The Travelator effect

1. There’s a nasty bump when you go into the later phases of the 
World Cup. Up until yesterday there was a game a day. Now, suddenly 
and horribly, there are these gaps. It’s like when you’ve been going 
along one of those travelators and you come to the end of it and step 
of and there’s that jolt as you forcibly decelerate down to normal 
walking speed.

The temptation, of course, is to try to compensate with alcohol, 
drugs or online poker. This should be resisted.

2. The National Basketball Association has announced that it’s 
bringing in a new ball next season. It’s the first time they 
have changed the ball since 1970, and only the second time they’ve 
changed the ball in the last 60 years. So in the time it has taken 
Fifa to change the ball ten times, the NBA has changed the ball 
once.

The point has been made before, but it’s yet another example of 
the benign form of semi-socialism practised in American sport, 
enjoying as it does legal protection from many forms of free market 
mayhem, not least in the way the draft-pick system systematically 
attempts to even out the differences between weaker and stronger 
teams. By contrast, football in England has been growing steadily 
less interesting since the eighties, when the League decided that 
home and away teams would no longer share the gate. SInce then, 
inevitably, the rich have grown steadily richer, and the interest (as 
opposed to the manufactured frenzy) has steadily leaked out.

3. Buckets of ink have already been spilt on the number of red cards 
referees are handing out—25 already, as opposed to 22 for the whole 
of the last tournament. I’m not sure it’s having all that much effect 
on the way the games are played, other than to introduce yet another 
element of unpredictability and randomness to a game that has always 
been, in that respect, horribly lifelike.

4. I have a new version of my old e-mail programe, Mac Mail. This one 
makes a  high-energy whooshing sound whenever I send something. I can 
see how some people like that, but for me, it’s completely 
inappropriate. I need something that sighs, or groands, or does the 
audible equivalent of a shrug.

OK, time to fire up a spliff, crack open the Absolut, and hit 
PartyPoker.com.

Comments

[Jonathan Lewis]

1. Regarding your Mac Mail sounds. A post from Nyarlathotep on the Apple support discussions tells you how to change this:

The Mail sounds aren't officially changable..
..But if you :-

1) right click on the mail application
2) select show package contents
3) double click on the folder shown [contents]
4) double click on the resources folder
5) within this folder are the sound files used by mail - mail fetch error, mail sent, new mail, no mail

The beauty is that you can drop any aiff files in there, rename them to replace a set sound and voila !! sound effect has changed !!

Obviously, make sure you back up the official sound files before you change anything - in case there are any problems, you want the opriginal sounds back, etc.

2. On Footynomics, I don't know if Japan vs. Australia supports your thesis very well. Their per-capita GDPs are essentially the same, but Japan has six times the population (and a much longer established football league). On the other hand both their defences have been described as naive in this World Cup.