Horse Arse!
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Evander Holyfield Still Not Dead.
Last night’s embarrassing side show “fight” in Florida ended anticlimactically, with punch drunk ex-champion Evander Holyfield (59 next month) taking a few decent punches and appearing surprised at them, which is only fair for a man who can’t remember the last time he was in the ring or even what he had for lunch. Holyfield misfired a left hook and fell on his ass, then was punched back onto the same ass by his oponent, before the whole sorry mess was called off by the referee in the first round. This is about as good an outcome as we could have hoped for.
Elsewhere on the undercard, British ex-champion David Haye staged another of his periodic comebacks. Haye, who retired at 30 to piss his money up a wall, returned to the sport aged 33 and had a couple of fights on “Dave,” a British TV channel normally dedicated to screening Top Gear repeats for the unemployed. During this period his most notable feat was beating Swiss fighter Arnold Gjergjaj, a man who was named during an unfortunate Scrabble accident. David Haye then retired, again, and has now made a “one fight comeback” aged forty, securing a dull points decision before abandonning the “one fight” promise and calling out Tyson Fury.
Based on that level of poor decision making, expect him to be back in a ring and falling on his ass aged fifty nine, a process hereafter referred to as Holyfielding.
Sadly, due to the short nature of the main event, guest comentator Donald Trump and his idiot son, Donald Trump, didn’t have time to make good on their vague promise to spill the beans on Area 51.
I can’t help but think of something an old trainer of mine used to say: “Try to dop your hip more when you throw a right hand, and if Evander Holyfield had a better chin, that cunt from The Apprentice would have told us more about UFOs.”
I never really understood what he meant until now.
“I Can Boogie” Singer Not Still Alive.
Spanish singer Maria Mendiola, known almost entirely for being half of the duo Baccara and recording Disco anthem “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” has died aged 69.
This is obviously sad for her family and friends and I wish them well, although I have no strong opinions on anything else in the story. It did make me think, however, that when people die who (without sounding mean spirited) don’t really mean a lot to people outside their families, it’s redundant to ask their loved ones to comment.
In future, I’d like to see more of people’s enemies interviewed. Or people they didn’t know very well. When Leo Sayer dies and 20% of the population go “Yeah, I sort of remember him,” it will make it far more worthwhile printing a news story if the first person interviewed is someone who was involved in a bitter dispute with him over parking spaces, or else someone who once saw him getting changed in between TV segments in Covent Garden in the 90s.1
It’s not really newsworthy when minor celebs die, but it becomes even less newsworthy if the body of the story simply contains the information that their families will miss them. I sort of already assumed that part. Let’s hear from alternate viewpoints in future. Failing that, let’s use the example of writer Keaton Patti, whose book “I Forced a Bot to Write This Book” contained a fantastic example of how AI might be used:
Everyone For Tennis.
British teen Emma Raducanu has won the US Open. The Tennis one; she’s presumably shit at golf. Still, the papers will be full of jubilation and flag waving for a few days, and it gave us a strong candidate for Joke of the Week from Twitter user @beardedgenius:
I don’t follow tennis, but good for Emma Radacanu. She seems like a nice kid and she deserved it.
Elsewhere, joyless, insufferable hatred-bot and current Home Secretary Priti Patel has vowed to send all migrants back across the channel if they try to enter the UK, thus ensuring that Emma Raducanu (father Romanian, mother Chinese) will be the last British sporting success story as we all slowly inbreed into pale, Covid-ridden, malnourished cretins who TOOK BACK OUR COUNTRY and DON’T LIKE FOREIGNERS.
I’m kidding, of course. Not about Priti Patel hating immigrants (and herself, and everyone else) but about Emma Radacascu’s parents not being allowed into the country. They work in finance. They’d have been fine.
Still, Emma Radacanu is a shining example to all little immigrant girls that they can grow up to succeed and be beloved in Britain, as long as their families are rich enough to afford tennis lessons and not get deported in the first place. Otherwise, they can paddle their fucking door back to where they launched it.
Horse Arse!
Okay, I promised some lighter stuff, so here’s a fun thing I learned this week.
I’m a fan of chaos theory, which most people know from Jurassic Park but which is actually a little more complicated. Without getting into it too much, one of the central ideas is that you can’t ever accurately measure “zero” in a complex system, and as a result, even a system with simple rules will have unexpected outcomes.
This came up recently when I learned that the standard American railway gauge - ie, how far apart the rails are - is 4ft 8 1/2 inches. This is an odd measurement, so the natural question is why.
The sort answers is that the first American railways were laid when it was still a British colony, so the British used the same measurements they used at home. But this doesn’t answer the question; it just kicks it further down the road.
The reason the British were using that measurement is that when trains were invented they were based off of the design of carts, and 4 feet 8 1/2” is the standard width between cart wheels. Why? Because it’s easiest to built a cart’s wheels to fit the ruts in the road, and most of Britains roads had ruts worn into them by centuries of cart travel which were four feet eight and a half inches between them.
The reason for THIS was because of the Romans. The Romans built a large number of roads across Britain, and the standard width of a Roman imperial cart was decreed to be just wide enough to fit two horses in harness, side by side.
This means, firstly, that the official width of a Roman horse’s arse was apparently two foot four and a quarter. But it also means that when Roman chariots wore ruts in the road they were creating a blueprint for all future carts.
It gets better: Some larger components of NASA rockets have to be shipped by rail. And some rail tunnels used in the process are designed to be only slightly wider than the width of the rails. This means, in a very real sense, the shape of our space ships is partly dictated by the size of a Roman horse’s arse.
This is what chaos theory means when it says that you can’t measure zero. If you were asked what dictated the shape of a rocket, you’d never think that the start point of your investigation would be how wide a horse was thousands of years beforehand.
I think that’s pretty cool.
*In the 1990s, I was in Covent Garden and saw Leo Sayer being interviewed. He had to change into different trousers while the cameras were off so that he could be ready to go on stage, hence my oddly specific choice of reference.