Rish's Diary: May 2007

The moral maze

Played footy for the first time in ages last night - I have alluded to this on the Nottingham Forest Blog. I love having a kickabout, we hire a five-a-side pitch and we split into two teams for an hour or so. It is more like playground football than anything else, obviously you want your team to win, but at the end everyone shakes hands, and it doesn't really matter which team wins or loses.

Yesterday was different. One player on my team, RS, has a reputation for fouling. I don't think he does it deliberately, but he is probably one of those "win at all costs" types. Over the couple of months that he has been playing, a little bit of ill-feeling had obviously built up amongst those who played against him. I actually agree that he is out of order sometimes, and needs a quiet word - we all want to stay friends, after all.

Fairly late on, I went in goal for a bit. Goalie is my best position in five-a-side (it is one of the rare occasions where being a shortarse doesn't hinder your chances of stopping the shots), and I like to try and be vocal when I'm in goal. The other team had two great players, MT and NX, but both of them are fairly right-footed. So when I told the defender in front of me to "put him on his left foot", I thought that I was doing my duty in helping defend our goal.

Unfortunately, NX went what I can only describe as mental, raising his arms and complaining about the attitude of our team. Even though it was my comment that triggered his response, and he was complaining about me, it seemed to be directed at others. It is worth noting that NX had been on the receiving end of some of RS' more robust challenges. NX then picked up his stuff and walked off, and the rest of us had a discussion in which we all decided that we need to take it easy if we are going to enjoy it - we are a very mixed-ability group (I personally am rubbish at five-a-side!), so we need to respect the fact that it is never going to be that serious a game.

Or at least, that is what everyone tried to say - however, different people have different ways of expressing things, so it ended with someone telling RS that he needs to cool down on the pitch, only to get called a "psycho" in response.

My question to you, dear reader, is do I need to apologise to NX? It was my comment that set him off. I feel that it was a football comment, but maybe he misinterpreted me as telling the defender to kick his left foot? My instinct is to say, "I am sorry if I offended you, but I also hope you realise that there was nothing personal in what I said"; I don't know NX very well at all, so I certainly don't want to fall out with him.

As for the rest: well I am not convinced that I want to keep playing football if there is going to be continued bad feeling, and I must say that it is largely down to people's inability to concede that other people can sometimes be right. I just want to enjoy it, and if I don't enjoy it anymore, then what is the point?

UPDATE (13th June): I emailed NX a day or so after writing this - he apologised for flying off the handle but also insisted that it was nothing to do with me. Due to work commitments, I couldn't play footy for the last couple of weeks, I may be getting "back on the horse" next week...

How soon is what?

According to the Nottingham Evening Post, ex-Smiths and now Modest Mouse guitarist Johnny Marr could have played for Forest!
For risk of legal action, I am not going to express my views regarding the perceived accuracy or otherwise) of the NEP's stories, or of the general standard of their journalism...

Get the message

To those of you who drive - you know how pay and display car park tickets often feature adverts on the back? Sometimes it is a special offer at Bella Pasta, occasionally vouchers to go bowling. In Lichfield, it says that there is "No Excuse for Domestic Abuse".

A very worthy message, but I am not from Lichfield and have to confess it left me wondering what kind of people live there?

Overpaid prima donnas

Who said that footballers and musicians are overpaid, and/or have lost touch with reality?

"My greatest competition is, well, me. I'm the Ali of today. I'm the Marvin Gaye of today. I'm the Bob Marley of today. I'm the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. " - R Kelly

Premiership footballers were asked to donate a day's wages to a Royal College of Nursing hardship fund. The whole squads of Watford and Sheffield United, Fulham, Tottenham, Blackburn, Reading and West Ham did. Chelsea - not one player volunteered.

As reported by Popbitch. I don't recall Ali, Marvin, Marley or Martin Luther King being (alleged) paedophiles. As for the latter, maybe Frank, Andriy and Cashley didn't have their bank details to hand?

Celebrity lookalikes Pt3 - Carlos Tevez special!

Carlos Tevez and Taz-Mania

Carlos Tevez and The Incredible Hulk (courtesy of Football 365):

Carlos Tevez and Dick Dastardly's sidekick, Muttley

Housekeeping

Just a quick note to explain why there has been so little added to the blog recently, followed by a spate of posts in the last two days:

I have been pretty busy with work. I have been pretty busy at home - my brother and I are working to set up a website for Nicola - more on this later. I have also (finally) got around to compiling the BaRabica "anthology", Between the rubbish and the recycling. And of course, we had the Internet "outage" due to the incompetence of Tiscali. But mainly, I have been busy at work, and as most of my blogging is during lunch- and tea-breaks, this has accounted for my silence over the last month or so. Which is a shame as I have stuff to write about - so now it is time to catch up...

In the meantime, here are some nice pictures of "coffee art".

Be thankful for what you have...

Some of you may have previously seen me wax lyrical about Tom Reynolds' book, Blood, Sweat and Tea, and his blog, Random Acts of Reality (see links section on the right).

It is posts like this that seriously bring home how indebted we are to our healthcare professionals, who constantly get treated shabbily by governments and lay people alike.

We may never know if the patient survived, but if she did pass away, at least she wouldn't have died alone...

Derren Brown

I have never really watched any of Derren Brown's TV shows. Not because I am not interested, but more because I either don't realise they are on, or I am just not able to watch.

However, I am very interested in what he does, so when my good friend Mohan offered me his two spare tickets, I thought, "well, there is nothing to lose and it might be entertaining".

I am reasonably sceptical of psychic abilities, and I do not like hypnosis as a form of entertainment. Derren Brown does use some hypnosis, but he is adamant that he is not psychic. Some of what he did was astonishing, some was plain and simple distraction (the sort that a conjuror might use when performing a card trick). However, DB seems quite willing to explain a lot of his techniques. While it would be very easy to harp on in depth about the conscious and sub-conscious mind, it was simply that he would talk a lot, the audience would be trying to second-guess what was going to happen next, and so things would come as a surprise. The best example of this was when a man came on stage in a gorilla suit and stole a banana from a table - only about three people in the audience noticed!

The second half of the show was altogether more complex; it was a tribute to many of the "mind-tricksters" of the past. This included a "seance", whereupon members of the audience would make a table levitate using the powers of the spirit world (or so DB would have us believe), and also a trick called the "Oracle", whereby audience members would write questions, put them in an envelope, and write their initials on the front. DB would then guess the question and answer simply by looking at the envelope, and then did it simply by feel (he was wearing a massive blindfold).

All in all, an entertaining show. The only blackmark in my mind was the use of hypnosis on an audience member - I disagree very strongly with this as it is impossible to tell what long-term effects this may have on someone (I am sure you may have heard horror stories of more vulnerable people who say that their lives changed forever after going to hypnotist's shows). However, DB has clearly done his homework on psychiatric and psychological techniques, and also demostrates a very strong affinity to those who have attempted to perform mind tricks in the past.

Finally, a big thank you to Mohan for the tickets!