Strip billiards for the Olympics!

So Prince Harry's been "letting off steam" again. Given the number of times he does this, he must have the steam-filled constitution of an old Mallard locomotive. But the intriguing thing this time is that apparently he was engaging in something called "strip billiards".

 

Now in my previous post I was advocating sports like billiards for the Olympics and also suggesting we include variants of these to enhance the GB medal prospects. So I am indebted to HRH for coming up with one such variant that in my wildest dreams I never would have thought of. Well done sir!

 

Billiards itself is a game rarely played these days. It's like snooker but both far more sophisticated and, for the spectator at least, far more boring. For the uninitiated, there are only 3 balls involved, a red, a white and a white with a spot. One player has the plain white as "his" ball and the other the spotted one. You score points by potting, or  going in off, one of the other 2 balls, or by a cannon, which is hitting one of the balls with yours followed by the other. You can see there is no natural conclusion to this so you play the first to a certain score or put a time limit on it. Or last man still awake wins.

 

So far so good, but how on earth do you get the disrobing angle into the game? I reckon what you do is to divide the game into 50 point chunks, or less if you are (a) rubbish at the game or (b) keen to get naked ASAP. The first person to 50 wins and demands a garment discard by the other. Then the first person to get to a hundred wins and...etc, etc. You could have some kind of extra special forfeit at a particular score. In fact, looking at those pics of the Prince, I reckon that's exactly what they've done in this instance.

 

But here's the interesting bit though. Back in the real world, I'm quite sure that whatever game they were playing, it wasn't billiards. But the fact that it was described specifically as "strip billiards" implies that this variant of the game must exist. So I now feel very naive that I have never been involved in such a game and clearly my life must be very sheltered. I must get out more and check out a different snooker/billiards club as I've never seen any stripping at the one I frequent.

 

Already, with Zara Phillips,  we have one Olympic royal. I look forward to being able to cheer on a second in 4 years' time in Rio!

Pop festival economics revisited

I was musing in a previous post about how the money goes around when it comes to running a festival. I was, and still am, puzzled by the number of these things (which must be in the hundreds, just in the UK) and the huge number of acts that promoters book at each.

Well here's a couple of things, partly prompted by out recent return from Cropredy and also by an item in the press. (Oh and thank you for your prayers: the weather at Cropredy was fantastic).

The famous Cropedy Fringe in action: who needs Edinburgh?

At Cropredy there is just one stage. This means that all the acts have a captive audience and all will perform in front of the best part of 20,000 people (allowing for the fact that a few will be pottering around in their caravans, or having a late breakfast at the rowing club, or visiting the "Cropredy Fringe" at one of the two village pubs). This means big exposure and surely allows for a bit of bargaining power on behalf of the promoters. Speaking of which, the promoters of Cropredy are folk-rock leviathans Fairport Convention. They always play a 3 hour headline spot to close the whole thing on Saturday night but this year it was stretched to 3.5 hours plus, they now do a short set to open proceedings on the Thursday. You will have spotted that the longer Fairport play, the fewer other acts they have to pay and the more money they make. And Fairport make no apologies for seeking to supplement their annual income by making a profit out of Cropredy.

I believe other festival promoters could learn from this. Take the Hop Farm Festival (Marshside blog passim). I read over the weekend that it lost money this year. I'm not surprised. Too many acts and stages and not enough big names to encourage people to part with large amounts of money and put up with yucky loos for 3 days.

Anyway, Glasto's back next year and we've never been. On the basis that surely it's time for Radiohead to headline again, I might well be joining the queue for tickets this time round. Plenty to time to book a nice B&B in the Somerset area!

You say Olympics I say Ol*mp*cs

On me 'ead son...now that's what I call sport

Well here we are in a brief respite twixt fit people's games and those for the less so. And what excitement we've had so far, eh? Especially so for those of us with Sky TV (and the time to enjoy it) who have got through several remote control batteries as we flicked between a bewildering number of channels showing every sport you could think of plus a few you couldn't. Strange how one always seemed to end up back on the beach volleyball...

Elsewhere we had a glimpse into the usually invisible-to-the-naked-eye infra red end of the sports spectrum with things like Greco-Roman wrestling, dressage and taikwando. This peek into the sporting twilight zone was best summed up by a BBC radio commentator who, when dealing with the transfer of the coverage between the last two of these activities, said "this is what the Olympics is all about: dancing horses and girls trying to kick each other's heads off!" Excellent.

The one exception was Korfball which was notable by its absence. Please join my campaign to have this intriguing sport included next time round. This will then enable us to sing regular choruses of the excellent Half Man Half Biscuit song "Joy in Leeuwarden (we are ready)". Do check this out (it's on their latest album "90 Bisodol") and you'll become a paid up member of the UK Korfball Association in a trice (assuming there is one - if not we'll form one.)

In a similar vein, but for entirely different reasons, let's see things like snooker, billiards and darts included. Then we might have a chance of overtaking the USA and China in the medals table. Especially when we create several variants of each.

So were there any negatives then or was it "all good", to use one of the favourite expressions from the "2012" sitcom (I do hope you've seen it?) Well there were some bizarre acts at the closing ceremony: Russell Brand singing "I am the walrus"? Ed Sheeran with some motley prog rock supergroup?  And who on earth allowed Georgie Michael to plug his new single? You could almost hear the whole country shouting "Wake me up before you go go!" at the TV. Well you could in our house.

But the one thing that irked me was this embargo on the use of any words or symbols associated with the Olympics (if I'm allowed to call them that) or any item emblazoned with a brand name being on view inside the venues. This meant people having umbrellas confiscated; having to remove labels from bottles of water; radio DJs on non-Olympics programmes not being able to say "Olympics" etc., etc.  An inadvertent display of the M&S tag on your knickers and you'd be frogmarched to the strip search area...

This sort of thing is just not on. I've droned on about freedom of speech before and no doubt I will again. It's important for goodness sake! If there was ever a just cause for civil disobedience then this is it. If you're off to the Paralympics then ensure you and all your accessories are fully adorned with every conceivable logo. I'd like to see them take away someone's wheel chair just because it's got "John Lewis" on it.

I'm not sure if they have wheel chair beach volleyball but I believe they have wheel chair rugby and that it's the most vicious sport you ever saw. Time to buy some more batteries for the TV remote.