Showing posts with label Tennis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tennis. Show all posts

Thursday 3 December 2020

The Thirteenth Month

I have often wondered why we have twelve months when we say four weekes is a month. If that were so we'd be starting our thirteenth month tomorrow and would probably called Undecember (latin for eleven is Undecim) . Here is an explanation , apparently the romans started with ten months but then tried to match it to the (just over) 12 lunar cycles in a year so a 13 month year would be out of sync with th elunare cycles.

The thing remind me of imperial weights and money systems  (12 pennies to a shilling , 5 shillings to a crown , then there's half crowns , twenty shillings in a pound and twenty one shillings in a guinea. Then sixteen ounces to a pound, fourteen pounds to a stone etc , then you have twelve inches to a foot , three feet to a yard , six feet to a fathom etc.

Then you have tennis scoring which is weird as hell and the Duckworth-Lewis method in cricket for curtailed matches and all the weird scoring possibilities with light stopping play and more.

Metric is a far more sensible measurement system , although people still have problems with our swith to decimalisation fifty years back.

So this is my first post of the month and think I'm going to go with "The Killing Moon" by Echo & The Bunnymen because of the lunar cycles that prompted this post in th efirst place.

Saturday 3 August 2019

Anyone For Tennis?


This is nothing about tennis, which is a game I find generally tedious (I can't play or hit a return serve), although Wheelchair Tennis actually does command my total respect, I cannot play being reasonably fully mobil and these girls and guys do it from a wheelchair, how absolutely amazing is that.

The Bok had a song called "Tennis" but I don't have a recording of that, maybe I should try and recreate it, but this is just about the Cream song which is one of those Cream songs that is like nothing else Cream did and I like it and actually think it's good. There are others like "Pressed Rat and Warthog"(the "B" side) that are just plain silly, and I suppose lots of bands tried and keep trying completely different sounds to the point of taking on alter egos to either be able to play more intimate gigs aor see if it's just their name that sells.

"Anyone For Tennis" is the Theme from the film "The Savage Seven" (a biker film lost in time but available on Amazon.com) and was recorded during the "Wheels of Fire" sessions and released as a single and on the album soundtrack. It was written by Eric Clapton and someone called Martin Sharp

I don't know why I wanted to post this, possibly because I saw a "Best of Cream" (which doesn't feature the single) in Beyond Vinyl but it's Saturday , it grey , and it's the first day of the Football season, so all is reasonably good.

I keep looking at posts I've done and often notice spelling and grammatical mistakes and more and more I think I am being wrongly autocorrected rather than mistyping, or maybe I am just being paranoid. The latest was a post which had "their" instead of "there". Now given that I am a bit of a grammar stickler myself that is not a mistake I think I would make but autocorrect might.

I know it's short (this post) but see what you think .

Monday 23 October 2017

Darkness


It's twenty to seven and looking out the the window it is black, it is Monday and I really need to walk to work not having done much walking over the weekend. I have had the Beastie Boys ("Stake Your Rump") and The Stooges ("1969") spun by John Hillcock on 6Music so all is not doom and gloom. I am hoping it won't be as cold and windy as last night.

I was reading about how Lewis Hamilton, despite being the most successful Formula One driver ever is not universally loved.I find this similar to the Andy Murray situation in tennis. Murray is the most successful UK tennis player since Virginia Wade, but when he won Wimbledon the press missed her out of UK successes (she's a woman) and Murray is Scottish so still not as acceptable as Tim Henman. Same with Hamilton, and could I suggest it's partly media racism. Both of them also do things that the UK press hate... they do their job and succeed, which the press find very difficult to denigrate, so when they run out of insults they ignore them.

Personally I find both sports tedious (F1 is going round in circles sounding like a mosquito, and tennis is stop start and goes on for too long like cricket and American Football), but love Murray and Hamilton for their attitude to their sport and the way the treat the gutter press.


The Brexit and Trump victories have also validated open racism and misogyny, which the red top media perpetrates and its subscribers lap up the hate and spread it often defending the rags becuase of the crosswords or sports coverage.

I today found out about Princess Margaret's allegend liaison's with gangster John Bindon, there is a documentary listed here but I suggest you google to find out more as all the links were to gutter press websites.

So what song for this morning, it has to be "Darkness" by Van Der Graaf Generator, as at ten past seven it's still black outside. Try and have a great Monday, it will get lighter .... I hope .