Thanks for wearing your lucky socks, but now it’s time to break out your lucky pants (that’s underpants for you Americans)! That is of course if you’re one of the estimated 5 million English who regularly participate in superstitious pre-match rituals before a game of football (soccer) in order to help your team win. Count them down, how many do you do?
1. Watch the game with the same group of friends every time
2. Watch the game in the same place every time (same pub, house etc)
3. Sing the same football chant
4. Kiss the badge on your football shirt
5. Wear the same item of clothing for every game
6. Wear the same lucky socks
7. Wear the same lucky pants – thankfully games are rarely back to back on consecutive days!
8. Have sex before the game – or more bizarrely, abstain from sex before the game
9. Watch from a lucky chair or seat
10. Wear a lucky hat
Superstition is an interesting thing, possibly the most interesting is that a third of superstitious participants in the 4000 strong survey, said that they felt personally guilty if they didn’t perform their rituals only to then see England lose! And 37 per cent said they would pray for England’s victory, even if they are not religiously inclined.
Despite all this, it’s the superstitious antics of the players that are the most perverse. E.g.:
- Gary Neville refusing to change his boots on field and belt and shoes off field, whilst he was on a winning streak.
- Gary Lineker who would keep the same shirt all game if he scored, but change it at half time if he hadn’t.
- Dean Ashton who score a hat trick (3 goals) after once eating bourbon chocolate biscuits the previous night, and so continued to eat several bourbons the night before every game.
- Shay Given keeping a container of Holy Water in the net of his goal.
It was 1966 World Cup Winner Alan Ball who summed this craziness up thus: “I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe you need it”
For many years, playing computer games was my #1 hobby. This is something I mostly resolved a few years ago, and I now rarely play games, and then only on my iPhone now.
However, Civilization has always had a soft spot in my heart, as it was one of the very first PC games I played, and yes I was known to play it for 24 hours straight whilst at university! In fact, I’m playing Civilisation Revolutions on my iPhone sporadically at the moment. So the news that Civilization 5 is due out this autumn, does pull on the old heart strings. And to be fair, it does look awesome:
I stopped posting funny videos on my blog a while back, but this one is just superb. Give it a few moments to get going, it’s a cracker, the Vitruvian Man cracked me up!
“In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?”
So begins a fantastic article that draws on pollen analysis techniques to determine the history of Easter Island and asks whether we are doomed to extinct ourselves, the way that the inhabitants of Easter Island did when they consumed the entirety of their available resources. It’s a great read which I will summarise here.
Easter Island is devoid of trees, which would have been required to construct and move the standing stone statues the island is famous for. Not to mention the sea worthy boats that must have been available to the Polynesian population for them to hunt the dolphins that archaeological evidence shows was a mainstay of their diet.
“Pollen records show that destruction of Easter’s forests was well under way by the year 800, just a few centuries after the start of human settlement. Then charcoal from wood fires came to fill the sediment cores, while pollen of palms and other trees and woody shrubs decreased or disappeared, and pollen of the grasses that replaced the forest became more abundant.”
It took only a couple of centuries for the humans to start to stamp their imprint on the subtropical forest that dominated the island. With the forests dwindling, so did the indigenousbirds which were also a staple source of food. Within a thousand years, with the whole forest gone, suddenly porpoise bones disappeared from the rubbish heaps: the islanders had lost the ability to build the seafaring canoes they needed to hunt them with.
In desperation, they turned to last remaining abundant meat source: human meat. Cannibalism is evident not only in the oral traditions and history of the people (with insults like: “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!”), but also from archaeological evidence of human bones in garbage heaps.
It’s a simple story in the end. They landed in a subtropical paradise and prospered. A complex society flourished and consumed the finite resources at an unsustainable rate. Eventually natural resources failed and food supplies were compromised. Society fell apart and the islanders fell upon each other.
It’s easy to look at the situation from the comfort of your chair and say: “That would never happen now. We’d never cut down the last tree or kill the last pair of birds.”But it is happening, right now. Unsustainable fishing of fish stocks? A society and economy that’s utterly based on finite oil? Destruction of rainforests at a rate measure each year in the area of land of small countries? Even on a basic fiscal level, Western governments aren’t even able to spend within their means provided by their tax receipts. If we can’t do a simple thing like balance the books, how can we balance the needs of the planet’s ecology?
If we don’t heed the lessons of history, we’re doomed to follow in their footsteps.
This is a compilation video of both real road crashes and public safety adverts. It’s a stunning reminder of just how dangerous the roads are and how it only takes a split second to be in a life changing (or ending) event.
If you can honestly say you’ve never been distracted whilst driving, not even for a second, then feel free not to watch this video. If you ever have been though, as I have, it’s a timely reminder that when you drive a car, death is only a quarter turn of the steering wheel away.
SPEAR is a self defence system that’s based on using your basic human physiology to make yourself and your stance as strong as possible, and I can honestly say, I was amazed how doing something as simple as opening your hand and splaying your fingers, can massively increase the strength in your arm.
We did hours of drills and exercises to show specific traits and strengths of the SPEAR system, always with a view to what happens in the real world and in a real situation. It was intense. It was physical. It was bruising (but then I was paired with a professional rugby player, so it was never going to be easy grappling with someone who does it for a living!). But it was educational, insightful and a lot of fun.
But most of all, I am now better equipped to handle myself in a real situation than I was before. If you get the chance to have a go, I’d definitely recommend a SPEAR course. Here’s a quick intro video that gives you a flavour:
I was very interested to see this article on the BBC website this week on a study from Harvard University: ‘Sausage not steak’ increases heart disease risk of particular interest was this key quote:
“the lifestyle factors associated with eating unprocessed meats and processed meats were similar, but only processed meats were linked to higher risk.”
That’s a really telling conclusion. Personally I think it’s a load of old nonsense that eating red meat is linked to health issues, the reason being, several studies I’ve seen lump processed meats with red meats, when assessing risk factors. It’s very refreshing to see this study do the exact opposite and conclude that red meat does not increase the risk of heart disease!
The world’s dietary advice can be changed, one study at a time.
So far in my life there have been 3 bits of technology that I’ve bought, all of which I never thought I’d need or really use much, but now couldn’t imagine my life without them. They are:
My first Mobile Phone – Duh, I know! But like many people, I was sure I’d hardly ever use a mobile phone, I mean, I’d survived fine without one all these years right? Yeah, clearly silly once I got one.
Sat Nav – “What’s wrong with a map. I hardly ever get lost.” Yeah, I remember saying that many times, but oh man, sat nav is an awesome bit of kit. I note that there are still some poor people stuck without it. They’ll come round.
The iPhone - I always swore I’d never by a Mac, or any other Apple product for that matter. But I have to say, the iPhone is AMAZING. It was everything my previous smart phone should have been. The things you can do with it are simply incredible and I can’t imagine life without it now.
So that’s 1-3 and as the iPhone was a recent acquisition, I didn’t really expect to come across another bit of revolutionary tech so soon. But today I did and I have to say, when I saw the demo video of it, my jaw was on the floor! This might be the single most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen, and will ever see, until I take delivery of my own personal flying car.
For anyone in education or who works in an office or has any contact with clients or suppliers, this is going to replace the humble pen: It is the LiveScribe Pulse Smart Pen. Put simply this pen:
Is a computer in a pen
It records all audio as you write
It can play back the audio, just by clicking on the words you wrote on the page
It understands what you’re “clicking” on with the pen. You can draw interactive menus!
You can upload everything you wrote straight into your computer. No scanner needed
Look, words will never describe properly what this “pen” (I use the term loosely) can do. Check out these 2 videos and then checkout just how cheap it is. I can see this appearing in a parcel in my near future.
Given the hung parliament, I thought the UK election results map was interesting, as it really shows the partisan nature of various regions throughout the UK. I know it’s a slightly simplistic interpretation, but you can see in the map below, that the Conservatives control most of England, especially in rural areas, whereas the Labour strength comes mostly from highly populated inner city areas.
Yes of course there’s an argument for how constituency boundaries are drawn, but it’s very difficult to have an unbiased opinion on that, and I accept that my own view would be clearly clouded by the outcome that I’d want. But what has not occurred to me before, is that 2 of Labour’s clear areas of dominance, are South Scotland and South Wales. In fact Labour have 41 seats in Scotland as a whole, and 26 seats in Wales, compared with the Tories’ 1(!) and 8 respectively.
So consider this: if Labour ever really allowed the devolution of Scotland and Wales and this general election turned into an English election, that would result in a loss of 67 Labour seats, compared with a loss of only 9 conservative seats, meaning a swing to the Tories of 58, or a fifth of Labour’s power base. It would also reduce the number of MPs in the English parliament by 100, to 550. In the current election then, this would have given the Tories a clear majority with 298 seats (54%). Compared with Labour’s 191 seats (35%).
It is no surprise at all then that Labour rejected the Scottish National Party’s suggestion of a “Progressive Alliance” with Labour and Plaid Cymru (Welsh nationalist party). I can’t ever see Labour agreeing to the full political devolution of Scotland or Wales, as to do so would be political suicide.
Robb Wolf has be at the forefront of dietary and lifestyle advice in the Crossfit community for as long as I can remember and I’m quite looking forward to getting his first book, which is now available on pre-order at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk:
