Happy Birthday to my co-blogger

MiceElf is 21 today. Again. 21 with grandkids; good going.

Norrie un-personed by the media

Remember all the hype about Emma Raducanu? Won the US Open tennis as a qualifier and spent the next few weeks doing PR, glamour shots for the front pages and generally swanning around and luxuriating in her astonishing victory. Sacked her coach. First match back on court, a bad first round defeat at Indian Wells to a lower ranked player. Currently ranked 24th in the world.

Cameron Norrie: British male tennis player, won the Men's Singles in that same Indian Wells event. The first British man to win a Masters 1,000 singles title since Andy Murray in 2016. No need for qualification for Norrie - he has reached six tournament finals this year and is now ranked 15th in the world. No swanning around for him, he is studying for a sociology degree in his off-court time. No PR, no glamour shots, no front pages, just working hard preparing  for the next tournament.

Just saying.

Just found it

 So, first thoughts on being invited to be a guest on the distinguished Just Chilling’s blog: 

It’s taken a lot of effort to find out how.  Perhaps that’s because the font is so small or perhaps because I’m IT challenged and am struggling to achieve Level 4 - levelling up is a flawed concept.clearly. 

Secondly, I see my avatar is the church cat.  She’s called Suki and is temperamental, unlike my own dear Coco. But when I had to post on Google for some reason now forgotten, Coco was not yet born and Suki was a beauty. 

And the last thought was that it’s much easier to comment on someone else’s thoughts than produce ones of my own.

However, all that football needs an antidote, even if my host is as antipathetic to wild flowers as I am to football.

 ‘One day’ I promised MiceElf I’ll make an effort and learn to identify the wild flowers in my local area.  And when lockdown arrived it proved be the catalyst. My son and DiL bought me two definitive reference books and on Christmas morning 2020 we set out for Woolwich Common. It was cold but the watery sun made the mist rise and the Common looked lovely. We were the only people there.  I found two flowers: the first was a solitary knapweed down amongst the nettles and brambles, its deep cerise flower being the only spot of colour in the 150 acres, and the other was a single white blossom on the bare branches of a cherry plum.  It took me the best part of an hour to work out the keys and discover their names.

Since then I’ve found 163 plants which I post on the Friends FB page and acquired an undeserved reputation for botanical knowledge. I suspect I’ve also damaged the knees of a certain chilled gentleman for which I sincerely apologise. 

The Wizard of Noz

New Zealand has an official Wizard. Until yesterday, when Ian Brackenbury Channell was given the sack by the city of Christchurch. 

You can understand NZ's desire to embrace wizardry; after all, their Australian neighbours have their very own Wizard - of Oz. In 1990, Prime Minister Mike Moore proclaimed Channell the Official Wizard of New Zealand, appointed to “protect the Government, cast out evil spirits and upset fanatics”. In other words, New Zealand's Alistair Campbell.

Channell describes himself as an "educator, comedian, illusionist and politician", although he basically travels the country casting spells and mixing potions. He must have cast a spell on the Christchurch city councillors, who decided to pay him $16,000 p.a. to "provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services – as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch".

Rod Liddle, that unreconstructed anti-wokeist and Sunday Times columnist, writes today that Chiristchurch's act has "aroused fury among occultists" although given Channell is 88 years old it could just as easily be his fellow octogenarians who are up in arms. One man who will surely be delighted is Ari Freeman, who is the Wizard's Apprentice and, with a bit of corporate smooching, could take over this lucrative contract. Freeman is known around Christchurch and beyond as the front man of the psychedelic funk band Rhomboid. Despite all this weirdness, their stuff has a certain magical [gettit?] charm:

I could find no record of any other country or city having a wizard on the payroll, although the Ku Klux Klan has its Grand Wizard. I'm willing to provide wizard services for St Austell, for a small fee of course.

Go Ahead Eagles

Regular readers will know I am fascinated by football club names. See my earlier post about the Stuttgarter Kickers. The Go Ahead Eagles are a club in the Eredivisie - the Netherlands First Division. They gained promotion last season by finishing second in the Eerste Divisie (First Division, which is what the second tier competition is called - don't ask). They last won the Eredivisie in 1933, so it's time to Go Ahead again.

Proper football fans, i.e. all our readers, will be interested to know that the Go Ahead Eagles were the first club of renowned player Marc Overmars, winner of 86 caps for the Netherlands. Marc came out of a 'retirement' in 2008, after leaving Barcelona in 2004, to give some glamour to his home town club for a year at the age of 35, making 24 appearances for them in the Eerste Divisie. I always find it heartwarming that there is still romance in football.

The club is from the city of Deventer, population 100,000; the eagle is in the coat of arms of Deventer

Hence Eagles in the club's name. The club was founded as Be Quick in 1902 but had to change its name because the players were not quick enough there was already a Go Ahead club. As for the name, dutch.news.nl tells us "The Dutch, as we know, are a sensible folk. But not when it comes to naming their football clubs. In most countries football clubs have really boring names like Manchester United, Barcelona or Paris Saint Germain. But not so in the Netherlands. Here, names are descriptive."

I guess that's some kind of answer and at least it give the fans - average attendance 6,500 - a reasonable chant. And ... I have a song for them:

1, 2, 3, GO!

Go ahead now! See the mail order

Go ahead now! Cooling off the paper

Fall in, fall out, Fall in, Fall out

Go ahead now! Check your speedmeter

Go ahead now! Refrigerator

Fall in, fall out, Fall in, Fall out

Take a big mess, take a little rest

Take your reflex, spoil your test

We're pinheads! Here we go now!

Go for it! Let'em make a phone call

Go for it! Let'em get a own goal

Fall in, Fall out Fall in, fall out

Go for it! Let'em dig a big hole

Go for it! Let the good times roll

Fall in, Fall out Fall in, fall out

Let's go!

Take a big mess, Take a little rest

Take your reflex, Spoil your test

We're pinheads! Here we go now!

Let'em scoot, Let'em go!

Go ahead now! Go for it!

Go ahead now! Go for it!

Fall in, Fall out

Here we go ahead now now now now!

Take a big mess, Take a little rest

Take your reflex, Spoil your test

We're pinheads! Here we go now!

Take a big mess, Take a little rest

Take your reflex, Spoil your test

We're pinheads! Here we go now!

The song is by Polysics, a Japanese new wave and rock band from Tokyo, who dubs its unique style as "technicolor pogo punk". It was named after a brand of synthesizer, the Korg Polysix. [according to Wikipedia]. This is it:

Obviously a bit tricky for the fans to sing, but a great "entering the field" booster.

You'll be pleased to know they are Going Ahead reasonably well so far this season. And - at the time of writing - they have just gone ahead in their latest match.

15,215 days to the end of oil

1,459,013,978,422 barrels of oil left when I started this post. 1,459,013,757,364 barrels left when I finished.

15,215 days is 42 years. And a few days. What then?

Coal has longer to go: 148,329 days

Apparently 1,748,707,614,456 Megawatts of solar energy struck the earth so far today. Grab a bit of that and we'll be fine.

Yep, I'm back on worldometers.info and browsing aimlessly.

At the start of this post, China's population was 1,439,323,776. According to https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/. There's a guy out there counting. Here comes another... Surprisingly, the Chinese rate of growth is declining; 20 million extra in 1990, 13 million in 1995, 8 million in 2005, just 5.5 million in 2020. The fertility rate (the number of children a woman has on average) was 6.3 in 1970 and is now 1.69. 1.7 is generally regarded as the benchmark for a stable population size.