Fucking jelly beans?!?! What's this about? I acknowledge that my time in cricket was a long time ago and at a much, much lower level than test cricket but what part does this bush league shit have at any level of the game? Oh, and just how did this little fracas work out boys? So, no opportunity to quietly imply the fatuous ‘end justifies the means’ bullshit. So we need to ‘get into the head’ of No. 9 batsmen in order to get them out now do we? Here’s a radical approach, how about getting the ball in the right place, setting the right fields and even on a shirt front a No. 9 bat will get himself out before any significant damage is likely to be done. If we need an ‘edge’ to get Khan out then we are going to need a razor blade the length of a fucking broadsword to remove the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly and reports of them enduring a shower of confectionary haven’t reached me. I believe Khan dropped a 5 for on your sorry asses in the second innings? Here’s the gen, this behaviour is not ‘swagger’, it’s bush league and it’s bullshit.

Humility in victory, generosity in defeat. Gobs shut, do your talking with bat or ball in hand.

Let me firstly acknowledge that this could be yet another in a long list of ‘is it me’ moments and this arrangement could well be the greatest boon to society in general since the slicing of bread became commonplace. I was in a filling station yesterday to fill the truck with diesel; the tank was well down and would need about 350lt. I guess the flow from the pump is about 35lt per minute, it keeps the maths easy and is about right, so I should have been there for about 15 minutes. In fact I was there for nearer 35 minutes. I’m sure your curiosity is raging as to how this could possibly be the case? The transaction when through OK on the card, I didn’t spray fuel all over the forecourt as many customers seem to do, I just spent the extra 20-25 minutes standing around in a queue, twice. Once to hand in the diesel card and then to sign for the transaction because the owners of the site have seen fit to put a Spar shop in the station so first I had to queue behind some sad git stocking up on ready meals, crisps, tinnies, a few bakery items and numb nuts lads mags and then when I came back to confirm the fuel there was someone doing their holiday shop, a folding chair, a pair of really stylish sunglasses, for £2.99, tins of beans and sausages, soup, Mr Kipling apple pies and a pile of other cack. In addition to this there were the customers from the nine petrol, four diesel and one Autogas pumps who got in ahead of me. All going through two tills. This filling station is the nearest one to the depot and so would be the one I would prefer to use but it’s not going to be happening, so that will be £350 and on occasions £700 p.w. going elsewhere and I’m certainly not going to be filling up the bike there. It takes me longer to open the filler cap than it does to fill the 11-12lt needed so I would be climbing the walls if I had to wait 10 minutes to pay for taking about 30 seconds to pump the gas. I understand that this is one way of keeping local services available and the Tesco behemoth at bay but the facility is there first and foremost as a petrol station and if no one is going there to fill up then neither the gas nor the groceries will be there for long. Get more tills or have separate tills for petrol and groceries because at the moment it’s a bunch of arse and I won’t be anywhere near it in the future.

Rather rashly, as it turns out, I got an HD TV in anticipation of Sky’s HD offering thinking that in view of the limited fare that would be on offer at launch the price would be reasonable, a cheap box and £10-12 monthly sub or a pricier box and monthly fee of £5-7. So less than thrilled when it launched at £299 for the box and £10 pm and blew off the whole idea. I see now that Sky are knocking off £100 on the price of the box, which makes it a little more attractive but still not that hot on the idea after seeing my first HD offering in Tesco a few weeks ago. It looked there that the image quality you get has everything to do with the brand of TV you’re viewing it on and little to do with the signal received. Sony and Hitachi offerings looked crisp and vibrant but a number of lesser brands, Proline and Goodmans I think, produced a picture that looked little better than the standard Sky offering I get through my moderate spec Hyundai. Maybe Tesco had been sloppy setting up some of the TVs or the HDMI leads were not of the same quality; I have no way of knowing.

So if anyone has any experience of Sky HD I would love to hear about it.

When is the UCI going to stick up it’s hand and say ‘we have a problem’? I’m a sports fan and in general if someone tells me something is a sport then I’ll give it a look, but I really haven’t got the cycling thing, the wheels on the bike go round and round, round and round, round and round, round and ro........(repeat for 3550 km). Maybe having a thing for fit blokes in multi-coloured spandex helps? I can no more contemplate completing the Tour than I could consider climbing Everest without oxygen equipment, and maybe this is the problem, it requires superhuman effort and in order to produce this a human requires chemical assistance to become ‘superman’. The UCI claims, I’m sure quite rightly, that cyclists are the most regularly tested athletes in sport and seem, by implication, to be shrugging their collective shoulders and saying ‘what else can we do?’. Even more testing I would suggest, a lot more would be a start. The tours of Italy and Spain, the Giro and La Vuelta, are big events in the cycling calendar but if they disappeared, who outside the cycling fraternity would notice? Le Tour is the global shop window for this sport and once again the view through this window does not look good. Even whilst writing this, the holder of the yellow jersey, Rasmussen, from Rabobank, has had his ass handed to him, supposedly for violating internal rules. It must be in doubt now if Rabobank with continue or join Astana and Cofidis on the sidelines. It does seem very odd to me though, if Le Tour is riddled with performance enhancing drugs but also riders being subject to extensive testing, why are top riders being caught out relatively easily? Rasmussen could not have imagined that two missed tests would go unremarked upon, increased testosterone levels are easily detected and if you’re kicked out for blood doping then you must be using EPO, or some other detectable agent, when there are alternatives out there that are far more difficult, if not impossible, to identify. Clearly the issue doesn’t rest solely with the athletes, the governing body needs to take a much closer look at the entourage, team management, medical staff and conditioning staff and regulation needs to be tightened up to keep them on a very short leash, and if they don’t like it then they can take their little pharmacies and tell their story walking. As I said earlier, I don’t get the cycling thing, but that’s not the point, this event is appearing to be such a cesspit that the shit overflows into almost all other top level sport, tainting the performances of all participants, the vast majority of whom will be clean.

In fact if the recent clip of Golden Brown on ITN just now is anything to go by then Golden Brown is now descending the spectrum towards grey, not just his hair but skin colour also. Could extrapolate this simile to his policies being blue/grey as well but that might be stretching things a little. But unless ITN have a problem with the colour balance on their cameras or Golden’s make up artist was taking the piss, it looks like he’s in need of a holiday from his new job already.

Deepest sympathy and condolences to the family and friends of Ollie Bridewell who died today during a BSB practice session at Mallory Park.

How about shutting the fuck up about how wrong it was for you to have smoked cannabis. How about it, eh? We’ve got the idea, it’s wrong to smoke cannabis, at least it’s wrong for a newly appointed Home Secretary to have been associated with a splif of any dimensions, at any time in the past, in the company of others, with whom you may be out of touch or who, heaven forefend, may have the tiniest inclination to place a phone call to the Daily Mail. Was it wrong then or is it just wrong now? Don’t think we quite got to the bottom of than one during your self serving protestations. Maybe you didn’t inhale? I’m sure that one has a creditable track record.

You’ve spiked the media’s guns on this one and your precious greasy pole climbing careeer can continue a pace. Rest assured it never crossed our minds that you’re just another weak and vacillating politician, unable to withstand a modicum of peer pressure, regularly to be found at the business end of a bong the size of the local dealer’s hydroponic setup.

I recorded the MLB All Star Game from San Francisco and have now had chance to watch a little of it and the game looks to have been, well, fairly decent through the first three innings compared to the last offering I watched about three years ago. This was pretty startling to me, though nowhere near as shocking as the revelation that the C5 presenter, Jonny Gould, loves the All Star Game? Now I don’t have a problem with JG, or anyone loving the All Star Game, but this is surely a piece of tautology we can do without. Gould gets flown out to San Fran, by C5 or MLB International, to swan around for a week with Erik, Josh and Dave Lengel, an access all areas press pass, goes to Fan Fest, gets to take batting practice on the field at A T & T Park on the morning of the game (I really must check the tape on that but I’m sure that’s what he said!) and meet as many of the selected players and coaches as time allows from a hectic sightseeing schedule. Now if I had experienced all this and had my tonsils removed via my arsehole I would still admit to enjoying the All Star Game but most of us do not get to experience the game through this perspective, we get to see an oddball sort of a game on TV, lacking cohesion due to the many player changes, with little of the usual strategy on show and given a quirky edge by the spurious confirmation of home field advantage in the World Series to the winning league.

Anyone for the next flight to San Francisco? Me, me, me, I love the All Star Game I do.

I am at something of a loss to understand the furore that has been surrounding the opt-out proposals that have come forward today. Maybe there is no controversy, just the media whipping up a story into something it’s not on a slow news day. But it would seem that should these proposals be made law, then there will be people wandering around, and, therefore, alive, consumed with worry about what is going to happen to them once they are dead. I have a little trouble rationalising this concern, if you are dead then one of a small number of things may happen, depending on your beliefs, or lack of them. a). You are with your maker, in whatever happy place has been set aside for you, free from worries or cares, therefore whatever is happening to your corporeal presence in the world you have left behind cannot be a cause for any distress. b). You’ve been flushed to somewhere rather less convivial, and reputedly a lot warmer, depending on your beliefs I guess. Well, if the rumours propagated down the centuries are true then you will have much more to concern you than what’s happening to the physical remains left behind. c). Helloooooo, your dead, you’re meat on a slab, no longer sentient by any measure physical science can devise and so your concern would be what?

I appreciate there will be individuals and groups of people that, for varying reasons, have objections to this approach and safeguards will need to be in place for them to make their opt-out decision easily and have the oportunity to register it on many ocassions during their life. The demand for organs is only going to increase as procedures for using organs improve, there maybe a finite period for this increase if the promise of stem cell research begins to fulfil it’s claimed potential, but until that time greater availability of donated organs should be encouraged, more organs means less time in transport and the deterioration which goes with it and the possibility of better tissue type matching and a reduction in the strength of the ongoing drug regimes to manage rejection.

I’m sure the debate will continue for quite sometime but I can see no reason not to JFDI.

Yet another obscure example of Sod’s Law to be added to the extensive list, if you wash your bike, you’re going to get caught in the rain on it within 48 hours. Check.

Shouldn’t grumble, didn’t get too wet but the filthy spray demonstrated a little acknowledged, relativistic effect of transporting my bike back to about 11.30 Sunday morning, just slightly before I started washing it. Perhaps I could leave it out in the forthcoming downpours which will then wash off the accumulated crud? Or might this just be the triumph of hope over expectation, or not being arsed to put the sodden cover over it? Beats me, I just can’t tell.

Well, can’t say I elevated it to an art form, but I have done some the last couple of days. Topped up the fluids, checked the braided hoses and pads, the pads will have to come out in the next couple of months, washed and polished it, cleaned the lube off the rear wheel and adjusted the chain, may have left it just a touch tight, always seem to do this due to getting the adjusters just so but then it always tightens up a little when I torque up the wheel spindle. Still got a little cosmetic work to do, there is a little pitting on the fork stanchions above the triple clamp and a few other bits of chrome need some attention. The chrome on mine is nothing like the quantity seen on cruisers, cannot imagine having to take care of all the brightwork seen on these contraptions, their owners must get the Autosol delivered by the tanker load. How do they make time to ride them and clean them?? It really needs to go into the shop soon, been in need of a major service for the last year or so, which means going into the rocker cover and off with the camshaft to get at the shims, will get some plugs thrown at it at the same time but that will cost me in the order of £350 and I’d be struggling to get four figures for the whole thing if I sold it. Still, there is no better fun, at least on a daily basis, than being out on the bike.

I had not seen this program before last weekend when I saw the one off special, ‘Spinners and Losers’ on BBC3 or 4, can’t remember which, they’re all the same aren’t they? But I watched it again tonight, on BBC2, and recorded it, and then watched it again. And it was definitely the best hour of comedy I have seen this year, maybe for quite a few years. After last weekend I went out and got the DVD of the first series, which was good but not as good as the special. Whilst the ‘first series’ bears favourable comparison with Yes Prime/Minister’, a bumbling and ineffectual Minister hemmed in on policy and obsessed by media image, the absence of Chris Langham’s character, Hugh Abbot, due to Langham’s current little difficulty, has placed Peter Capaldi & Paul Higgins scenery chewing characters front and centre and it’s all the better for it. Although it must make the writing much more demanding. As a long time fan of Yes Prime/Minister the Hugh Abbot character bore far too close a resemblance to Jim Hacker, intellectually limited, befuddled, often pompous and condescending, sometimes naive and image obsessed. The surrounding players have moved on though, the Civil Service element from Yes Prime/Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Wooley, are now Special Advisors and Enforcers leaving Langham’s character looking a little anachronistic. Whilst these traits in the Hacker character made him implausible in the eighties, today it verges on the incredible. Cynically, I would suggest that you can be incompetent or demonstrate a lack of media savvy, but not both.

Unless Langham contributed a great deal of material after the shooting script was decided, though he does not get a writing credit, then I find it inexplicable that he has received many of the plaudits. This is an ensemble piece with Capaldi, Higgins, Addison and Smith all turning in performances of at least equal merit.

I can't find anything to indicate that there is another series on the way at the moment but I hope that Iannucci and the rest of the writers can put some more together sometime very soon.

So Golden Brown has become, with a single, glorious fudge, I mean decision, the moral compass of the nation. Apparently. I have a number of issues with this ‘Super Casino’ lark. Up until yesterday the matter had not bothered me in the slightest, I’ve been to casinos on a couple of occasions and if one was opened, super or otherwise, within walking distance I might go again, if I had to get the car out, I don’t think I’d bother. But it’s not the substance about which the decision was made that I have a problem with but everything behind the process of making the decision. Parliament took a vote; yes to a whole rash of casinos, ostensibly in the expectation that the corporate purveyors of all things chancy would throw their largesse at various areas in need of regeneration into which H.M. Govt. would plant them. After whittling away at it the number of ‘Super Casinos’ to be built ended up at 1 with a number of locations racing towards the end of the rainbow. So here we have one of the problems, a beauty contest was arranged, involving the expenditure of private and local government money, with an unambiguous prize to be bestowed upon the winner. Well here’s the news guys, every last penny spent, win or lose, was pissed up the wall. Is there some morality in stimulating pointless expenditure of local government money? Personally I rather see it spent on weekly garbage collection if it’s all the same to you Golden.

Was Brown’s predecessor not someone who claimed to be led into Iraq a by a moral imperative? I am not for a moment trying to equate the decisions, just the spurious basis in ‘morality’ which has been ascribed to the decision making process. All this started for me during a moment of inattention, I found myself listening to the renown lightweight Jeremy Vine, upon who’s show Amanda Platell was supporting Golden’s decision. A Daily Mail columnist supporting Brown, some mistake surely? It got worse, he then gave air time to a couple of rabid, anally retentive Tories who avowed that, until this decision, they would rather have opened a vein than vote Labour, were now on board with Golden!

But just how much morality underlies this decision? Is Golden just trying to distance himself from his predecessor, if so is abandoning parliamentary decisions and cabinet politics so radical a departure? It’s OK, no consultation required, it was a ‘moral’ decision. Was it just a knee jerk reaction to feeling like he was having a pole shoved up his arse, politically speaking, by, of all things, Ian Duncan Smith pissing in the wind about how to ‘heal our broken society’? Really, if Golden can’t withstand the blathering of washed up Tories of the calibre of IDS then his domicile at No. 10 may not even stretch to the next General Election.

And finally, has any decision actually been made, or unmade, or made and then unmade? Morally or otherwise. Whilst at the Despatch Box did Golden say that his sensibilities, and those of the nation, would be affronted by such a heinous institution as a ‘Super Casino’ and the whole concept was done like dinner? No, he did not, he said that the project was to be subject to a further period of reflection. So no decision. Well, no, or yes. A ‘well placed source within No. 10’ seems to have briefed all the media, with the possible exception of the Shetland Free Ads, that it is in fact toast. See, this is the way to do politics, just ask Tony Blair.

I have a problem here, as a baseball fan, and, for what it’s worth, I guess I should be doing my evangelising bit and encouraging any non-believers out there to watch Major League Baseball’s mid-season showpiece. But I can’t. The structure of the game is there for all to see, four balls, three strikes, twenty seven outs, nine innings, but most of the subtleties are missing. During a ‘proper’ game batters make adjustments to pitchers and pitchers to batters but this never occurs during the All Star game due to the team managers feeling obliged to get as many of the selected players into the game as possible. The upshot of this is that the batters will not face a pitcher more than once, the starting pitcher will go two innings, maybe, to be followed by three or four other ‘ace’ pitchers and the final innings pitched by four top closers. No chance for adjustment by the hitters, no ‘fat’ pitches from a tiring starter. Few base runners, as everyone is trying to get lucky swinging for the stands, so no base stealing, no hit and run plays, no situational hitting, no bunting. Call me a snob about this but it is these, and many other of the little things missing from the All Star game, that make baseball so fascinating a game.

So the day has arrived, the day we save the planet at the behest of a bunch of pop stars, celebs and a former U.S. Vice President who did Sweet Fanny Adams about it during an 8 year window of opportunity. Is it me or is this just another example of towering arrogance and condescension on the part of a group of people who have been lining their pockets, in large part, by flying around the world for years and not giving a flying fuck about the consequences? Forget the little plastic and magnets thingamabob, some of these acts during a world tour are the nearest thing we will see to a perpetual motion machine, hauling themselves, their entourage, hairdressers, wardrobe assistants, minders, publicity staff and tonnes of sound and lighting equipment from city to city, country to country and continent to continent, all in the name of personal gain. But that’s all OK, and will no doubt continue in the future, because they have taken the time, maybe as much as 48 hours, to pontificate to the great unwashed about how the availability of cheap flights to the basic rate tax payer is fucking with the planet. Now that may, or may not, be the intent but it is the reality inasmuch as China and India and the global business players are listening no more today than they were yesterday or last week.

Here’s way to make a difference, stop buying any products associated in any way with these finger wagging freaks and then they’ll have no reason to go swanning off around the planet because they’ll have nothing to pimp.

Apparently this is me;

Never realised I was this colourful!

Not a name familiar to most people, nor is he now likely to become so as he has just resigned his job. However to many people who became interested in baseball at the time Channel 5 started showing games he will be far better know. Hargrove was the manager of the Cleveland Indians at the time and Hargrove, along with General Manager, John Hart I believe, had built them into a competitive team. This, allied to the team moving to a new stadium, Jacobs Field, and breaking all sorts of attendance records ensured that C5 showed many of Hargrove’s Indians games. The team also went to the World Series losing in seven to the Marlins.

Time moves on and Hargrove, until yesterday, was managing the Seattle Mariners and had them in 2nd place in the AL West, a very creditable performance and somewhat unexpected. Whilst not favourites to win the division they were by no means out of the race but nevertheless Hargrove seems to have called it a career saying that his heart was no longer in it. If this is the reason or there is some other, I’m sure baseball fans in this country will wish him well due to all the memories from the time when baseball started to make regular TV appearances over hear.