Olympic Avoidance Log 2008: Day 6 and 7 – The Team, Lightweight, Coxless,...
As I move into the second week of Olympic avoidance, the game is getting considerably harder. The reason? I am no longer in charge of the television as I am visiting my parents. And they want to...
View ArticleNo Ray Ewry…
So, OK, Michael Phelps may be rather good and no doubt in four years time he will become the most medaltastic performer in any sport ever ever ever, BUT at the moment he still just trails the great Ray...
View ArticleOlympic Avoidance Log 2008: Day 8 – Of Tables
STOP WINNING MEDALS so called Team GB (so British to invent a teamname which tries not to actually say the contentious British word). Its relatively easy to avoid the Olympics when your radar is set...
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Swimming: Analysis (incl. GRAPHS!)
The swimming is finally finished*, Michael Phelps is reaping in lucrative sponsorship deals and everyone has started watching the athletics instead, so it must be time for some stat-cruching! The...
View ArticleAfter The Goldrush
In an ordinary Olympic games, Britain racks up 5 or 6 gold medals: this time, we have 16 and counting – marvellous news, incredible work on the part of Team GB, etc etc. But also, in a sense a slightly...
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olympic fashion watch – prequel
during the 2006 winter olympics in turin i developed an overweening and somewhat embarrassing crush on tempestuous skateuse IRINA SLUTSKAYAshe of the apple cheeks, mousy hair and how shall i put...
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the 2012 london olympics opening ceremony
question: who should create and direct it? preamble: the chinese capitalised (er haha) on A: a known gift for fireworks, B: a known gift for people prettily running with flags, C: spectacular oriental...
View ArticleOlympic Avoidance Log 2008: The End
So the UK won more medals than ever before. Well ever if you don’t include 1908 which forevermore will be known as the British Cheating Olympics where we made up most of the sports and the competitors...
View ArticleHurray for the FSF!
Never ones to miss the chance of a lovely headline or two, our friends at the Football Supporters Federation had this round the blogs by last night, well done them! I’ve seen some ridiculous measures...
View ArticleTed Williams’ frozen head has a myspace page
this week the slugz of time talk cryostuff as the inspiration (?) for futurama gets read out and discussed, interspersed with a forgotten olivia newton-john classic about fate and “the gift of life...
View ArticleUFC vs WWE
I’d never watched any of the ‘ultimate fighting’ stuff, bar a little in a pub once. It looked very boring to me. I’m a big WWE fan – as silly as it is, I am hugely entertained by that. At the weekend I...
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Blind swordsmen are like football teams with ten men
Hard to beat. Love and Honour the sadly generically titled final film in Yôji Yamada’s samurai trilogy is a sedate, old fashioned tale which features a blind swordsman. The ICA for some reason had to...
View ArticleSuspicious? Don’t be ridiculous!
Two recent results from the South African Vodacom Second Division: Young Pirates 2 Real Madrid (not that Real Madrid) 26 Namaqua Stars 50 Kakamus Cosmos 0 Extraordinarily, the South African FA is...
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Its Not Just Cricket, Its Maths!
I cannot say I was over the moon when the Netherlands beat England in the opening game of the 20 20 World Cup.Clearly as a neutral it is great when a minnow beats a big gun, especially when said big...
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I Hate Andy Murray
Andy Murray chastises a tennis ball During Wimbledon’s inaugural set of night-time tennis on Monday night, played under what’s become the most famous roof since the Sistine Chapel, I found that I...
View ArticleFilms Are Short – GET A NEW BLADDER
Things I have never really understood. a) Pies at football b) People going to the toilet during a movie Both of these are predicated on the same issue really. Football matches take less than two hours....
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Baseball roundup
I’ve left it a little late, huh? The season could be over tonight, around 11pm. That’s Eastern Standard Time, Bronx Time, the time at Yankee Stadium, where the World Series returns this evening after a...
View ArticleThe Most Important Game Ever Made #23: Druuuuuuuuugs
Been away for a while and will probably be away for a while longer, but I have a brief window to advance this now-glacial series a little further. So then, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds: William...
View ArticleWhy Capello really dropped John Terry
Of the thousands and thousands of words that have been written about The John Terry Situation this week, Louise Taylor’s ridiculously florid piece in the guardian on Wednesday which starts: Fabio...
View ArticleThe Levellers
I wrote a post before. in the “I Was A Goblin” series, about how the Dungeons & Dragons concept of player “levels” and “levelling up” was an innovation which became hardwired into pretty much every...
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I WAS A GOBLIN: In Which I Was Actually A Goblin
I was suspicious of Live Action Role Playing for a long time. I had three excellent reasons: it couldn’t possibly work, it verged dangerously close to SPORTS, and most of all White Dwarf strongly...
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Come as you are (or not)
Ryan Lochte is never one to shy away from a good publicity stunt. He may have 11 Olympic swimming medals of various colours, but as you can see below his main talent is for getting people to look at...
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Vinylanders
Tree Rex. Eye Brawl. Scarlet Ninjini. If you’re the parent of a small boy there’s a good chance you know these names well: the ferocious cast of Skylanders, a computer-game-meets-action-figure...
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In praise of Thatcher.
No, not that one, it’s okay. I mean Timothy Thatcher, the wrestling one. No? The one with the mean face. No? Let’s start this story again. I love professional wrestling. It can be looked at in so...
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The Dave Clark Five
Hooray for the England Blind Football Team. They beat Greece 5-1 in what appears to be a bit of a walkover. And are happily anticipating the blind European champions where the prodigious talents of...
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They Don’t Like Cricket…
Did the members of 10CC* actually like cricket or not (answer THEY LOVED IT!) Cricket has, for want of a better word, a fuddy-duddy image. It has panama hats, dress codes and ties for supporters. And...
View ArticleIntertotal Football
My adopted* Veikkausliiga (Finnish Premiership) team, FC Honka, seem to be suffering a touch of ‘second season syndrome’, but I don’t mind, as one of my most enjoyable discoveries this summer has been...
View ArticleThe Swish Of The Traditional Curtain Raiser
A question just occurred to me: does the phrase “traditional curtain raiser” get used AT ALL outside of a sporting context? Actually I wondered if it even got used outside of the Community Shield...
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Jump, They Say
Sorry, I don’t mean to turn this into the wacky world of inventions but these things keep nagging me from the edge of my consciousness. I’ll give you more on “The Scandal Of Skinny Water” later, but...
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More Songs About Volleyball and Food
Following on from last night’s volleyballpop discussion on Lollards, I thought I’d do a quick post as a follow up with some links to the other songs I mentioned! Doing the theme tune to volleyball...
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amisquake: or u can’t spell “ESTABLISH THE CALIPHATE” w/o a “q”
i. BUQSHA, BURQA, FAQIR, INQILAB, MBAQANGA, MUQADDAM, QABALAH, QADI, QAIMAQAM, QALAMDAN, QASIDA, QAT, QAID, QANAT, QI, QIBLA, QIGONG, QINDAR, QINDARKA, QINGHAOSU, QINTAR, QIS, QIVIUT, QOPH, QWERTIES,...
View ArticleA Trigger Almanac: 2007
Here’s a selection of some of the most entertaining/interesting posts on the site this year – thoroughly incomplete, as it doesn’t include much of the frothing ephemera that makes FT so good (in my...
View ArticleFreaky Trigger & The Moomins of Pop – 13 February
PLUG PLUG! Tonight leading Moomin academic Dr Vick, Tom Ewing and Pete Baran, corralled into brilliance by the Atommick Brane herself halloo the return of the kid-lit husband list! (Ms Puddleduck come...
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mah jongg attacks!
belatedly reviewing lust, caution, the element i most woke up to was probably the mah jongg, a game my family played a little when i was a teen — we had a very strange set made not of ivory-bamboo or...
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cthulhuedo
the hideously maddening game from World of Lovecraft: —yog sothoth beyond the mountains of madness with the indescribable terror —the winged fungus-beings in the outer dimensions with the unspeakable...
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Punk Metaphor Watch #1: Guess His Theory
With the biting winds of PUNK ROCK beginning to blow through the Popular comments boxes it’s time to examine the ways in which punk has become institutionalised as a metaphor – starting with Richard...
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Blurzillas, the Olympics and Jet Li’s Piss
So the BBC have launched their slightly abstruse trailer for the Olympics. It being a two minute summary of Wu Cheng’en’s Journey To The West, better known in the west as MONKEY. The animated two...
View ArticleAnnouncing The Comprehensive FT Olympic Coverage (Snidely)
I hate the Olympics. Once every four years the world seems to stop –for some sort of celebration of fair play, school bullies and bizarre stage management. This seems all kinds of wrong to me,...
View ArticleOlympic Preview: SWIMMING
Have we got a chance in the backstroke? Or will we sink without trace? As one of FT’s diligent aquatic correspondents I’ve put together a quick guide to the swimming events – the form, the favourites...
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Olympic Preview: WEIGHTLIFTING
Some of Freaky Trigger’s Olympic coverage, you will have realised reading Kat’s swimming piece, is being provided by writers who are genuine experts and enthusiasts in their field – as well as...
View ArticlePremature Sports and British Withdrawal.
Isn’t the Olympic opening ceremony tomorrow? You know, 08/08/08 = money, money, money? (Actually the games start at 8.08pm, which suggests that the first track should be a cover of the Abba tune by 808...
View ArticleOlympic football and Eurosport commentators
“No score at the break – the mighty Brazil being held by Belgium.” We have the old problem here of commentators having stereotyped ideas fixed in their small brains before they have seen a team play....
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Foiled again! etc etc
Unlike, say, sailing, fencing is a naturally telegenic sport. Violent and shrouded in darkness with dramatically spot-lit little runways for the fencers to jab at each other, each point of a bout will...
View ArticleOlympic Avoidance Log 2008: Day One – Rowing
I hate the Olympics. But it is everywhere (except for the fencing), so it is very easy to accidentally stumble across it. In the last Olympics I managed a personal best of racking up less than an hour...
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Olympic Avoidance Log 2008: Day 2: Bouncyball (Giant Division)
I saw a minute of the Basketball game between the USA and China today. Gosh Basketball is dull. Look at all the things I thought about in that minute to try to avoid engaging with the game a) Is...
View ArticleHis snatch was his downfall
Thanks to the miracle of the BBC streaming video I have now seen some live weightlifting – the mens’ 62kg finals. I can report that I was – as someone in the comments mentioned – quite wrong about the...
View ArticleSwimming: Rebecca gets gold!
You’ve probably seen the headlines already – in the early hours of this morning Britain’s Rebecca Adlington won the 400m freestyle, making her the first women’s swimming medallist since 1984 and the...
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No Rubber and No Blow Up Dolls
You know how I keep saying I hate the Olympics. Well there is one bit of the Olympics I like, it’s the bit which suggests that there is still room for bonkers artistry and fireworks this a po-faced...
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Olympic Fashion Watch: ARCHERY
Taking time out from my dedicated swimming coverage, I caught a bit of the women’s archery last night. The Koreans totally dominate this sport – possibly because the opposition take one look at them...
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