Charles on… anything that comes along

I very much like The Triforce’s latest Quiz of The Week. Blimey, these pub quiz things are hard. No wonder I don’t go to pubs any more.

Example extract:

Film In Four
Example:
1995: “Kevin gives Brad head” = Seven

1. 2005: Arthur enters Ford Galaxy.
2. 1975: Eat ship and die

Now that’s class. “Kevin gives Brad head” indeed.

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• Factoring: test your speed! (6 September 2004; score: 27.09%)
• Oh god, The Apprentice is *so* compulsive (2 April 2008; score: 25.17%)
• Michael Dell re Blu-Ray, and disable those iPod nano scratches! (4 October 2005; score: 23.46%)

So Seb Coe - sorry, Sir Sebastian Coe is out in Ghana lobbying IOC members, imploring them to give London the Olympics.

(And who paid for his flight there? Or did he run?)

OK, now I’ve been wondering about where there are all these pro-Olympic adverts all over the Tube in London. Good Lord, British Airways, some construction company, and so on are all in favour of the Olympics coming to London!

Well, duh. Of course they are. If London is cursed by winning the Olympics, those companies will get pots of money - travellers coming here, and of course all those stadia that will have to be built on the recently-levelled spaces where people used to live but have been rehoused. (Has anyone mentioned this? No?)

So you know why the companies are in favour of the Olympics: whoever loses, they win. Hence, they advertise, and urge people who haven’t heard any sides of the argument to “Back the Bid” and text their “backing” to some daft number. No number to text your opposition to, you’ll notice.

And about the losers: ah yes, that would be all the people who live in London. Because if Seb Coe succeeds, then they’ll all get higher council taxes to pay for the “regeneration” (more like, to line the construction companies’ pockets). And that’s about it. Given that they don’t really want the stadia, though they’d like better rail and public transport services, Londoners don’t really have any reason to like this bid, in my opinion.

You want regeneration? Why can’t central government pitch in to help make the capital better, then, along with money from the council tax. Plus you wouldn’t have to build redundant stadia for sports stars who aren’t going to use them.

So why don’t you see any adverts against the “London 2012 Olympic bid”? Because, durr, it’s a widespread dislike or apathy. Who’s going to club together to buy an advert on the Tube to express their disaffection with this daft idea? However the companies that stand to make pots of money from something that will leave London with lots of unwanted facilities, ah, they’re monolithic. They have marketing budgets.

But for the people who’ll actually be paying don’t get a referendum or any other way to express their opposition, or more exactly to determine their support. They’re being railroaded by politicians and companies.

(Lest I be thought of as some couch-potato churl, I should point out that I love sport, enjoy playing lots of them, think that playing and pursuing and enjoying sports is an essential component of childrens’ - and adults’ - characters. But as for building stadia? For example, we have the All-England Club, surely the finest tennis venue in the world - and I’ve seen them all, first-hand. [The AELTC is the only one whose courts I haven’t played on.] But that hasn’t produced tennis stars, because the quality of your stars is about the infrastructure and society in which that sport happens, not the quality of the stadia you have to play in. If you want Olympic winners, you need a society that puts sports at the core of its thinking. Case in point: Australia. Far smaller population than the UK; far better sporting reputation in most sports, and over-represented in pretty much all of them.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• London wins Olympics: and now interviewers start saying "Yes, but.." (6 July 2005; score: 42.13%)
• When readers bite (because reviewers don't) (6 November 2006; score: 39.32%)
• Save Hackney Marshes! London must not get the Olympics! (5 January 2005; score: 33.15%)

My alarm at present is my phone - playing Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” (a suitable way to start the day..). In fact my phone (from Orange; it has good reception, which sorts the problems I referred to earlier) could replace my iPod shuffle, because it can hold quite a few songs, play them at random, has a screen (that’s a plus) and will hold the songs while a call comes in.

So what’s the problem? Why can’t I quite see them killing iPods? Read my latest Netimperative column for more.

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• In The Independent: why we're all reading slower than 10 years ago (9 November 2005; score: 42.84%)