Snazzing Up Snooker

‘It’s dying.’ says Ronnie O’Sullivan, probably before regaling us with another tale of how sick he is of the game and how he’ll probably jack it in soon anyway to go bungee-jumping with Tibetan monks.

He’s wrong, of course, the game is not dying at all. Up and down the country, snooker clubs still draw the same amount of punters they ever did (credit crunch notwithstanding) and it’s generally a game most blokes from Blighty have a secret desire to be good at. We play lots of pub pool because it’s much easier and less demanding of actual talent, but we’re the first to congratulate and show admiration when a snooker-playing fellow comes in and cleans up every frame without missing a ball. We love it.

But, alas, Ronnie isn’t interested in potting eight balls in a row to amuse a few ale drinkers. His is the professional game and thus is his livelihood, rather than a fun couple of hours down the Swan. If money is draining out of the coffers of pro-snooker and prize funds are shrinking, that’s the equivalent of a wage cut for a factory worker for our Rockets and Whirlwinds. Maybe he has good reason to be concerned because in this current climate, bungee-jumping trips in Tibet are getting pretty pricy.

I have conspired with myself though to produce a five-point-plan of Snazz Factors to turn snooker into a hugely exciting, spectator-friendly event of enormous proportions which will ultimately draw more attention than the World Cup Final, Superbowl and Olympics put together.

Snazz-Factor 1

End the silence. Under my new guidelines, the spectators at snooker matches will now be allowed to make as much noise as they like, even during the shots. It will then be incumbent upon the player to ‘snazz-up’ his personality and public persona so as to gain favour with the crowds. This will likely see the conclusion of Peter Ebdon’s career.

Snazz-Factor 2

No more of this time-wasting business of ‘lining up your shot’. To combat this, a shot-clock of 10 seconds will count down, and if you haven’t taken your shot by the end of it then a Caribbean steel drum band will begin to conga around the table as they play the drums as loudly as they can. You have until they conga around the table to take your shot or they will barge into you with their portable steel drums and possibly dig you with their drumsticks.

Snazz-Factor 3

Pocket fireworks. Every time a colour is potted, a huge flame the colour of the ball will shoot up out of the pocket. Umpires will have to risk serious burns to retrieve the balls and replace them, adding a danger factor previously not present in snooker.

Snazz-Factor 4

Forfeit balls. Before each frame, both players must place their own ‘forfeit ball’ any where they like on the table. If your opponent pots your forfeit ball at any stage in the frame (which they can only do after potting a red or when all the reds are gone), you have to choose a random forfeit from a Lucky Dip box which you must perform immediately or throw the frame. The forfeits will include, among hundreds more; hopping round the table while waving your trousers around your head, singing obscure Latvian Karaoke and reciting Shakespeare while doing the ‘Running Man’.

Snazz-Factor 5

Break fights. No more coin-tossing and alternating who breaks off a frame. The players will now fight each other for every break-off, Robin Hood and Little John style, using their cues as staffs. They will fight on top of the table and the first one to be knocked off it loses the break for that frame. This thus brings an element of the martial arts to snooker, again a factor previously missing from the professional game.

Apply all of these Snazz Factors to professional snooker and you will see an immediate surge in fan interest and sponsorship opportunities. Apply them not, and dear Ronnie you may have to get a proper job and then really worry about wage cuts.

Carling Cup Final Penalties

Man Utd v Spurs

0-0   AET. United Win 4-1 on Penalties

A largely boring affair (the details of which, if you really cared, you would already be aware) was always going to be livened up by a lovely bit of penalties at the end. Criticised as a way of deciding football matches the length and breadth of the land, penalty kicks to decide the winner, after extra time has failed and claimed several victims of cramp and exhaustion, is called a lottery and an injustice.

I’m not convinced of either of these charges, having had my head turned by the apparently simple fact that it is five of their lads against five of the other lads to see who is better at scoring from the spot. Seems like a fair contest to me. The fact that it comes after you all run around for 120 minutes only asks more questions of the ability and mental strength of the players. You even get to pick your five best ball kickers to go first.

It’s either that or keep playing until everyone has collapsed from cramp except the goalkeepers who proceed to spend the next few months launching 80 yard punts at each other’s goals until one of them trips over his beard or dies of starvation.

Penalty kicks break down football into its most basic ingredients: one man gets one kick to score a goal, another man gets to stand in the way of the goal and try and stop it. All the other stuff like tactics and passing and defensive awareness and dribbling and switching play and offside rules are all superfluous to the main event of one man shooting at the goal and the other man trying to stop it. If all the other fancy business like long balls, far post crosses and slide-rules fails to produce a winner, then why not do away with it all and break it down to its most basic parts, the simplest equation.

Penalties provide us with glorious heroes and terrible villains, and any player of any status can instantly become either.

I remember exhibiting my self-thoughtingly extensive footballing knowledge back in 1994 when I proclaimed that the budding Buddhist, and my hero at the time, Roberto Baggio never misses penalties as he strode up to take his in the final against Brazil. He never misses, I declared profoundly, barely bothering to watch the screen as he ran up, so assured so I was of the result. Three seconds and four foot over the crossbar later and I was buying my footballing knowledge a one way ticket to Bequietville.

In 1998, David Beckham managed to acquire the blame for England’s shoot-out defeat to Argentina despite not being one of the two players who missed kicks for England or even being on the pitch at the time of the shoot-out. His red card in the second half apparently being the real reason why the English national team consistently fails to produce five men out of eleven who can score from twelve yards.

In the Carling Cup final yesterday the hero was United reserve keeper Ben Foster, brilliantly saving Jamie O’Hara’s first kick after studying clips of Spurs players taking penalties on the United goalkeeping coach’s i-Pod just before the shoot-out. He didn’t get near any others, but thanks to pantomime villain David Bentley dragging his kick a foot wide of the post, United had the shoot-out wrapped up with a penalty to spare, Anderson scoring the winner as confidently as he tucked away his kick in the Moscow Champions League final back in May last year. He takes penalties very well for someone who doesn’t seem able to hit a cow’s backside with a banjo in normal play.

That it was Bentley to miss was almost too predictable, as it was that Anelka was the ultimate misser back in Moscow. Footballers that football fans love to hate really shouldn’t take penalties in shoot-outs. Even the ever-booed FIFA World Player of the Year Cristiano Ronaldo missed his shoot-out kick in Moscow before John Terry went to ground a bit early. He scored his kick yesterday, though in fairness he was up against Hilarious Gomes in goal for Spurs. With him in goal, the best tactic always seems to be to hit it straight at him and hope he tries to catch it. Instant goal. Just add Gomes.

Accusations of shoot-outs being lotteries are understandable from those who lose them, but it overlooks the incredible amount of mental strength that confident and well-aimed kicks require, on top of the physical stamina needed too, as shoot-outs always come after having played an extra half hour longer than you would ever normally play in a match. Managers with no faith in their players call it a lottery, and for them I suppose it is. But it is no lottery for the men who take the kicks or the keepers trying to read the direction of the ball from the kicker’s body language.

Yes, when it’s your team taking kicks it can be less an emotional rollercoaster and more of an emotional bungee jump without the elastic, especially if you’re English. But the pure intensity of such moments as a penalty shoot-out should be savoured. They are the purest, most undiluted form of football. The crack cocaine of soccer. The most vital ingredient of football, extracted, purified and injected directly into your eyes.

I even find myself rooting for a draw and cheering for penalties now just to get a quick fix when watching a cup game as a neutral. Come on penalties! I shout, and yes, I accrue many funny looks. But the funny lookerers don’t know what it’s like being addicted to the rush of the pure stuff. Maybe only Manchester United fans and crackheads will really understand me, and I’ll probably lose the United fans next time they lose a shoot-out.

Just me and the crackheads then. Come on penalties!

The Art of Diving – A Study in Simulation

In the 1970s we blamed the Italians. In the 1980s we blamed everybody who wasn’t British or Irish. In the 1990s we blamed everybody else who wasn’t in the team we were cheering on ourselves, or Jürgen Klinsmann, who even developed a goal celebration mocking his diving reputation.

Now, at the end of the 2000s, we seem happy enough to pour all the blame on Cristiano Ronaldo’s greasy shoulders. He even got booked in the Carling Cup final for naturally stumbling over after a genuine challenge, with the referee stopping play with United in possession to do so. To be fair to referees and football justice, there are a few free kicks and penalties out there in history where Ronaldo probably should have been booked for simulation instead of getting up less bruised than he should be to score. Being booked for genuinely falling over though is a bit much.

His actual dives are not such terrible crimes either. He runs very fast and gets kicked a lot, so he is probably quite tuned-in to being whacked by opposition feet. How many are real out and out dives, as in attempts at cheating, and how many are simply an instinctive reaction that results in a slightly early tumble to avoid having his ankles hacked off? Half and half at least.

His general demeanour when going down is not to fake injury, but to cast aside his arms in childish frustration. If he was rolling around for five minutes every time then we might dismiss any notion of defending him, but he’s an instant moaner and then a getter-upperer and a try-againer, not a roll around injury faker.

Remember Rivaldo? I hope not. I hope his name disappears from football folklore forever. He’s the one who had the ball passed to him by an opponent as he was meant to be taking a corner (or maybe a throw-in or free-kick, YouTube it), but instead of saying thank-you and taking the set play as he was meant to, he decided to allow the ball to strike his torso before plunging to the ground in supposed agony and clutching his face as if he had been shot in it. He may well have convinced an innocent bystander that an invisible face-hugger from Alien was attacking him, except for the cheeky glance over at the referee he gave as he fell to the floor, making sure that he could see the terrible pain he was apparently in. The face of agony faded for a second as he checked the ref could see him, then back in the hands it went, no doubt accompanied by a terribly pained wail. He rolled around for a good few minutes pretending to have been struck in the face by the ball, getting the player who kindly passed him the ball in trouble as kicking balls in someone’s face is a little bit illegal. During play okay, between plays not so okay.

Now that’s what I call proper cheating. Anticipating knocks and clips while running full pelt is one thing, out right pretending of the Rivaldo kind is just not cricket.

Another I remember is our old friend Jürgen Klinsmann. He took a hard tackle in a European final (I forget which) when playing for Monaco I think. He didn’t like it, fair enough, but the player was rightly booked for it. I remember him wagging his finger at the player as he walked away, nodding to himself like he had something in mind. Well, he did have something in mind: cheating. Some minutes later and Klinsmann and the same player are chasing for a ball heading for the corner. The player is a good yard and a half ahead of Jürgen, with the ref halfway down the other end of the pitch after the play moved up quickly. Suddenly Jürgen flings his head back and hits the ground like a sack of baby potatoes, holding his nose and rolling around in Rivaldo-esque agony. The other player continues on to the ball, unaware that Jürgen has been struck by an invisible cannonball in the face behind him. Retrieving the ball and turning around to play it, the entirely innocent player is confronted by a barrage of angry Monaco players and a referee waving a red card. The unelbowed Klinsmann smiles to himself as the game continues, his opponents now unfairly down a man and the sent off player’s dreams of playing in a big final ruined because Jürgen Klinsmann didn’t like being tackled. I hear he does a lot of work for charity though.

Talking of robbing your fellow professionals of their dreams, what about Slaven Bilic for Croatia against France in the World Cup semi-final a fair few years ago now? He pretended to be elbowed by Laurent Blanc and hit the deck clutching a fake injury on his face. The innocent and honourable Blanc was sent off, and thus was suspended for the final as France still overcame Croatia despite Bilic’s attempts to cheat them.

Can you imagine Laurent Blanc’s emotional turmoil? Getting a little elbow in the face must be nothing compared to having a World Cup Final taken away from you for a crime you did not commit. I wonder if Bilic ever apologised. Do these guys ever apologise?

Kevin Nolan nearly broke an opponent’s leg the other day with an insane two-footed, studs-up lunge right on the shin-pad. He could be found after the game begging any opposition players and staff he could find to accept his sincere apologies and to ask about the health of his unintended victim. I can’t imagine Bilic rocking up in the French dressing room afterwards to say, ‘Sorry, Laurent, mate, but I was hoping we would be in the final instead of you lot so your suspension would be for the crappy third-place play-off that no one wants to play in. I thought I was doing you a favour. I’m sure your teammates will show you their medals after the final though.’

There are whack-anticipation dives, clip-assumption dives, thought-there-was-a-leg-there dives and whoops-I’ve-lost-the-ball-so-I’ll-fall-down-and-see-what-happens dives, and then there is the just plain cheating of the Klinsmann kind. It is the wool-pulling antics of the likes of Rivaldo and Bilic that are the real enemies of football. Them and ITV’s FA Cup coverage.

Of the family Huntsman, the Dancing White Lady Spider, also known as the Carthwheeling Spider or Golden Wheel Spider, has an bizarre but ingenious method of escaping an enemy’s attack. Clips of the beastie’s visionary evasions grow ever more popular on YouTube and rumours abound that they’re even the subject of internet bloggery. A probable fact is that if you were to place a number of thoroughly modern young gentlemen and ladyfolk in a room together for a while with a few shandies and a few whatevers then it would surely be only a matter of time before one of them introduces another to the video on his phone.  

Dancing White Lady Spider AKA Golden Wheel Spider AKA Cartwheeling Spider AKA Bob Fellows AKA MC Spider AKA Mr Spider AKA Spido AKA Spi AKA The Spider With No Name

Not invisible, just not there

They don’t spin webs, you see, Dancing White Lady Spiders. Instead they silk-line the insides of little tunnels they dig in the sand dunes upon which they live. They generally use the tunnels to escape all potential foes. However it is at the very beginning of the construction of a tunnel that they are vulnerable to deadly attack, as there’s an awful lot of digging with your face in the sand to undertake. Thus your assailant has a nice big target to aim for: your unassuming bottom. Which is not such good news when you share a sand dune with a pompilid wasp (otherwise worryingly referred to as a ‘spider wasp’).

A Spider Wasp comes and has a go because he thinks he's hard enough

They’re aim is to sting you, and if you happen to be a spider, say, a Dancing White Lady Spider, then they will completely paralyse you with their sting. They then lay their eggs inside you and they slowly incubate within your body while you lie there, wondering why the hell you didn’t just find a dark little corner somewhere and catch an occasional fly.

Oh yes, and then the babies hatch and eat you because you are still alive because you’re a spider and can survive on a single cricket every summer. But those babies can’t survive on one cricket per summer. No, they survive on you. Then they grow up and do the same thing to your mates.

Consider it from the perspective of someone who's best friend is a giant tarantula

It's just plain mean, man

Living with such terror every day would be enough to drive a human being insane, so it’s a good thing that we, as a species, are not a spider. Particularly a Dancing White Lady Spider. This particular sand-coloured critter has no time for insanity.

Instead of becoming deranged with lunacy, the perilous spider will jink onto its side, arching its legs outwards as it does so to form what will become a dazzling wheel spinning down the dune at up to 44 turns per second. Human beings, for all our computers, space travel and prime-time TV shows starring Piers Morgan, cannot even turn fully once over the entirety of a whole second. So my own in-depth analysis and investigatory experiments report, though it is difficult to be entirely certain of the accuracy of my findings as I did drop the stopwatch both times before the twinge.

"This is how we do it..."

"...Nah na-na-na-na nah."

Really, spider wasps are exceptionally sick individuals. But every great fight must have a goodie and a baddie to make the battle more interesting. I’m sure if you’re a spiderist and you really love them then you would likely cheer them on in every battle they have, but it’s a new experience for most folk to find themselves egging on the spider (don’t you dare pardon that pun). It is one of nature’s great natural rivalries come alive before our very own YouTube pages.

WITNESS THE GLORY

Besides, here’s a spider that has clearly realised that they give us the heebie-jeebies. Have they stuck around to fall from drawn curtains or make mad dashes across the living room floor when you’re trying to watch telly? No. Have they descended into our baths and then discovered them to be rather more slippery than they first envisaged? No again. They have very politely taken themselves off to live on sand in a baking desert where they’ll probably get eaten alive by giant wasp babies.

What have wasps ever done for us? They don’t even make anything. They’re like layabout bees who can’t be bothered to get proper jobs and so just hang around the streets causing trouble. And now they are picking on the one bloody spider to do us all a favour.

Spiders & human hands: like two peas in a pod

Like humans, these spiders share a instinct to bury parts of their bodies in the sand

That wasp is extremely lucky that we, the human damn race, are not all catching EasyJets out there to duff its bloody head in. We would, wouldn’t we, folk? But you know, we hear that there’s a lot of crazy spiders out there hiding in the sand.

Urrgh.

Dublin-born Hugh Leonard the Irish playwright, dramatist, television writer and essayist has died. His career spanned more than 50 years and he wrote more than 18 plays, two volumes of essays, two autobiographies, one novel and several screenplays. He was also a regular newspaper columnist.

Leonard’s born name was John Joseph Byrne, later changed to John Keyes Byrne, and he was known to close friends as Jack.

Hugh Leonard 1926 - 2009

Full report from the Irish Times:

“That’s a million quid’s worth of land,” remarks Stormy, a builder himself. “Someone got his palm well greased.”

When his wife hints that Stormy might not have been above a bit of palm-greasing himself and mentions “the houses in Churchtown”, he replies indignantly: “That was a favour. I didn’t pay . . . Back-scratching is one thing. Paying money is corruption.”

The remarkable thing about this scene is that it is set not at the height of the Celtic Tiger, but in 1974, the year the play was first produced. That it could be cutting-edge contemporary theatre reminds us of the neat dramatic timing of Hugh Leonard’s final exit. He leaves the stage at precisely the time when his great themes – the rise and fall of new money and the terror of a return to the past – are again deeply resonant.

Hugh Leonard’s adoptive father, whose memory haunts his most famous play, Da , worked for 54 years as a gardener in a grand Dalkey house on Dublin Bay. During that time it changed its name from Enderley to Sancta Maria, as the old Protestant owners were replaced by members of the rising Catholic bourgeoisie. Dalkey – half small town, half affluent Dublin suburb – was a perfect microcosm of social change in Ireland. As a lower-class kid growing up there, and as a relatively well-to-do returned exile when he went back after a decade of exile in England, Leonard was at once sufficiently rooted in the place to know all its details and sufficiently distant to observe them with a sharply satiric eye.

It was both his curse and his blessing to be the laureate of the nouveau riche. It was a curse because the anguish of newly minted millionaires is not the stuff of grand tragedy. Leonard’s hinterland was more brittle, less open to being mythologised, than those of contemporaries such as Tom Murphy, Brian Friel and John B Keane.

The classic bourgeois forms of farce and boulevard comedy were appropriate to the task in hand, but they do not necessarily lend themselves to high critical approval. (Leonard was excluded, for example, from the massive Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing .) While more sensitive or high-minded artists held their noses and looked the other way, it was Leonard’s fate to be the great reflector of the vanities and vulgarities, the lusts and terrors, of an unheroic class.

Yet this was also his blessing. He was, after all, himself a member of that rising Catholic middle class. He was a moderniser who embraced popular culture and became the first major Irish writer to establish a reputation in television. (His superb technical facility made him the Andrew Davies of the 1960s, turning out everything from classy Dickens adaptations for the BBC to RTÉ’s big dramatisation of the 1916 Rising on its 50th anniversary, Insurrection.) He embraced new modes and new money, with all the hunger of a poor boy making up for lost time, becoming the only Irish writer one was likely to see in the seat of his Rolls Royce with a big cigar in his mouth.

BUT THAT COINCIDENCE of his own trajectory with that of the country in the 1960s and 1970s was more than just a matter of biographical detail. It deepened his engagement with middle-class life in three important ways.

It gave him, firstly, the swagger of success, deriving from the knowledge that he was up there with the people he was writing about. This mattered because it gave him an audacity that at times hardened into real courage. It took guts in 1971, as Irish nationalism was resurgent, to write a bedroom farce called The Patrick Pearse Motel , in which all the rooms are called after dead patriots and the restaurant is The Famine Room . It took even more guts to write a thinly disguised attack on Charles Haughey, who was then in power, revealing both corruption and a mistress, as Leonard did with Kill in 1982.

Secondly, Leonard’s psychological intimacy with middle-class life allowed him to move beyond farce and satire and to diagnose its neuroses with forensic toughness. He once wrote of how, even as Dalkey’s most famous resident, he was still subject to “the faintly mocking glance that reminds you of how you once lived in the alley lane with the behind out of your trousers”. The fear of that glance may have lain behind his infamous waspishness and intolerance of criticism. (In one of his last Sunday Independent columns, he called for my own assassination, as “justifiable homicide by a posse of theatre-lovers”.) But he was able to transmute it into a genuine fear that haunts his characters, the anxiety that what has been so newly won may simply disappear again, returning the new rich to the old poverty. It is that terror that, above all, makes Leonard’s plays so relevant to our current situation.

Beyond that primal dread, Leonard captured the fierce loneliness that was the price of the new individualism of a culture obsessed with money. In Summer, one of the main characters, Richard, sums up this terror: “Your whole life there is you and there are strangers and there is no one else. There’s a clock in the room, and you invite people in for drinks, and hope the chat and the laughing will drown out the noise of it. Well, it doesn’t, and after a while you realise they’re listening to it, too. You wish they’d go home.”

Thirdly, Leonard’s closeness to the world he was writing about allowed him to bring autobiography and social commentary into a particularly fruitful relationship. His great subject was his own life – in his plays Da and A Life , and in his two superb volumes of memoir, Home Before Night and Out After Dark.

All four are haunted by two father figures: his own Da and the civil servant, Desmond Drumm, who functions both as a mentor and, in his asperity and frustration, as a version of what Leonard himself might have become if he had stayed in the Land Commission rather than becoming a writer. Both men represent, in a more personal form, the inescapable nature of the past that troubles his characters. As Leonard’s alter ago in Da, Charlie, asks: “When did I ever get a chance to pay it back, to get out from under, to be quit of you?”

The answer, in Leonard’s Ireland, was obvious. However many barriers you built with sex and money, you could never be quit of the past.

IT IS PIQUANT that this Ireland seemed to have died in Leonard’s later years. We seemed to have escaped at last, and the neuroses of his people seemed to recede into another time. He had less to write about and the plays dried up. It must have amused him in his latter days to know that we had not escaped after all.

If he were still around, he would find comedy and satire and a melancholy poignancy in our current predicament. His consolation might be in knowing that this predicament is so precisely foreshadowed in his work.”

Police have charged a man in connection with the recent bush fires that have ravaged southern Australia. He is believed to be 39 years old and an Australian, though his identity has not yet been revealed as he is currently being held at a secret location for fear of reprisals from the surviving victims of the scorching fires. 

Picture: David Caird/The Australian

The number of deaths from the fires currently stands at 181 at the time of writing, with 1800 homes destroyed leaving over 7000 people homeless.

Full report from TimesOnline:

“An Australian man has been charged with arson over one of the country’s deadly bushfires, but his identity has been suppressed and police have moved him to a secret location amid fears of a backlash by victims seething with grief and anger.

The 39-year-old has been charged with lighting the Churchill-Jeeralang bushfire in the LaTrobe valley region of Gippsland. The suspect is a local man. Twenty-one people died in the eastern Victorian region where the Churchill fire began.

The man appeared in the regional Morwell Magistrates Court on Friday afternoon charged with three counts – one of arson causing death, one of intentionally or recklessly causing a bushfire, and one of possessing child pornography.

There are fears of an enormous backlash by mourning members of the Churchill community, angry over the fact that one of their own has been charged with the fire that devastated 36,000 ha of land, destroyed hundreds of homes and killed dozens of their friends and neighbours.

As a result, the court hearing was closed and a suppression order was imposed on all details of his identity. The man was secretly transferred to Melbourne on Friday afternoon where he is expected to face court again on Monday.

On Wednesday, Janice Michelsson, whose house in Callignee burnt down in the Churchill fires, wrote an open letter in the local paper addressed to the arsonist responsible for the fires in her area.

“You bastard. You are a fire terrorist. You are a murderer. You have taken my neighbours, my friends. You have taken my home. Do you hate people so much that you really want to see this misery?” Ms Michelsson, 42, wrote under the headline: ‘I am disgusted by you’.

Dannye Moloney, the Victoria Police Assistant commissioner, would not disclose any details about the arrest or what led police to the man.

He said the suspect was moved from the Gippsland area to Melbourne for “security reasons”. Mr Moloney stressed the man had been charged in relation to last Saturday’s fire and not the blazes in nearby Boolarra the previous week.

“It is very, very important for the community, especially around the Gippsland area, for a clear understanding that the charges relate solely to last Saturday,” he told reporters.

Scores of bushfires devastated Victoria on the weekend, killing 181 people, destroying more than 1,800 homes and leaving 7,000 homeless.

Many were sparked naturally by freak weather conditions, but up to five were believed to have been deliberately lit. Since a special police task force was set up to investigate the suspicious fires, arsonists have become the most hated people in Australia.

Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, has accused people who deliberately light bushfires of being “mass murderers”.

On Friday the Victorian Premier John Brumby would not comment directly on the man charged with lighting the Churchill fires, but voiced his anger about the arsonists who are partly responsible for the devastation to his home state, labelling it is a “heinous crime”.

“I’ve made very clear my views about arson. It’s such a shocking, terrible thing to do,” Mr Brumby said. “We’ve seen some shocking fires and people who light fires deliberately put the community and human life at great risk.”

“I don’t intend to comment on the specifics of this matter but it’s an unspeakable and heinous crime.

“I hope now that when an individual has been charged that the normal course of justice will be undertaken.”

The Churchill fire remains out of control, but is no longer posing a threat to communities in the region. It has killed 12 people from the town of Callignee, four each in Hazelwood and Koornalla, and one in Jeeralang.

The arrest came as police confirmed on Friday that fires at Marysville, Murrindindi, Buxton and Narbethong were being treated as suspicious. Up to 100 people are believed to have been killed in Marysville alone.

Two small fires were also deliberately lit around Melbourne on Thursday night as the Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon voiced fears over copycat arsonists. She said police were also working around the clock in the pursuit of arsonists.”

A Continental Airlines commuter plane crashed early this morning, killing the 49 passengers and crew on board and one person who was in the house that it hit, landing as it did in a residential hamlet of Clarence Center, New York. Two others in the house were taken to hospital for non-fatal injuries. 

Firemen battle to to extinguish the flames of Flight 3407

The plane had been heading to Buffalo Niagara International Airport when it crashed for as yet undetermined reasons, though both black boxes have already been retrieved and investigations into the tragedy are underway. 

Investigators hope the black boxes will reveal what caused the crash

Full report from New York Times:

“Federal investigators have retrieved both black boxes from a Continental Airlines plane that crashed late Thursday night near Buffalo on its way to Buffalo Niagara International Airport from Newark, killing 50 people. The boxes were in good condition and should be at the laboratories of the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington for analysis this afternoon, officials said. The plane, which crashed in the hamlet of Clarence Center, N.Y., carried 44 passengers, a crew of 4 and an off-duty crew member, officials said. All the people aboard the plane and one person in a house destroyed by the plane were killed, said Chris Collins, the Erie County executive.

Two others in the house, a 57-year-old woman and her 22-year-old daughter, suffered minor injuries and were taken to a nearby hospital, where they were treated and released, officials said.

Among those on the flight was Alison L. Des Forges, a historian and human rights advocate who documented the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and has investigated related issues in Burundi and Democratic Republic of the Congo since then, according to Emma Daly, communications director of Human Rights Watch in New York City.

Also on the flight was Beverly Eckert, the widow of Sean Rooney, a Buffalo native who died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

She was heading to Buffalo for a weekend celebration of what would have been her husband’s 58th birthday, and had planned to take part in the presentation of a scholarship award at Canisius High School that she had established in his honor, The Buffalo News reported.

Ms. Eckert was at the White House last week with President Obama as part of a meeting he had with relatives of those killed in the 2001 attacks and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Speaking at the White House late Friday morning, Mr. Obama said Ms. Eckert “was an inspiration to me and to so many others, and I pray that her family finds peace and comfort in the hard days ahead.”

He said that the crash reminds the nation of the fragility of life and the value of each day.

Continental Airlines said the pilot was Capt. Marvin Renslow, the first officer was Rebecca Shaw, flight attendants were Matilda Quintero and Donna Prisco and the off-duty crew member was Capt. Joseph Zuffoletto.

After the crash, other pilots in the area reported icing on their planes, but the airplane that crashed was certified for flying into icing conditions, and the crews of such planes are trained for icy conditions.

An intense fire at the site of the crash fueled by a natural gas leak initially made it difficult for the investigators to retrieve the black boxes, said Steven Chealander, an N.T.S.B. spokesman. The cause of the crash is not yet known and will be the subject of the investigation by 14 N.T.S.B. investigators, he said in a news conference.

Since the airplane is a newer model, the flight data recorder should have captured hundreds of data points each second about the performance of the airplane and its condition. While there was no communication from the crew during the flight that indicated a problem, the cockpit voice recorder could provide information from conversations and other sound that was picked up.Tony Tatro, who lives near the crash site, told CNN that he was driving home when the plane passed about 75 feet overhead, with its nose pitched lower than normal and its wings tilted. The plane struck the ground moments later, he said.

The plane, Continental Connection Flight 3407, crashed about 10:20, five minutes before it was due to land. The plane — a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 with 74 seats and twin turboprop engines — was on approach to land. It was operated by Colgan Airways, a feeder airline for Continental.

David Bissonette, the emergency coordinator for Erie County, speaking at a news conference about 4 a.m., said the plane made “a direct hit” on the house, which officials said was located at 6038 Long Street in Clarence Center, part of the Town of Clarence.

“It’s remarkable that it only took one house,” he said. “It could have easily taken the whole neighborhood.”

He said the only recognizable piece of the plane was the tail. The investigation, he said, would be “painstaking” because of the amount of damage to the plane and the house.

Mr. Collins said that about 12 houses had been evacuated after the crash and that a limited state of emergency had been declared.

The crash, which occurred as a light snow fell in the area, was the second major one in a month in New York State, coming weeks after the Jan. 15 forced landing of a US Airways jet into the Hudson River in which all 155 people on board were pulled to safety.

Sandra Baker, who lives on Railroad Street, two blocks from the site of the crash on Thursday, said: “It was just like a huge great big crash, a boom.”

Both of her sons, volunteer firefighters, went to the scene.

“There was this banging sound” before the crash, she said. It was followed by a boom, then a dark cloud and flames and the smell of fuel and fire.

Another woman who lives nearby described the sound before the crash as “a loud roar over my house.”

“It was like the whole house shook,” said the woman, Jennifer Clark, who also lives on Railroad Street. “Then there was silence.”

Ms. Clark said she looked out of her window and saw a ball of flames rising into the sky.

She woke up her husband and said, “I think a plane just crashed.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel bad for the people on the plane and their families. I feel bad for the firemen who have to recover the remains of those poor people.”

Ms. Baker described the town as “small-town U.S.A,” a place that will reel from what she was sure would be the biggest tragedy the town has ever seen.

A joint investigation was being conducted overnight by the State Police, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority. A team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Buffalo on Friday morning.

Mr. Collins said families of the people on the plane had gathered at the Buffalo airport waiting for news.

At a command center where officials gathered after the accident, Chris Kausner told CNN that his sister was on the flight. He said she was connecting from Jacksonville, Fla., where she was a law student.

“Right now I’m thinking the worst,” Mr. Kausner said. “And I’m thinking of the fact that my mother has to fly in from Florida and what am I going to tell my two sons.”

When a reporter asked Mr. Kausner how his family was taking the news, he said: “I heard my mother make a sound into the phone that I had never heard before. So, not good.”

In the neighborhood where the crash occurred, flames rose high above the bare trees and neat houses. Neighbors rushed from their homes to the carnage, through a swell of emergency lights and sirens.

Brendan Biddlecom, who lives a few blocks from the crash, made his way with other neighbors.

“I didn’t get too close,” Mr. Biddlecom said. “I didn’t want to get too close. It was clear what was going on.”

By 2:30 a.m., the police had set up checkpoints around the neighborhood. The smell of burning fuel and rubber was still thick in the air.

Scott Bylewski, the Clarence town supervisor, said he heard the crash from his house, about a half mile away. “I took a look from my house and the sky was red,” Mr. Bylewski said at the 4 a.m. news conference. “I know when I go home I’m going to give my wife and kids a kiss.”

In a statement released early Friday, Gov. David A. Paterson said: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who were on board, and with the people of the Buffalo metropolitan area.”

Colgan, the operator of the plane, also flies as a feeder for US Airways and United Airlines. Colgan’s Web site said the airline operates 51 turboprops.

The last fatal crash involving a scheduled carrier in the United States was a ComAir regional jet in Lexington, Ky., in August 2006. The crew picked a too-short runway for takeoff; 47 passengers and 2 of the 3 crew members were killed.

Colgan, which has flown for Continental since 1997, is owned by Pinnacle Airlines Corporation, based in Memphis. Pinnacle has about 6,000 employees around North America, 1,800 of them in Memphis. The company has 142 regional jets and 51 turboprops. Pinnacle said last month that it had reached an agreement with Continental for Colgan to buy an additional 15 turboprops to fly as Continental Connection airplanes.

Earlier on Thursday, Continental posted a notice on its Web site that its operations would be affected by the winter storm on the East Coast, including in Buffalo and the New York City area.

The storm caused flights to Newark Liberty International Airport to be delayed by more than five hours on Thursday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. That was unusual even for that airport, which routinely has some of the worst delays of any destination in the country.

Early on Friday, the F.A.A.’s Web site showed delays at Newark of three hours and 50 minutes.”

Are porcupines & hedgehogs lazy evolvers or is it that God just wasn’t feeling bum poison and had run out of spare fangs after making all the spiders in my shed? Why and how do they exist, and who exactly do they think they are anyway?

All creatures have in some way managed to develop a particular or shared defence mechanism to some degree, but surely porcupines are taking things a bit far. What exactly is the process for evolving loads of giant spikes on your back so that nobody eats you? What kind of environment did their ancestors exist in where the only way to avoid being eaten was to have giant spikes on your back? I propose this is pure laziness on behalf of evolution.

Porcupines: plain lazy

Hedgehogs have done it as well, only they take the laziness several steps further by incorporating rolling into a ball and lying very still as their extra defence mechanism. Which ancient creature started this trend for lazy evolution? Which one decided that no, they weren’t going to develop poison or really good hearing ability, and that no they were not going to evolve fast running or jumping  ability, nor were they going to grow big fangs or razor claws or anything else useful in a scrap. Except giant spikes on my back. Yes, I’m going to evolve giant spikes on my back so that if you eat me I will bloody hurt.

A porcupine checks her babies' spikes haven't evolved into tomatoes

Perhaps the habitat of their evolutionary ancestors was populated by much taller predators that liked to sneak up on their prey from behind like a Portobello road pickpocket. Still, surely they would develop eyes that swivelled round to see all angles, or a sudden spring in their limbs for a speedy scarper. Even poison squirted from their bottoms would seem a more likely development. The second anything untoward approaches from behind, a huge cloud of noxious gas and temporarily blinding acidic juices could overwhelm and confuse the assailant. But no. That would require effort.

A baby porcupine wonders why he has two willies

Collected recently from underneath the hedgehog tree

Question:  How many lightbulbs have been changed in jokes since 1945?

Answers on a trailing plane banner flying past the window to my left at precisely 3:04pm, Sunday, 15th February, 2009.

Last Question: How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

Answer: “An accurate answer depends entirely on how long the roads are, what events might occur upon such roads, and of whom the question is being asked. The third factor is of primary importance, for we could spend many hours calculating road length and dividing it by the occuring events upon each road, multiplied by how quickly the road will be walked down, only for the person of whom the question is being asked to blurt out a declaration of the subject’s manliness after only a few steps.”

- Submitted by Professor R.T. Wakefield PhD, LLD, MSocSc, MBA, BSc, PGD, DCL (Hon), University of Mymagination, Wisconsin, USA

Have you, like me, ever been relaxing in the garden of a late summer evening with a whiskey and Vimto, thoughtfully stroking your chin, momentarily wondering where your beard’s gone before remembering shaving it off this morning, and deeply contemplating exactly which insect is the very fastest in the world? Can you compare a winged insect’s flight speed with that of a grounded running insect? Should the two disciplines remain separate, like judo and boxing? Or should there be one final, glorious face-off to determine the ultimate fastest insect in the world?

But how would you race an airborne insect against a grounded insect? Individual time trials would be more accurate but not nearly as much fun. Would it be possible to get them to move at their fastest possible speeds in a straight line over a pre-determined distance at the same time? How would you get them to wear numbered bibs?

Representing the grounded insects and relying heavily on its legs, the Green Tiger Beetle, which doesn’t appear to have too many rivals according to many years of other people’s research and a couple of my quick Google searches. There are some large tropical cockroaches of the family Dictyoptera which are pretty quick as well, but if they are not even going to give them proper names then they don’t count. 

Tiger Beetles are faster than tomatoes

Green Tiger Beetle – whoever discovered it certainly knew how to name an insect. I like to think there are all sorts of Tiger Beetles which are colour-coded according to their particular skills. Green clearly represents speed. I imagine Beige Tiger Beetles have, over millions of years, developed a superior interior designing ability. 

Cockroach of the family Dictyoptera - according to my experiments - is faster than a rolled sprout

And we think Leonardo Da Vinci thought up helicopters all by himself. He clearly nicked the idea off Donatello

But the ‘Death’s Head’ Hawkmoth has  been scientifically clocked at over 53mph and carries considerably more weight; it also has what appears to be a human skull on its back; has also starred alongside Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in a famous horror movie, which means it could easily keep pace with the Dragonfly in a race, beat it up afterwards and then steal its girlfriend and take her to much better parties. However, in an insectoid drag race or short-distance sprint, the slightness and instant speed of the Dragonfly would likely triumph every time, creating for me a dilemma which cannot be solved by science, philosophy, or random guessing alone.

Hawkmoth - possibly fears the Dragonfly over short-distances

So while the insects of flight squabble amongst themselves for the right to represent their discipline, it is clear that the leg-inspired Tiger Beetle, of the Green corps, remains unchallenged for the title of fastest insect in the world.  

The hand is not quicker than the Green Tiger Beetle

The incredibly fast Green Tiger Beetle demonstrates its versatility by very slowly standing still

Ah, so the tiger thing isn't ironic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thus, my late summer evenings sat pondering in the garden, stroking my chin, momentarily wondering where my beard came from and then remembering I haven’t shaved for a few weeks, still flow with whiskey (though not Vimto as my wife has banned all concentrates from the house since I began racing insects in the living room), and are now cluttered with contemplations on which animal and/or insect can move backwards the fastest. My money’s on bears.  

"You might wanna move."