Month: June 2017

Mayweather Vs McGregor – A Showdown of Inevitable disappointment 

jimdroberts

So, it’s on. After all the name calling on all the YouTube videos, after all the social media stunts, call me cynical but all of which I’m pretty certain have been carefully choreographed in order to maximise public interest, Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor will fight on August 26, In Las Vegas.

At least I hope they fight, because up until now, to me the premise of this fight reflects more of a circus freak show than it does a contest of pugilism. McGregor and Mayweather are both the most talented performers, and the biggest showmen in their respective sports. Individually they are able to draw more attention to their own fights than any other fighter, combine the two of them and you’re guaranteed an unprecedented hype fest. Both have exchanged considerable amounts of trash talk through social media, thus selling the fight like no other in history. There’s nothing new about hype and fights but is there any chance that this fight can even come close to living up to this amount of hype?

Simply, no. Already I feel cheated. Cheated because I desperately want to believe that this will be a spectacular contest, a fight for the ages. I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve hoping for a PlayStation, only for the next morning to be given the box set of the Twilight saga. Nothing good can come out of watching the Twilight saga, we won’t learn anything from it, and I tend to feel exactly the same way about the Mayweather McGregor fight. At the end of Mayweather McGregor I’m afraid that I will find myself reacting like this boy, sucked in by the promise of great things, only for it to result in empty promises, abject disappointment, and self loathing at having believed in the empty promises, hype and cheap marketing:

All the name calling, all the funny jokes McGregor and Mayweather have made about one another has been to make the audience believe that there is some degree of animosity between them, a reason for these two to fight. Well the reason they’re fighting is first and foremost about the money. Quite simply neither fighter, nor his support staff, could refuse this fight. Both fighters will pocket in excess of $100 million, the revenue from pay per view television is anticipated to break $1 billion.

Image result for dr evil gazillion dollars    Financially the fight makes sense, the fight itself will generate almost a much money as a small African country can in a year. That really is disturbing. When Conor McGregor made his debut in the UFC he was paid $8,000. By contrast, over his career Mayweather has accumulated a wealth estimated at $340 million. But while this fight is a no brainer financially, will the public be spending there money on anything more than hype?

 

Again, the answer is almost certainly no. Don’t get me wrong, I concede that Conor has the puncher’s chance, but that’s what people always say when one fighter doesn’t realistically have a chance, Dolly Parton would also have a punchers chance against Floyd Mayweather. This will almost certainly be the most over hyped, over paid, and disappointing moment in sports since it was revealed to us how Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds could hit home runs so far. The McGregor Mayweather fight wil fail because:

  1. McGregor is not a boxer. Yes he does hit people with his fists in the UFC, but that’s as far as the similarities between boxing and mixed martial arts goes. The rationale that this can turn into a real fight is like Roger Federer challenging Tiger Woods to a game of tennis and saying that it’s fair because they both hit balls.
  2. What are they fighting for? McGregor isn’t a boxer, Mayweather is a retired boxer. Whoever wins, what do they gain? What’s the incentive outside of the money. Money which they’ll be guaranteed before they step into the ring. Really, how can you expect a decent fight when neither fighter is really fighting for anything.
  3. Mayweather is the greatest defensive boxer of all time, because of this he’s generally one of the most boring to watch. When watching someone swing and miss Mayweather for 12 rounds, it’s possible to appreciate Mayweather’s skill, while at the same time not be entertained. McGregor will be fighting with far bigger gloves than he uses in the UFC, to be honest he’d have more chance knocking Mayweather out using a pillow.

This isn’t the first time that a boxing legend has accepted the challenge of someone skilled in another martial art. The greatest, Muhammad Ali fought  kickboxer, Antonio Inoki in 1976. However, unlike the Mayweather McGregor fight ,Ali’s opponent was allowed to to use his specific skill set and kick Ali. In truth it was an ugly, farcical contest, the highlights of which can be seen below:

 

Maybe I’m being too close minded about Mayweather versus McGregor, a touch too cynical. Maybe this type of contest heralds a new era in sporting match ups, in which we find two contestants with vaguely similar skill sets and then pit one against the other . For example, Stephen Hawking could take on Lewis Hamilton at formula 1. I mean Hawking literally lives in that chair, driving himself around all day, I mean how different can it be?

Image result for stephen hawkingImage result for formula 1

What about a contest in which Maria Sharapova challenges Beyonce to bake a Victoria sponge cake, whilst gurning. I know it sounds silly but hear me out. This should be an even contest based on the fact that they’ve both got opposable thumbs, and they’ve both got faces. Believe me, this promises to be a far more even competition, and probably a more entertaining spectacle than Mayweather versus McGregor is ever likely to be.

downloadImage result for victoria sponge cakedownload (1)

My final suggestion for this new age of celebrity competition features two people with egos comparable to that of Mayweather and McGregor, if not the same degree of talent. I propose that Kanye West, takes on Justin Bieber in a game of Russian roulette. I’m quietly confident that based on the fact they are a pair of insufferable idiots, the promise of at least one of them blowing their own brains out, should appeal to an enormous audience thus securing record pay per view subscriptions.

download (2)download (3)Justin-Bieber

 

Well it’s 71 days until Mayweather versus McGregor, and despite all my negativity there’s not a chance in hell that I won’t be watching it. I want it to be good. No, in fact I want it to be great, it’s just that experience has taught me that I’m probably going to end up disappointed. Anyway, between now and August 26, I’ve got the Twilight box set to watch, so if you don’t mind.

 

Politicians, Coalitions, Pineapple and Pizza

jimdroberts

Well here we are at the end of another election in which another western democracy has largely, once again, made itself look like a widower dancing at his own wife’s funeral. It’s undignified, largely arrhythmical, and depending on whether or not they’ve had a hip replacement, painful to watch. Nobody benefits from being forced to observe such a spectacle of misplaced eccentricity, much in the same way that nobody seems to have really benefited from last week’s general election. (I couldn’t find any videos of old men dancing at funerals, but I did find this, which to me at least appears equally as undignified.)

For the United Kingdom the general election was an unqualified disaster. In the wake of a Brexit vote that split the country 52%/48%, the country needed direction, to be led by a leader with a cast iron mandate. The strong and stable leadership that Theresa May Image result for strong and stable memerepeatedly promised when she called the snap election with a 24 point lead in the polls, ended with her party losing the majority necessary to form a government. This now leaves May, a leader of the Tory party who has never even won a leadership contest, with a barely tenable mandate with which to represent the British people at the Brexit negotiations. The Brexit negotiations being the single most important event to happen in Europe since the fall of the Berlin wall.

In the space of just under 12 months Conservative leadership has called a referendum and an election that has resulted in the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union and ending up with a hung parliament, quite a staggering achievement given that 12 months ago David Cameron was the Prime Minister with a majority of 12, of a country that was still a part of the World’s largest economic bloc. When you consider that the British parliamentary system is stacked in favour of the party which has formed a government, they can call the election whenever they want, they can change the boundaries of constituencies, it becomes really hard to imagine that the Conservatives didn’t engineer their own downfall intentionally. If they didn’t, then they’ve clearly lost touch with the electorate.

Despite not having the number of seats necessary to form a majority government, Theresa May will form a coalition that will enable her to theoretically have a majority. So who’s she inviting on board her political version of the Titanic? The DUP of course, you know the DUP? In British politics there’s the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, the Green Party, Scottish Nationalist Party, Sinn Féin, Plaid Cymru, and then you’ve got the DUP. The Democratic Unionist Party, they will be the ones invited to form a government with Theresa May. The DUP with their 8 members of parliament will, in theory anyway, hold the power of veto over everything the Tory government try to do. But who are the DUP? Well, they’re the political wing of protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, In other words they’re the yin to the IRA’s yang. They’re the pro United Kingdom terrorist group of Northern Ireland. Jeremy Corbyn was lambasted for having held talks with Sinn Fein during his political career, then only weeks later Theresa May will shamelessly form a government with the political wing of a known terrorist group. Of course if you watch the news no reporter dares to use the word terrorist, because when they appear to be on your side they go by the name of paramilitary. I’m sorry but whatever you chose to call them, it’s still…

But even if we’re able to ignore their paramilitary past, the DUP are fanatically pro choice, something I imagine, that would have not thrilled quite a number of people that decided to vote Conservative just last week. The idea alone of the Conservatives forming a coalition is counter intuitive, the ultimate political oxymoron. It’s a little like expecting a pride of lions to ask you to pull up a chair and share their freshly killed wildebeest with you. I’m afraid to say that the DUP will end up as the DUPed in the event that they form a coalition with the Conservatives. They will inevitably be wowed by the possibility of going into Downing Street. Of being shown the button, with which they’d want to unleash a nuclear strike on the Catholic population of Belfast. But, in reality they’ll be nothing more than a class of 11 year olds on a field trip to a bank. They’ll get to see the tellers count some money, they might even be shown a pie chart, but that’s as close as they’ll ever realistically come to influencing any long term fiscal strategy of the bank. And no politician ever wants to share their power. A politician needs power in the same way a diabetic needs insulin. Interestingly Theresa May is a diabetic, so she craves both. This leads me to wonder which one she could live without the longest, her slipping into a diabetic coma would certainly go a long way towards explaining some of her interviews in the lead up to the election.

Both the referendum and the general election have managed to drive a wedge down the middle of British society. I’m 40 years old, and I’m not sure I can recall the nation being this divided. With divisiveness being a theme which appears to be undermining so many western democracies, I was interested to learn that Sam Panopoulos passed away last week. Panopoulos was the leader of the Democratic Ulster Unionists for… No he actually had a far more positive impact than that; Panopoulos claimed to be the man who first conceived the idea of putting pineapple onto a pizza.

Like Brexit, Theresa May, and Donald Trump, putting pineapple on top of a pizza is a contentious matter, an acquired tase. And just like Brexit, Theresa May, and Donald Trump, the opinion you have regarding whether it’s reasonable to put pineapple on a

Image result for nazi pizza
Catering to a niche market, Josef Koch bakes pizzas and offers free delivery to customers on the right side of town. The far right side of town.

pizza can be used to determine the opinions that you probably hold about a swathe of other social issues. Just how if you support Trump people will assume that you’re against immigration, for the second amendment, and against commonsense. People that support using pineapple as a pizza topping are seen as progressive liberals who support immigration, gay marriage and universal healthcare. Compare this to the pizza that was most popular during Hitler’s Third Reich where olives and salami came to symbolise, strength, supremacy, and purity of the Aryan race.

 

Panopoulos’ Hawaiian pizza became political just before he died, when last year the president of Iceland said he would ban pineapple as a topping on pizzas if he could. At the time this created quite a stir amongst the press as they dreamed of a Neroesque president ruling over a remote volcanic island, issuing decrees about pizza toppings while making their pet dog commander of the Navy. Unfortunately for the media the evil Bond villain they desired never manifested, instead he was just expressing his opinion about pineapple being added to pizza, during a question and answer session with a group of high school children. President Gudni Th. Johannesson went on to state that it would be an abuse of his power to ban pineapple from being a pizza topping. This didn’t prevent the media from running with the following ridiculous headlines:

 

Iceland leader reveals desire to outlaw Hawaiian

pizza http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2017/02/iceland-leader-reveals-desire-to-outlaw-hawaiian-pizza.html

If he had his way, Iceland’s President would ban pineapple pizza

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/21/europe/iceland-president-pineapple-pizza-ban-trnd/index.html

Iceland’s President wants Hawaiian pizza ban

http://www.skynews.com.au/culture/offbeat/2017/02/22/iceland-s-president-wants-hawaiian-pizza-ban.html

 

To round things off some funny clips from the British general election. They’ll leave you wondering why we all get so worked up about having the right to vote when you have to choose people like this.

An opportunistic reporter, bored with having to listen to Boris Johnson’s wool gathering and navel gazing, takes the initiative and stabs the foreign secretary in the face with his microphone:

 

After enjoying an election result that few predicted, Jeremy Corbyn congratulates one of hie colleagues by slapping them on the breast:

This one’s from Australia, remember when I mentioned that some suspect that our education systems are being dumbed down:

 

 

Yet More Elections, Yet More Democracy

jimdroberts1 Comment

Say whatever you like about democracy, but it’s still the best system that man, or woman has managed to think up of so far for delegating power and structuring his, or her society. Democracy is so great that this will be the third time in two years that the people of the U.K will have been asked to go to the polls and enjoy the thrill of democracy, proving that you can never have too much of a good thing

If last year’s E.U referendum is anything to go by then anything is possible in the forthcoming election. When Theresa May called for a snap election, ignoring the Fixed-term Parliaments Act that her own party brought into effect just 6 years prior, the polls gave her Conservative party a 22 point lead. Now that she’s been out meeting the public she’s been able to reduce that lead to single figures. YouGov’s latest poll has the Tory lead at just four points over Labour, as at 5 June. It’s been a somewhat fragmented election campaign owing to a handful of murderous bastards perpetrating acts of extreme violence in the name of a morally bankrupt ideology. If these maniacs hadn’t forced suspensions to the campaigning, it’s reasonable to assume that the more the public would have seen of  Theresa May the more appealing Jeremy Corbyn would have become and maybe the Labour party would even be ahead in the polls.

The parallels between Theresa May and Hilary Clinton are obvious. It’s like watching two people in quicksand, the more they struggle the more they get consumed. The more they talk the better their opponent seems to do. In the near future, if anyone has any sense, political candidates will just say nothing throughout their campaigns, a strategy adopted by Blackadder when he put forward Baldrick to run in a by-election:

So with Theresa May projecting all the charm of toxic waste seeping into an orphanage, this raises Jeremy Corbyn’s profile, without him actually having to do anything. When Corbyn does speak, he sounds like a 1970’s politics student who only got as far as reading Marx’s Das Kapital. I’ve got nothing wrong with Marxism per se, it’s just that I’m not sure how viable it is to the complex economies that we have today. Corbyn is also very open minded towards the ideology of terrorists, I have a hard time validating this stance towards terrorism in light of recent events. But whatever Corbyn might think or say is of little consequence, Corbyn’s most electable quality is that he’s not Theresa May.

Essentially, on Thursday the people of the United Kingdom have to chose between Jeremy Corbyn, a man who looks like he would be more comfortable pottering around an allotment, or Theresa May, a woman who we can’t trust to sit the right way round on a toilet.

A friend of mine made the following analogy of this Thursday’s election:

 … so we are faced with a choice that is similar to being asked to move a dog turd. You can either pick it up with your bare hands and take to the bin, or pick it up with your bare hands and put it in your pocket.

Crude as though the dog turd analogy might be, I consider it to be fairly accurate one. The British electorate is once again being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils: Image result for hunter thompson lesser of two evils

Image result for hunter thompson lesser of two evils

There can be little doubt that this general election pits two of the blandest party leaders against one another, offering the electorate a choice of either grey or beige. But, if our democracy can be so easily reduced to turd analogies and choosing between two evils, then I’m left to wonder if the terrorists haven’t already won.

 

While we should consider elections to be meaningful and terrorism to be a very real

Related image
EPeter Sallis, star of Last of the Summer Wine and voice of Wallace from Nick Park’s Oscar winning Wallace and Gomit, died June 2, 2017.

 

threat, I was saddened to hear of the death of Peter Sallis. Sallis starred in the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine for 37 years, and provided the voice of Wallace in the multi award winning Wallace and Gromit animations. As a child I spent many a Sunday having tea and sandwiches, whilst watching Last of the Summer Wine, which was essentially three old men wandering aimlessly around the verdant Yorkshire Dales accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful theme tune. Now that’s something a jihadist will never understand. In fact that’s what I recommend for radicalised extremists, they should be forced to watch all 37 years of Last of the Summer Wine, can there be a surer way of curing a person of homicidal ambitions?

 

 

 

Image result for theresa may jeremy corbyn star wars
Probably as good a reason as any that you’ll find for voting Labour.

 

The President and the Covfefe Conspiracy

jimdroberts3 Comments

When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, some of us expressed doubt as to whether a business man come reality game show host would have the political acumen necessary for the job. Others were concerned that a person with Trump’s impulsive character would have the worlds most powerful nuclear arsenal at his disposal. But, none of us could have predicted just how soon he would play the “covfefe” card.

covfefewhalberg

The president’s mention of covfefe has set the heads of political analysts spinning:

Philippe-Abeille-webBunker Cheeks, BBC Political Analyst

This is unprecedented. To mention covfefe so soon into your first term as president represents an enormous political gambit, it’s a game changer. It will make or break his presidency. The last president to mention covfefe was Kennedy, and I’m pretty sure that he lived to regret that.

The president starts to outline his hopes for covfefe.

Many people were worried that the president had raised such a nebulous issue as covfefe at an inopportune moment, on the eve of important climate talks. But the president stuck to his guns, arguing that if Paris had an accord then why didn’t New York? The president then abruptly left the talks. Gerd Achterschip was a delegate in the meeting:

The President Trump stormed out of the talks so quickly that he resembled a sort of golden, orange gas. As he left the room he kept chuntering “covfefe” and made wild lurches towards all the female delegates.

One thing remains certain, amidst all of the political carnage, President Trump is unlikely to stop serving us with a veritable smorgasbord of covfefe and flapdoodle.

 

Image result for brian williams the 11th hourIt’s testimony to the renegade maverick nature of this president, and shows all of us that he’s not going to kowtow to the Washington elite by using a lexicon they understand. Following the president’s tweet, covfefe climbed a point on the New York Pussy Grab Index as traders backed the president’s tough stance on covfefe.

Brian Williams – CSNBC

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