Anyone for Golf?

The Open golf championship is under way at the home of golf – St Andrews.  And this being Britain, it does of course mean that the British even is the best in the world.  Jingoistic commentators in every media pronounce this as though it is a matter of fact.  But they seem to ignore the reality of what is going on in front of our eyes.

The fact is that the British Open, excuse me – THE Open, is a complete lottery, utterly dependent on the weather.  If the sun shines and the wind doesn’t blow too much, then the best golfers will indeed do well.  But because the competition is often held in grim seaside places in Scotland, more often than not the result is a lottery, won by somebody who is a complete non-entity.

At the time of writing this year’s competition seems to be a collector’s item for dreadfulness.  One day sunny, the next windy, the next lashing with rain.  Clearly the best golfer in the world in such conditions I the one who plays in the best conditions.  And that means he is the luckiest golfer in the world – not the best.

Why does the British media have to devalue our competitions by claiming them to be the best in the world when they so clearly are anything but?  I don’t know – but I do know a second rate competition when I see it.

Overated England Players

I was intrigued to se that England boss Fabio Capello has demanded that player ratings website the Capello Index be removed from the internet.  I would have thought he would have wanted them engraved in tablets of stone.

The rankings, which score players on their performances in this summer’s World Cup, appeared online on Saturday.

“I did not authorise this and am angry it was published,” said Capello, while the Football Association claimed it was “satisfied” with the Italian’s actions.

The project was set for launch before the World Cup but, following a media outcry, it was postponed.

“The index was published without Mr Capello’s knowledge and his representatives have taken immediate steps to have the material taken down,” read an FA statement.

The website uses a statistical system devised by former Roma, Juventus and Real Madrid coach Capello to award players a score out of 100.

Not a single England international appears in the top 45 players from the tournament, following the team’s dismal showing in South Africa that ended with a 4-1 last-16 defeat to Germany.

Captain Steven Gerrard is the only member of the squad to be ranked in the top 100 performers of the group stages, coming in at a lowly 65.

Tottenham striker Jermain Defoe has the highest average score of Capello’s squad with 62.47, while goalkeeper Robert Green, who was dropped by Capello following his glaring handling error that gifted the USA an equaliser in the England’s opening 1-1 Group C draw, has the lowest score – 51.67.

Uruguay’s Diego Forlan, the Golden Ball winner in South Africa, top the ratings. Germany’s Miroslav Klose and Thomas Mueller are second and third respectively.

Tournament winners Spain occupy the next three spots with Andres Iniesta fourth, Xavi fifth and David Villa sixth.

Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez, Dutch winger Arjen Robben, Germans midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger and goalkeeper Manuel Neuer complete the top 10.

News of the project first emerged in early May, when Capello announced himself as a co-founder of the Index, alongside Chicco Merighi, the founder of an online gambling company.

“It’s not only about money, my interest is in football,” Capello said at the time.

A four-week trial of the index – limited to players from Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur – rated Ledley King, Michael Dawson and Sol Campbell as the best English central defenders ahead of John Terry and Rio Ferdinand.

However, following harsh media criticism of the idea as badly timed and potentially damaging to players’ confidence, Capello was forced to put World Cup ratings on hold after holding emergency talks with the FA.

But a message on the front page of the site reads: “We are finally able to satisfy the numerous request we have had by publishing the results of the evaluation of the players’ performance during the South African World Cup.

“Out of respect to the Football Association, who asked us to suspend the real-time publication, we decided to wait until the end of the tournament.”

The site also claims the analysis will next season be applied to “all games of the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and the Champions League”, with all the data to be published “within two hours of the end of the matches”.

Virgin Galactic spaceship tested

If you feel you can trust Richard Branson just about as far as you can throw him, then maybe space travel is not for you.  But the toothy entrepreneur is on the brink of offering tourists a quick trip into space.

His slightly more practical version of the space shuttle appears to have come through some test unscathed.  Good news I suppose for those who want to throw money at Mr Branson and go up where the sky is black – and then look down on the rest of us.

But I have to admit that space exploration on the cheap is not for me.

The Virgin team aiming to send tourists on suborbital flights has tested its spacecraft with a crew for the first time, it has announced.

The craft remained attached to a specially designed aeroplane throughout a six-hour flight over California’s Mojave desert on Thursday, Virgin Galactic said.

On its website, the company congratulated the crew and said “Objectives achieved”. It says the two crew members evaluated all the spaceship’s systems and functions.

Virgin Galactic says the flight test programme will run until 2011 before it starts commercial operations.

Vintage Champagne

A group of divers exploring a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea have found bottles containing what is thought to be the oldest drinkable champagne in the world, made in the late 18th century. “I picked up one champagne bottle just so we could find the age of the wreck, because we didn’t find any name or any details that would have told us the name of the ship,” diver Christian Ekstrom from Aland told Reuters on Saturday.

Ekstrom and his Swedish diving colleagues opened the bottle and tasted the contents.

“It was fantastic… it had a very sweet taste, you could taste oak and it had a very strong tobacco smell. And there were very small bubbles,” he said.

Experts said the shape of the bottle showed it was from the late 18th century, and the bottle and its contents have been sent to champagne specialists in France to be analysed.

“We are 98 percent sure that it is Veuve Clicquot champagne and that it was probably (made) between 1772 (the year the business was established) and 1785,” Ekstrom said, adding that the cargo vessel was probably sailing to St Petersburg, then the capital of

He said they had found the wine on their first dive and did not yet know how many bottles the wreck contained or what other cargo it carried.

The current title of the world’s oldest champagne is held by Perrier-Jouet, which has two bottles from 1825.

Richard Juhlin, a Swedish champagne specialist, told the newspaper Alandstidningen he believed the champagne was Veuve Cliquot and said that if it was from the late 18th century, it could cost around 500,000 Swedish crowns ($68,000) a bottle.

Because the wreck lies off Aland, an autonomous part of Finland, the local authorities will decide what will be done with the wreck — and the champagne.

Getting work

What is it about work?  We are led to believe that we should all want to work for a living, never take a day off sick and basically work until we drop.  I have to say I take exactly the opposite view.  Maybe there is something wrong in my make up- – but I have to say I am at my happiest when I am doing no work at all.

However, economic necessity dictates that every so often I have to do some work.  Usually this is pure purgatory.  I sign up with a local job agency and do some factory job that nobody in their right mind would do.  It pays crap – but at least it pays.

However, recently I have discovered the surreal world of cleaning.  In a former life when I worked in advertising, I was introduced to the darker side of office cleaning or office cleaners when slightly shy, awkward types who came from faraway places like Peru and Brazil asked me if I wanted my office cleaned.  I was never entirely sure if they were just being exploited – or were illegal immigrants who were really being exploited.

To my mind office cleaning is really quite cushy.  If you want to earn not very much money with a frisson of danger you could always pack agrochemicals as I did recently.  Or unload lorry-loads of flat-pack furniture.

This too was highly dangerous – putting fingers and backs at risk for a pitiful hourly rate.  But the strange thing was it was all being financed by high-street companies who just sold on furniture that had been returned for whatever reason to a bunch of cowboys.

But the bottom line is, if you want to earn a bit of money, don’t get a job at Tesco’s – get a job in office cleaning.  You get paid by the hour to do not very much at night.  And the day is yours.  And when you get fed up – just give your job up!

Selling Mobile Phones

What is it with mobile phone contracts?  Every single year you get offered yet another phone. It’s a though somehow this year’s must-have gizmo makes up for the appalling cost of making phone calls on a mobile network.  This probably explains the sudden emergence of all those TV advertisements urging me to sell my mobile for mobile phone recycling

I used to have a foolproof way around these bargain offers.  I would ask what is the lowest tariff they company could give me if they wanted to keep me (and not give me a new phone I did not want.  For a few years this worked fine.  Then I realised I was making virtually no calls on my mobile phone – so I canned the contract and went on to pay as you go

On the face of it this might seem a daft decision.  I have to pay for every call and every text. And the tariff is I believe, quite eye-watering.  But here’s the thing – I don’t make any calls.  For me, the mobile phone exists as a medium for people to call me – except they never do.  So far this year I have made £20 of credit last until July.

From this little insight you might guess that I am fairly immune to all those TV adverts that promise you money for your unwanted phones.  Let’s face it if your mobile phone service provider puts a value of zero on your phone, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that its value is not unadjacent to zero.

But no.  If the adverts are appearing – it must mean that people are sending their phones in.  To my mind this is a bit like all those fools that send off gold in an envelope, expecting to get anything like a fair price.  It just isn’t going to happen.

SO the bottom line is.  If you want to risk having an unknown person get access to all your numbers in exchange for a few pennies, send your phone off to phones r us.  If on the other hand, you are not a mug, do what the rest of us do.  Stick the phone in a drawer.  Who knows – you might actually need it.