SF14 - Spanish Flu
I am going to suggest that the chances of most people getting Covid-19 in their lifetimes is going to approach very close to 1. Granted that there are vaccines currently being deployed but even if you account for that, the likelihood of rolling out a vaccine which is going to have the same take-up rates as the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine, in my lifetime is not great. It took the destruction of more than a hundred million people in two world wars to produce a work of community sufficiently large enough in societies, such that they saw very big collective action problems as requiring very big action answers and solutions. I do not think that societies have that same spirit of community and forced altruism today.
If what I have said is true (and I do not know if it is or not) then Covid-19 will follow the same kind of timeline as H1N1 which is more famously and incorrectly called the Spanish Flu.
The only reason that it was called the Spanish Flu was that because Spain wasn't embroiled in the First World War, the Spanish media was actually prepared to report the news in the newspapers.
One of the better theories that I have read was that it started in the United States and came to the Western Front when America threw its hat into the ring. Of course nobody who is fighting a war wants to admit that troops are dying left, right, and centre, due to a flu because that would look poxy and weak in the face of the enemy. So whereas France, Britain, Italy, Germany etc. wouldn't report the truth due to trying to keep morale up, Spain had no such reason.
In 2020 we saw an equally weird propaganda war where instead of this an epidemic and then a pandemic, which should have absolutely been prepared for and expected in the long run, Covid-19 became this thing which was started in a laboratory. This is in spite of all available evidence that engineering anything like this is as far as we know, orders of magnitude more complex than anything that we are currently able to do, and ascribes imagined power to a designated enemy which they simply do not have.
Moreover, if this was genuinely considered to be the act of a skilled state actor in an act of war, then the United States' response to refuse to enact universal health care in the face of this, suggests to me that the administration is by design incompetent on both sides for the purpose of extracting profits from the general public.
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SM7 - Scott Morrison
Is Scott Morrison hanging on to the Premiership purely because he likes the office or is it because the government is otherwise so internally divided that nobody wants the job? I genuinely do not think that it is reasons for ideology or agenda because this government repeatedly demonstrates that it has no obvious ideology or agenda driving it except for letting business abrogate any obligations that they might have to the economy and people of the Commonwealth of Australia.
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AS12 - Aryton Senna Is Not The GOAT
If you win a competition by being worse than your opponent and by fluke of the rules, then almost by default, you aren't eligible for greatness.
In 1988 Senna dropped many zero points paying positions (in some cases where he'd either crashed or blew up the engine), whereas Prost was forced to drop second place positions. Prost finished in more races because he was both kinder on the equipment and because he made fewer mistakes. By operation of the rules though, Prost was penalised for being better and that is stupid.
In reviewing 1989, the very charismatic accident which took out Senna and Prost going into the final chicane at Suzuka could probably be attributed as a 50:50 incident. However, taken in context of the season where Senna had already taken out Mansell in Portugal, and the fact that James Hunt predicted in the commentary that the accident was going to happen before it did, then what looks like a 50:50 incident, begins to look like a 55:45 incident.
That would be fine except that this doesn't exist in isolation and a year later, there is no doubt whatsoever that Senna deliberately rammed Prost off the road in the first corner at Suzuka. He should have been banned for life but instead he was rewarded with the 1990 championship. As far as I'm concerned, if you deliberately use a car as a weapon, in an action which would normally result in criminal prosecution and a prison term, then I am simply not going to admit as evidence anything which happened after the event.
I strikethrough Senna's 1988 championship because he was worse than Prost. I strikethrough Senna's 1990 and 1991 championships because he was a knave.
Someone on 0 championships is not the GOAT.
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BU23 - Burglary
Robbery is the act of stealing property. Robbery can occur directly from a person or from a premises.
Burglary on the other hand, is the act of stealing property from a closed premises. The assumption of a closed premises means that the owner/proprietor/occupier is not present at the time that the stealing took place.
My guess is that the word 'burglary' relates to the concept of the burg and burghers. These are principally city dwellers as opposed to people out in the country and my further guess is that stealing from a premises in a small city, is more daring, more audacious, and more rude, because it happens within the supposed presence of others in the city. I can not say for sure but I think that the act of burglary which happens in close proximity to a great number of people is deemed to be more offensive because it could have happened to anyone. It's weird because stealing things from a farm with wide open spaces seems somehow easier and ruder to me because you could kill someone out in the middle of a field and nobody would be any the wiser.
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BD4 - Cricket Without Boundaries
"We want to see a bigger future for cricket after this pandemic is over. We want to imagine a better world and cricket without boundaries."
- NatWest spokesborg on BBC World Service
I completely understand Faustian bargain that sport has to make with advertising because essentially sport is an otherwise inherently useless endeavour, where the only actual products are temporary entertainment and narrative building. Sport in that respect is no different than crime dramas, talent competitions, and game shows, where the advertising space pays for the performers and the media companies broadcasting the show.
As someone who follows motor racing, the link with advertising couldn't be more obvious as since the 1960s, the entire liveries of race cars have been coloured by the advertisers as mobile billboards. The most famous articles of clothing in bicycle racing are also the direct result of advertising; with the Pink Jersey in the Giro D'Italia being coloured for the colour of the newsprint of La Gazetto Della Sport and the Yellow Jersey being coloured for the colour of the newsprint of L'Auto respectively.
I very much do not need to be reminded of why sport has to dance like a monkey with cymbals in order to chase the corporate and general public's coin. However, a quote like this is a reminder that people who live in corporate land are often gormless and humourless, and very often do not bother to do basic research about the things that they are being corporate partners to.
For one of the things that both defines the field of play and the scoring of the game of cricket, is the boundary and "cricket without boundaries" defies both the logic and the laws of cricket itself. How exactly does one score a Boundary 4 or a Boundary 6 if you are playing in a game of cricket where there is "cricket without boundaries"?
Unless of course this corporate spokesborg is trying to make a weak pun; in which case I appreciate that and will give it an appropriate "hurrrrrr" for being so horky borky. Does NatWest want to tell Dad jokes?
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GN21 - Guinea
Especially through the era of hammered coinage, British currency is notoriously complex. The Sovereign for instance, at the time of Elizabeth I, was a big flat gold jobby which was tariffed at 30 shillings and not at 20 as it later came to be.
The Guinea which was named after the source of gold in Africa where it came from, was initially tariffed at 20 shillings but as it was purer than other gold coins, it came to be as high as 30 shillings at various points.
The so-called "spade guinea" of the 1790s, seems to be a response to The City of London's request for a trade coin for use within the guilds. At some point in the 1780s, there is a Guilds Act of Parliament which affixes the charge out rates of guilds to firms getting a pound and clerks getting a shilling. The value of the spade guinea at 21 shillings or £1/1/- appears to reflect this in physical form.
I have previously alluded to the fact that Bob Cratchitt in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is very handsomely paid at the rate of 15 shillings a week which is akin to about $130,000 a year now. The firm of Marley and Scrooge as private money lenders, is likely taking in at least 15 guineas a week, if they are legally covered by the Guilds Act (which I suspect that they are). At bare minimum, we can assume from the text that both Marley and Scrooge are taking home £7/10/- if Bob Cratchitt is on 15 shillings a week. If this is true then they are taking home £390 a year; which is an astonishingly astronomical amount of money. If we calculate this further, at the long rate of interest as alluded to by Honoré de Balzac in "Old Man Goriot" then Marley and Scrooge probably have a lending book of at least £20,000 under management. No wonder heaps of people hate them.
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KN18 - I Know Nothing
We know so very little about the world, it's laughable. I have almost no idea how my own body works, much less how my soul managed to operate this electro mechanical meatbag device.
I have no what most people in the world are thinking (literally everyone in the world minus one) and on top of that, I have no idea how a thought works or even where it lives. If I imagine an apple for example, we (and I mean boffins who know just a little more than I) don't know where in the brain that thought is, nor do we know why some people can not imagine an apple in their mind's eye.
Having said all of that, when we have a thought that we know that we think a thing and it turns out not to be true, the general reaction in people tends to be one of deep confusion and even spills into anger.
This explains why when after Pluto was declared not to be a planet any more, lots of people got angry. I use this example because it is the biggest reaction to the most trivial thing that I can think of. The actual influence that Pluto has on any of our lives is actually nil. Yet the reason for people's visceral reaction to Pluto not being a planet any more, is that people had put some amount of work into getting a handle on this one thing and that someone can take that away, is outrageous.
Imagine then what happens if that kind of reaction spills into things which actually do matter. People invent narratives about how the world works, even if those narratives run counter to fact. People have gone all kinds of crazy when presented with the fact that people who look different to them might have inherent worth, value and dignity.
I find it maddening that people have to invent wild parts of cruel narratives, just so they can shoehorn in reasons to kill people.
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FC5 - My Five Cents
Why do we still have 5 cent coins?
I feel that the act of picking them up is more rubbish collection than actual picking them up to collect value. Evidently most other people also consider this to be true or else they wouldn't be left lying around with such alarming regularity.
There has to be some point when the utility of their existence is so small as to be minus. At that point they fall in their only function, which is to be part of the universal token system for the facilitation of the exchange of goods and services. That point has not yet arrived, it seems.
To highlight the decidedly bonkers nature of its current almost non existent utility, I shall now enumerate just how many you need to do some basic transactions.
It takes 13 of then to buy a can of baked beans. It takes 20 of them to buy a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven. It takes 40 of them to buy a loaf of bread and maybe another 19 to put something on that bread if you want to make a sandwich.
This presumes that you're only going to use 5 cent coins in these transactions. However, if you do choose to use other coins then by practical demonstration, you've already proven the current almost non existent utility of the little things.
You're better off using them for something else. Drill holes in them to make washers. Use them as tokens for card games. Put a whole bunch of them in a blunderbuss and use them as buckshot; or rather 1/20th of a buck... shot.
My current favourite use for then is as a plectrum for a guitar, which was made famous by Brian May. It certainly isn't for using in a transaction; including when transaction is helped by a robot.
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VS8 - Supercars' Closed Premises
The Bathurst 1000 is five months away but because we are currently in a time of weirdness with sport running limited and cut back schedules, it means that with less going on, various teams are making longer term announcements.
Already we've had full driver lineups for the 1000 announced; as well as announcements for so-called wildcard entries where the bigger teams in particular have planned to run a third car. Already there have been two such wildcards announced.
While that's all good and fun, it still only brings the total number of cars in the field up to 26; which is poxy compared with the fields of 55 which used to occur when I was a lad.
The excuse given is that there's simply not enough space for everyone but as I confirmed in person at the track in April, there are in fact 36 double garages with space in between them, which means that it is probably possible to pit 108 cars and certainly possible to pit 72 cars.
What this means is that not only is there enough space to house the entire field multiple times over but given that the number of cars entered in Super 2 and Super 3 is less than the remaining 46 available spaces, they could all have their individual garages. In fact at last year's Bathurst 1000, that is precisely what happened. Super 2 and Super 3 got their own garages for the weekend but still didn't compete in the main race. They competed in their own race which counted for their own championship.
The problem is that Supercars as it stands is a closed shop. The teams which exist have decided that the number of teams allowed to play is more or less fixed by instruments called Racing Entitlement Contracts; the kinds of cars allowed are specifically mandated in Vehicle Specification Documents. With both of these being closely held by the existing teams, it means that the number of new competitors allowed to play, is tiny. The pandemic allowed the existing teams the ability to close the number of entries to 24 and although they are playing with the idea of expanding that to 26, once you add the possibility of 'wildcards' which they deign to admit, then that means that for the foreseeable future, three will be a maximum of 30 cars at most.
There is exactly zero opportunity for a new team to join unless someone else either sells up or they hope for new REC to be released. This is a very far cry from the days when privateers could show up and play.
There will of course be people who actually like this new era of increased professionalism but I do not think that it is good for motor racing in this country and the proof is that the Bathurst 12 Hour has become the race where the rest of the world comes to play, and the Bathurst 6 Hour is set to become the place where the same kinds of people who would have been privateers in the past come to play. The 1000 apart from being the race meeting for a category which rudderless and which doesn't really know what it wants to be, is no longer the place where dreams are made.
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