Tyson Adams's Blog, page 28

Kids and Sport

A couple of years ago, I made the very popular argument that sports are not actually that popular and that we should be funding more recreational physical activities. I was particularly critical of the way funding goes to team sports as populist pork-barrelling.

Recently I stumbled across an American survey of children’s sports participation that suggested kids are playing less sports, less regularly, and that Armageddon must surely be upon us if this isn’t immediately addressed*. Obviously, I was terribly concerned and immediately emailed my local senator, before realising I’m Australian and think they are concerned about the wrong thing.

While sports, particularly team sports, make up a significant proportion of the organised physical activity of kids, this rapidly declines with age. The two biggest reasons for this change are people having a lack of time to be involved in organised activities, and injury and health issues (from people’s mid-thirties onward Source). Almost as if contact sports might result in injuries. Amazing.

I think the obvious solution is to stop placing such an emphasis on sports and instead focus on the activities we are much more likely to be able to do throughout our lives. But since kids are too young for sex, best to encourage them to go to the gym, go walking, riding, or running.

Now, being Aussie, I’m more interested in Aussie stats: call me a patriot. Our stats are slightly different from the US, showing that there has actually been an increase in kids playing sports, lead by increased participation in soccer and dance. Eight times as many girls doing dance, but boys are starting to get the hint about how to meet girls.

A similar Australian sports survey to the US one was done by AusPlay which looked at what people were doing for physical activity, and it matches with other data from the ABS and Roy Morgan.

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This table hasn’t changed much, particularly when it comes to the top 3. Sometimes these tables are presented with jogging, athletics, running, and track and field separated, such that swimming comes out higher. But that’s just to confuse people or make swimmers feel like that aren’t painfully alone, staring at an endless black strip at the bottom of a pool, chlorine itching their skin, as they struggle toward their next breath. Regardless, it shows that the vast majority of interest is in fitness activities, not sports.

But those figures are for all Aussies. Kids have a different emphasis. Caring parents are desperate to turn out well-rounded offspring with plenty of torn ligaments, broken bones, and early stages of CTE by having them play sports. As a result, kids tend to ignore going for walks in favour of bouncing a ball off of their foreheads. But this quickly declines as kids enter their teen years, continues to drop into their twenties, then levels off until another rapid decline after 40.

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This isn’t the whole story, of course. As I noted in my previous article, participation is usually measured annually. Regular participation tells a slightly different story. Most kids are physically active at least weekly**, while adults are trying for three times a week. Or put another way, kids get dragged to sport on a Saturday morning (and maybe once after school depending on how mum is feeling after cocktail hour) and adults manage to go for a walk three times a week when the dog starts bouncing off the walls with energy.

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Likewise, the motivations for physical activity are also tied to what people actually do – namely health and fitness. The differences come in with enjoyment and socialising being higher for sports versus activity. Obviously, everyone loves having their ribs mashed into their lungs as they are tackled to the ground during a friendly game of football***, so it is completely understandable that people would rank these highly for sports. But I would argue that non-sports activity is potentially fun/enjoyable and can be very sociable. If you don’t believe me, go to any university gym and see how much fun the gang of dudes pretending to look swole in stringer singlets are having hogging the bench press.

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Attitudes are changing.

“If you go back in the old days, competition was probably the key driver of the sports,” Mr Fairweather said. “Now it is all about health and fitness, whether you are playing sport or physical activity.” Source

So with that change in attitude and lifetime participation, I think it is time to change our focus away from sports. Whenever these surveys are reported it is always couched in terms of how we need to encourage people back into sports – with pictures/videos of football players and fat kids lying on a couch gaming. But that is missing the point entirely. People are shifting away from sports for a reason. People actually prefer physical activity. We’re pushing kids to be involved in sports instead of setting up good physical activity behaviours for life.

Trying to increase sports participation isn’t the solution, it is the problem. Setting up kids to be physically active for life is the solution, and that requires a rethink and a reallocation of resources. We could start by not calling these sports surveys “sport” surveys. Unless we want to keep pretending walking is a sport.

*As opposed to the very concerning rise in the pastime of shooting US kids.

**Kids are generally more active than adults, though. This is something lost in these surveys due to the way activity is defined. An adult might go to the gym and have an intense 30 minutes of telling other gym goers about their new diet, but kids will spend several hours chasing each other around the playground in an attempt to ruin yet another pair of sneakers. The former will be counted as physical activity, the latter won’t.

***The type of tackle and how many ribs that end up broken will greatly depend on the most popular code in your area. Not every football code is wimpy enough to wear padding and not every code allows proper tackling instead of tripping.

Book vs movie: Pet Cemetary – What’s the Difference?

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It was inevitable that someone in Hollywood would try to reanimate the corpse of yet another classic film. So with the upcoming release of the remake of Pet Cemetary, what better time for CineFix to discuss the original book and movie in What’s the Difference?

Pet Cemetary is one of the many books lingering on my shelf in the TBR pile. While I have decided that this year will involve a concerted effort to make a dent in said pile*, it is unlikely I’ll get to read this novel anytime soon. If I’m completely honest, I want to read The Stand first.

What about the movie, I hear you ask. Back when I was a young lad – walking the obligatory 10 miles (whatever a mile is in real measurements) to school through 10 feet of snow (why would there be feet in snow?) after working 10 hours at the coal mine – Stephen King novels and movies were all the rage. Whether it was Needful Things, Carrie, Misery, Lawnmower Man, IT, or Children of the Corn, there always seemed to be someone bringing a Stephen King VHS** to watch. And after my hard lesson learnt with IT, I tried to avoid the obviously scary films – hence I have seen Lawnmower Man and most of Needful Things, but not Children of the Corn.

At this point, I probably sound like a wimp. It is odd that I generally don’t find horror novels that bad, and even movies with horror elements are fine. But movies whose goal is to creep you out or gross you out (think Saw franchise or Hostel) just aren’t for me, particularly the latter. It’s a little hard to be entertained by that sort of thing.

Yes, yes, more excuses as to why I haven’t read or watched something. Don’t worry, plenty of horror in my TBR pile. Stay tuned.

*I’ve managed to read one from the pile and added two more to it this month. That counts as progress, right?

**VHS, that’s right. I am truly that old.

Book review: Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Is it okay to punch Nazis? What if I told you that is only one of the tactics for dealing with Nazis?

The Anti-Fascist Handbook aims to summarise the history of fascism and its opponents, the rise of more recent fascist groups, the lessons from history for dealing with fascism, the issue of “free speech” and fascism, and how to combat fascism today. Historian Mark Bray has detailed the tactics of the Antifa movement and the philosophy behind it through interviews and the compilation of history and research into fascism.

I’ve noticed that there are several topics that seem to be widely discussed but never with any actual knowledge. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other social movements are prime examples. So when I saw Ollie from Philosophy Tube’s video discussing this book (and other related work) I knew that Bray’s book on Antifa would be another of my must reads.

I think one of the most important takeaways from this book is that the rise of fascism to power hasn’t historically required huge support, just a lot of apathy from the masses. Too often debates will rage around “free speech” or “is it okay to punch a Nazis” while completely missing the point that fascists are loving being legitimised with any of these debates.

The five important lessons (my summary of the headings):

Fascist revolutions have never succeeded, they gained power legally.
Many interwar leaders and theorists did not take fascism seriously enough until it was too late. (Sound familiar?)
Political leaders/groups are often slower to react to fascism than those on the ground.
Fascism steals from left ideology, strategy, imagery, and culture (e.g. the liberal idea of “free speech”).
It doesn’t take many fascists to make fascism (Overton windows shift easily).

Whilst this was a very interesting and important book, it wasn’t perfect. The coverage of fascism outside of Europe was limited; something Bray acknowledged he wasn’t going to cover in detail and would have been a nice addition – something for the next instalment perhaps. Also, the defining traits of fascism were clearly made, but the differences between groups that fall under that banner, or are adjacent (and thus facilitate normalisation), weren’t discussed. I would have found it interesting to have the discussion of how alt-right and alt-lite differ and how you combat the latter. Minor points that might be in future editions.

So before you next hear a professional opinion-haver brand Antifa as terrorists, it would be worth reading this book.

Philosophy Tube video:

Alt-lite influence: https://datasociety.net/wp-content/up…

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How to declutter your book collection

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Tom Gauld’s latest in The Guardian Review in response to the grossly misunderstood Marie Kondo book decluttering affair. Do I need to say you should follow Tom and buy his stuff?

Super Wings – Too Serious

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The latest craze in our house is Super Wings with the various character catchphrases having entered my own lexicon. Super Wings is a children’s toy advertisement TV show following the adventures of the red delivery jet imaginatively named Jett. The various sentient planes on the show have the ability to transform into robots and I’m left with some very important questions.

Jett is the series protagonist. Every episode he is dispatched to another location far across the planet to deliver a package. Yes, just one package. Anywhere on the planet. By jet plane.

How does this package delivery company manage to stay financially afloat!?!

I’ve crunched the numbers on a single 3,500km adventure and just the cost of fuel would be ~$3,000. That’s an expensive package. But Jett is modelled off of an F-16 Falcon which has a range of ~4,000km, yet routinely does deliveries of twice that distance. Not only would Jett have to stop over for fuel or do an aerial refill, neither of which have been shown to occur in the show, but those package delivery costs would also further sky-rocket.

This company’s package delivery economic model can’t work. Either the packages, which are often small items like badminton racquets, are freighted with super expensive delivery fees to only extremely wealthy clients, or the company runs at a massive loss. Now, we already know from the list of clients that many of the package recipients are not wealthy. One adventure sees Jett deliver a sled to a Moroccan villager, and whilst Moroccan’s aren’t living in the poorest African nation their average take-home pay is half that of an average Aussie. This leaves us with a company that has to be running at a loss.

But does it? They have to pay for that fuel somehow. Jett’s employment must be worth something. As a sentient transforming plane surely Jett must have economic needs to be met. Jett might be internationally famous, but I doubt that keeps a roof over his head and whatever equivalent of clothes on his back there is for an anthropomorphic plane – paint maybe?

That leads me to conclude that the package delivery company must be operating with an ulterior motive. It can’t be drug smuggling, even their profit margins couldn’t cover the ridiculous costs involved. Or maybe not. Maybe Jett and his deliveries are a cover for the smuggling operations that other delivery planes are involved with. Jett might be the publicity-friendly face covering for a much darker trade. Maybe sentient planes delight in trafficking human slaves around the world. If so, they already have the police in their pocket.

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There is another possible explanation for the company’s motives and it relates to Jett’s adventures.

Without fail, every delivery that Jett performs he manages to instigate a series of unfortunate events. You have to wonder if Jett is a magnet for Murphy’s Law*, is some sort of Clouseau-esque character, or an agent of mayhem. Regardless, these events require Jett to call on his friends, the eponymous Super Wings, to help clean up his mess.

Several of these Super Wings friends appear to work at or are based out of the same facility as Jett. It is unclear why a package delivery service would have such broad-ranging staff – police, rescue, passenger, a WW1 biplane. It is also unclear why they are always so readily on-call to help. Are they just waiting for Jett’s latest mishap? But the biggest question is how they manage to fund the involvement of all of these extra staff for every delivery adventure. I’ve already covered how expensive just the fuel would be, but a minimum of two staff per delivery, one staff member unable to perform their primary role whilst helping out Jett, and the extensive travel time to far-reaching parts of the planet, and we start to see a mounting cost that has to be footed by someone.**

But what if these unfortunate events and resultant adventures for Jett and the Super Wings are a deliberate act? What if Jett and his package delivery employers are secretly working toward nefarious ends? They could, in fact, be trying to drive socio-political instability in far-flung places around the world. The only question that would then remain is if Jett is a knowing participant in this nefarious plot or if he is merely a pawn in a dastardly game of epic proportions.

Hopefully, all of these questions will be answered as the Super Wings series unfolds.

*For anyone lucky enough to be unfamiliar with it, Murphy’s Law states: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

**Perhaps the aftermath of every episode is the delivery of an invoice for extra associated costs. Maybe that is how the package delivery service makes its money. Lure people in with a super cheap luxury personalised service and then charge for all of the added expenses incurred when Jett’s mayhem inevitably occurs.

Pros of reading

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Rebuttal.


#1: Or it can make you sound pretentious.
#2: Neighbours will think you’re an antisocial serial killer.


#3: Still conducting that study.


#4: Books have broken hearts. They could kill.


#5: Books don’t tend to fossilise well. No idea if dinosaurs read.

Food & Fiction: Memorable Meals in Literature

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This month’s It’s Lit! covers everyone’s favourite topic: food.

If it isn’t your favourite topic, just give yourself 48 hours without it and see if that changes your mind.

I’ve always found food scenes in books to fall into two categories: needless exposition, or important showing (Oliver Twist is a great example of this). While the video discusses the latter, it is all too common that the former is what we read most.

While I was watching the video I was reminded of something I read last year. The discussion of bread in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, particularly around the hard bread that needed to be soaked, was something that Karl Marx wrote about in Das Kapital. The hard bread was actually due to deliberate contamination to make cheap bread that workers could afford, knowing full well that it was bad for them to eat, and the employers knowing full well that the workers couldn’t afford to eat properly (keeping them hungry so they would work).

A great way to remind us future people of how society used to run.*

Food varies wildly from place to place and from culture to culture; since humans are such sensory creatures, using words to evoke the experience of eating is an excellent way to bring a text to life.

It’s Lit! is part of THE GREAT AMERICAN READ, an eight-part series that explores and celebrates the power of reading. Hosted by Lindsay Ellis.

*Let’s be honest, society would quite happily go back to those conditions, and in some areas of the world, it still is operating in that way.

Death of the Author

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author… or so says Roland Bathes in his essay Death of the Author. Are we talking about literally killing authors? No, this is figurative (like most uses of literally). Can Death of the Author include killing the author? Sure, but get a good lawyer first.

Let’s let Lindsay Ellis (and John Green) explain:

My take on Death of the Author is somewhat complicated. I think there is relevant information that the author has that doesn’t make it into the story (think Elvish languages from Tolkien*), but I also think that quite often if it isn’t in the story it doesn’t really exist. I think that stories are really up to the readers to interpret, as viewpoints and interpretations will change over time**, but that doesn’t mean readers always interpret correctly.

This is a hedged way of saying that Death of the Author is probably too simple a way of thinking about how stories should be interpreted. At least, that’s my interpretation of it.

[image error]Source: Mimi and Eunice

*Let’s not get into how “relevant” I think those languages are, or a lot of that world-building from authors in general is.

**You may remember book reviews here where I’ve discussed how older books haven’t aged well due to changing societal standards. Sexism and racism are obvious changes that have happened in the last 50 years which make formerly acceptable, even progressive, moments in a story seem backward and unacceptable now.

Another thing that can occur is changes to society changes interpretations. E.g. The Baby It’s Cold Outside controversy can be summed up as an old song made references to things that we are no longer familiar with, so our interpretation changes. This makes Death of the Author a truly bad thing for any artwork that is “consumed” outside of the social and temporal setting it was made within.

Book review: Killer Thriller by Lee Goldberg​​

Killer Thriller by Lee Goldberg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If your novels keep coming true, do you try and make them more fantastical or more boring?

Ian Ludlow’s latest novel isn’t like his previous one. He needed a thriller that had international espionage, a conspiracy that would justify his Clint Straker character getting into life-threatening situations, and preferably a plot that wouldn’t come true this time. But his far-fetched plot about a Chinese operation has him and his assistant, Margo French, mistaken for spies and the only ones able to stop an assassination.

I always seem to enjoy Lee Goldberg’s thrillers. Whether it be his collaboration with Janet Evanovich (which gets a reference in this book) or his standalone novels, he always manages to make them fun and humorous. Some stories of this sort can fall flat through a lack of tension or poor pacing but neither problem is present in Killer Thriller.

There are quite a few in-jokes in this novel, such as the Evanovich reference, that you may miss if you aren’t familiar with Lee and his writing. I don’t think this detracts from the novel, but it may have enhanced my enjoyment more than the casual reader.

This is a great novel for anyone looking for a highly entertaining, funny, and fast-paced adventure.

I received an Advanced Review Copy from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

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Book review: Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Believe in something. Anything. No, not that. No, best not that either.

It’s Hogswatch, the time of year for carol singing, presents, warm alcoholic drinks, and giant department stores to sell lots of stuff. But some “people” have hired Mr Teatime (Teh-ah-tim-eh) to stop the Hogfather bringing presents and drinking sherry. Can DEATH and his granddaughter Susan help?

To get in the festive mood this year, I decided I needed to read an appropriate book. Rereading the Hogfather was an obvious choice. HO-HO… oh yes, HO.

There are many of my favourite characters in this novel, DEATH and Susan being prime examples, as well as some very memorable others, Mr Teatime if only for the proper pronunciation of his name. It is also such a wonderful satire. I think that I enjoyed this novel more upon rereading than the first time around, which means I’ll have to make sure my copy stays on my bookshelf.

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