Arts versus Sports

It's annoyed me for years that the Arts in our newspapers get such short shrift compared to Sport. Oh, yes, we have two pages (on the same day, Thursday) each week, given over to the Arts. But wait, Sport not only gets a minimum of three or four pages per day, but a complete and separate section of its own on a Friday. 

Reviews of concerts and theatre events each get a minimum number of words (300) and even some of those may be cut at the sub-editor's discretion, if they get a review at all. And sometimes the reviews are so late that they're no use to someone making up their mind whether to go to a show or not. The Taieri Musical Theatre production of Grease which took place last week from Thursday to Saturday, with four performance in all, got a review, but it didn't appear until Monday this week, after the show had closed. This isn't unusual. 

So I was immensely pleased to see someone else commenting on this issue in today's paper. 

Letter to the Editor in the Otago Daily Times, 28.7.16, page 20.

The ODT (7.7.16) reported in just 87 words the outstanding clean sweep by the New Zealand Youth choir at a recent international competition in Pardubice, Czech Republic. The choir won all four categories and the Grand Prix.

Imagine if this [had] been given an All Blacks’ victory treatment. Front page, with a picture, it would have included: every piece of music the choirs sang, how many points were awarded in each category, the judges’ comments, which choir members had sore throats or mild colds, biographical details of “new caps” in the choir and performance statistics for those who had been in the choir before, comments on their training and preparation, and reactions to the win from singing teachers and choral experts. The conductor would be a household name.

Dreaming, I know, as apparently we are far more interested in reading 500 words on the naming of the Russian Olympic athletic team.

Rosemary McBryde, 

Waitati. 

Interviewed by Ognian Georgiev

Christmas has come and gone and my mind has become a blank on some things in all the rush.

For instance I can't quite remember now how I happened to come into contact with the Bulgarian sports journalist, Ognian Georgiev. It may have been on Google+, but I honestly don't remember! Anyway, Ognian is doing a series of interviews on his blog. These are conducting digitally, with the questions being sent to various authors around the world. The authors reply at their leisure, and the result, with a bit of additional comment, is uploaded to Ognian's blog. Apart from being a journalist (he covered the 2012 London Olympics, amongst other things) Ognian has himself written a book, The White Prisoner – Galabin Boevski’s secret story. This is the story of the way in which Boevski's Olympic fame vanished overnight when he was caught at the Sao Paulo airport with cocaine in his luggage, and imprisoned for nine years. 

Ognian has posted interviews with a wide variety of authors already on his site, and is continually adding more. The authors write in a variety of genres, and most of them are people I've never heard of, so it's an interesting way to discover a heap of new authors.

My interview, which mostly relates to The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret, is number 130 and can be found here. 

You wanted to follow for Why?

I've hit the 111 mark with Twitter in terms of how many people follow me.   That may seem a positive thing, until you actually check out who's following you. 

Some are people I follow as well; some are people who know me from elsewhere.  

But some seem rather random in terms of why would they follow me?   It's as if they have some automated system that looks for a key word related to their area of interest.  If I happen to mention that key word in one of my tweets, voila!,  I have a new follower. 

Even then, some of them are mysteries: the 'official tweets for the Olympic Games'?  A stunt actor and fight choreographer.  Someone who's "Sexy, sassy and adventurous."  (She's definitely in the wrong place.)  "DocLocker [who] delivers the ideal combination of first-class maximum security and ease of use."  Someone who has a photo of a collie with boots on as his avatar.  

Someone who has this as their profile: My beloved Nelson died November 6,2009.Memory Eternal.My blog:The Unwedded Widow.Orthodox Christian,hypothyroid/CFS/spoonie,knitter,jobless,navigating grief.  The Brazen Head, that advertises itself this way: Welcome to Ireland's oldest pub, come and experience great music, award winning food & a unique atmosphere!  Terry, who....enjoys Maui sunsets with his wife! Real Estate & Tax Lien Investor. Realtor, Trainer, Speaker for Real Estate Investors. Internet Marketing Consultant.  Carl, who writes: Im married with 2 daughters and have an awesome recipe for chick pea curry. I also lead a UK and increasingly international mens ministry.

An awesome recipe for chick pea curry?   OK, Carl.

How not to throw the discus

Four days without rain or overcast skies or freezing winds. Real live sunshine. We’re beginning to feel human again.
While we were watching the movie, Serenity, last night at a friend’s place, our host was recording some of the Olympic Games on his HDD. (It’s something we can do too on our machine, although we haven’t actually done it yet.) Anyway, amongst the various things that we picked up on after the movie was finished, were some of the Decathlon events: the hurdles and the discus throwing.
A couple of odd things stood out. In one of the hurdles heats, one of the contestants leapt up with all the others to race, and then stopped, and did nothing more, while the other hurdlers ran on. No explanation from the commentators – he was just ignored, as though he’d never been in the race to begin with.
And then, as we were watching the discus, we pondered on how easy it would be for someone throwing the thing to miss the opening and send it crashing into the nets. And immediately one did! A gentleman by the name of Roman Šebrle, who was the top man in the Decathlon discus. How frustrating for such a thing to slip from an athlete’s fingers. Our host reckoned it was because Roman had spat on the discus before he threw it!
I didn’t know Šebrle as a name, so I kept hearing it as Roman Chevrolet, which seemed to be how the announcers were saying it. Crikey, what a romantic sounding name – it’s the sort of name you give to a hero in a romantic novel!
We also watched a bit of the Russian/American volleyball game. I think if you added up the amount of time they spend playing and the amount of time they spend hugging each other, the latter would come out on top easily. The game is played in a pretty boring fashion, really, with massive serves that almost invariably cause nothing else to happen in that volley. When they do actually all get to chase the ball around, it's over in seconds.
I watched the table tennis the other night: at least in that game they get on with it, and while some of the rallies may be very short, a good number have some action in them. I don't know who the two guys were, but one was a tall Scandinavian and the other a Chinese from China or Hong Kong. The Scandinavian wiped the floor with the Chinese, which apparently wasn't supposed to happen.
And one other thing we caught up on: the women's Taekwondo. There was a New Zealand girl in this, and she and her opponent spent so much time hopping back and forth from foot to foot and never actually doing more than sizing up the opposition that the referee had to keep stepping in and reminding them they were supposed to be fighting - and giving them penalties for not doing so. Not one of the highlights.

Mr Phelps, the food addict

In my pessimistic mode, I have to wonder how long Michael Phelps, the Olympic gold-medallist (over and over) can go on before he falls apart? In yesterday’s Otago Daily Times, they listed how much food he consumes in a day in order to keep himself thriving. His meals would feed several families in the Third World for a week. You have to wonder at the rationale of that: one human being consuming so much food in order to do what? Swim faster than everyone else. How long will the fame last? What’s the point of being a millionaire swimmer if, in a few years time, you’re going to look like an overweight blob? Because consuming food on that level must have an effect eventually, even if it isn’t now.
And the way he and these other Olympic swimmers look: they’re all shoulders. Top heavy, somehow. Every time I see them I’m reminding of this picture by Bettina Tizzy which I first posted on my other blog.
Anyway, according to the report, Phelps consumes 12,000 calories a day (the average male needs only 2,000 and would survive on less).
Here’s breakfast: three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise, two cups of coffee, a five-egg omelette, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar and three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Urrgh.
Lunch is: a pound of enriched pasta and two large ham and cheese sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on white bread – and about 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.
Evening meal: a pound of pasta and an entire pizza, washed down with another 1,000 calories worth of energy drinks.
It’s enough to make you sick, personally, and that seems to be pretty much how the Guardian writer Jon Henley felt as well.
Notice the lack of vegetables (apart from breakfast tomatoes and lettuce) and fruit. This poor kid is going to have a very unhealthy system before much longer.