The Importance of Being Idle

If He Were A Mime He'd Already Be Dead

Man alive I am bored already, and today has barely begun!
Seriously though, what the hell? What am I gonna do with yet another day? There seem to be altogether too many of them in a row - we should get a break somewhere where there isn't a day and I don't have to feel like this. That'd be nice.
Hmmm so let's see. The other night I was watching a programme on TV about why the British love a loser, and in fact why we find it rather vulgar to win anything, and if we do by some freak occurence win, why we try and pass it off as luck. Now seems to me you don't have to look all that far, that's the Victorians for you right there, and more specifically their attitude towards sport. See, once upon a long ago, when we'd just invented cricket and the colonies hadn't started to beat us at it, there were two types of people who played cricket: gentlemen and players. Gentlemen, quite obviously, were wealthy professional men who played for the love of the game, and players were professional cricketers who played to get paid. Clearly, getting paid to play a game was very un-gentlemanly, and so players (who obviously comprised the vast majority of the foreign teams from the colonies) were not popular due to their obvious vulgarity. I also doubt any other country in the world would have spawned the phrase "It's not the winning, it's the taking part" as some sort of maxim. It's weird though, I mean we nationally support the "plucky brit" who embarks on some foolhardy project with absolutely no idea what they're up against, and yet when we have people who kick arse at whatever walk of life they've chosen, we tend to if not belittle them then certainly down-play their achievements. I shall provide two examples: Dame Ellen McArthur, the worlds leading solo yachts woman, who nobody really pays any great attention to, and Eddie Edwards, the worlds worst ski-jumper, who for a brief period back in the mid-90s was a media celebrity without compare, based purely on his almost tragic inability to ski-jump (and I do mean almost tragic, how he didn't kill himself is beyond me). He hit the chat show circuit, had a hit record, wrote a book about his non-achievement, did the lecture circuit... and why exactly?? Because for some reason we, as a nation, took him to our hearts, because he was a "plucky brit". He had, for instance, never actually ski-jumped in his life until he was in the Olympic finals, because there weren't any near where he lived, and he obviously never actually went to any countries where there were because that would've been too much like effort. Nope, he practiced in his drive way, and yet still expected to go out there and win a gold medal against competitors who'd been jumping since they were children, simply because they were foreign and clearly not as good as us Brits. To my mind though, he wasn't a hero of any kind, he was a fucking embarrasment, he was actually making his nation look bad in front of the entire world. I don't think he was brave, I think he was fool-hardy. Of course if he'd actually have been any GOOD, then the tabloids wouldn't have been supporting him, they'd have been looking for ways to destroy him, but there you go, I've never quite understood this country...
My word that was a long and pointless rant. lol
In other news I didn't get tickets to Live8, so I suspect I'll watch it on TV, although my copy of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou came this morning and I really want to see that... I also need to go out and get some sort of food into the house, but I'm tired and I can't really be bothered, although I know I'll regret this laziness at some point in the very near future.
I'm sure I had other things I wanted to talk about (my fear of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie producing a child, for instance, a child so physically perfect it would dazzle us all and would eventually rule the earth with a perfect fist of iron, why Tom Cruise needs to keep his fucking mouth shut in public, and why I'm wondering if I'm a potential serial killer...), but this post is already far too long, so I'm sure I'll come back to them later.

posted by BadMonkey @ 10:35 AM