Apple – PowerBook G4 15″. Next Christmas, that is.
Here is where I formally sign up for the Apple Appreciation Society. Boxing Day, my cousin turns up to a family gathering with with a powerbook. I play with. I am converted. Me so wants.
Merry Christmas to one and all. Father Christmas has been and given some magical gifts to the children. Kid A was most excited.
My Christmas present is, I hope,
only delayed and hasn’t crashed and burnt. And I so wanted to use the title “The Beagle has landed”. Nevermind, hopefully it will be a Boxing Day present for the British Scientists.
Now, I’m a fairly forgetful person, on one occasion I missed going to a very important meeting at work, remembering half an hour later in a cold sweat thinking I was going to get the sack for it, and wondering why, since I had been at my desk the whole time, no one had phoned me to remind me. Luckily my employers are not the FA who last night “banned Rio Ferdinand for 8 months for failing to take a drugs test”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/3333091.stm
There are lots of arguments from both side of the fence about the length of the bad deemed harsh by some and lenient by others. The arguments are sometimes based on facts that to be wrong. Please note, that whilst I am a Manchester United supporter, I don’t think I let this influence my thoughts. If it were Sol Campbell instead, I would think the same. I just might not write about it here.
First of all there is the case of precedent. Earlier this year, a Manchester City player did exactly what Rio did and failed to take a drugs test. He received a £2000 fine and no ban. The argument for not letting this be a precedent seems to be that the City player in question could speak no English and therefore had mitigating circumstances. I would argue that his non-English is irrelevant. He failed to take a drugs test. What happens if this guys is a non-English speaking drug taker who was only managed to get his way into the English game by taking performance enhancing drugs? However, the FA took on his special circumstances and only fined the player.
Next, we have the length of the ban. Rio got 8 months. Jaap Stam, when he was his drug test was positive, received a 4 month ban. Others in the Italian game got similar length bans. Mark Bosnich, testing positive for cocaine use, got a 9 month ban. None of these add up. Failing to take a test shouldn’t be deemed to be twice as bad as testing positive, should it? And why is cocaine, not exactly a performance enhancing drug, a lot worse than missing a test and testing positive for nandrolone? If you argue that it was different FA’s that dished out the ban, then you must agree that Seep Blatter, publicist and FIFA president, should keep his nose out of the Rio saga. You should also argue that anything is relevant from the world of athletics should be ignored too.
World Anti-Doping Agency president Dick Pound however said he thought Ferdinand should have received a longer suspension. I would agree if the standards of testing in football were as good as in a lot of other sports, e.g. athletics and tennis. Because, in that situation, Rio would have never failed to take the test. He would have had to have gone on the run from his drug testing “minder”. You can’t forget when there is a tester almost physically attached to you. The world must know that English football’s drug testing procedures are rather lax. Random testing is, it seems very random. Some Arsenal players have never had to have a test in three years, apparently.
There is an argument that goes “How could he forget something so important?” I think, in football, it clearly isn’t that important. Tests just aren’t performed that often, and there is a clear indication that footballers don’t take them seriously because “you can’t really improve football skills with drugs.” At least this notion has been disproved. Therefore, has Rio been made an example of?
Mark Palios has come in an made the FA’s drugs policy stronger and stricter. Has he? Well, where is the clear and unambiguous policy document that states exactly what a player should expect if he “forgets” to take a test? Was it communicated to clubs and players? Why were the drugs testers not using the same strict policy as in the world of athletics, tailing the player until he took the test? I would have accepted any length ban if we had found on that in July, for example, a new document had been issued to players and clubs about the new hard stance they were taking, detailing that if you failed to take a test you would get an 8 month ban. I would have also excepted a 3-6 month ban if they produced that document right now, and implemented it straight away.
I would also like to know the FA’s exact reason for the length of this ban. Why 8 months? It is just conveniently long enough to interfere with the start of next season. Also, why so long. Did you not take into consideration any of the mitigating circumstances? Do you actually, then suspect Rio of taking drugs. If so, why not a two year ban? With Alex Ferguson hard on alcohol abuse, don’t imagine for one second he wouldn’t off load Ferdinand if he knew he were taking drugs. This was one idea raised when he got rid of Jaap Stam, and Mark Bosnich’s lifestyle was certainly the reason that he was off loaded to Chelsea.
The best case scenario for the FA is that they quickly revolutionise themselves, changing not just their drug testing policies but all the disciplinary they have. With clear policies in line, clubs will have nothing to complain about.
The worst case is that Manchester United will depart company from the FA, joining with other clubs, either in an independent English Football League, or actually going the whole way and forming the much proposed European Super League out of jurisdiction of the FA, UEFA and FIFA. In my opinion, this is a very bad thing to happen, but I wouldn’t blame Manchester United for wanting to do it.
Please let me know your thoughts, especially if there are arguments I haven’t thought of that might change my mind.
I’m on Return of the King spoiler evasion alert. I hope I don’t find out how it ends before I see it. Titanic was ruined for me when I found out the boat sank.
I hope I don’t get the answers to the following questions :
Will Frodo make it to the Crack of Doooom?
Will Gollum or Smeagol win out?
If Frodo suceeds, how on earth will they be able to get out from the Crack of Doooom without Peter Jackson resorting to that “giant eagle” trick he pulled on Gandalf in FotR?
Has someone in my family bought me the Two Towers Extended DVD or should I not have mentioned it and bought it when it first came out?
Tim Bray has been slowly reading through QuickSilver. He’s not the only one. I’m on page 264 and I’ve been reading for nearly two weeks now. By my standard this is incredibly slow. I usually cruise through 200 pages a day, and read Cryptonomicon in about a week.
However, I am loving Quicksilver and it ties into a lot of things I am interested in; early scientific advances, Newton, Hooke, Pepys, the Plague. It was funny watching Steve Coogan (not often I say that these days; the last series of Alan Partridge was whipping the rotting carcus once too often) as Samual Pepys the other night on BBC2 after reading Neal Stephenson’s version of him.
I may be in the minority of most of Stephenson’s previous readers (sci-fi/cyber/neo-victorian or whatever) for liking a good historical story.
That is why I loved “The Years of Rice and Salt”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006511481/qid=1071742683/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-2331353-6811602 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which also touches on many of these areas in an alternate universe way. The plague wipes out western Europe and the scientific advances made by Newton and others are made by the Chinese and Muslins.
Look left and you’ll see a link log on the left, entitled “Newspaper Cuttings(a bunch of blogging grandmas)”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/archives.blah/007609
It’s powered by “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us as it very easy to set up and use. The RSS feed is “here(the rss feed from delicious)”:http://del.icio.us/rss/sarabian
At the moment, a python script updates the main page from the RSS feed using “FeedParser(still ultra-liberal and ultra-useful)”:http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_parser/ . I like the idea of having inline links though, so this may change in the future.
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