World Cup Questions. Answers sought.

There's a kind of fever sweeping the nation and I'll give you a clue it's not yellow or dengue. It is, of course: World Cup Fever. I'm talking about the Association Football World Cup that starts in Brazil imminently (sorry to disappoint those of you who are gearing up for the lacrosse World Cup in July but I try to keep it topical). Last week at work, I watched six grown men spend three hours swapping stickers and casual xenophobia in an effort to complete their commemorative sticker albums. 

Naturally, all this has got me thinking: What is it for? Why should we care? I reject the tribalism inherent in supporting a team as I am suspicious that it teaches a kind of jingoistic nationalism, an unquestioning subservience to power at which I instinctively recoil. Do fans support a team because they wear the same colours as them or do they wear the colours because they support the team? Why do fans pin their emotional well-being to the failures and successes of people they have never met and probably wouldn't get on with if they did? 

On the one hand it seems arbitrary: Why are teams divided geographically? Why not by height or hair colour or age? If we are to have geographical teams shouldn't they be drawn from constituencies of equal size? Why all the fuss about this World Cup and not the one played by the other gender? In tennis, equal coverage (and pay) has been granted to both genders (after a long struggle). Why is football so far behind?

On the other hand it seems sinister: The massive corruption at FIFA that their internal investigation process is amazingly unable to investigate because... er... there's a World Cup starting. The billions spent on stadiums in Brazilian cities with barely functioning hospitals and no public transport. The hundreds of migrant workers enslaved in Qatar (due to host the tournament in eight years time) their passports impounded on arrival, forced to work and watch their colleagues fall to their deaths. The beautiful game.

I would quite like a caxirola though.

   

n = 5/24(n cubed + 17n + 30)

Like any anarcho-syndicalist blogger, little makes me angrier than unearned income. Now suddenly I have some. And I've been experiencing guilt about the value of bitcoins. I will assume that my tech-savvy regular readers are familiar with the electronic currency, but for anyone who may be reading this from a future (perhaps researching a doctorate in the origins of the philosophical-bartending movement that came to dominate poetry in the mid Twenty-first Century) where bitcoins have gone the way of the groat and the ecu, a brief explanation follows:

Bitcoins are mined by setting a computer to solve increasingly difficult equations. There is a finite number of bitcoins available. For each equation solved a bitcoin is earned. All the easy equations have been solved now, so you would need a supercomputer to be a miner. However, the coins can be exchanged for 'real' money and then swapped back or spent at the limited number of places that accept them. They are a volatile currency to say the least. Early adopters might have spent a hundred bitcoins on a pizza. Before Xmas last year, a bitcoin was worth nearly $1200. They have since crashed in price and I bought a fraction of a bitcoin (0.038 to be precise) at the recent low in May. That £10 investment is now worth £15.07.

Fortunately, my local pub is one of about three in the country that take bitcoins, so I can spend my windfall on a couple of pints of bitter this afternoon, instead of worrying about getting a fortnightly 50% dividend which would net me... *grabs pen and back of envelope*... one moment... *opens calculator app*... bear with me... *opens Wolfram Alpha calculation engine*...Ahem: Which would net me £3760 by the end of the tax year if they continued to rise at this rate.  

Incidentally, the simple equation this blogpost has as its title is the one for which I had to consult Wolfram Alpha in order to reach the total £3760. My old maths teacher Frederick J. Clarke would be ashamed of me. Also I couldn't work out how to get the little superscript '3' in the title so I had to write 'cubed' instead. This would have come as no surprise whatsoever to my old computer science and business studies teacher Louise Absom.

Jigsawn

The beginning

The world record for solving a previously unknown 500 piece jigsaw is 54 minutes and 10 seconds (this is a link to a records site that quotes the source not an hour long video of a man solving a jigsaw puzzle). This one took three of us a little over five hours. Spike said he wouldn't help unless it was a Doctor Who puzzle. He loves Dr Who. 

My favourite jigsaw record-breaking story features craftsman and fellow Weymuffian,Dave Evans' attempt to build the world's largest jigsaw. He made the 40,000 piece giant puzzle only to see it collapse a week before it was to be presented to the Queen for her Golden Jubilee. The experts claim the time to complete a puzzle quadruples as it doubles in size. So if Evans had brought in me, Charlie and Spike to reassemble his puzzle it would have taken us:

The end!

5 = 5
10 = 20
20 = 80
40 = 320
80 = 1280
160 = 5120
320 = 20480
640 = 81920

Let's be generous and say it would have taken us 30,000 hours or a little over three and a half years!

Election Blues and Clerihews

It's coming up to European election time. Lacking the glamour of the general election and the relevance of the local election, the European election can come across as a bit faceless and boring. You don't even get to vote for a person. Just a party (not the good kind). Here in the East, there are seven seats that are distributed to the parties according to the proportion of the vote received. Asleep yet?

Honestly, I am boring myself just writing this. Vote Green. Here are some Clerihews of three of the party leaders:

Nigel Farage's
Party's the largest
Bunch of xenophobics.
(That's Greek for racist pricks!)

David Cameron
Lives in a mansion
Surrounded by Nitwits
Cutting workers' rights and disability benefits.

Nick Clegg
Is a chocolate egg
That likes to lie to you.
(One part of the sentence above is not true.)

If you think you can do better, why not write one for Edward Miliband and whoever is leading the Green Party this week? A small prize will be awarded for the best one in the comments below...

Forth! The Three Walkers!

Every year or so or whenever we can fit it in, my brother, my father and I go on a holiday. To stop us drinking all day and arguing we tend to theme the break around a pleasant walk. And by 'pleasant walk' of course I mean 'ridiculous endurance challenge'. 

Last year found us struggling against driving snow and forty knot headwinds on the Norfolk coast. Not to be outdone, my brother has organised this year's trip. We are going to walk the Test Way, which follows the river Test from source to mouth for forty-six miles across most of Hampshire.

Obviously, that seemed a bit easy for our normal long weekend, so he has made it tougher by restricting us to two days and insisting we start the first day before it gets light so we can get a couple of leagues in before breakfast. This is all very well for my country-dwelling coffee-drinking companions. Whom early nights and early starts have made healthy, wealthy and free of farts (or something, not too up on my rhyming aphorisms). But for the indulged city-boy who would never rise before noon given the choice it presents something of a challenge. I am actually writing this, in bed, at quarter-to-three in the afternoon. I did get up earlier so I could lie in the bath for a bit. Forty-six miles. Two days. Hmmm...  

A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time the King of Nursery Rhyme Land called his Chief Teller of Fairy Tales to appear before him.

"I want a fairy tale," said the King.

"Your wish is my command," said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales.

"One without wishes," said the King.

"No wishes, your highness?" said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales.

"In all the fairy tales you tell, there are always wishes being granted by talking frogs. I want a story with no wishes and no frogs," said the King.

"No frogs?" said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales.

"No frogs!" said the King.

"How about a toad?" said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales.

"No toads!" said the King.

"What about a newt?" said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales (but he didn't hold out much hope).

"No amphibians!" declared the King. "And, by the way, why do things always have to happen in threes?"

"Things always happen in threes, Sire, that's how things happen. If things didn't happen in threes there would be no order to the world and things would just happen randomly and unexpectedly in twos... or even... fours! I don't want to think about it to be honest!" said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales, the colour draining from his face, "I suppose we should also scrap the "Once upon a time... ...and they all lived happily ever after" framing device while we are at it?" 

"Good idea!" said the King, "I have never understood why a story has to take place in an ill-defined distant history or why its protagonists should enjoy enduring happiness after the tale's conclusion."

"If I have this correct then, Sire, you want a story set in a modern day world, where frogs can't talk, events just occur randomly, wishes don't come true and nobody lives happily ever after."

"Yes!" said the King.

"Well," said the Chief Teller of Fairy Tales, "I can set a tale in such a world, Sire, but I wouldn't want to live in it!" 

Skyfail

Three o'clock and no sign of the engineer. John Paul Sartre said that three o'clock in the afternoon is either too late or too early for anything you want to do and I'm starting to agree. Agreeing with Sartre is not something I often find myself doing. Does this constitute an Existential crisis? Can 'does this constitute an Existential crisis?' even be considered a meaningful question? Such are the questions one is likely to ponder when deprived of Television for two days.

I secretly like the first couple of hours of waiting in the flat for someone to come and fix something. I find it a really good opportunity to do nothing productive. No point starting work on a project when Graham from Sky TV could ring the doorbell any minute.

Graham from Sky TV is visiting as the Sky box has stopped receiving a signal. To start with, Spike was probably the most concerned about it as at least Charlie and I can play scrabble or have an argument about whether or not a word is permitted in scrabble.  

After the first couple of hours of waiting, I start to feel that existential guilt that I haven't done anything except stare into the middle distance. That's when I pull myself together and ring Graham (who should have arrived between 12 and 2). Half an hour, he says. Plenty of time to bang out a blogpost. Not a proper one with links and photos. Just a self-referential piece of existentialism featuring an anthropomorphicised cactus. Outside, it's a cold spring day. Daffodils bloom. Life thrives.