Quotulatiousness

September 13, 2012

Cutty Sark now housed in “worst new building in Britain”

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:33

Andrew Gilligan tells the sad story of the Cutty Sark‘s new “home”:

The architectural trade journal, Building Design, has announced that the historic tea clipper is the 2012 winner of the Carbuncle Cup, the wooden spoon for the dregs of British architecture.

The architects, Grimshaw, have taken something delicate and beautiful and surrounded it with a building that looks like a 1980s bus station. Clumsy and ineptly detailed, their new glass greenhouse around the Cutty Sark totally ruins her thrilling lines, obscures much of her exquisite gilding and cynically forces anyone who actually wants to see her to pay their £12 and go inside. The sight of people pressing their faces forlornly against the smoked glass to try to see something of the ship is one of the sadder in London.

Grimshaw have also punched a shopping centre-style glass lift up through the middle of the ship — and put two more lifts in a new square building, the size of a small block of flats, next to and towering over the ship herself. They’ve plonked a glass pod on the open main deck for a staircase (the old housing was wood, but that’s so nineteenth-century). They’ve installed lights on the masts which make it look like a Christmas tree. Above all, of course, they’ve hoicked the ship up on girders, dangling above the dry dock to create an “unparalleled corporate entertaining space” underneath — an act of vandalism that prompted the resignation of the chief engineer, who said it would place the vessel under unacceptable strain and end in its destruction.

Cutty Sark was severely damaged in a drydock fire in May 2007.

September 6, 2012

Gentrification of Brixton

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:30

The Economist looks at the demographic and social changes underway in Brixton:

A good deal has changed in Brixton, a south London district, since Eta Rodney bought her Victorian terraced house in 1980. Then many of her neighbours were, like her, Jamaican. West Indians had settled in Brixton since 1948, when some arrived on the Empire Windrush. Today many of Mrs Rodney’s black neighbours are selling up and moving out of the area, making way for predominantly white newcomers. Britain’s historic black centre is being transformed — but in an odd way.

The Afro-Caribbean population of Lambeth, the borough where Brixton is located, is estimated to have fallen by 8% since 2001 even as the borough’s overall population has risen by 9%. Interracial mixing explains only part of this: the main reason is black flight. Afro-Caribbeans have dispersed from other parts of central London too, such as Hackney and Hammersmith and Fulham. They move to escape crime, buy bigger houses and get their children into better schools — the familiar reasons people of all races head for suburbia. In the South East outside London, Afro-Caribbean numbers have jumped, albeit from a low base.

[. . .]

Mrs Rodney feels both pressures. Her husband would like to retire to Jamaica. She prefers Streatham, further south in London, where she could buy a palace for the money gentrifiers are keen to pay for her house, with its original cornicing and marble fireplaces. The former council house she bought under the Conservative Party’s right-to-buy scheme—“I love Mrs Thatcher, God bless her soul”—would today fetch at least 20 times what she paid.

Of course, for many of us, the name Brixton has a very Clash-y context:

August 31, 2012

Where would London be without the Tube?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:27

At sp!ked, Neil Davenport reviews a new book about London’s iconic underground:

The closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was notable for its groaning reliance on tourist-shop icons — all black cabs, bowler hats, Houses of Parliament, red pillar-boxes and Mini Coopers. In a dreary way, what could we expect? A tourist-shop portrayal of Britain is still internationally recognisable and, for the organisers, safe enough to avoid party-pooping controversy. Curiously, though, one famous figure of the capital was noticeable by its absence: the London Underground. With its roundel logo, distinctive trains and elegantly functional map, few landmarks of London are as richly iconic as this. Indeed, as a character player in umpteen films, novels and pop songs, no London setting would be complete without the Underground.

Throughout the network’s history, though, Londoners’ relationship with the Tube has often been uneasy and aggravating: overcrowding, delays, cancellations, the fare’s dent on the wallet and, for the middle classes, striking tube workers and their ‘inflated’ salary. Nevertheless, it is only when the Tube is not working properly that we become aware of its magnitude. Unlike Tower Bridge or Beefeaters, the Tube isn’t a remote or mythical symbol of London. It’s the living, working and organic lifeblood of the capital. It is the way in which millions of Londoners are able to work and play and thus, unlike Parliament, has meaning to ordinary people’s lives.

The boons and banes of the tube for Londoners (and visitors) are warmly captured in Andrew Martin’s Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube. A novelist and former ‘Tube Talk’ columnist for the London Evening Standard, Yorkshireman Martin pithily combines an authoritative history of the network’s development with personal reflections on his daily journeys. People can say they have become Londoners when they can navigate the vast system and reflect on its highs and lows, quirks and anomalies. Whether we admit it or not, Londoners will have their favourite stations and lines (the author’s is the Central line, mine the Victoria). They will notice the art décor splendour of Arnos Grove station or the beautifully rich tiles at Baker Street. They will curse themselves for falling asleep on the last tube (it’s that gentle rocking motion that sends you off to the Land of Nod) and waking up, as I have on numerous occasions, in High Barnet.

August 19, 2012

Minnesota Vikings to play at Wembley?

Filed under: Britain, Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Don’t panic, Vikings fans … the team isn’t moving. What is being considered is to allow the Vikings to play a couple of “home” games at Wembley Stadium in England while they await the end of construction on their new stadium:

The NFL and Vikings are both reportedly very keen to make this happen. It makes sense for the Vikings because, with the new stadium construction, they’ll have to play away from their real home for up to two years anyway. A couple home games at Wembley, which seats 86,000 for American football, means two fewer home games at temporary residence TCF Bank Stadium, which after upgrades will still be able to accommodate less than 60,000.

Of course the state-side fans might gripe about losing a couple of home games, but if there’s money to be made elsewhere, the Vikings won’t hesitate to follow it (sorry fans). It seems what we have here is a match made in heaven. The NFL wants to make more inroads in the European market, and the Vikings want to make back some of the revenue they’ll be losing by temporarily moving into a much smaller venue. So it seems inevitable that, for awhile at least, the Vikings will become England’s team.

A side-benefit to this would be that it ensures at least two games will be telecast outside the Vikings’ home region: a matter of great interest to this Toronto-area Viking fan.

August 14, 2012

O’Neill: London outdid Beijing in politicizing the Olympics

Filed under: Britain, China, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Brendan O’Neill says that the London Olympics were far more politicized than the Beijing games in 2008:

From the flurry of fanboy commentary that followed Danny Boyle’s am-dram opening ceremony to the insistence that the Games represented the coming to fruition of the post-Diana dream of a new, less stuffy Britain, the urge to politicise the Games has been intense. That the political classes have sought so shamelessly to usher in ‘another kind of Britain’ on the back of the Games speaks volumes about their desperate need for a new national narrative, and their disillusionment with the democratic route to social overhaul.

Normally we frown upon elites that heap their political obsessions on to mass sporting events. We think of Hitler turning the Berlin Games into an advert for Aryan superiority (a vision shot down by Jesse Owens) or of the Beijing opening ceremony’s thousands of fantastically coordinated drummers and boastful history lesson, described by one British hack last week as ‘crypto-fascist’. And yet, Britain’s ostensibly liberal observers thought nothing of turning 2012 into an advert for their own allegedly superior way of life and thinking.

The tone was set by Labour MP and historian Tristram Hunt, who described Boyle’s opening ceremony as the ‘march past’ — that is, victory parade — of his side in the Culture Wars. The ceremony was proof, said Hunt, that ‘the left took victory in the Culture Wars’, and moreover that a New Britain was being born: if the Queen’s Jubilee celebrated a ‘staid and nostalgic national identity’, this ceremony ‘offered an attractively contradictory, complicated, and above all creative conception of these Isles of Wonder’.

There has since been a concerted effort to turn the ‘bonkers’ opening ceremony into a new national narrative. Somewhat defensively, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland insists that it is ‘not just Guardian types’ who are exalting in the new political vision provided by both the ceremony and the multicultural message of the Games that followed — the whole nation is, apparently, recognising that ‘we have glimpsed another kind of Britain’, and that we should ‘love the country we have become — informal, mixed, quirky — rather than the one we used to be… reactionary’.

August 9, 2012

Cam Cole: FIFA launches “Captain Renault-style” investigation

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Soccer, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Now that we’ve all had a bit of time to calm down about the awful officiating in the Canada vs USA women’s soccer game, Cam Cole explains why FIFA should penalize the Canadian team for their intemperate comments:

On a magnificently warm, sunny Wednesday at the pristine playing fields of Warwick University, all was forgiven if not forgotten by the Canadian women.

Word spread quickly that FIFA, the sports governing body, had determined that its investigation into the bitter post-game remarks by the losing side needed more time and … well, had basically decided to bury the whole thing and maybe one day suspend the star of Canada’s team, Burnaby’s Christine Sinclair, at some future date — like for a couple of friendlies she hadn’t planned to play anyway.

To say coach John Herdman was relieved to have his best player available for Thursday’s bronze medal match against France — to say nothing of the thunder to Sinclair’s lightning, the equally vocal Melissa Tancredi — is a considerable understatement.

[. . .]

And let’s face it, the Canadians were out of order by almost any sport’s standards in the volume and toxicity of their remarks about the Norwegian referee.

If they had merely said she was blind as a platypus and ought to be carrying a white cane and have a guide dog to help her navigate the field, they’d have been well within the bounds of fair comment.

It was when Sinclair accused Pedersen of having decided the result before the first ball was kicked, and when Tancredi suggested that the referee slept in Team USA jammies, that matters crossed the line from acceptable criticism to slander.

Ineptitude is one thing, bias quite another.

So FIFA took matters under advisement, and launched the kind of thorough investigation that Claude Rains launched when Humphrey Bogart shot the German general at the end of Casablanca.

Of course, I must point out that Cole is absolutely wrong here: it was Major Strasser who was shot, not a German general.

August 3, 2012

Did the Olympic badminton tournament format lead directly to four teams being ejected?

Filed under: Britain, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:57

Scott Page and Simon Wilkie contend that the real responsibility for four badminton pairs being tossed out of the London Olympics should fall on the tournament organizers, not the players or their coaches:

Why though did teams try to lose? And specifically, why four teams? The answer lies in the organization of the Olympic tournament and provides an illustration of the importance of a field of economics known as mechanism design.

Here’s how the Olympics set up the tournament. In the “round robin” phase, the 16 teams were divided into four pools, each team playing all three other teams in its pool. The top two finishers in each pool would then advance to a playoff.

After pool play, the tournament becomes single elimination (also known as “win or go home,” with the lone exception that the semi-final losers would compete for the bronze medal). This single elimination portion would pit the winner of one pool against the runner-up in another pool. The winners and runners up were matched up in such a way that no two teams from the same pool would play in the first round.

The best teams advance, and by coming in first in your division, you play a runner up from another pool — an expected weaker team in the knockout round of eight. Not only does this make sense, it’s a tried and tested institution that has stood the test of time, from little league to the FIFA World Cup.

They offer some alternatives to the existing tournament format that might work better. On the players themselves, I see the point that Page and Wilkie are making, but I still agree with the BWF decision to sanction the players. For that matter, I’d support my local badminton club in this kind of decision in a local tournament. To have gotten away with what these teams attempted to do, they’d at least have to pretend to be seriously playing. I’ve seen better acting by seven-year-olds.

August 1, 2012

Badminton in the headlines, but not in a good way

Filed under: Britain, China, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

It’s not a sport that generally attracts a lot of attention during the Olympics, but several Badminton players are accused of deliberately losing games to secure better match-ups in the elimination round:

China’s Olympic sports delegation has begun an investigation into allegations two badminton players “deliberately lost” their match, state media say.

Doubles players Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli are among eight players charged by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) with “not using one’s best efforts to win”.

Four players from South Korea and two from Indonesia have also been charged.

Some of the players said they were saving energy. Reports say they wanted to lose to secure an easier draw.

It may not be a technical violation of the rules to “take it easy” in a non-critical game, but it does sound as if these particular players didn’t even bother to make it look like they were competing.

The match between the top-seeded Chinese duo and South Koreans Jung Kyung-eun and Kim Ha-na came under scrutiny after the longest rally in their game lasted four shots.

Match referee Thorsten Berg came on court at one point to warn the players, who also appeared to make deliberate errors.

Both pairs were already through to the quarter-finals.

The Chinese duo lost, meaning — Xinhua noted — that if both Chinese pairs continue to do well, they will not meet until the final.

Update: The IOC Badminton World Federation (BWF) brings out the ban hammer:

EIGHT female badminton players have been sent home from the Olympics, disqualified by the sport’s world federation after throwing matches in a case condemned by London Games boss Sebastian Coe as “depressing” and “unacceptable”.

A disciplinary hearing held this morning, which Australia’s badminton coach made a submission to, found that four players from South Korea, two from Indonesia and the competition’s top seeds from China deliberately tried to lose their qualifying matches in an attempt to manipulate their draws.

The four sets of doubles teams were charged after matches on Tuesday littered with basic errors. Accused by badminton’s international governing body of “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport”, they were ultimately found guilty of trying to lose with the motive of improving their positions for the knockout stages.

The spectators who attended the matches on Tuesday night will not be offered refunds by the London organizers, according to the BBC:

Update, the second: I couldn’t find any actual footage of the match in question until CTV posted it (not embeddable, unfortunately). It’s amazingly bad. The audience absolutely deserve a full refund.

July 31, 2012

QotD: The crony capitalist Olympics

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

The Olympics are a giant exercise in sports socialism — or crony capitalism, if you prefer — where the profits are privatized and the costs socialized. The games never pay for themselves because they are designed not to. That’s because the International Olympic Committee (an opaque “nongovernmental” bureaucracy made up of fat cats from various countries) pockets most of the revenue from sponsorships and media rights (allegedly to promote global sports), requiring the host country to pay the bulk of the costs. Among the very few times the games haven’t left a city swimming in red ink was after the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when voters, having learned from Montreal’s experience, barred the use of public funds, forcing the IOC to use existing facilities and pick up most of the tab for new ones.

Even that’s far from fair. If anything, the Olympics should be compensating the host city for the hassle and inconvenience, not the other way around. The only reason they don’t is because the Cold War once stirred retrograde nationalistic passions, blinding the world to the ass-backwardness of the existing arrangement. Londoners are signaling that this can’t go on.

Shikha Dalmia, “Why London Is Yawning Over the Olympics: Have Western countries finally outgrown the sports socialism of the Olympic Games?”, Reason, 2012-07-31

New British tolerance: it’s still conform or be cast out

Filed under: Britain, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:01

Brendan O’Neill on the dangers of dissenting from the cult of tolerance:

Did you enjoy the Olympics opening ceremony? If you didn’t, it’s probably wise to keep it to yourself. After all, you don’t want to end up like Tory MP Aidan Burley, who has been denounced as “reprehensible”, “offensive” and even “incompatible with modern Britain” — wow — for having the temerity to tweet that he thought the ceremony was “leftie multicultural crap”. There is a profound irony at work here. The ceremony celebrated the openness and diversity of modern Britain and has been hailed as a wonderful spectacle of “inclusion”. Yet it seems our celebration of diversity does not extend to allowing any criticism of the ceremony itself; our inclusiveness does not mean we will include dissenting views on Danny Boyle’s vision of the New Britain. When it comes to the opening ceremony, you must conform and celebrate, or risk being cast out (of polite society).

The opening ceremony is speedily morphing into another “Diana moment”, into another instance when everyone is expected to kowtow before a new, unstuffy vision of Britain, and heaven help those who don’t. Following the death of Princess Diana, we were told that we had entered a post-traditional, emotionally-aware New Britain, and yet the expression of certain emotions — such as criticism of the cult of public mourning outside the various royal palaces — was frowned upon and censured.

July 29, 2012

British army dispatches troops to … fill empty seats at the Olympics?

Filed under: Britain, Military, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

I don’t want to turn the blog into an exercise in mocking the major international sporting event being held in a major English city, but this report from the Guardian can’t be missed:

Soldiers have been drafted in to fill empty seats at the London 2012 Olympics after prime blocks of seating at the Aquatics Centre and gymnastics arena went unused on the first day of competition.

Troops were despatched to the North Greenwich Arena this morning by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog), to take up seats left empty by accredited officials from Olympic and sporting federations, as well as some sponsors and members of the media. More troops, many of whom had their leave cancelled to provide emergency cover after the organisers failed to find enough security guards, will be issued with last-minute invites to take seats in venues when blocks of seats are found to be empty, the games organisers said this morning.

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said on Saturday the empty seats were “very disappointing” and suggested they could be offered to members of the public. He said the matter was being looked at “very urgently”.

I guess giving the seats to members of the public would be too much of a security risk?

NBC’s Olympic coverage under fire

Filed under: Britain, Media, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Billy Gallagher at TechCrunch explains why he’s recommending viewers not watch NBC:

Spoiler alert: Phelps and Lochte raced today. The results are all over Twitter. But the race won’t air on TV in America until tonight.

This is 2012, not 1996. NBC has put all of the events live online, provided you have a cable subscription, but won’t have them available recorded online and won’t air many events, including the most high-profile ones, until a primetime tape delay.

This isn’t a new strategy, just a dumb, outdated one.

Sums it up pretty well. We’ve already covered the failings of NBC (and the IOC) fairly extensively, but its a topic that bears repeating. Check out #nbcfail for a live (gasp, what’s that?) stream of people’s frustrations with the peacock network.

A brief critical analysis of Olympic merchandise

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Stephen Bayley – Founder of the Design Museum – gives the Olympics merchandise a critical mauling.

In ‘Rule Britannia: The Vice Guide to The Olympics’ VICE takes an in-depth look at the British public’s reaction to The Games coming to London this summer and the negative impact it’s having on certain people’s lives.

The six week festival promises to bring a a celebration of unity and sporting achievement, not to mention a huge cash injection to our beleaguered capital. VICE questions the real effects of The Games on a city as complex and tempestuous as London and discovers that they go much deeper, and murkier than the Olympics’ media spin-machine would have us believe.

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

July 28, 2012

Feschuk’s Olympic opening ceremony highlights

Filed under: Humour, Media, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:23

I didn’t watch the opening ceremonies, but I did enjoy Scott Feschuk’s twitter updates during the festivities. He’s collected some of them along with the appropriate photos for Maclean’s:

Clocking in at three hours and 45 minutes, the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Games featured many remarkable moments and tophats. Here’s a selection of just a few of the images that captivated the world when the world wasn’t busy asking, “Did they seriously just play a song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood?”

[. . .]

[. . .]

[. . .]

July 27, 2012

Bruce Arthur calls for moderation in regard to the London Olympics

Filed under: Britain, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:13

In the National Post, Bruce Arthur tries to encourage all of us, in spite of our memories of what British journalists were saying about the Vancouver Olympics, to avoid being nasty about the London games:

But perhaps we in Canada should restrain ourselves, as a nation. Perhaps we should take the higher road. That is, unless the higher road is crammed with traffic in this built-for-horses-and-carriage town. Or the tube is down again.

The Brits did not treat Canada kindly two years ago, it’s true. The Guardian said Vancouver could be the Worst Games Ever three days in, and they based the assessment on refunded snowboard tickets rather than on the preventable death of an athlete. The Guardian also called our glowing totem poles a collection of ice penises, and even the BBC announcer cocked an eyebrow, as it were. The Times of London called us cursed, while the Daily Mail mocked the escalation of the budget. They were, to be honest, kind of jerks about it.

But that doesn’t mean that Canadians should stoop to a similarly savage brand of mockery, beginning with the Opening Ceremony. It doesn’t mean we should make fun of the leaked details of the event, starting with children in hospital beds, which doesn’t seem terribly festive. It doesn’t mean we should make fun of the fact that Muse will apparently play, and even if they do not, that the official song of the Olympics by Muse is a grating, strutting, whining, overcompensatory sneer of a song.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress