Wake Up and Smell the Deep Heat: It’s the London Marathon

I’ve put down some words of advice for nervous London Marathon runners. It’s so indispensable it will probably be read out over a loudspeaker on the start line on Sunday. Regular readers will recognize it as a amalgamated revival of some posts I wrote a year ago. I would say about 50% of the text is new so you may just want to read every other word. Here it is.

Still haven't found Wally.

Ian Wheelie

It’s tragic that misadventurous Segway tycoon Jimi Heselden careered off a cliff to his death. For many reasons, not least that he was unable to witness perhaps the crowning achievement of his beloved machine:

 

I love how carefree and happy he looks as he glides past Mark Nicholas into the gaping maw of catastrophe.

One Barmy Soldier

Normally the Barmy Army trumpet rings out it works as a call to arms, the signal for a thousand stupefied contract workers to form a disorderly conga and sing ribald songs about Mitchell Johnson. In Dubai it sounds like a lonely last post. Where is everyone? Perhaps the insurmountable clash of cultures is to blame. Beer snakes and t-shirts bearing unhilarious ‘all Australian people are convicts’ slogans are actually forbidden according to sharia law. Getting lashed is stitched into the constitution of the Barmy Army. But not with an actual lash.

The ICC are hoping that the attendance will double when the series returns to Dubai for the final game. I’m going.

As for the team, maybe they are pining for the boozy encouragement from the sidelines. Or maybe they didn’t prepare properly. A lot has been spoken about the issues that the English batsmen had picking the length of the spinners. Thanks to an e-mail from a nice woman who appears to be doing PR for dhows, I’ve found the reason why:

 

Worst Blog Set To Coldplay

I am descending into a dangerous obsession with the way in which people stagger onto this site. Of course the more I discuss the squalid succession of search engine terms that have been typed in to arrive at this destination, such pearls as “sex Hazel Irvine snooker” and “Sue Barker discusses Serena Williams tits”, the more likely it is that these kind of internet bottom-feeders will find themselves here.

Today we had a visitor with the following query, “what is the worst hurdler set to Coldplay?” Well that certainly is a question that needs to be asked. I’m not a expert in the field of athletes performing to alternative rock music but if I was pushed for answer I would probably plump for Tony Jarrett. He seems like the type of hurdler who would struggle to run to the tunes of Coldplay.

Anyway, all this is just leading up to a plug for my latest piece for the Huffington Post. They don’t really accept articles about Hazel Irvine’s breasts so I’ve written about fat people instead. Here it is.

 

A Pointless Nerd Analogy

This blog is rapidly degenerating into a conduit for my contributions to the Huffington Post. I have to point these articles out to you otherwise you wouldn’t know they were there.

Think of the HuffPost as a novelty box of retro sweets. The political comment pieces are the Wham bars. The cultural reviews are the chewy Drumsticks. The celebrity blogs are the fizzy strawberry laces. There’s a particularly interesting one written by Martine McCutcheon who explains how yoghurt changed her life.

My review is the single loose Nerd at the bottom of the box. You probably don’t want to eat it because you’re just coming down from the sugar rush of reading of how Susan Boyle conquered her demons.

Here’s the Nerd anyway.

There Are No Tits Here. Hazel Irvine’s Or Otherwise.

A few weeks ago I reported that this blog had been laid siege to by a deviant of the worst order. Some diabolical pest has typed in “Hazel Irvine tits” into a search engine, one would have to presume to ogle at images of the diminutive Scottish sportscaster’s breasts.

I am sad to relay that affairs have darkened since. The fiend has visited again, three times. Firstly he or she landed following the query “Hazel Irvine sex tits”. I may be naive but I don’t know what a “sex tit” is. I’m pretty sure it’s bad though. And again today, two more hits: “snooker Hazel Irvine sex tits” and “snooker Hazel Irvine sex titss” reveals some sickening fetish for Hazel Irvine in sexy bar game situations. As well as negligent spelling.

I urge this person to reveal themselves, figuratively speaking obviously, and perhaps some kind of support can be sought. There are people who can treat you, injections they can give you. I know a good surgeon if necessary.

Down With The Trumpets

I’m blowing my own trumpet again. If you are fortunate to have your own trumpet, what else are you going to do but blow it? It would be a waste of a good trumpet otherwise. That said, I do possess an electronic keyboard which I seldom play, except to amuse myself with its built-in helicopter sound effects. I can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in chopper. It’s become quite a hit in Dalston.

Anyway, here’s the my latest piece for the HuffPost.

Huffing and Puffing

I’ve had my head turned again. This time by the Huffington Post, the American based newsite and blog-aggregator, which features the some of the sharpest minds polemicizing about the urgent issues of the moment.

I wrote about Liverpudlian scrubbers using a strained gerbil metaphor. Here it is. Any haphazard use of italics and single parentheses are the website’s and not my own.

If you’ve somehow clicked here from the article via my Twitter feed then best not to click on the link otherwise you’ll embark on an horrid circular journey of my brain-toot.

And to person who entered ‘Hazel Irvine tits’ into Google to land on my page today, we don’t have any of that kind of material here. And get some help.

 

 

 

South Africa 1 Australia 1

It’s never quite as intense when you can’t smell the red and white face paint around your nostrils, but watching South Africa take on Australia at cricket is nearly always absorbing, even as a Englishman from afar. The current series is as magnetic as ever, thanks largely to the flailing failures (flailures? that should be a word) of the batsmen on either side.

Australian tribulations are particularly satisfying. Phil Hughes is the Great White Hope of the batting line-up and he isn’t that great. Although he is white to be fair to him. He’s also a human slip cradle. A Mardi Gras-style parade nearly broke out in Sydney when Usman Khawaja made a whole 37 on debut against England, such was the craving for a new talent to emerge. His average has since dipped to 32.5. Mitchell Johnson runs into bowl with the grace of a pantomime horse whose front portion has just farted into his partner’s face. He took 3 wickets at 85. All good fun.

But it is also strangely comforting to witness the Australians reveal their survival instincts and level the series at the Wanderers (obviously disregarding the pustular look of jubilation on Peter Siddle‘s face). Hughes and Khawaja made runs. Pat Cummins is a very fast bowler and he was born in 1993. I’m literally old enough to be his dad, although that would have required relations with a girl when I was 14, where I was actually just at home playing carpet bowls with myself on my parents’ landing. And even Mitch dusted himself down and made a poised 40 to win the game. In Perth last winter he seemed to strike a rhythm with the ball after showing it with the bat. Perhaps this will be the impetus for a five-fer in the deciding test.

The series is tantalisingly poised. It promises much. A famous showdown between two ferocious rivals.

What’s that?

Really?

Oh.

Musical Montage

I’ve just been watching a compilation of highlights from the 1997-98 Premier League season set to “A Whole New World“, a cloying piece of music composed for the Disney film Aladdin. There are tears in my eyes. That is the immense emotional punch of the musical montage. Separately the footage and the song don’t have the capacity to stir, but together they form a powerful cocktail that reacts with that section of the brain controlling blubbing and throat-lumps.

The most seminal work in the field has been created by the BBC. Musical montages form part of their public service remit. I hope that in the seconds before I die, when my life streams before my eyes, it’s edited into a BBC musical montage. I have spent Olympic Games and Wimbledons waiting impatiently for the events to finish before enjoying the concluding montage. The segment following the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona was so moving it was conceivable that R.E.M. had written “Everybody Hurts” specifically as an elegy for Derek Redmond‘s snapped hamstring.

Montages can be potently funny too. Consider the collection of clips broadcast at the end of the World Snooker Championship, mainly of “ball-hitting-another-ball-and-going-into-a-pocket-it-wasn’t-intended-for” scenarios, perhaps the most unhilarious happening in sport. But place a Scott Joplin ragtime classic over the action and you’ve collapsed to your knees, crumbling in laughter, pointing at the screen screaming “OMG, did you see that ball fall into a pocket it wasn’t supposed to?”.

The phenomenon extends to other non-sport television. I managed to avoid the last series of the Channel 4 Big Brother series until its final episode, during which a montage was aired. It largely consisted of people that I didn’t know and didn’t care about walking up the steps to leave the house in slow motion. Temper Trap‘s “Sweet Disposition” played. Chills coursed up my spine. With this faculty for making even the worst in society seem sympathetic, advertisers should rethink party political broadcasts and simply show clips of David Cameron or Ed Miliband chatting to kittens or making daisy-chains set to Coldplay or Elbow or other mawkish music.

Snazzy despot Colonel Gadaffi recognised the potential of the musical montage, using one to impress his paramour US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice. He cut photos together with a specially commissioned song called “Black Flower in the White House”. Rice described it as “strange and creepy”. Perhaps that was more of an ITV one.