Any Other Business: Part LXIX

As the title suggests, so forth.

The Purity of the Turf Revisited

There was an unfortunate coincidence the other week of happenings in the Tour de France and the European Championships. Kylian Mbappe was running at speed towards defenders and the commentator bellowed about how they were backing off because they were so afraid of him. Well, yeah, because he was near the edge of the penalty box and if they touched him he would fall down. Indeed if they didn’t touch him but merely invaded his personal space he would probably also fall down. Because, despite his great speed and skill, Mbappe would always rather fall down theatrically and seek a penalty or a free kick than ride a bad tackle for the sake of glory as Maradona did in the 1986 World Cup for his spectacular goal against England. But this is somehow now normal in soccer. When Jurgen Klinsmann joined Spurs in the mid-90s the parodic diving goal celebration was appreciated because it was understood that diving was wrong and he was repentant. Now diving is par for the course. Gamesmanship. Clever play. There are any number of euphemisms to cover such disgusting cowardly craven cheating. But on the same day Mbappe was being praised there had been a number of crashes in Le Tour. Geraint Thomas, after one, with an audible pop, had his dislocated shoulder put back in place, and then got back on his bike to continue the race. He is still continuing in the race. I’ve complained before about the decline of soccer as both spectator sport and character building exercise due to the incessant cheating and the tactical negativity (raised to an art form by the Italians). It is not hard to imagine a time-travelling Spartan on his way to compete at Olympia passing Geraint Thomas: “What was that pop?” “Dislocated my shoulder. Put it back in.” “Respect”. Can you imagine that same Spartan having anything other than utter contempt for the parade of dissemblers at the Euros? Bafflingly two Atlantic writers have been praising the England team. Because they make all the right gestures for all the right political causes. And this apparently makes it okay to completely overlook these footballers’ actual conduct as footballers. England might well win tonight, but it will have an asterisk after it, just like France’s disgraceful triumph in 2018. The conduct of their fans, booing the Danish national anthem, defended by Gary Neville, and shining laser pointers at the Danish goalkeeper before a penalty kick, was equalled only by the conduct of their players, diving to get an unwarranted penalty, and thereafter retreating into corners with the ball like they were small children going nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. I don’t know how such behaviour is a spectator sport. I don’t know how such behaviour is morally improving. And I certainly won’t be tuning in tonight to see a thrilling clash between such a cheating team and a team renowned for not playing, in an attitude of pure defensiveness that, if replicated, would see all matches everywhere end 0-0. The only way to win this curious game of petulant millionaires is not to play…

Intemperate language betrays inane logic

So, an incident at the RDS on Friday made me think about an unhinged conspiracy theory that rattled around Facebook back in 2013. Apparently the real reason that Pope Benedict XVI was resigning the Papacy was nothing to do with the rigours of the job and his advanced age. Oh no, it was to avoid being extradited *somewhere* to stand trial for covering up child abuse. Now, this didn’t seem all that logical. He would after all have to never leave the Vatican ever again by the logic of the argument. But he went to Castel Gandolfo a few months later. And no SWAT teams abseiled down from helicopters to crash thru the windows and arrest him for extradition. And they never have in all the years since. Because the argument was bollocks. And it was very obviously bollocks if you took the time to read the ‘article’ that was being breathlessly shared. The only problem was nobody did, because, in the manner of the scam outlined hilariously in the standout essay in Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship, it played in to all their prejudices and fears about the world. I watched semi-aghast as numerous acquaintances after years of university education, who would regard themselves as educated and sophisticated, fell for gibberish, because they would also regard themselves as progressive, and this gave them a heaven-sent opportunity to vent Anti-Catholic bile in the name of justice. None of them ever posted anything retracting their venom when Benedict moseyed out of the Vatican, none of them ever gave any indication of feeling even a little bit sheepish about having fallen hook, line and sinker for total nonsense. Because none of them had stopped to wonder why the tone of the ‘article’ felt so wrong – breathless, abusive, poorly structured, poorly phrased, full of pseudo-legal claptrap. I couldn’t help but feel the same tonal incongruity the other day pouring forth endlessly, repetitively, and then see on Twitter and Facebook the faithful for whom it was meant lapping it up; all oblivious to the total insanity clear to anyone who would actually listen to it, think about it, and call it what it was – nonsense.

*As with a previous post on Legion I feel I ought clarify a drift from decorum; hopefully more people than not got the Blackadder Goes Forth reference and appreciated the tongue-in-cheek nature of using it amid a complaint about use of language.

Any Other Business: Part LXIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

It’s March, Bones, but not as we knew it, not as we knew it, not as we knew it then

Something approaching a red alert

Now is the winter of our discontent… Etc. Hours before the clock struck midnight and we entered Level 5, a return to a modified form of the panicked lockdown of March and April, news leaked that the number of coronavirus cases in schools were actually surging. But no matter, the important thing is that most people stay under house arrest for six weeks, while the schools stay open. If the numbers don’t improve, we will be chided for our complacency, rather than the schools being shuttered just to see if that might make a difference. The 5 Level plan fell apart from the moment it was announced Dublin was between two of the stages. The Engineer held forth last week to me that all we needed was a simple 3 Level plan — 1) basic precautions 2) things are hotting up 3) lock it down — and simple empirical thresholds to trigger those transitions, like 14-day new cases/per 100,000 population figures applied by county. Instead we have had our own ‘chaotic disaster’ of illogic, inconsistency, endless leaking by Leo Varadkar and Simon Harris, and pointless back and forth. And what frustrates more than all is the insistence that the schools stay open, even though this logically consistently offends against reason when all gatherings are bad, all indoor gatherings are very bad, but schools are somehow magically grand.

I for one have this vision of —-Level 6: Apocalypse—

BUT THE SCHOOLS STAY OPEN

Trop de Grand Tours

Yesterday while watching Eurosport manfully attempt to cover the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta Espana at the same time my mind rebelled. I had slowly realised that the Giro seemed light on big names this year after Geraint Thomas was invalided out, and then when watching highlights showing Roglic pipping Alaphillipe for Liege-Bastogne-Liege I figured out that if they were there then many big names had skipped the Giro because it overlapped with the Vuelta. The Vuelta was therefore the bigger race. But watching them both in these past few days has been an unnerving experience. I have literally started to feel cold just from watching the unusual vistas: there is something karmically wrong about Grand Tour cycling in the late autumn, indeed the Vuelta is going to hurtle into November. And even when temperatures were still high in Sicily the landscapes looked autumnal, and increasingly desolate. Not exactly the mood you usually get from the sun-kissed tours. And not exactly the mood you want to imprint on yourself for six weeks of strictest lockdown either…

Zhang Yimou presents Tour de France 2020

The French sports minister’s suggestion the Tour de France could be held behind closed doors caused much confusion yesterday. But this was not a comment lost in translation, there is in fact advanced pre-production on the plan with a film director, writes B. Bradley Bradlee from lockdown in Hubei province.

The spectators this year will be animatronic, but their clothes and hair will be changed daily to fool the peloton.

Roxana Maracineanu’s statement at first appeared to be garbled, and then after clarification simply insane. The Tour de France is after all defined by taking place outdoors, and with or without spectators the peloton rides as tight as a flock of birds and social distancing be damned. But the plan is as logical as only the French could think. Social distancing will not be enforced because the riders, their teams, and their accommodation will all in fact already be quarantined – as the race will take place behind closed doors, on a proposed 60 acre soundstage in the south of France.

This would be 43 times the size of the 007 soundstage at Pinewood and is already at an advanced stage of pre-production, preparatory to Chinese military flying in for construction in a planned 10 days. A number of animatronic spectators are already being manufactured, with a bewildering array of costumes and wigs being sourced so that the peloton will believe them to be different each day. A small herd of goats will be installed on a mountain laid with real grass so that a sniper operating a zipline camera can recreate the effect of animals fleeing the noisy helicopter camera.

Zhang Yimou, acclaimed film director and maestro of the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony, is masterminding this production. He is also on lockdown in Hubei province and spoke to us across the balcony. “This is for me like taking a theatre production on a cruise ship, you can’t go back for anything you forgot once you’ve started, so it’s high-stakes. Once the riders and their teams are in, that’s it. The ‘hotels’ better have all the rice and pasta they need…” We asked how the Tour would showcase France while indoors? “Huge greenscreen backgrounds, cutting edge! Real time footage of Provence”.

As well as complicated projections in the background for television, the physical space the riders travel thru will be something between an Escher staircase and a Victorian stage spectacle involving levers and pulleys. While unwilling to reveal details of how he would achieve an undulating terrain the director cackled, “The King of the Mountains will be as confused as he is exhausted by the end of this trek”. Apparently the French are resisting having Chris Froome mauled by a lion who will then be shot live on air. The director grumbled about Coppola being allowed to kill a water buffalo, and insisted that getting #ClaudetheLion trending on Twitter could only add to the publicity of the race. When pressed he admitted drinking an awful lot of green tea during this lockdown, but insisted the idea still had genuine artistic merit.

B. Bradley Bradlee is fictional editor emeritus of The New York Times. He is currently a quarantined roving reporter for the German weekly Die Emmerich-Zeitung.