Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Fuck the Cyclops!
Are we talking Leela from Futurama here? Oh no, Mr Phillipousis is referring to a machine. It's always quite fun waiting for someone at the BBC to realise they're broadcasting live pre-watershed swearing. Took a while in the end, but they got there eventually (after he'd stopped shouting).
Having watched the end of the Roddick-Popp match by accident [1], I turned over to watch the Henman-Phillipousis match. Which was actually much less enjoyable tennis. Especially the third set where Henman appeared to be getting progressively worse. Working on the theory that I seem to able to jinx sports by watching them, I went off elsewhere during the fourth [and apparently final] set, as I wasn't sure Henman could win. This jinxing effect is responsible for my utter lack of interest in football. I've never been that keen, but decided to watch one full game, just to see what it was like. It was England-Germany, in, I think, Euro 1996. It ended in penalties [England lost], which suggests it was pretty pointless watching and hour and a half of it.
A couple of years later, I repeated the experiment. The game ended with England losing in the shoot-out at the end. This year, I don't bother watching most of any of the games. England-France I flick over about 80 minutes into it, we're winning, so I turn back. We lose, via a penalty shoot-out at the end. Ditto the Portugal game.
Even not really watching the football that's on in a pub I'm in, causes the same effect. Despite being flanked by tables supporting Sweden and Holland, I didn't really care who won [well, the swedes were smoking upwind of me, so preferably the Dutch team]. That game also ended in the bizarre shoot-out situation. Though apparently I'm not the only person to cause this effect: the comments at GfB [so what would happen if I supported one team, and the other jinxer the other? A shoot-out undoubtably, but with all sorts of Schroedinger's cat duality kinkiness, either that or some brane trickery would spell the ultimate in destruction for every notion of the universe. So that's another good reason for not watching football: persevering the existence of everything]
[1] Having heard in passing that there was a match on in which very good tennis was being played. When I could I turned on the Wimbledon coverage, and lo and behold, there was in fact decent rally laden tennis on. Except apparently the person who told was apparently talking about a different match. Oh the fickleness of digital [and analogue] television.
And can you spot the misplaced footnote? Oh well.
And that'll have to do for now, as I'm tired and Radio 1's stopped playing their Glastonbury highlights, so I'll cover how exactly I came to miss all coverage of Glastonbury some other time.
The Guardian has assorted stuff on the quagfest, including this piece.
Anyhoo,
Are we talking Leela from Futurama here? Oh no, Mr Phillipousis is referring to a machine. It's always quite fun waiting for someone at the BBC to realise they're broadcasting live pre-watershed swearing. Took a while in the end, but they got there eventually (after he'd stopped shouting).
Having watched the end of the Roddick-Popp match by accident [1], I turned over to watch the Henman-Phillipousis match. Which was actually much less enjoyable tennis. Especially the third set where Henman appeared to be getting progressively worse. Working on the theory that I seem to able to jinx sports by watching them, I went off elsewhere during the fourth [and apparently final] set, as I wasn't sure Henman could win. This jinxing effect is responsible for my utter lack of interest in football. I've never been that keen, but decided to watch one full game, just to see what it was like. It was England-Germany, in, I think, Euro 1996. It ended in penalties [England lost], which suggests it was pretty pointless watching and hour and a half of it.
A couple of years later, I repeated the experiment. The game ended with England losing in the shoot-out at the end. This year, I don't bother watching most of any of the games. England-France I flick over about 80 minutes into it, we're winning, so I turn back. We lose, via a penalty shoot-out at the end. Ditto the Portugal game.
Even not really watching the football that's on in a pub I'm in, causes the same effect. Despite being flanked by tables supporting Sweden and Holland, I didn't really care who won [well, the swedes were smoking upwind of me, so preferably the Dutch team]. That game also ended in the bizarre shoot-out situation. Though apparently I'm not the only person to cause this effect: the comments at GfB [so what would happen if I supported one team, and the other jinxer the other? A shoot-out undoubtably, but with all sorts of Schroedinger's cat duality kinkiness, either that or some brane trickery would spell the ultimate in destruction for every notion of the universe. So that's another good reason for not watching football: persevering the existence of everything]
[1] Having heard in passing that there was a match on in which very good tennis was being played. When I could I turned on the Wimbledon coverage, and lo and behold, there was in fact decent rally laden tennis on. Except apparently the person who told was apparently talking about a different match. Oh the fickleness of digital [and analogue] television.
And can you spot the misplaced footnote? Oh well.
And that'll have to do for now, as I'm tired and Radio 1's stopped playing their Glastonbury highlights, so I'll cover how exactly I came to miss all coverage of Glastonbury some other time.
The Guardian has assorted stuff on the quagfest, including this piece.
Anyhoo,
