It began two weeks ago when I referenced the government’s wheeze to ease Mary Seacole out of the classroom. That touched quite a nerve, and triggered pointed communication from Wales. Not once did you mention the Welsh Crimean nurse Betsi Cadwaladr, it said; another example of the Welsh being airbrushed. Is this Hideously diverse England? What about Wales? What should I write about, was my question? Language he said. With more children taught in Welsh, Welsh in the media and government keen to promote the language, we thought more people than ever were speaking Welsh. Then came the census suggesting decline.
We’re in shock. So here I am, at his suggestion, in Swansea, sharing a chicken tikka lunch with author, linguist and activist Heini Gruffudd. He is slightly perplexed, and he’s worried about what the decline – 21% to 19% – means for the Welsh and Welsh. But at 66 he’s seen a lot and he’s an optimist. His message: don’t panic. ‘People have been saying that Welsh would die out for hundreds of years,’ he says. ‘With all the pressures it has faced, its survival is a bit of a miracle.’
Interesting. Whales older than Moby Dick.
That’s right, some of the bowhead whales in the icy waters today are over 200 years old.
Source: blogs.smithsonianmag.com
GELSENKIRCHEN, Germany — The resurgence of German soccer began, like the country’s economic comeback, after a long slide toward stagnation amid dire prophecies of impending irrelevance.
The sick man of Europe, as Germany was known a decade ago, could as easily have been called the sick man of soccer. After a disastrous European Championships in 2000 when the traditional powerhouse won no games and scored one goal, the problem-solving, build-a-better-widget German drive kicked in.
While the government was loosening German labor laws to grease the creaking gears of the country’s economy, a society known for its apprenticeships and vocational training set about methodically developing young talent in the world’s most popular sport.
In a little more than a decade, Germany has invested nearly $1 billion in its youth programs, with academies run by professional teams and training centers overseen by the national soccer association, the Deutscher Fussball Bund, or D.F.B. The programs testify to the long-term strategic thinking and to the considerable resources that have driven Germany’s rise to renewed prominence in — and at the expense of — a struggling continent.
THE OLD stereotype of the stupid footballer may have to be consigned to history after a new study claimed that players have better cognitive skills than undergraduates and even PhD students.
Research by Canadian academic Jocelyn Faubert, of the University of Montreal, found that sports stars were able to ‘hyper-focus’ when doing tests, thanks to physical differences in their brains.
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However, some people appear to have got carried away by the findings. ‘John Terry is brainier than physics super-boffin Professor Stephen Hawking, exclaimed The Daily Star.
When the Queen was first crowned in 1952, the kitchens of Buckingham Palace were hard-pressed to invent a dish that would satisfy the foreign dignitaries and guests in attendance. Not that bangers and mash isn’t delicious, but the thoughtful chefs (along with the Queen’s florist), perhaps borrowing a leaf out of newly-independent India’s cookbook, put together the following: cooked chicken, curry powder and heavy cream, served chilled with rice and vegetables. Sound anything like chicken tikka masala, national dish of England? In any case, Coronation Chicken was a hit, and now it’s fashionably retro and Jubilee-appropriate, so of course it’s what’s for lunch.
Source: foodrepublic.com
In an interview with The Associated Press, Altidore said he decided to play through the abuse Tuesday because he didn’t want to give satisfaction to people who directed monkey chants at him.
The 23-year-old said it was the first time he has experienced racism like this, on or off the field.
‘This was pretty big. To have a stadium chanting monkey sounds is not something pleasant,’ he said in the phone interview. ‘I’m the only black player on my team, so I think it was more directed to me than anyone else.’
Jackie Robinson’s birthday was Thursday. Two days before the first black player in Major League Baseball would have turned 94, American soccer player Jozy Altidore was racially abused by Dutch fans of FC Den Bosch, the team against which Altidore’s AZ Alkmaar was playing.
Unrelenting monkey chants. Just weeks after Kevin-Prince Boateng walked off a pitch in Italy in response to fans’ taunts.
UEFA/FIFA, get your house in order.
Rather than make clear from the top that racist abuse will not be tolerated, UEFA is worryingly silent. And when they do talk, like last summer when they fined a Danish player more for wearing unapproved underwear than they did the national teams whose fans abused black players like Theodor Gebre Selassie or Mario Balotelli, their priorities are never quite in line.
The silence and/or uselessness from the top leaves the sole responsibility of responding to racist fan culture to men who are barely adults and are being abused and attacked in their place of business. And when individuals are making decisions on the spot and under enormous pressure, we see a variety of responses that journalists and other commentators are taking it upon themselves to judge. Is Altidore’s playing on better than Boateng’s leaving?
Who are we to judge?
And why are we spending more time thinking about the individual choices these players are making instead of demanding that UEFA/FIFA treat this as an issue of utmost importance? We owe it to Jackie Robinson to demand better.
Source: ESPN
The beginning of today’s class on sewage, from Punch, July-December 1849. (Scroll for the second part of the cartoon.)
Kevin-Prince Boateng’s stand (or walk, more precisely) against racist fans. It speaks for itself.
Source: youtube.com
I have become fixated with a map. It’s an interactive map of London that shows where the German Luftwaffe dropped bombs on the city between 7 October 1940 and 6 June 1941. It’s a period that includes 57 nights of consecutive bombing that pummelled the city at the height of the Blitz. You can find it on a site called bombsight.org.
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Yet the map works now in another way. A reading street by street explains much about the city you see today. My exploration has radiated out from the small street in Bloomsbury where I live. My road was not hit. The neighbouring street, however, took a double strike when two highly explosive bombs hit a row of houses. And this explains why it’s now lined by blocks of not very nice late-1950s apartments.
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Almost every post-1945 building in my ’hood owes its presence to a bomb dropped from a German plane. Perhaps this is how history can really be brought to life – how many of the children, or adults, living in my neighbourhood realise that what the[y] see every day is the consequences of war. It’s made me more sensitive to the city and its randomness and quirks. It’s also made me think how robust this old city must be: all that destruction and terror but it rebuilt. At their best, cities can heal again and again.
Source: monocle.com
Greg Rutherford: Olympic gold medalist, baker, lover of history
Yes, this lack of nerves. What’s that about? It’s a weird one. You have to have nervous energy to perform, because that’s what kicks your body into mode. But there’s nervous energy where people are absolutely bricking it and it’s detrimental, and there’s nervous energy where you look at it and go, ‘You know what? It’s going to be amazing, I’m going to have the best time of my life and I’m going to go out and win this.’
But that brings its own pressure, doesn’t it? Obviously my heart was beating faster – of course it was, I was in the London Olympic final – but the way I viewed it was very different, possibly, to some others who maybe let the occasion get to them. And that comes with experience. In previous years I had issues where probably I had let the nerves get to me a little bit too much and I underperformed, but there I felt so confident with the way I was training, the way I was jumping. I felt pretty good. The only time I was nervous was in Round Six, when I knew I was eight jumpers away from being Olympic champion and I had to just pick each one off and hope nobody jumped further than me.
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We hear that you’re a keen baker. Any chance you can squeeze the Great British Bake Off in to your schedule? I wouldn’t mind that, to be totally honest. Baking is something that I do. I haven’t had a lot of time over the last few months to get any done – and obviously I couldn’t eat the produce, but now I can, so once I actually get some time to get home for a bit I’m going to get baking again and have some fun. It’s just a way for me to relax at times. If I had the opportunity to go on certain shows I’d definitely be going on them.
And are you likely to make sugary concoctions or those slightly forlorn-looking savoury tarts? I’m very much a sweet-toothed person. There are days when I only feel like savoury, but generally I’m very sweet-toothed. So baking cakes I love.
What’s your favourite? It’s more a challenging one for me: it’s a checkerboard cake. My attempt a few months ago didn’t come out very well. My Mum is a great, great cook and a great baker; she sort of taught me. She makes the perfect checkerboard cake and I just want to perfect that technique. Basically when you cut it open it looks like a chess board. It’s easier than it sounds but you have to have equipment to do it.
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Did you love history at school? It was the one subject that I could really apply myself to because I actually really enjoyed it. So that and a couple of others, that was sort of my forté, but everything else I let go by the wayside really, I wasn’t as keen. Even though arguably I could have done much better at school, I’d decided at a young age that I was going to be a professional sportsman at some sport. And at that stage there was a bit of luck: I was fortunate to meet the right people at the right time to get me to where I am now.
Source: Guardian
How the Olympics killed the killjoys | Tim Black | spiked
My biggest regret of 2012: not being in the world’s best city for such a sensational Olympics.
Fear, cynicism and a sheer overwhelming desire to piss all over the Olympics parade; these were the key themes of the dominant story that prefaced London 2012. And what was so staggering about the pre-Olympics snipes and snides was that they were effectively green lit by the overt defensiveness of successive governments, both Labour and Lib-Con.
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So you see, there was a time, before the sun shone on Stratford, before an audience of billions revelled in an extraordinary spectacle, when the Olympics was the focal point for little more than fear and loathing. A fear of what happens when large numbers of people gather together, and a loathing of the type of high-cost ambition embodied in the staging of an Olympics. In the years after 2005, when London won the bid, the anxieties and prejudices of a narrow stratum of British society, composed mainly of the political and media classes, shaped and formed the pre-Olympics narrative into a tale of hubris and imminent misery and woe.
Then it happened. From the Games’ opening ceremony onwards, another narrative erupted into life, a story drawn from the excitement and enthusiasm of the millions who simply loved what the Olympics is actually about: the sinewy drama of competition, the ceaseless, tenuous striving, and of course, for some athletes, the glory. Mo Farah’s double distance gold, Usain Bolt (enough said), David Rudisha’s 800 metres supremacy… the list goes on.
As the public buzzed, the elite cynics, the miserable pseudo-radical killjoys and the endless panicmongers, simply melted away.
Source: spiked-online.com
50 years after independence, my people swept the track.
(via The best photographs of 2012 - in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian)
Source: Guardian
A lot of people said my win was unexpected, but it wasn’t. I was world number one going in. I had won most major competitions during the year. I went into the race saying, ‘I’m going to win this’, because I genuinely believed that I could.
a Christmas crime
Every Christmas when my mother was alive, she and I watched A Child’s Christmas in Wales. In the 11 years since I last saw it, it’s apparently become incredibly hard to find, which is a crime. Best Christmas movie ever.
One of the most lovely things you can watch during the holiday season is the 1987 film of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” starring the late Denholm Elliott. It’s a faithful yet playful adaptation of Thomas’ work, a narrative poem conceived as a radio play, and the film is at once appropriately sentimental about Christmases past and tartly realistic about the Christmas depicted in the film’s present. It stands in contrast to so much Christmas entertainment that is either gloppy or pious; Elliott, as both narrator and lead actor, provides a vinegary crispness to the role of nostalgic grandfather.
But here’s the thing: A Child’s Christmas in Wales is difficult to find.
Go to Amazon.com and you’ll be told that the DVD version is “not available.” The VHS copy I bought years ago skips and stutters, and its colors are faded — I always expect the tape to snap when we hook up the old VHS machine to re-play it on Christmas Eve, a Tucker family tradition.
Source: ew.com
bibelot: an attractive or curious trinket; a miniature book
