Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Somehow cricket needs to be more like Blurnsball. Or was that what Cricket Max was?
I reckon it should be more like Calvinball, never played with the same rules twice. Although you could argue that with the advent of powerplays, supersubs, and umpire referrals, that's essentially what's happened.
My wife reckons the game would be better if hungry lions were released onto the field during slow periods of play.
Seriously, though, the one thing UK (and NZ, for that matter) cricket adminstrators should do if they want to increase participation among children is get the game back onto free-to-air television. If it's essentially invisible to children in over 50% of households, of course the number of players is going to decline. The extra money that Sky pays for screening rights over state broadcasters is a total false economy.
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But I thought the election of a National government would instantly solve the Youth Crime OMGWTF Epidemic!
You do realise Paula Bennett can't be everywhere at once?
Yes, well played, Sir.
I think this is a golden media branding opportunity for National. CSI: Paula Bennett! Police Paula Bennett 10-7! I want to see her out there, in live, grainy TV feed, springing on sullen youths from moving police cars!
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Vaguely off-topic, but interesting in a "what the hell...?" kind of way
But I thought the election of a National government would instantly solve the Youth Crime OMGWTF Epidemic!
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I don't want to rain on everyone's nice parade, but Barack Obama is sworn in as President and but 90 minutes later Wellington City is "crippled" by a power cut....
Coincidence?
Oh man, I was totally thinking that. My wife and I were standing in the living room, listening to Fisk and Klein witter on about what a sell-out Obama's going to be when, BANG, no more TV for us! We turned to each other and were, like, '__well, Obama's got all the power now!__ '.
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Heh. The 'Chanson des jumelles' song just about ruined my life for a week after seeing that film. In case anyone else wants to have an earworm for the ages.
All together now:
Nous sommes deux soeurs jumelles
Nées sous le signe des gémeaux
Mi fa sol la mi ré, ré mi fa sol sol sol ré do
Toutes deux demoiselles
Ayant eu des amants très tôt
Mi fa sol la mi ré, ré mi fa sol sol sol ré doGAH!
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Yeah, I'm not really convinced by Fergusson. My impression is that he's basically a military historian who's out of his depth, but due to the popular nature of his audience and his self-conscious contrarianism, he never really gets called on it. It's like he's taking simplified versions of ideas expressed earlier by much subtler historians (J. C. D. Clark and J. G. A. Pocock, for instance) and applying them to an explicitly right-wing agenda. That he got snapped up by NYU and Harvard says more, I think, about the rather unhealthy academic star system in the US than it does about the quality of Fergusson's work.
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Windmills of Your Mind
That song is like Dr Demento for middle-class intellectuals, or something. It really is quite evocatively creepy.
Oh, absolutely. What gets me is that Michel Legrand could write that, and then produce the pathologically chirpy soundtrack to Les Demoiselles de Rochefort . Which is also a hell of a thing to have stuck in your head at 3 AM ...
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Wikileaks has published a large cache of confidential United Nations reports and investigations, including those relating to sexual abuse by serving UN personnel in Africa. Shit to hit fan?
There's a really interesting article in the January 5 New Yorker on the UNHCR mission to Chad, which provides relief for refugees from Darfur. There are some vivid snapshots of UN life, and a couple of cynical observations that stuck with me. Long-term staffers claim the agency in Africa consists of three classes of people -- missionaries, misfits, and mercenaries ...
You don't ever listen to National Radio between the hours of midnight and six? Wayne Mowatt not ring any bells?
Who would have guessed that part of Radio New Zealand's public service mandate was to provide a home for more awesomely crapulous music that you could shake a colostomy bag at...
When I was a kid, I had chronic insomnia and would tune into the Nat Rad all-night show to stave off night terrors. This is back when Philip Liner hosted it. I think it did long-term psychic damage. 'Those Were the Days, My Friend', 'Windmills of Your Mind', 'Sealed with a Kiss', and the terrifying 'One More Ride on the Merry-Go-Round' will be burned into my brain forever. I don't think anyone could select a more sinister and melancholy handful of songs than the all-night show played, night after night. I'm getting sweaty palms just thinking about it.
Maybe it was some kind of psychological warfare project.
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Some figures on RTD consumption (from David Jernigan, 'The Need for Restraint', Addiction 102, no. 11 [2007]: 1747):
[S]tudies by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) have found that advertising placements for alcopops are often placed on programming and in publications more likely to be seen by youth ages 12–20 years than by adults of the legal drinking age (21 and above in the United States and 18 and above in almost all other countries). For instance, from 2001 to 2005, youth saw 58% more advertising for these beverages per capita in magazines than adults. In 2005, although there were only 22 alcopops advertisements placed in national magazines with readerships measured by industry-standard sources, 20 of these were in magazines with disproportionately large youth audiences. On television, from 2001 to 2005, 29% of advertisements for alcopops were on programming more likely to be seen by youth than by adults—the most of any beverage category. On radio, in 28 of the largest radio markets in the United States, 52% of alcopops advertisements in 2005 and 31% in 2006 were on programming more likely to be heard by youth per capita than by legalaged adults (calculated from data licensed to CAMY by Arbitron and MediaGuide).
Youth survey data from the United States echo Copeland et al.’s findings about the popularity of alcopops among adolescents. According to the annual Monitoring the Future survey of US schoolchildren, in 2006 76.2% of 13–14-year-olds consumed ready-to-drink beverages (also known as ‘alcopops’) in the past 30 days, 73.1% of 15–16-year-olds and 64.7% of 17–18-year-olds. The level of use and amount of difference is even more marked for female drinkers: 86.9% of 13–14-year-old female drinkers, 79.6% of 15–16-year-old female drinkers drinkers and 75.1% of 17–18-year-old female drinkers had a flavored alcoholic beverage in the past 30 days in 2006.
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Alcopops are crap, they don't have the requisite adult sophistication to bring about positive drinking habits. In other words Alcopops encourage childish drinking behavior.
Is that sort of how it work?
Yeah, and they're intended that way. Studies of alcohol advertising show that they're disproportionately marketed at adolescents and have very high brand recall with underage drinkers. One recent US study found that over 75% of sampled 13-14 year-olds had drunk RTDs in the previous 30 days. This is what they're for -- it's how alcohol is packaged for that market segment. So, yeah -- cynicism, recklessness, harm; go alcohol industry.