Tennis, Ig Nobel prizes, sex and snuffles, parrots and kindness

12 September 2021

Emma Raducanu’s victory over Leyla Fernandez at the US Open tennis championship was the highlight of the week even for those of us who aren’t sports fans:  two teenagers playing in New York on the anniversary of 9/11 (which took place before either of them was born) with Raducanu becoming the first British woman in a grand slam singles final since Virginia Wade at Wimbledon in 1977.

I don’t know why we stayed up late to watch the match rooting for Raducanu, who I hadn’t even heard of a week ago.  It’s not because she’s British – the only other player who’s affected us in this way in recent years is Roger Federer, who’s Swiss.  Perhaps it’s because nobody thought she’d even make the semi-finals and we Brits tend to back underdogs, or because she’d assumed she wouldn’t even qualify and had already bought her return ticket, or because she’d fitted all her training round her ‘A’ Level revision, or because they’d both knocked out all the geriatric wrinklies over 20 on their way to the final, or perhaps it was just seeing her play so brilliantly that we could see a future champion in the making.

Good on yer Emma.

The announcement of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes came a close second.  Introduced in 1991 by the ‘Annals of Improbable Research’ magazine, the award aims to celebrate research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think”.

A decade after he’d won an Ig Nobel prize for his experiments using electromagnets to levitate amphibians, Sir Andre Geim, a Russian-born Dutch-British physics professor at Manchester University, won a Nobel prize with Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov in 2010 for his discovery of graphene.  (Graphene is, of course, a sheet of single carbon atoms joined in a hexagonal lattice form that is the strongest material found so far, a 1 square meter sheet of which would support the weight of a 4kg cat while weighing only as much as one of its whiskers.)

This year’s ten prizes were presented at an online ceremony which, for added entertainment, included a premiere of a mini opera that connected angry adults with miniature suspension bridges (don’t ask me, I’m just telling you what it says here).  The economics prize went to Pavlo Blavatskyy, a professor at Montpellier Business School, whose research showed that the higher a politician’s BMI is, the more likely they are to be part of a corrupt system.  (This can be proved by comparing pictures of Boris Johnson with Jacinda Ardern.)  (On the other hand, the same comparison might show that a regime’s corruption is in inverse proportion to the number of teeth its leader has.)

The physics and kinetics prizes went to complementary projects, the first showing why pedestrians in crowded areas aren’t constantly bumping into each other, the second showing why they sometimes do.  However, the most fascinating prize, for medicine, found that an orgasm is as good as commercial decongestants at clearing the nasal passages.  (If anybody finds themselves annoyed by a persistent sniffle, it might be worth a try.)

In the Willowbank Wildlife Sanctuary in Christchurch, New Zealand, there’s a disabled alpine parrot called Bruce (do you think this is a racist joke and his partner is called Sheila?) who’s lost the top part of his beak, which makes it difficult for him to eat and preen himself.  Luckily, parrots are intelligent and he’s taught himself to choose exactly the right stone to help him dislodge dirt and mites from his plumage. He also scrapes pieces of carrot against a hard surface to reduce them to an edible size.

Birds’ use of tools is not uncommon – corvids are particularly skilled tool-users – but this is apparently the first recorded instance of a bird selecting the right tool from a selection to groom itself, though Hamlet wouldn’t have been surprised.

Back on one of my hobby-horses, a new book on child-rearing has been published:  ‘How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes’ by Melinda Wenner Moyer.  It aims to supplement books like ‘How to Get Kids to Like Kale’ and ‘How to Raise Einstein 1.2’ and ‘How to Get the Little Bugger to Sleep’ by concentrating on how to create a kind, compassionate person.

In researching for the book, Moyer discovered that one particular study had shown that kind people tend to be more successful and that boys (sic) who were the most helpful and generous in kindergarten were earning the most when they were 25 and were least likely to be in prison.  (Do you think the people who were least helpful and generous in kindergarten are most likely to go into politics?)

In some interviews, famous people are sometimes asked what superpower they would like to possess;  I haven’t yet seen anybody say “kindness”. 

Let’s all buy into it and think what might improve somebody else’s life, even by a fraction.  Smile at strangers (but not in big cities where you’ll probably get arrested), send a message to somebody you haven’t contacted for some time and ask how they are, have a chat with a ‘Big Issue’ seller before giving them more than the price of the magazine, give money to charity, avoid Amazon and use local shops, give someone a flower, whatever you think might brighten somebody’s day. And say thank you for the kindnesses that people show you.

So, if you’ve read this far, thank you.

Football, racism, “levelling up”, foreigners, goldfish and Britney Spears

18 July 2021

Before last Sunday’s football match, an England supporter wedged a flare into his bum and lit it, to the delight of his mates (and a wider internet audience).  What a good job he inserted it the right way round.  On the other hand …

In the event, Italy won the 2021 UEFA European Championship after extra time and a penalty shoot-out.  If two teams have drawn after all that time, it surely says that they were evenly matched and both teams played equally well so it seems very unfair to pick five members of each team to kick a ball to decide the result.  Why they don’t they replay the match later (didn’t they used to do that?) or just accept it’s in the lap of the gods and toss a coin, or agree they’re both the best and share the prize?

Imagine how you would feel if you’re one of the ten kickers and miss and your team then loses;  wouldn’t you feel you’d personally let down your six team-mates who didn’t have a go, and your manager, and the club, and the fans, and your country?

What was so sad about the aftermath was the reaction of a certain senior politician who said that, if footballers kept out of politics and stuck to footballing, they’d play better*, and a small minority of bad losers tried to assign the ultimate loss to something about the players that had nothing to do with their footballing skills.

In a different context, the irrelevance of these types of prejudice was neatly encapsulated by Lucy Mangan in a review of the recent Channel 5 series ‘Anne Boleyn’:

“Holding it all together they have a superb Anne [Boleyn] in [Jodie] Turner-Smith … Turner-Smith’s casting caused a stir because she is of Jamaican descent.  If you are someone who is bothered by that, well then you are probably the kind of person who is always going to be bothered by that and we need not detain you here.  For what it’s worth, I am aware that Anne Boleyn wasn’t black, but I’m also aware that she wasn’t Claire Foy, Merle Oberon, Helena Bonham Carter or any of the other women who have played her over the years, and my brain is not unduly upset by any of it.”

Then, on Thursday, Boris Johnson addressed the nation and I watched part of his speech until I became so incensed I had to leave to burst into tears somewhere quiet. 

It was obvious from the speed with which he flipped over the notes he was reading it that it was written in very large type so even he couldn’t ad lib his way through the smaller print (why don’t people just push sheets to one side instead of flapping them up and over – it doesn’t matter what order they’re in after they’ve been used does it?).  And it was still so toe-curlingly feeble that even his front-benchers had to turn their faces to the wall.

There was even a reference to recovering like “a coiled spring”.  Have you ever seen an uncoiled spring?

It’s roughly two years since Johnson announced his “levelling up” policy so he’s had about 730 days since to decide the detail of how he will achieve this but all we got was political soundbites about rich areas not getting poorer, more support from government, more to encourage businesses, more jobs and more opportunities, more power to local government and other vague improbabilities.

I thought one journalist who described his speech as being “light on detail” was being over-generous but I was more worried about the things he didn’t mention, like how to fund the recovery; or the reducing state benefits;  or people who are unable to work because of medical conditions or family commitments or lack of local opportunities;  or homeless people;  or his broken promises about foreign aid for people (foreigners) starving to death overseas;  or increased powers to reject refugees (foreigners) seeking safety in the UK and to deport those who have been here for decades (foreigners) to countries they’ve never even seen.  I wonder if those who came over on, say, the Windrush and have since died (late foreigners) will be exhumed and returned to their country of origin, freeing up more space for jerry-builders to throw up cheap, nasty micro-houses on tiny plots which can be sold as “affordable” because cheap, nasty materials make even more profit for them.

Transparency International, an organisation whose mission is “to stop corruption and promote transparency, accountability and integrity at all levels and across all sectors of society” works “in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption”.  They recently reported that the Conservatives have an “unhealthy financial reliance” on property developers and more than 20% of their income in the last decade came from the residential property sector.

This obviously doesn’t prove that their policies were influenced by these donations but the report makes the point that such reliance on housing-based donations creates “a real risk of aggregative corruption” but it could of course be sheer coincidence that the government is now supporting the construction of housing estates on SSSIs, AONBs, ancient woodlands and floodplains.

As for the NHS, education, the global climate emergency and trying to rebuild relations with our neighbours (yet more foreigners) after Johnson was/is so dishonourable and/or incompetent about the Brexit deal he signed …

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research unit, NHS funding increased by an average of 6% a year while we had a Labour government, and National Insurance contributions were increased by 10% to help pay for it.  Since 2010, the Conservatives have refused to increase raxes and limited NHS funding increases to just over 1% despite a survey by the King’s Fund in 2016 showing that 70% of us are willing to pay more tax if the extra revenue was ring-fenced and spent only on the NHS.

Unfortunately, the government has this delusion that private companies, particularly those who once poured a senior politician a beer, can do things better so there’s no need for competitive tendering or probing too deeply, and certainly no need to ask why companies claim money from the government under the furlough support scheme but then give it to their senior management and shareholders.

What’s most surprising is that quite a few of the intelligent Conservative MPs feel that’s it’s more honourable to support and be loyal to their elected leader than to call out his continual lies and failures;  the only consolation is that quite a few even more intelligent Conservative MPs are becoming willing to stand against his more extremist ideas.

Witness the government’s approval of the Nationality and Borders Bill, although this could actually be a worthy attempt to ensure that England keeps its reputation for low-IQ, drug-fuelled English football ’fans’ unsullied by closing its borders to foreigners who are just trying to find somewhere they can live and work and stay alive.  (According to some specialist lawyers, the Bill is apparently worded so badly that RNLI lifeboats could get prosecuted if they’re found in coastal waters saving people from a sinking ship.)

Still, I gained some small comfort from the fact that we still have enough freedom to set up a new right-wing TV channel under the leadership of Andrew Neil, the man who converted me from the Sunday Times to the Observer when he became the former’s editor all those years ago.  I was even more encouraged by its initial impact and viewing figures – hardly anybody watched its lunchtime programme on Wednesday and Neil’s own ‘flagship’ show has disappeared while Neil disappears for a holiday in his main residence in the south of France and other executives have resigned.  To recover these losses, they’re now bringing in two beacons of undoubted objectivity and integrity:  Nigel Farage and Piers Morgan.

Our new health minister, Sajid David, has tested positive for Covid so the entire Cabinet including Johnson will now presumably have to self-isolate, along with all the top people at the Department at Health who actually do the work.  Let’s see if we miss them.

The fascinating leak of Russian documents confirm that, in January 2016, they assessed Donald Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex” and they apparently confirm that the Kremlin possesses potentially compromising material on him.  Their conclusion was that “It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate [Trump’s] election to the post of US president”, predicting that this would lead to “the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system and see hidden discontent burst into the open”.

How right they were.

The world can only hope that enough of the umpteen charges now being levelled against Trump both corporately and personally will prove enough criminal malfeasance to merit a prison sentence that would prevent him ever standing for president again.

Interestingly, it appears that owners of fishponds and aquariums in Minnesota have been transferring surplus goldfish into local waterways where they grow huge and destroy local ecosystems.  They remain bright orange and immensely stupid but latest reports imply that none of them are planning to stand for president in 2024.

And finally, I have to admit that I know next to nothing about Britney Spears or her father but her recent attempts to be freed from her father’s control, which extended even as far as contraception, did make me wonder if the courts would have allowed a 39 year-old man to be so controlled by his mother.

Anyway, she’s finally won and has said she’s happy to work with the other conservator, which – in my ignorance – pleases me no end.

*          How I wish some politicians would stay out of politics and just play football