7 Reasons

Month: February 2010

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons to Watch the Six Nations

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons to Watch the Six Nations

    If you get your news from 7 Reasons, you’ll be delighted to learn that the Six Nations starts today.  We have decided to celebrate this with a guest post.

    Our guest post comes from Rachel Simmonite, a 21 year old BA Hons Media and Communication (Journalism) student at Birmingham City University.  When she’s not busy gracing Twitter with her wit, wisdom, and frankly astonishing knowledge of club rugby, she can be found writing here.

    1.  Birthday.  This year, the Six Nations celebrates its tenth birthday.  Of course, the tournament has been going on forever – in various guises of the Home International Championship and the Five Nations – but this year is the tenth year since the Italians joined the party; with their light blue kit, dodgy hair and sideburns, and their habit of beating Scotland every other year or so, Italy – despite being the whipping boys of the tournament – have always provided good competition.  And they have the best national anthem.

    2. Rivalries.  Talking to an Irish or Welsh friend during this tournament means you get a lot more abuse than normal.  National pride and traditional rivalries are all the rage during the Six Nations.  Being English, and therefore supporting the red roses through thick and thin while thinking back to the good old days of 2003, you get it in the neck more than anyone else, as every side wants to beat you more than anything.  The Celtic teams (Ireland, Wales and Scotland) need to beat you for bragging rights – I haven’t been able to face my Welsh friends for the past two years – and to try and get the Triple Crown or, in the case of Scotland, the Calcutta Cup, while the French and the Italians just like to join in with the English bashing.

    3.  Something for everyone.  Whether you’re after someone nice to look at, or a good game, the Six Nations provides both.  The annual desire to beat your local rivals for northern hemisphere dominance brings out the best of the teams, both in the forwards, and the backs.  With the return of the rolling maul to the game – following last year’s ELVs* – the forwards can add that extra string to their bow again, enabling loads of fans (either in the pub or at the ground) to go “HEAVE” whenever it happens.  As for the backs; as long as they’re running with the ball, it doesn’t affect the precise alignment of their gelled hair, and they’re stealing the headlines, they’ll be having fun.

    Rugby isn’t just about the game now, it’s about the totty.  Following calendars such as Le Dieux de Stade, the word “moisturiser” has become commonly used in rugby changing rooms, as has the phrase “fake tan” – particularly if you’re Welsh.  If I was feeling shallow then my 7 reasons to watch the Six Nations would be very short: Jonny Wilkinson, Tom Croft, Leigh Halfpenny, Hugo Southwell, Brian O’Driscoll, Yannick Jauzion and Sergio Parisse.  Of course there are more than seven good looking players in this year’s tournament, that selection are just my favourites.

    4.  Anyone can win it.  The beauty of the Six Nations is that you never know who is going to win the tournament; there’s no runaway winner or clear favourite.  I mean, nobody would have thought that Wales would win the Grand Slam in 2005.  Likewise, we didn’t expect Italy to come fourth in 2007 – the year when France beat Ireland with a +4 points difference – but that was all that separated them.  Of course, with Ireland having won the Grand Slam last year (only their second since 1948), they will be labelled as favourites for this year’s tournament.  But on their day, anyone can beat anyone – the Welsh very nearly spoiled the Irish party last year and who knows what the French will come up with, having beaten the World Champions, South Africa, in November?  We do know that the Scots and the Italians will probably be fighting it out for the wooden spoons, but who knows?  And as for England…

    5.  The WAGs.  Becoming a rugby WAG is increasingly popular – even a member of the royal family, Zara Phillips, is a rugby WAG.  The recent crop started with Gabby Logan and Kirsty Gallacher; the likes of Kelly Brook and Una (from pop group the Saturdays) followed for England, with Duffy and Charlotte Church flying the flag for the Welsh WAGs.  It is inevitable that if a well known rugby WAG is in attendance at a match the television director will give them plenty of screen time.  If not, you’ll be able to see photos of them cheering on their men in the Daily Mail.

    6.  The singing.  You can’t have a rugby match without the singing.  The Welsh, in particular, are very good at the singing – it’s like their second sport after rugby.  With the likes of Katherine Jenkins, Charlotte Church and that blond one off of the X-Factor to sing the national anthem, Delilah, and Bread of Heaven, they do their singing brilliantly.  England have adopted a song that comes with actions, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”.  I think you have to go on a rugby tour to learn the actions though.  Ireland spoil the crowd with two anthems before a match while the French and Italian anthems are just great – I love them – like I love the bagpipes in Flower of Scotland.  In fact, I love the anthems more than the bagpipes.

    7.  The romance.  How could you treat your better half on Valentine’s weekend this year?  Card?  Flowers?  Cheesy Marvin Gaye CD?  How about a weekend in Cardiff, Paris or Rome?  Arrive on the Friday night, take them out for a meal, let them do damage to the credit card on the Saturday morning and then – come the Saturday afternoon at about midday (or Sunday in the case of Rome) – announce that you’ve got tickets for the rugby and enquire whether they fancy a romantic afternoon watching thirty men run around a pitch for eighty minutes?

    Of course, if your other half really doesn’t like rugby then you may find yourself in a spot of bother – but it is something that you love…

    *Experimental Law Variations

  • 7 Reasons To Climb A Mountain

    7 Reasons To Climb A Mountain

    1.  Measure It. Nothing excites me more than when the end of year mountain height measurements are released. Is Everest still 8848 metres tall? Is Ben Nevis still the biggest in Britain? So many questions answered in one PDF. Obviously these figures aren’t just made up. Someone has to use a tape measure and a long stick.

    2.  Picnics. Nothing beats a picnic with a spectacular view. Of clouds. I know you can get this type of view atop a grassy hillock, but it is far more exciting trying to eat while simultaneously struggling to breathe.

    3.  Photo Opportunity. Let’s be honest, a facebook profile picture of you standing atop a mountain looks so much more impressive than a self portrait you have done of yourself at home. You know the one I mean. The one that took 30 attempts to get right and then ten minutes of cropping so your outstretched arm isn’t showing.

    4.  Getting Home To Babe. Because there ain’t no mountain. No mountain high enough. No valley low enough. To stop you from getting to baby. So you may as well go and climb one. Babe will be so much more impressed when you tell them that you took a shortcut across the top of Scaffold Pike* to get to the restaurant.

    5.  Eye Of The Tiger. Eye Of The Tiger, Rock. Climbing a mountain is one thing. Running up it is even better. Especially if you are making a movie about a boxer. Or indeed if you are just plain daft.

    6.  You’re Hot. No, not in the Sandra Bullock way. If you are hot in the Sandra Bullock way you can ignore all mountains and just come straight round to mine. You won’t even have to wipe your feet. I mean hot as in temperature hot. In other words you need to cool down. Common sense tells you that it’s much colder up a mountain.

    7.  No Pain, No Gain. There are a couple of ways to get blister repellent feet. One is to chop them off. The other is to build up calluses. You can do this by walking. Barefoot. Up mountains. Yes, it’ll hurt the first few hundred times you do it, but eventually your feet will have Zola Budd written all over them.

    *Yes, I know it’s Scafell Pike. Scaffold Pike is a clever play on words. What with scaffolding being something you climb. Clever, yes.

  • 7 Reasons Bull Durham Is The Greatest Baseball Movie Ever

    7 Reasons Bull Durham Is The Greatest Baseball Movie Ever

     

     

    1.  Women.  Unusually for baseball films, the central character is a woman.  This shouldn’t be unusual – some of the most passionate and knowledgeable sport fans I know are women – but it is.  The use of a female narrator and the fact that the baseball isn’t the only story in the movie – the journey that Susan Sarandon’s character goes on isn’t really about baseball at all – gives it a totally different perspective to other baseball films, making it far more rounded and realistic.   It’s about baseball, but it’s also a romantic comedy.  Would my wife sit through The Pride of the Yankees or Eight Men Out with me?  No.  Would I watch Sleepless In Seattle or You’ve Got Mail with her?  No.  Would we watch Bull Durham together?  Well… no – but only because she’s out shopping at the moment.

    2.  Realism. Despite not being entirely about baseball, Bull Durham has some of the most realistic and interesting scenes of match-play in films.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, since the director spent five years playing in the Minor Leagues.  The tight, close-up shots of Davies batting and Laloosh pitching – with their thoughts providing the voiceover – are far more intimate than anything usually seen during matches in baseball movies.  The rest of the off-field baseball activity is also imbued with a down-to-earth realism.  We learn that you should never punch a man with your pitching hand, and that you’ll never make it to the Major Leagues with fungus on your shower shoes – which is obviously where I went wrong.

    3.  Tim Robbins.  Tim Robbins is in Bull Durham.  Tim Robbins is funny looking.  Tim Robbins is weird.  Tim Robbins is distracting.  Tim Robbins ruins most of the films he is in for those reasons.  To withstand the casting of Tim Robbins, a film has to be very, very good.  High Fidelity, for example, managed to overcome a hugely distracting appearance by him.  In Bull Durham he is still quite distracting (and weird), but he’s good.  It’s a measured performance in which the growth of his character is completely convincing and very well performed.  If your film is good enough to withstand the presence of Tim Robbins, it’s a very good film.  If your film can withstand – and be enhanced – by his presence, it must be a great film.  He’s still weird though.  And funny looking.

    4.  Sex.  You don’t often find sex in baseball films.  This is a shame.  I like sex; I like baseball (and we don’t have much of either in England).  Baseball movies are full of men being men, involved in manly pursuits like sport or drinking beer or more sport.   In Bull Durham though, with strong female characters and a female narrator, there is room for more than just baseball.  This is great, as the film’s other preoccupation is sex.  Not gratuitous, graphic sex, mark you – it’s quite understated.  It’s just that the film has sex, romance and mortality as central themes in addition to the baseball, making it far more rounded and interesting that the usual baseball movie fare.  I could have done without seeing Tim Robbins in a suspender belt though.  That’s something that should be hidden away on the internet.

    5.  Comedy.  Bull Durham is well written, performed and works brilliantly as a whimsical drama based around small-town Minor League baseball.  It would stand alone as a good, solid drama.  But it doesn’t stop there.  This charming film is also full of some wonderfully observed and pithy lines.  When worldly Crash Davis discovers the inexperienced Nuke LaLoosh wearing the aforementioned suspender belt in the locker room he calmly walks up to him, adjusts it and tells him, “The rose goes on the front, big guy”.

    6.  Making poetry interesting.  I hate Walt Whitman.  Some of my hatred for Mr Whitman stems from three years of being forced to endure his wearisome prose at University.  I found him dull in the first place, and my opinion was not helped by having him read to me in lectures or having to read him myself at home.  Bull Durham shows us how to study Walt Whitman: tied up in  Susan Sarandon’s bed*.  I’d have happily spent three years doing that.

    7.  Kevin Costner.  I’ve never really understood the enormous appeal Kevin Costner had in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  I always found him a bit dull.  In Bull Durham he plays Crash Davis, an experienced and underrated Minor League catcher coming to the end of his career.  He seems to be playing Don Johnson playing Sonny Crockett playing Crash Davis, but it works very well.  When he’s not playing ‘ball he’s all moody introspection and Bourbon-swilling charm.  Sadly, he does not live on a boat with an alligator.

    *Susan Sarandon has not replaced Jennifer Aniston in the affections of this website.  We imagine them in complementary roles.

  • 7 Reasons You Should Be Able To Quote Eleanor Roosevelt

    7 Reasons You Should Be Able To Quote Eleanor Roosevelt

    1.  “There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands.” For use when your wife returns home from a bit of shopping, to see that you have tried to do the dusting as she asked, but you have just dusted around all the objects on the mantel piece. She doesn’t think this is a good enough effort.

    2.  “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavour.” For use when your friends ask you why you don’t just settle down and get a normal job instead of being the perennial dreamer. A man who longs to catch one hundred buses in one night would fall into this category.

    3.  “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.” For use when you think that to make a sex joke funny you must include crude and vulgar language or demonstrations.

    4.  “Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyse may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.” For use when you are in Waterstones trying to work out what to buy your wife for her birthday. This should be enough to drag you away from anything that has Jordan’s face on it to something like Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About The Bike: My Journey Back To Life.

    5.  “Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.” For use whenever someone suggests you may be getting a little narcissistic. Or when you are fourteen and your Mum has just found a photo of Posh Spice under the mat in the bathroom.

    6.  “A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” For use when you are the producer of The World’s Strongest Woman.

    7.  “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along’.” For use whenever you switch on the TV to find one of the following filling your screen: X-Factor/Britain’s Got Talent/The Persuasionists/America’s Next Top Model/Britain’s Next Top Model/Piers Morgan/Kerry Katona/Katie Price/Harriet Harman.

  • 7 Reasons January’s Premier League Transfer Window Was a Major Disappointment

    7 Reasons January’s Premier League Transfer Window Was a Major Disappointment

    The January transfer window closed yesterday after a month of fevered speculation and very little in the way of big deals.  Here are 7 Reasons that it was a major disappointment.

     

    1.  Where’s Waldo? Despite strong rumours in December, Chilean defender Waldo Ponce was not signed by Wigan in the January transfer window.  I can’t begin to express how disappointing this was.  I wasn’t even consoled by their signing of Moses.  Waldo Ponce…Waldo Ponce!  It would have been amazing.

    2.  Loan moves. It seems that most of the transfers in this January’s window have been loan moves.  That’s not surprising given the current financial state of many of many Premier League clubs, but the redistribution of players who are not deemed good enough to make it into the the first teams at their own clubs to other clubs is hardly exciting.  Also, Robinho left the Premier League on a loan deal, and he was really entertaining me.  Well, off the pitch, anyway.

    Ruud van Nistelrooy visits the set of a popular American television show.

    3.  Ruud van Nistelrooy. A genuine world-class striker, he was linked with just about every major Premier League club this January and hasn’t gone to any of them.  He’s gone to Hamburg where, if he can steer clear of hoof injuries, he should do rather well.  Or if you believe Wikipedia, he’s signed for Gateshead many years into the future.

    Wikipedia

     

    4.  Harry.  The ever-prolific Harry Redknapp has been disappointing during this transfer window – he’s only brought a couple of players in and sent a couple out on loan.  Not only has he been unusually inactive this January, he’s also been below par when dealing with the media.  This is how he announced the signing of Eider Gudjohnsen: “It was his decision to come to us. He said ‘I want to come to Tottenham’.”   Sadly, I could find no Youtube footage of this revealing press conference.

    5.  Campbell. With the arrival of Thomas Vermaelen in the summer Arsenal seemed to have completed their defensive line-up.  And, to most people, it appeared that all they needed to revitalise their team in January was a big, prolific striker and an aggressive defensive midfielder.  So they re-signed lumbering war-horse, Sol Campbell.  Opinion is divided over whether Sol will be a good signing for them.  The argument from most of those in favour of the move seems to be that he was a great player once, so he’ll be fine, despite lacking the pace that most people believe is necessary to play in the Premier League.  I just hope that he can still do this.

    6.  Manchester United. Behind Chelsea in the title race, it was supposed that Fergie would want to improve his squad in January. The most exciting transfer news from Old Trafford last month was Danny Wellbeck going out on loan to Preston North End. Do you remember where you were when you heard that? No, me either.

    7.  Final Day. The activity on the final day of the transfer window is usually frenetic and exciting.  The biggest announcement on the final day of this window was that Robbie Keane had gone to Celtic on loan.  That’s right, a talented and exciting player is leaving the Premier League – for a bit.  That pretty much summed up this January transfer window.  A loan move that does nothing to enrich the quality of the Premier League and not a lot else.  It’s lucky we had John Terry to distract us.

     

     

     

     

     

  • 7 Reasons It Is Stupid To Compare Asterix and Tintin

    7 Reasons It Is Stupid To Compare Asterix and Tintin

    1.  It’s A Moot Point. Comparing Asterix and Tintin is like comparing Superman and Spiderman. Or Batwoman and Catwoman. Each has their own talents and each has their own flaws. And to be honest, no one cares. Not even me. And I’ve spent the last week indulging in the subject.

    2.  Two Brains, One Brain. Asterix was invented by two people – illustrator, Albert Uderzo, and writer, Réne Goscinny – while Tintin was created by just one, Hergé, or to give him his proper name Georges Rémi. To say which is better is a bit like saying who is better when you have the Williams sisters on one side of the net and Andy Murray on the other.

    3.  Different Worlds. Asterix was set in the time of Julius Ceasar. 50BC. That’s quite a long time before Tintin hit the scene in the 20th Century. Think Cleopatra and Louis Theroux.

    4.  Different Styles. As Uderzo, Goscinny and Hergé all agreed in one of their very rare interviews together, the Adventures of Asterix were very much humorous adventures. Tintin’s adventures were the opposite. No, not unfunny jaunts. Just adventures with occasional humour slotted in. So basically it’s like comparing Paul Merton in China with Michael Palin’s Pole to Pole.

    5.  You’ll Be Wrong. Suggesting that Dogmatix is better than Snowy is asking for trouble. Suggesting Captain Haddock is a better name than Anticlimax is also inadvisable. The fact is that people are passionate about the things they love. Which means there is a never a right answer. But there is always a wrong answer.

    6.  Devaluing Greatness. By comparing the two works, you are automatically looking for ways in which you can devalue one or the other. That has to be wrong. They are two of the greatest comic book inventions ever. They deserve nothing but the utmost praise. So well done lads.

    7.  Default. It just is. The only reason I did it was because I needed something to write about. I don’t have a preference one way or the other. Though, if pushed, I would say Asterix. I like funny. Which is something we’ll get back to on Wednesday by the way.