Posts by Kyle Matthews
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@Raymond: I'm not a fan of berry-flavoured beers. But I will try most things. Did you mean Emmersons?
I was in Canada a couple of years ago and found they had a fairly good beer culture. Their mainstream beer wasn't too bad, and a couple of smaller suppliers that I tried was good.
They have a fascination with raspberry flavoured beer there. I tried one, and couldn't see the attraction at all. It was like mixing ribena into your beer.
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Well, I certainly think someone like moderate Maine Senator Olympia Snowe (who anywhere else in the world would be considered firmly on the center-right) would have been totally unacceptable to the theo-con base as a veep nominee. Even Kay Bailey Hutchinson, whose conservative bona fides are impeccable except on abortion, wasn't.
Yeah. I also understand why McCain has had to go socially conservative, so that between the two positions he's bridging the republican divide, energising the base etc.
It's very season 6/7 of the West Wing, except Alan Alda made a much more appealing Republican candidate.
Why he chose this social conservative however... who knows.
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I can also offer kittens with ribbons.
Love cats, but can never manage to eat a whole one in one sitting.
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The past is another country. I was thinking of NZ, this election. However, perhaps the same holds here and now, and I haven't registered its extent.
I think you can make a fairly strong argument for the past influencing the present. "Body politic" etc.
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With one good medical term you can step in and put the paddles to the most lifeless of sentences. How strange, then, that our political discourse is so vapid; so devoid of the doctors' vivid words.
An academic in my department is doing - well done really - on the influence of medical language on politics - medieval period mostly. He would strongly disagree that our political discourse is devoid on doctor's words, not sure about the more vivid ones.
See Dr Shogimen's two articles on the topic:
# 'Treating the Body Politic: Medical Metaphor of Political Rule in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan', The Review of Politics 70 (2008), pp. 77-104
# ‘Medicine and the Body Politic in Marsilius of Padua’ s Defensor pacis’ in A Companion to Marsilius of Padua, eds. Cary J. Nederman and Gerson Moreno-Riaño (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming, might be out by now...). -
And she's got an Irish last name, which gives her an in with the EU.
Practically 'vast foreign policy' experience these days ;)
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__I can't think of a single sports competition that doesn't enter a knock-out phase in some way at the finals.__
Aside from all the national soccer leagues in Europe, you mean?
I don't know anything about soccer on the 'mainland', and very little about it in the UK, but if you say so.
__And if a team wins all their games all year but then loses the big one, that loss probably says as much about them as every win.__
Oh, that's just rubbish.
No I don't think so. Leagues work on averages - best performed team across a whole season. Which is a fair way to assess a team. It's perfectly possible to say a team had a great year, but didn't win the final or whatever.
But in terms of sports having great marketability, and building throughout a season towards a climax, you can't beat a knockout. Various grand finals throughout the world attract interest from a much bigger range of people than people that would normally watch those two teams play. More intense, more media interest, and more often than not, knockout games produce better games because players are 100% committed to winning, not the 99% that they are committed during the main season. You'll get more drama, heroism, players taking the field injured excitement etc.
Take for example the All Blacks. Great team all world cup year several times, favourites to win, fall over at the 2nd/3rd to last hurdle.
If that happens once, then its just 'sports'. Happens three or four times, it starts to say something about a team and its culture and mental toughness. Both critics, and many fans of the All Blacks would agree with that. You wouldn't learn that if they just played in a league - it's something that you discover from a knockout.
Doesn't make them a bad team, does start to indicate how they cope when the pressure is really on and it's win or go home.
Take for example the Stanley Cup Western Conference finals between San Jose Sharks and Dallas stars. Dallas won the first three games straight, but San Jose came back to win games four and five, and if they won game six, they would have had a deciding game 7 at home. At the end of regular time in game 6 the two teams are locked up 1-1. They went into four overtimes periods (that's a full additional game and a bit) before Dallas scored the game-winning goal. Both goaltenders stood on their heads to keep their teams in the game, the Dallas goaltender let in one goal and made 61 saves. The San Jose goaltender was just as good.
You won't see that sort of game any other way. I watched the whole thing, it was like a coaching manual on how one player can cling on to earn victory for their team.
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In Palin, the Republicans have their own smiling assassin who adds authenticity to the view that, as a result of the surge, US troops in Iraq have now brought victory in sight.
I read this three times. How does choosing Palin as a VP candidate add authenticity to the view that victory is in sight in Iraq? Shouldn't you look at, y'know, Iraq to figure that out, not US domestic politics?
This telling family story underlines, in a way that Obama cannot, that Palin is a heartland American, one of the many small-town parents who have farewelled loved ones to fight our wars, following in the tracks of her running mate John McCain in Vietnam.
Wait, we're picking on Obama now for his kids being too young to serve in anything other than a school play? Kay...
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There's no need for a knockout phase, except a desire for spectacle. I think that if you've won the league, you've won the league.
That's precisely the system we used to have in the NPC which they did away with to have semis and a final because it was often known a week or two before the end of the season who was going to win it. It was badly designed and not suited for a modern sports competition.
I can't think of a single sports competition that doesn't enter a knock-out phase in some way at the finals.
And if a team wins all their games all year but then loses the big one, that loss probably says as much about them as every win.
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I still stand by my point: Perhaps we should leave the content-free adorable kids for selling toilet paper, and just pretend that politics is a matter for grown-ups.
I suspect you and I both will be eagerly awaiting (with little happiness) the majority of politicians and the media acting grown-up in the next couple of months.