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Why has Bush given up golf?

Never let it be said that President Bush doesn't know the meaning of sacrifice. In an interview with Politico, he revealed why he has given up one of his favourite pastimes:

I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.

Alice Fishburn

Top ten Gordon Strachan ripostes

The other day, monitoring the football scores on the internet, I came across a fabulous riposte to a journalist by footballer manager Gordon Strachan:

Reporter: "Gordon, can we have a quick word please?" Strachan: "Velocity" [walks off]

Then, searching for a link to the Strachan comment, I discovered he makes a habit of it.

Here are my ten favourite:

1. On Wayne Rooney : It's an incredible rise to stardom, at 17 you’re more likely to get a call from Michael Jackson than Sven Goran Eriksson.

2. Reporter: Can I ask you about Augustin Delgado [an underperforming player Strachan had purchased for Southampton] Strachan: I've got more important things to think about. I've got a yogurt to finish by today, the expiry date is today. That can be my priority rather than Augstin Delgado.

3. Reporter: Welcome to Southampton Football Club. Do you think you are the right man to turn things around? Strachan: No. I was asked if I thought I was the right man for the job and I said, "No, I think they should have got George Graham because I’m useless."

4. Reporter: Gordon, you must be delighted with that result? Strachan: You’re spot on! You can read me like a book.

5. Reporter: This might sound like a daft question, but you'll be happy to get your first win under your belt, won't you? Strachan: You're right. It is a daft question. I'm not even going to bother answering that one. It is a daft question, you’re spot on there.

6. Reporter: Bang, there goes your unbeaten run. Can you take it? Strachan: No, I'm just going to crumble like a wreck. I'll go home, become an alcoholic and maybe jump off a bridge. Umm, I think I can take it, yeah.

7. Reporter: where will Marion Pahars fit into the team line-up? Strachan: Not telling you! It's a secret.

8. Reporter: Gordon, Do you think James Beattie [one of Strachan's players] deserves to be in the England squad? Strachan: I dont care, I'm Scottish

9. Reporter: You don't take losing lightly, do you Gordon? Strachan: I don't take stupid comments lightly either.

10. Reporter: So, Gordon, in what areas do you think Middlesbrough were better than you today? Strachan: What areas? Mainly that big green one out there….

When philosophy and football collide

Silly me. I thought football and tennis were just games --- things to be watched because they give pleasure to the spectators or an opportunity to let off steam by shouting. But oh no, I'm wrong, sport should be taken a lot more seriously than that. David Goldblatt in the cover story for Prospect makes the pointy-headed case for treating sport in the same high-falutin' way as we do the performing arts. He says this: 

When we play, we step out of our conventional state. We create our own stage, take on new roles and identities, make and tell ourselves fantastical stories. Sport is also a form of improvised popular theatre; its apparatus of challenges, contests, competitions, unknown outcomes and final results is like a vast polymorphous machine for generating improvised and compressed stories.

It's easy to imagine in the new Goldblatted world of sport, Gary Lineker asking an exhausted post-match Wayne Rooney.

GL: Were you disappointed by the 2-0 defeat, Wayne
WR: Well, Gary, the boys are sick as a parrot but we found solace in transcending the muddy boundaries of loss and victory and creating in those 90 minutes of chasing that unknowable sphere a narrative of self-exploration. It's a game of two halves and multiple dimensions and fragmented social identities. . .

Goldblatt also explains:

Sport generates meanings and pleasures in a multitude of other ways. The movement and choreographies of some sports evoke the same pleasures as dance. And in many sports, the crowd is unquestionably the chorus, not only supplying ambience, commentary and income, but actively shaping the tone and the course of the game. The opportunity that this provides for the collective dramatisation of identities and social relationships, both spontaneous and organised, is without parallel in the field of global popular culture.

Picture the scene: the terraces of the Emirates Stadium?

Arsenal Fan: Gooners, Gooners, Gooners!
David Goldblatt: Interesting. . . what do you mean by chanting "Gooners"?
Fan: I'm escaping my marketised, atomised identity through a unconscious act of self-dramatisation and constructing a new nexus of social relationships with my fellow consumers of the sporting experience.
Goldblatt: Good, carry on. . .

Strewth! There are some things that should be free from the dead hands of intellectuals.

Robbie Millen

Bring on the red shirts, footballers...

Michael Gove has some advice for Derby County.

Dr Ian Graham, the stats genius I work with on my Fink Tank football column was excited by Michael's announcement that:

Of the 50 best state comprehensives in Britain, 48 of them have a traditional blazer uniform policy.

He points out that the three most successful clubs in British footballing history have all worn red shirts. If Derby County want to be more succesful they should change their shirt colour.

Hey Good Lookin': why Jose Mourinho should cheer up

Good news for Jose Mourinho on a day when he'll be in need of some.

Chris Dillow reports on a new paper that estimates:

that men who spend an extra 10 minutes a day grooming - shaving, showering, brushing their hair - get 6% higher weekly wages; the paper attempts to control for the possibility that better-paid men spend more time grooming anyway, and for obvious other influences upon wages.

This work reinforces the findings of other studies that show that good looking people are more likely to be acquitted by juries and that tall people are more likely to become chief executive officers.

Chris's theory is:

Maybe narcissism pays.  Maybe people with a high sense of self-worth, who exaggerate their achievements and lack empathy with others do well in office politics. These sort of people would then both get higher pay and, because of their vanity, spend more time on their appearance. There’ll then be a positive correlation between grooming and wages.

Either way I'd say Jose was in the money.

It's a zionist plot...

...no wonder I liked the Olympics logo.

The London 2012 Logo: worth every penny

I am always one to jump on a bandwagon as it is pulled out of the mud and begins to roll backwards, so here goes.

I like the new Olympic logo.

It is distinctive, modern and clever. The only way of designing a logo that no one attacks is to design a logo that no one notices.

It will grow on people.

Now, there's a question of the money, of course.

Almost every media story about branding makes those who do it sound ridiculous and the amount of money spent on it obscene. In which case, why do so many companies do it? Is there a market failure that leads one company after another to spend unnecessarily on something that doesn't boost their business? I can't think what it would be. Over time, if branding consultancies were a waste of money they would go out of business.

And if very good logos could be done much cheaper then cheap branding businesses would grow up and drive down prices.

Maybe I am missing something, but I think my post yesterday explains why lots of us think that we could have done it ourselves for less money.

UPDATE: It's a zionist conspiracy! Click here to find out why

Thoughts on sport, scandals and match-fixing

The terrible death of Bob Woolmer will, inevitably, lead to a great deal of interest in match fixing in cricket, whether or not there turns out to be any connection between his murder and betting scams.

Here are a few observations inspired by my work on the Fink Tank, my football stats column.

First - why do cricket, horse racing and boxing appear to be particular targets for the syndicates? Well, they are all highly predictable games, thus producing excellent odds should a surprise take place. An alternative explanation is that the predictability of the games makes it easier to spot a scam. Football results are so hard to predict that a scam may be easier to disguise.

Second - it follows from this that a competent statistician should be able to work out if match fixing is taking place, by looking at patterns of results. Dubner and Levitt record such work on sumo wrestling scams in their book Freakonomics.

Third - it is suggested that cheating spoils the game and I certainly see why people say this. I certainly don't condone scams. But actually they probably make games more exciting. They introduce unpredictability into highly predictable games.

Venus wins again

The campaign for equal prize money for women at Wimbledon has been victorious.

And there were few more powerful contributions to the campaign than the oped that Venus Williams penned for Times Comment. It's worth reading again.

Muhammad Ali: Mad and Bad or The Greatest?

I am not quite sure what it is about Muhammad Ali.

I don't much like boxing.

I'm not in a position to judge whether he was he was really as good as some say.

I think Ali's relationship with the Nation of Islam was not to his credit. His separatist idea was barmy.

I disagreed with his stance on Vietnam.

But still I am sure that he was The Greatest.

In his Times piece Matthew Syed describes the way that history has sanitised Ali, forgetting what a controversial figure he was. But it is not a sanitised Ali that I admire. It is the raw, in your face Ali. My disagreements with his politics come from a middle aged Jew living in Pinner in the 20th century. He was of a young poorly educated black man living in America in the 1960s.

I admire him for the way he refused to accept his allotted role as a pawn in a boxing game heavily manipulated by white organised crime, and the way he kicked back against the racism of that time.

His indomitable spirit made him the Greatest and an important figure.

Here's Ali in his prime. The wit, the charm, the mad, bad political idea, the lot:

More on why we lost the Ashes

In a clever little post, Chris Dillow categorises the arguments over why we lost the Ashes, then divides them into left and right wing explanations.

And guess what? Mine is a right wing explanation.

But, funnily enough, I do accept that class has something to do with our performance in the Ashes. I made a class point about why we wouldn't win the football World Cup, too.

The consistent superiority of the Australian side over ours is remarkable given their much smaller population. One explanation is likely to be (I haven't hard got data) that a much higher proportion of Australians play cricket for a much longer portion of the year. This is partly the result of the weather, but partly due to the fact that the English game draws its players from a relatively narrow section of the population

Why we lost the Ashes

I don't do cricket statistics but I'd like to make an observation about the Ashes. Not about losing them again, but about winning them last time.

You can win the Ashes once in 18 years without being the better side when you win it. The higher scoring a sport is and the more games that are played the more likely it is that the best side will win.

Cricket is a high scoring game and a five game series is very likely to be won by the best side. But not certain.

Our victory last time, instead of being a great national revival was simply a feature of randomness. Even when we won the Ashes, Australia were the better team. This time that fact simply reasserted itself.