Category: Uncategorized

My true love re-planted the tree

The Champions League has eclipsed what used to be the most important and exciting football tournament. It seems that no-one cares *that* much about it these days.

But there’s one thing that people still love about the world’s oldest football competition. And it’s this special quality that could bring it back to the fore.

Giant killing.

Everyone loves it when the proverbial minnows beat the big teams. But the random nature of the draw means that too few crazy gangs get the chance to take on the culture clubs.

There’s nothing more deflating that having a camera in the dressing room of a non-league team who’ve fought their way through countless preliminary rounds dreaming of an away trip to the upper echelons, only to find they’ve drawn Lincoln at home.

So let’s rig the draw. And ensure more David vs Goliath possibilities.

It’s not as wrong as it sounds. Indeed other sports routinely use this model – tennis is an good example. The reason why we get a few exciting upsets, yet invariably end up with a big final is due to this method. Yes – seeding.

Let’s seed the FA Cup. The third round would be more exciting than ever with the lowest ranked teams guaranteed a shot at the big boys. It’d mean far fewer mundane pairings and far more Ronnie Radford moments.

Seeding – putting drama back in the FA Cup.

I was just about too young to appreciate Tony Grieg. So even though the pieces on him portray him as a much-missed sporting hero, I don’t truly care enough to really read them.

There’ll come a time when my heroes die. And sports fans 20 years younger similarly won’t care when the world says goodbye to Viv Richards, Paul Gascoigne, John McEnroe, Steve Ovett et al

It’s all too easy to see our time as the only time.

I love this photo from Tom Jenkins’ best of 2012. Getting the olympic rings in the visor is a terrific capture.

Have had this half-baked idea for an open source recipe timer protocol.

Eh?

Let me explain. People would tag up recipes with start times and
durations of each step of preparation in a standard way.

Then anyone could create apps to read those recipes and present them
in a useful way.

Eg, imagine a timer app that read a “roast lunch” recipe. It might use
the tagged timing data to give you cues in real time what to do:

Boil the kettle
Pre-heat oven
Put fat in tray
Take the sprouts out
Add the stock

The benefit is that it would be much easier than following a recipe
that requires you to calculate all the timings backwards from ready –
such an app would effectively be telling you what to do when.

But I imagine other people would create other more useful apps if
recipes were tagged up in a standard way.

Full set: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fb3eh9n9pnueeqr/Y_fkQHzT2e

Just watched the first Sopranos episode again. It’s something mildly obsessive like my eighth watch-through (albeit over fifteen years).

Even though I know the plot well, I get something new out of it every time. The layers and the poignancy are incredible. This first episode alone has to be amongst the greatest hours in all of television.

Go Wiggo.

Screening of the film with orchestra playing along live – and with Philip Glass himself on keyboards.

At first a novelty and then increasingly hypnotic; at turns beautiful, disorientating and meditative.

3G on O2

Wifi

4G on EE

TV and film end credits are vanity listings of the sort that only exist elsewhere in magazines. Who cares who the second cameraman was? 

Feels like I’m inter-railing again

12, 13, 17, 25 Across and 9, 16 Down