My latest whinge...

Random Data wrote:

I've also found wearing a tutu in the competitive section of W2G really
gives the wannabe racers the ****s. Tee hee.

But not the organisers, you made it onto the entry form.

http://www.careflight.org/client_images/46449.pdf

Care to monkey it up this year?

Parbs

On Thu, 11 May 2006 09:35:18 +0000, Parbs wrote:

But not the organisers, you made it onto the entry form.

Huzzah!

Care to monkey it up this year?

Why not? It could be amusing for everyone else, but I'll probably have
some fun. The climb after BMX hill looks to be the nastiest, or possibly
out of Redwire.

--
Dave Hughes |
Congratulations. Astronomers have detected pressure waves whose frequency
is something like 57 octaves below middle C in the core of another
galaxy, but you've found a lower tone than that. - Steve VanDevender

TimC wrote:

Sport is not for everyone. Not everyone is super competitive, and
sometimes we think testosteroned idiots on the football team are just
idiots. I like cycling partly because I don't think it is a sport

You'll have to pay Hawthorn back their prizemoney, Tim
We were there, we *saw* you racing!

(OK, so I have raced in 5 or so crits to date).


Of course, maybe it's my bias having been to so many tiny schools.
Could you imagine making some kind of sport compulsory in a school of
68 children and 4 teachers? Don't like the choice of 1) dodgeball, 2)
badminton? Too bad, that's all we have teachers for.

In summer, I was the queen of the pool, but I had no interest in
swimming squad, so I never did it, I just swam for fun. Mum was
wonderful and never made me go to a swimming squad either. So I did

Goddamn, I hated the yearly swimming competitions. We all *had* to
take part, whether we could swim the width of the pool or not. I can
still remeber the laughter when I had to compete against one other
person.

The only time I ever wagged school was a yearly athletics day. A full
bloody day! A day much better spent smoking dope next to the creek.

go, but the other kids would laugh at me. I would be the last kid picked
for sport.

Heh. Remember how the two team leaders would go back and forth with
their selection. And the first 10 people selected were always
selected with such enthusiasm? And the last 10 were "aww, do we have
to have him?" (or her, in perhaps your situation

I'd avoid any competition, anything where I had to line up against
others. I especially hated team sports because I felt like such a waste
of space, like I was letting the team down. I would practise catching at
home, bouncing the ball off the wall, but no one thought to practise

You were much more keen than me

with me at school. The PE teachers didn't want anything to do with unco
kids. Sport was for those who were good at it - the rest of us should
just go back to the classroom.

Except that we weren't allowed, even when we wanted to.

Eventually I noticed I was a bit fat

Pffft.

So I guess I feel like there is a serious lack of funding into promoting
sport participation for everyone, and that's bad enough. But it seems
even worse that there is a continual push for elite funding, spreading
the message that sport is only for people who are really good at it.

Hmmm, I'm wondering whether I agree with you now.

Sport would suck for me no matter what, if I had to have done it with
the rest of the yobs from school. I don't think any amount of funding
to us mere mortals would change the fact that the rest of the yobs
would all still be involved.

Compulsory school sport is not "the" answer, but it's got to be part of
an overall strategy. Our school had wednesday afternoon "elective
sport" where we could do all manner of things - some of the kids played
golf (and aparently that's a sport?!), some football, soccer, table
tennis, 10 pin bowling, windsurfing, kayaking, rowing, running ..
*anything* as long as it was vaguely physical. That's not realistic
for onehorse country schools, but I'm sure a lot of other things
-could- be done in that context. The aim being to show kids what's
available, and let them try (and learn) as many as possible.

Of course, then the schools would be accused (again!) of not teaching
the basics, and spending too much time having fun! *sigh* And kids
being kids, some will kick up a fuss, wag etc, but schools can only do
what they can with what they have.

A lot of it (moreso than schools) has to fall at the feet of parents
*and* the kids themselves. We as a society should encourage physical
exercise in some form or other as much as we can, but this isn't Soviet
Russia, in Soviet Russia State Exercises YOU!
(then again, with Howard's beefed up KGB ....). First, wean them off
their damn cars and get them RIDING TO SCHOOL!

On 2006-05-11, Bleve (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:

TimC wrote:

Sport is not for everyone. Not everyone is super competitive, and
sometimes we think testosteroned idiots on the football team are just
idiots. I like cycling partly because I don't think it is a sport

You'll have to pay Hawthorn back their prizemoney, Tim
We were there, we *saw* you racing!

Ssssh!

A lot of it (moreso than schools) has to fall at the feet of parents
*and* the kids themselves. We as a society should encourage physical
exercise in some form or other as much as we can, but this isn't Soviet
Russia, in Soviet Russia State Exercises YOU!
(then again, with Howard's beefed up KGB ....). First, wean them off
their damn cars and get them RIDING TO SCHOOL!

I just remembered that I thought cycling was too nerdly EVEN FOR ME
(WTF?!), in the last couple of years of high school (perhaps I should
have just realised that the particular bike I had just sucked, and I
could have done with a less ugly stack hat), so instead of riding the
3km to school on the other side of a very small town, I should just
walk it. I dunno WHAT I was thinking. Was certainly interesting
walking in the depths of winter when the sun had only just risen.

But for the sake of my future moral highground in oil dependency
debates, I'm glad my mum didn't drive me.

At least I was smart enough to ride and not walk back from the
observatory, when it was 3am, and -7 degrees (why the hell did I get
rostered on on the night that broke local records, temperature wise?
And why did I then use the opportunity to look through the clearest
skies one could possibly imagine, until my eyelids could no longer
cope?)

--
TimC
I've told them and told them: Temporal anomalies are different from
spatial anomalies. But the kittens know better. They laugh at my
feeble attempts to fool them. -- barbara in ARK

Bleve wrote:


Of course, then the schools would be accused (again!) of not teaching
the basics,

Well, if parents accepted their responsibilities and educated their kids
in life skills properly, then school wouldn't have to waste time making
up for this lack and there would be plenty of time to teach the basics.

No I'm not a teacher, but I'm married to one (well casual now)

in Soviet Russia State Exercises YOU!

err, what is different to here exactly?

Bleve wrote:

All that does is raise the bar for everyone. It's like the first home
owners grant, it just makes everything $grant more expensive. I've
seen the sponsor's side of the fence, and sponsors treat sponsorship as
advertsing (as you'd expect) except for a few (rare!) enthusiasts.

That may be the case with the high-profile, spheroid-centred, team
sports, but for cycling, my impression is that the opposite is true.
Behind just about every bike team, there's a sponsoring company run by a
cycling fanatic, right from Frank Fortuna at FRF Couriers up to Marc
Coucke at Davitamon and, until recently Georgio Squinzi at Mapei. And
it's not just teams; I wonder if Patrick will continue to support the
Tasmanian Carnivals after Chris Corrigan takes his several hundred
million and goes home.

The exception that immediately springs to mind is Discovery - but one of
the team's owners, Tom Weisel, is an extremely well-connected merchant
banker and venture capitalist who co-founded Montgomery Securities, the
original sponsor. As the team has grown, Weisel has tapped into his
business network to find more money, and you can bet there are
reciprocal favours involved in many of these deals. Tailwind used to
tout for overseas parcel business for the US Postal Service, for example.

Yes, sponsorship is justified as advertising and marketing. But *what*
it gets spent on is usually a result of someone in the company's passion.

On Thu, 11 May 2006 21:24:27 +1000, Terry Collins wrote:

err, what is different to here exactly?

In Korea, only old people propagate /. memes.

--
Dave Hughes |
Why don't the voices ever remind me it's mum's birthday? It's
always die die die, kill kill kill - Flynny, mtb-oz

In aus.bicycle on Thu, 11 May 2006 19:20:51 +1000
Random Data wrote:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 19:00:15 +1000, Terry Collins wrote:

err Zeeeb, you are supposed to give them the heavier crowbar and wonky
shovel[1]

Everyone knows that swordfighting has nothing to do with the waving shiny
things around. It's all in the repartee.

Absolutely!

"Well. It is now time to fight to the death. As hero and villain it
is expected of us. Do you want your duel with conversation or
without?"
"Oh with! Definitely with!"

Zebee
- slurp that robot then!

On Thu, 11 May 2006 03:39:15 -0700, Bleve wrote:

Our school had wednesday afternoon "elective sport" where we could do
all manner of things - some of the kids played golf (and aparently
that's a sport?!)

I did golf for a couple of terms of school sport. Walk around a golf
course, try to outdrive your mates, try to hit the groundskeeper [1], and
laugh at your mates trying to retrieve clubs from the water trap. There's
a reasonable amount of exercise there, and it's nicely social.

[1] Only once, and how stupid do you have to be to drive a golf cart in
front of teenage boys with golf clubs and balls?

--
Dave Hughes |
That's why I love VoIP. You don't get people phoning up to complain
that the network is down.- Peter Corlett, in the Monastery

On 2006-05-11, Random Data (aka Bruce)
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
On Thu, 11 May 2006 21:24:27 +1000, Terry Collins wrote:

err, what is different to here exactly?

In Korea, only old people propagate /. memes.

But in Soviet Russia, /. memes propogate old people!

--
TimC
When the revolution comes, we'll need a longer wall. -- Tom De Mulder