and investigating laws on what constitutes torture-by-ringtone.
And now, inconceivably, it’s spent four weeks at #1. Are the public really that gullible? Don’t answer that, it’s clear that yes, they are. There are enough morons in the world who are happy to be browbeaten into buying something horrible just because they’ve seen it enough times.
Oh the horror.
…and in today's geek news…
Looks like Google are going to take on Paypal in the online payment game.
This has to be good news for online traders (such as me) – Paypal have a near-monopoly on the online money transfer market (at least on sites that don’t have their own credit card processing stuff). Paypal is safe and secure, and fairly easy to use, but monopolies are rarely a good idea.
There are others at around – on my online cd shop, people can pay by Paypal or NoChex – a UK only credit/debit card processing engine, that works well and is used by a few people – I still get about 25 Paypal sales to ever NoChex one.
So if Google come up with an alternative, hopefully it’ll make Paypal streamline and broaden their service in an attempt to stay ahead, and it means the google service will have to be really good to move people away from paypal.
If you haven’t used paypal before, feel free to try it out in my online store… 
Noel doesn't get it…
World reknown and respected political commentator, Noel Gallagher, has been criticising the Live8 gig.
He says,
‘Are they hoping one of these guys from the G8 … sees Annie Lennox singing ‘Sweet Dreams’ and thinks, “Fuck me, she might have a point there, you know.” It’s not going to fucking happen, is it?’
Oh dear – he’s never been the sharpest tool in the box, but does he really thing that the idea of having the bands on is that they themselves will persuade G8 leaders to change things? Does he not see the importance of raising the issue, of building a worldwide pressure build-up of public support for changes in a brutally unjust world trade system?
He’s clearly even more stupid that I thought. He’s being interviewed by The Observer, there’s a bunch of his peers doing what they can to raise awareness about justice issues, taking the mad existence that is pop superstardom and attempting to channel some of that spotlight onto the plight of the world’s poor, and he uses his platfom in a national newspaper to launch an ill-conceived attack on the aims…
So this week’s berk of the week award goes to Mr G.
Wrong things on-line.
You know when you see a link to something, and just know it’s going to be horrible, but can’t help but look. So it is with Siegfried And Roy’s website – oh yes, the bright orange, mullet-haired, tiger-taming millionaire oompa loompas have a website as cheesey as the act.
Bizarrely I can’t find any mention of the incident that ended their show – Roy being half eaten by a Tiger (‘It was trying to save me after I fainted’ says the implausable talking tangerine).
Anyway, their site contains a load of horseshit about their psuedo-conservation plans for the white tiger, which contains this marvellous give-away line –
“For more than 20 years, we have been entrusted with the care and preservation of the Royal White Tigers. There are now 200 of these precious creatures roaming the earth, 38 with us in Las Vegas.”
Right, so at least 38 of them are in their natural environment of casinos, strip clubs and wedding chapels. I hear that the first white tigers were in fact the off-spring of a normal tiger and an Elvis impersonator in a white jumpsuit… Why anyone who cared about animals would keep 38 endangered tigers in Vegas is beyond comprehension. And why anyone believes that shit is equally unfathomable.
Everything that’s wrong about everything is summed up in the words ‘Siegfried And Roy’.
Britons now have the right to bare arms
Yes, it’s that hot it’s short sleeve weather. Blimey, the weather is lovely, summer is well and truly here – Wimbledon starts on Monday, my student roster is slowly switching over from those who have lessons during term time to those who only have lessons over the summer hols, and sunglasses are now added to the list of essentials when leaving the house.
Ah yes, it’s summer. 
Congrats to Bishop John…
So John Sentamu has become Britains first black archbishop. Good news all round for the Anglican church. John was the Bishop of Stepney, and therefor our local bishop at St Luke’s for quite a few years before he moved up to become Bishop of Birmingham in 2002, so I met him a few times and always liked him. He had a habit of taking the piss out of the St Luke’s congregation which was rather endearing in a Bishop.
He seems to be very focussed on justice issues, having spoken out again Idi Amin in Uganda in the 70s, and was involved in the Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence inquiries.
And it’s nice to see the white hegemony of the upper echelons of the Anglican church break down a little. Now we just need a woman or 12 in there as well.
