a convenient truth

Lovely quote from Ashley Giles in his Guardian piece. Talking about the closing stages of the Trent Bridge match:

…so Hoggy came out to face Lee for the first ball of the next over.

“Come on, let’s you and me get it done,” he said, with a bit of a smile.

“It’s reversing at about 95mph,” I told him. I thought it was best that he knew.

Such a gentleman. “It’s reversing at 95mph”. What a marvellous thing to hear when you reach the crease, to give you confidence.

This particular line has been touted around quite a bit in the last few weeks, mostly because it’s an easy journalistic trope to hang an article on. Hypocritical moi?

The term “new football” seems to mean “very exciting thing that everyone gets excited about”. If they are referring to the Premiership, this seems rather unfair on both cricket and football - the excitement in the Premiership is a combination of mindless partisanship and media-fuelled hype.

Occasionally someone does something skilful with a football, but that is rather beside the point. The teams could be doing competitive pressups but the effect would be the same. People support their club for all sorts of reasons, but they are all utterly arbitrary. This doesn’t detract from the intensity of the support - in fact it probably enhances it, but it does mean that the concern of the supporters is for their team to win, not for any good football to be played.

The media hype is similarly effective, with the constant quest for a story turning every dressing room squabble into epic proportions and decisions of squad selection becoming instant national news. This is obviously very silly.

Cricket is a different animal. Nobody supports their county with the intensity of a football supporter. If you asked the audience at a county match (presuming you could find him at the bar) whether he’d rather see his club win or see some good cricket, the answers would be exclusively the latter. Club cricket fans are fans of their sport, not of their club.

The cricket everyone cares about is International cricket, which is important in a different way. We are in the last throes of three hundred years of nationalism as the dominant political theory. The void left by the end of monarchy was replaced almost seamlessly with nationalism. It provided some simple answers to complex questions (”who is in charge right here?, What should I believe? Who is it ok for me to beat up?”), and provides a substitute for the tribalism that dwells within us all. It definies a bijection between position and identity that serves the dual purposes of justifying the state and providing a sense of belonging.

Nationalism is out of date, and no longer provides useful answers to these questions. I have more in common with a programmer in Delhi than I do with some of my neighbours. Some of my neighbours grew up in cultures utterly unlike mine, and to attempt to force a nationalistic straightjacket of “Britishness” onto both of us is bizarre and foolish. If that jacket can be made to fit us all it will become a meaningless tag for “someone who is currently resident in the British Isles”. Your current location is not an identity.

Some have tried to fix this by providing a simple hook onto which to hang their nationalism. One of those hooks is the national sporting teams. Norman Tebbitt made this explicit with his Cricket Test. He probably realised better than most that nationalism was on it’s way out, and decided to reinvent nationalism as a sport.

And so it has come to pass - the major reason for the current popularity of cricket is that England are winning. The series would be as exciting if Australia had won those close matches - but cricket would not be enjoying it’s current rennaisance. People love a battle (and this is an epic) but they love winning more than anything. We love to think of ourselves as a single tribe, but know in our hearts that this is something both impossible and anyway unwanted. But these instants of sporting victory press all the right tribal buttons, and make us feel like a nation again.

So, cricket is not the new football. They are utterly different. International-sporting-occasions-where-England-are-winning are the new International-sporting-occasions-where-England-are-winning.

All that said, I hope we send the convicts back with their tails between their legs!

Just in case you’ve never read it, Erik Naggum’s (in)famous post about perl.

Apparently the word “Podcast” has made it into the OED. In light of that, I’d like everyone to know that I have invented Folksonompodjaxes, which is a clever combination of collaborative taxonomies, mp3 and javascript to produce something really new and clever that everyone will love. So, when you see Folksonompodjaxing in the dictionary in a few years, just remember it was me that started it. Oh yes.

This post from Guido is going to be pretty big news in the Zope/Twisted communities I suspect. However, he doesn’t mention Adaptation at all - and that concerns me somewhat. Interfaces qua interfaces are a largely worthless documentation format, and not much else. But combined with adaptation it provides an amazingly powerful programming paradigm.

I’m sure Philip Eby at least will champion this particular corner, but it’ll be interesting to see if we get adapters in python too.

It is true, the Flying Spaghetti Monster did create the world, and this should be taught in school.

This guy seems to have gone stark raving bonkers. Talk about overstating your case:

32. Defendant slashdot.org is an far-right wing Internet news website that posts libelous and defamatory content and is used by Open Source Community members to anonymously post hate speech, death threats, threats to murder and promotes and advocates acts of domestic terrorism within the United States. The address and location of defendants is believed to be within the State of California, but is unknown at the present time.

46. The beheading and murder of United States Citizens in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have been videotaped, converted to MPEG and other images for viewing on the public Internet through the use of OSS and Linux software and computer technology developed and purloined by Linux and OSS members and illegally exported from the United States.

To cut a long story short, it appears that OSS developers are really satanic, mormon-hating terrorists out to destroy the US of A. What a nutcase.

The architecture for hamcannon has got more and more interesting as I work through the use cases. I’ve ended up with a requirement for a generic “Plone to Perspective Broker” adapter/proxy/facade/thing.

It uses a plone tool at one end and a PB Server at the other, with communication between the two handled by special objects in the ZODB, function calls into the plone tool and zasync asynchronous calls into twisted.

I’ve got no idea how well this will work, but it sounds like it could be quite a useful component for other things too. Unfortunately it’s going to be rendered obsolete by Zope 3 - but I suspect that Plone on Zope 3 is a way off yet.