We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The famed Australian cricketer (and much else) Keith Miller has just died aged 84. While idling through some obit-ing about this remarkable man, I came across this amazing throwaway paragraph, seized upon by Tim Blair and included in the original posting, but originally in a comment, here:
After what he went through during the war, cricket always remained just a game to him. He flew Mosquito night fighters. A lifelong love of Beethoven saw him leave his group during a raid over Germany and fly a further 50 miles to Bonn, where he flew low, at some risk, over the city – just to see the place where his hero was born…
I had no idea that Keith Miller cared anything for such things as Beethoven, let alone that he cared that much. (And I am guessing that he did not endanger anyone else’s life besides his own, right? Perry?)
It is truly amazing how much new stuff you learn about people when they die.
I have not really managed to develop much of an interest in the Olympic Games currently underway in Greece. I am watching the television right now. A bunch of Greek ‘fans’ are objecting to some US athletes for reasons I cannot quite seem to understand, judging by the less than helpful BBC commentator team.
The Games are not supposed to be about nationalism, and yet the constant focus seems to be on how many of ‘our’ (British) athletes have won how many gold, silver and bronze medals. When the Games are completed, there will be the usual bleating/gloating over how well ‘our’ men and women did. If ‘we’ do badly, be ready and primed for a great wailing about the unsportiness, unfitness, lack of moral fibre blah blah of young British folk.
It is easy to forget that the Olympics were originally envisioned as celebrating the value of individual achievement and struggle over nationalistic competition. I think it is fair to say that this hope has been well and truly thwarted.
I have always regardless the Olympics with indifference at best (I am not a great sports fan) but clearly the people organising the games in Athens are completely demented.
Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.
Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at the gates or be shut out. High on the list of blacklisted beverages is Pepsi, but even the wrong bottle of water could land spectators in trouble.
These people would be funny if they were not so self-important. And from a PR point of view: message to the folks sponsoring the Olympic… rule number one is do not piss off your prospective customers. Morons.
And whilst on the subject of sporting madness, what I cannot understand is why the furore over well known lothario Sven-Goran Eriksson’s love life? So he has some hanky panky with a kiss-and-tell money grubber who happens to be female employee of the Football Association… so what? The guy is the coach of the England football team: he is in the sports business which means reasonable expectations of probity are surely somewhere between rock stars in hotel rooms and sailors on shore leave.
If there is any scandal here it is that Sven’s standards seem to be slipping: at the risk of being ungallant, ‘beauty’ Faria Alam is not quite of the same ‘calibre’ as Italian lawyer Nancy Dell’Olio or Ulrika Jonnson.
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Can it be true that Lance Armstrong is to be stripped of his title by the French authorites? Say it ain’t so, Lance 
I do not have Sky Sports TV, because then all pretence of doing anything at all with my life would disintegrate. But I am a sports fan, and I am currently watching a game of cricket, on Ceefax.
You would be surprised how enjoyable this can be. Ceefax is especially good for following limited overs cricket, where each side only has a fixed number of balls to bat against, and where it’s all finished and done with in one day. These kinds of games can fluctuate wildly, and just watching the scorecard tick over can be very enjoyable, and fits in well with performing other tasks.
And there is no kind of cricket of which the above is more true than Twenty20 cricket, where each side has only twenty overs (equals 120 deliveries) to make its runs, and where the whole thing is over in one evening. And as if to emphasise the extreme extremity of this extreme form of cricket, the teams are not called boring old Yorkshire or dull Derbyshire. They are called things like the Yorkshire Hystericals and the Derbyshire Desperados.
These games fluctuate particularly wildly, and as if to make that point, one of the star batsmen of my team, the Surrey Psycho-Killers, just got out, for 32, against Kent Velociraptors. Another dismissal now, and Kent would definitely have the whip hand. More Surrey slogging and they should win. Okay, I would rather be there, especially since the Oval, where this game is being played, is only a walk away form my home. But Ceefax will do nicely, and this way I get to write this.
Last week, I swear I witnessed another game of Twenty20 cricket which was reduced, by our characteristically vile and windy weather last week, to each side only having five overs to bat each. Yes. They each had just thirty balls to score their runs. Northants Something Scary Beginning With Ns versus the Gloucester (inevitably) Gladiators, I think it was. Five5 cricket, you might say. But I can find no trace of this game on the internet. Did I dream the whole thing? No I did not. Here it is!
The point of all this is to emphasise how lively cricket seems to be in England just now, despite the fluctuating form of our national side, and in the world generally.
This guy is extremely down on these guys, just now. But however well or badly cricket’s mere administrators do, the underlying strength of the game is now a world sporting fact, if only because of the rise and rise of India, in the world generally, and as a great cricketing nation in particular.
Twenty20 cricket is already part of the Asian Games. Next, the Olympics.
David Carr will not he happy.
I spend a lot of my time writing a sports minded blog, Ubersportingpundit, which tries to do to sports what Samizdata.net does for economics and politics. Indeed, many of the contributors to this blog also contribute to Ubersportingpundit.
Ubersportingpundit covers the various Australian football codes, cricket, rugby, and UK football. However, I would like to ‘beef up’ the UK football coverage for the coming season. With this in mind, I’d like to invite Samizdata.net readers who have strong views about football and the willingness to express them on at least a weekly basis the opportunity to write for Ubersportingpundit.
I’m not looking for someone to write match reports on Aston Villa vs Charlton Atheletic; I’m more interested in someone writing about David O’Leary’s strategy to take Villa forward on a tight budget and how Alan Curbishley intends to fill the hole left by the sale of Shane Parker to Chelsea.
I am also looking for another cricket correspondent, preferably someone of South Asian background, who will give a different view to the Anglo-Australian cricket coverage that Ubersportingpundit currently supplies. Residence does not matter, but a willingness to cover India, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi cricket issues does.
If you are interested, please drop an email to ‘scott’ at ‘ubersportingpundit.com’. Renumeration is at Samizdata.net rates. (i.e., the goodwill and esteem of the editors!)
On Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous looking Russian seventeen-year-old called Maria Sharapova won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title, and the media have been in raptures ever since. Personally I was enraptured ever since she won her quarter final against a Japanese lady. But when Sharapova beat Serena Williams in the final, the world really noticed.
When Sharapova plays, she looks like a Bond girl. When she has won, she immediately becomes a giggly American schoolgirl. She is, from the female gorgeousness point of view, the biggest thing in tennis since the now somewhat ageing Anna Kournikova. Plus, she can really play. (Kournikova never won Wimbledon, or anything else big that I recall. Not that I ever cared.)
So, I was not surprised when our very busy-with-other-things but still very caring and concerned editorial supremo asked me last night to dash off a posting about the lovely Maria, so that we could have a picture of her up here.
However, underneath all the drooling from the likes of me and Perry, there is a more serious story here, which is why it took me a bit longer to write this than I promised last night. Yes, Sharapova is gorgeousness personified, and long may it last. But there is more going on than this. → Continue reading: Maria Sharapova comes to America and wins Wimbledon
The present UK government, like many socialist-leaning administrations, does not like cars. Besides complaints – sometimes justified – about pollution and congestion, a lot of the hatred of the car contains a puritan impulse (sometimes this is also seen among a certain tweedy sort of conservative). Congestion charges, petrol taxes, speed cameras, road bumps… you name it, owning a car will soon be on a par with smoking, eating red meat, or confessing to enjoying recreational sex.
Well, I have bad news for the puritans. I spent last Saturday in total petrol-head heaven – the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed in west Sussex, and the event was a total sellout. I saw the Lotus of the late Ayrton Senna driven immaculately on a wet track at 150 mph and hear the unbelievably high noise that a F1 car makes. Vintage Maseratis, Ferraris, Lotuses and BRMs vied with Le Mans endurance cars such as the Ford GT40 or the Gulf Porsche (of the kind that Steve McQueen drove in the movie, Le Mans). Magic. There is an almost sensual pleasure involved in the sight, shape, noise, and yes, the smell, of a very fast car.
The crowds were large although not so big as to impede my enjoyment. From what I could see, Britons remain firmly in love with cars, including very fast and noisy ones. I would not presume to check the political/cultural views of the crowds, but I would guess the bias would be towards liberal (small l), fairly pro-enterprise, pro-fun, and not very keen on environmentalism and high taxes. If I were Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, then the Goodwood Festival of Speed clientele would be the sort of folk I would have in mind as a target constituency. I would call it the ‘Jeremy Clarkson Voter Segment’.
The Goodwood event also reminded me of something else, which is the high number of South Africans, Finns and Scots who have excelled as drivers over the years. I wonder why that is?
So far, I have not been all that enthused by the Euro 2004 European Championship football tournament being held in Portugal at the moment but finally, it appears, the sporting event has sparked into life. This evening, Croatia came close to beating the former champions France, in a thrilling game. Earlier in the day, England, who lost their first game in the last minutes to France, managed after some hiccups to overwhelm Switzerland.
All to the good. I must say that watching some of the matches has reminded me of why, despite my annoyance at the antics of highly paid sportsmen, I still love watching football, and why I despise those who think it is amusing to sneer at we plebs and our love of what Brazil’s Pele called the “Beautiful Game”.
Take this piece of drivel from an anti-sports snob, for instance:
The players are even more loathesome than the fans. All professional sportsmen are more or less imbeciles, of course, but only footballers manage to be so utterly charmless with it. They are essentially overgrown spoilt children, diving and rolling around pretending to be injured, and practically wetting themselves whenever someone scores. There is a general, and sometimes quite fantastic, ugliness. If I had my way, I would have them all shot.
I wonder if the author of this piece would like to pass on his profound thoughts to one of the England team? Seriously though, for all that I despise the moronic behaviour of certain England football “fans” causing mayhem, I also despise a certain kind of anti-sport snob who imagines he or she is being terribly daring and original by sneering at the pleasures of the ordinary guy and his enthusiasm for team sports.
Oh well, come on England!
Trade here seems to be rather thin (although since I first put that it has got a bit thicker), just as it seemed to be this time yesterday. And this time yesterday I started concocting a posting (for my Culture Blog and to link to from here) about the strange things to be seen on or from Chelsea Embankment, just to the south of Samizdata HQ (which I was visiting the other day for reasons that need not concern you). This morning I finished it. Thinking about this posting some more, I now consider the ducks to be rather mundane. But the red sailed sailing boats and the bus are quite fun, I think.
Here is one of the red sailed sailing boats.
The point is that you do not see little sailing boats on the river in London very often. I seldom do, anyway. Follow the link above to get to a bigger version of this picture, and for the bus and the ducks, and for further commentary.
My recent posting on Slovakia contained a scoop and I missed it. The leader of the Slovak governing party’s campaign for the European elections tomorrow is former ice hockey player Peter Stastny.
I knew the name (one of the few names in ice hockey I ever knew of), but failed to connect it to the poster boy of the Slovak Democratic Coalition.
From the comments to my last posting, my description of SKDU as conservative-libertarian is controversial. Considering that the new Libertarian Party candidate in the USA was selected because he campaigns on sticking to the Founding Fathers’ intentions (nationalized Post Office and all), I stand by my description for now.
What is amusing is the contrast between the Slovak and the Austrian election: the posters in Austria oppose reform, the Slovaks put a celebrity on the poster and bring in massive tax reforms in the right direction. American show-biz versus Austrian corporatism. I know which I prefer.
[Thanks to Tim Evans at CNE for providing the tip-off about Peter Stasny.]
Sad news: Economist / baseball analyst / blogger Doug Pappas has passed away at age 43, the victim of heat stroke while vacationing in Texas.
Pappas chaired the Business of Baseball committee for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), and his work on the history of baseball’s finances was consistently intelligent and provocative. I mention this in Samizdata because Pappas was also one of the foremost opponents of taxpayer funded facilities for professional sports and was thus a friend of liberty as well. Pappas relentlessly criticized commissioner Bud Selig’s claims that Major League Baseball needed corporate welfare to survive.
I am a SABR member, but never got to meet Doug Pappas; for more in-depth tributes from people who knew him, see the excellent baseball / war blog Baseball Crank and David Pinto’s Baseball Musings, another excellent baseball-only blog.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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