More armchair athlete observations

Our office now has TVs, which we've largely used to watch big sports events - Wimbledon, notably, and now the Olympics.

To my horror I found not one or two but THREE channels of hockey by the end of yesterday, covering just two live games. Argh.

Today it's either curling (urgh) or cross country skiiing. I really like Xcountry, the little I've done, and this is way cooler than watching people fall down a mountain strapped to pieces of wood-substitute. (It was striking just how many elite athletes did not finish their runs, either in downhill events or in the silly snowboarding race.)

For some reason, even in these enlightened days, the women still race shorter distances than the men in cross country skiiing.

If women can run marathons, duathalons and triathalons, surely they can hobble their way through 15km, instead of 10km, for the middle distance? and can stagger through 50km for the long distance, instead of 30km?

These are serious endurance athletes who probably log this much distance in a routine training week.

The curlers curl the same length of ice.

The hockey players have the same size of rink, and (these days) now wear the same national colours. The figure skaters have the same events, though I still don't think their 'sport' belongs in the Olympics.

The biatheletes shoot the same size of target using the same guns (though again, the womens' skiing distances are a quarter shorter! WTF?).

Short track? (just checked, short distances are the same, longest distance is 5k for men and 3k for women, unbelieveable).

The traditional speed skaters do the same short distances, but there's no 5k and 10k event for women... apparently they just fall over after 3k (well, lots do, but only briefly).

(Aside: the Netherlands skaters are a great example of 'doing one thing well' - they're just clobbering this event, and had all three medals in one of the skating events yesterday.)

Why are the women still trailing behind in the skiing and skating endurance events? Dumb dumb dumb.

Also: I've found out why Britons keep calling skeleton the 'tea tray event' - it's because noone has sleds, toboggans or crazy carpets at home. So they don't have the cultural background of sliding downhills on pieces of kit built for that purpose.

But the nation of tea drinkers DO have tea trays - even if they don't use them, even if they now have largely abandoned their teapots and cozies and specialist teatimes. They still have teatrays. So that's what they use to slide down hills, on the rare occasions there's snow on them.

Unbelieveable knitting coolness!

A Glasgow City of science is doing a health hygiene project for kids, and wants knitted microbes.

They are totally totally beautiful and cheaper than the stuffed ones you buy commercially.

This is courtesy of the craziest knitting blog I've ever seen - really. The unicorn dog harness, the Star Wars tapestry in crosstitch and the knitted wireframe webdesign is just amazing.

I'm passing the microbes round my work colleagues, so to speak, to see if anyone else wants to knit up some health protection germs.

Ghosts

I've read through this story about the ghosts that haunt the survivors of the Fukushima tsunami and reactor shutdown. It seems a genuine reaction to terrible loss on a (thankfully) rare scale.

It is beautiful, and sad, and makes you think of how people react to grief, in ways they don't even understand. Their unconscious minds are operating at a furious rate even when they're numb and shocked.

The monks' and priests' approach, of allowing people to mourn in acceptable ways, is very thoughtful and shows how they coped with a sudden demand for their spiritual services.

BBC is starting a sort of Five Year Plan of WWI commemmoration, and kicked off with Paxman surveying how WWI changed Britain.

He remarked on the growth of spiritualists and mediums during the war and post-war. People who lost loved ones in the war preferred to commune with the spirits, and joined clubs of them.

Or perhaps not seeing their folks come back, and not knowing the outcome made it harder to cope with (as with in the tsunami - so many people simply disappeared).

Fortunately we don't have to cope with communal mass loss like this very often. But maybe ghosts really do appear when your ancestors are included in your life so fully, and when extended families are the norm.

I'm not convinced that ghosts exist. But I am certain that living people have experiences with their memory of their friends and family members, that are utterly real, and meaningful. There are just too many accounts of them, in all cultures, for them to be ignored - they must be an artifact of how our brains work.