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7P - PORSWI - Ronaldo Can't Find The Sixth
Ronaldo must've been licking his lips at the thought that it was all so easy and when he drilled it home, he probably thought that he has somehow would back the clock to a time when he could destroy sides at all. The man with the flag had other ideas and Ronaldo like a mad thing, blew his lid like a pressure cooker.
The replay showed the supreme height of his arrogance. Not only was Ronaldo significantly offside to the point that there was nobody else around him but as the only other person in the Swiss half apart from the Swiss goalkeeper, this offside was so blatantly offside, that it could be seen from space.
At 5-1 the match had already devolved into a circus. Gonsalvo Ramos was clearly the ringmaster and directing everyone else around him as a series of sideshows, whereas Ronaldo trying to entertain the crowd wasn't just a clown, he was the whole clown car.
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6C - MMM Country
During the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar, as the late game begins at 6am Sydney Time, I have mainly watched the first half of the 6am games and then listened to the rest of the game on a pop-up Digital Radio station called SBS Football 1. SBS Football 1 usually takes its live feed from BBC Five Live in the UK but has also taken the English language feed from DW, CBC Radio 1, stations affiliated with NPR in America, and done commentary in house for matches where it couldn't get a live feed. SBS Football 2 will usually be the same game in one of the languages of the countries playing the match, or will take French services from France Radio and Spanish services from Radio Espana et cetera.
Australia uses DAB+ which is excellent if you are on the train, because AM radio will pick up the RF junk from the motors of the train (trains in Sydney are all EMUs), and FM radio will be completely obliterated because train carriages act as giant Faraday cages.
This post is not about football on the radio.
Since I have my wee little DAB+ radio with me, I like to scan the airwaves for other radio stations which pop in and out of existence. Apart from the main stations, the ABC hosts ABC Jazz, SBS has SBS Pop Asia and SBS Pop Desi, stations like Elf Radio have appeared for the Christmas season, Nova Radio has Nova 90s and Nova 00s, and Triple M in Sydney has MMM Classic and MMM Country.
MMM Country is a truly bonkers radio station. Being on DAB+, it like all digital stations can only be received with direct line of sight to the transmitting tower; which means that it is utterly useless at being broadcast to presumably its target market, people in the country. I have no idea if MMM Country actually does broadcast in country areas but I suspect that it does not. This begs the question of who this station exists for and I fail to have any kind of sensible answer.
So not only have I found a radio station which I do not understand who it is for, I have a radio station which I do not understand its content either.
I am bewildered by country music. I absolutely love the talent on display, which absolutely must exist because country music is generally played live, in front of bigger audiences, and with actual instruments instead of keyboards, sequencers and drum machines. Technically its amazing. However the subejct material, once you remove the universal stories of love, loss, poverty, anger, revenge, and going around the carousel of human emotions to do it all again, is really weird.
As someone who is very clearly not countrified, it seems to me that one could write a country song with only a few select words:
- warm night
- cold beer (whiskey, tequila are also acceptable)
- pickup truck
- tanned legs
- blue jeans (painted on)
Now again, the whole idea of having a repetitive and catchy song isn't a problem because pop music has been doing this ever since the Sons of Korah were doing call and response songs on the ten-string lyre but what is bonkers to me is that as evidenced by the sheer numbers of these kinds of songs on MMM Country (which I suspect isn't a very good sample size) is that someone thinks that people will buy them.
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2C - Copyleft
Broadly speaking there are three kinds of things that fall into the realm of copyright law. Copyright usually refers to sequential works, like books, television and films, and songs and other audio works. The fact that a thing has been published in usually enough to assert the right of the owner of the work to the right to claim royalties and remuneration from it. Then there are devices, wordmarks, logos and other visual detritus which a person wants to assert is their mark for establishing a brand. The last broad category are registered designs and patents; with the former being the physical look of a good which has been produced and the latter being control over some process which describes how to make a thing.
I do not dispute that someone should have the right to extract proper profits from their work. I do not dispute that someone who owns the rights to a book, film, design, patent, computer software, or other some such has the right to be properly compensated for the use and enjoyment of their stuff. What I find annoying is when copyright law actively impedes the enjoyment of an end user, long after the original rights holder has reasonably vacated the space and extracted their benefits first.
There is a delicate balancing game going on, where a work, such as a film or book, is owned by its readers. There is such a thing as author intent but when it passes into the hands of the reader, they are free to extract any kind of meaning or importance that they like from it. Where I find the impedence of the enjoyment of the end users particularly annoying, is when after a long period of time, there have been fandoms and/or communities built around the shared enjoyment of a thing; yet they aren't allowed to transform or borrow from the original work which brought them together.
Generally speaking, registered designs expire after about 20 years. The exceptions to this are when those registered designs are part of an enduring and ongoing use. Nobody for instance would dispute the right of the Coca-Cola company to assert their right to their famous bottle. Not only is it in current use but is features very prominently in their ongoing brand and marketing.
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30T - These Is Thesises
The point of the matter is that if I want to, I can generate about 2000 words a day. This means that for a thesis length document, I could have that kind of job done in less than two months. However, writing a thesis is no mere matter of vomiting a hundred thousand words onto the page, be it electronic or paper. A thesis is by definition an academic research paper and that means by default that there has to have been at least a hundred thousand words of research worthy material which gets put through the grinder and sausaged.
The art of writing a thesis then, is not the art of writing 100,000 words. Any fool with two months can blork up a thesis length piece of gibberish nonsense schnick nuck neigh. No, the art of writing a thesis is the art of doing hours and weeks and months and years, of tedious and often difficult research and work to test hypothesis, to finally wrangle truth out of existence.
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24C - O 0 Oh Canada?
During the first half of this game, Canada have looked as if they have no idea that they are supposed to lay down and die at the feet of Belgium. Belgium started out this match with a sense of entitlement as they made the pitch very very big indeed, by stretching out passes and making the Canadians run further than they've ever run before. Canada though, has a squad in which exactly zero players were alive when they last featured in a World Cup. To give you an idea of just how long ago Mexico '86 was, Canada's last match in a World Cup tournament proper, was a 1-0 loss to the Soviet Union.
Canada, after they got over the initial shock of being made to run like rabbits, spent a great deal of the first half pressing forwards and getting in the face of the Belgian back three. They were rewarded 11 minutes into the first half with a penalty after a handball the ball in in the six yard box. Alphonse Davis did not deliver Canada's first goal at a World Cup.
The rest of the story of the first half as Canada is concerned is that they were simply unable to convert any of their 11 chances into a goal. Belgium when they did press forward looked like they were supremely cool and when X scored the only goal of the match, any kind of Canadian confidence instead of big and bouncy was deflated and became wrinkly and small.
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23S - The Net Weight Of A Cruise Ship
During the voyage of a cruise ship, the net weight of that cruise ship is the heaviest immediately after all of the passengers have been loaded on board. Matter can not be created nor destroyed; which means that the only thing that can happen from this point onwards is that all of the fuel on board, both for the ships engines and the people on board for their internal combustion, is chemically converted and some of it is burned. The results are then energy and the release of two major gases, which are Carbon Dioxide and Dihydro Monoxide.
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17M - Prithee Mustang?
There's just something which feels altogether wrong about the Mustang. The wheelbase is slightly longer than a Falcon but not markedly wider. The seating position is lower but you don't really feel any more grounded. Although I have driven Falcons where the steering was vague, or the suspension tired and floaty, it still did a better job of communicating its road attitude through the seat of your pants to you.
I am not sure if this is the kind of car which does well in A/B testing with an American public, who likely wants smoother cars so that they can eat up the miles on smoother interstate highways but it just doesn't do it for me. The Toyota GT86 which is very pitchy, or a BMW 4er which is equally as anonymous in communicating its road dynamics to you, both do the job better.
Maybe the Mustang is for people who like the thought of the 8 cylinder rock concert up front but are too old to rock out properly. The Falcon coupe that I had oh so many years ago, was only a six cylinder but the amount of power and torque coming from up front was more than enough to scare the jinkies both out of you and back into you.
The current Mustang is in my not very well paid opinion a true GTO type car - Grand Turismo Obligato - that is, it exists because Ford feels that they are obligated to make this car. Mustang II was like this at the time. Fox Body Mustang which has now received a sort of nostalgic love, is looked on more fondly now that it was at the time. Mustangs 3 and 4 were both anonymous. It could very well be that the problem here is me. I have driven both the original Mustang and various Falcons; so in my mind, the car is supposed to somewhat good but instead, the current Mustang is just this vague thing which isn't sure of itself and doesn't communicate anything to the driver.
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