Flipping cheerleaders ...
In an effort to appeal to more middle-aged men and fewer young women (or is it the other way round?) the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is gearing up to make cheerleading an Olympic sport – possibly just in time for the games due to be held in Japan, a country which in no way fetishises highschool girls in short skirts.
A good idea? The IOC thinks so. Governing body the International Cheer Union (ICU), which to date has not been mired in any IOC-style corruption scandals that I’m aware of, is also delighted, for obvious reasons. It paints a picture of a demanding sport whose most skilled participants combine the best attributes of Olympic athletics and Olympic gymnastics. A bit like a typical Scottish Sunday League footballer, in other words. But without the hangover.
It isn’t all about women either, say cheerleading’s boosters. Mixed cheerleading squads are apparently growing in popularity and the sport is inclusive enough for the ICU to be putting together ParaCheer, an organisation which will promote teams that include people with disabilities. So the Paralympics is an option now too. On one hand this is all well and good and worth raising a tinsel pom-pom in celebration of. On the other, cheerleading is a bit all-American isn’t it? Before you know it someone will be pushing to have gridiron included in the Olympics as well. Or, even worse, baseball, a game generally only played in countries the Yanks have dropped nuclear bombs on (Japan), made jokes about (Puerto Rico), propped up militarily to annoy the Chinese (Taiwan) or invaded and then flooded with exploding cigars (Cuba).
Last word, then, to the happy troller who blurted her thoughts into the comments box the New York Times gamely left open under an opinion piece arguing for cheerleading’s inclusion in the Olympics. “Sure,” she wrote, “and let’s make street sweeping an Olympic sport as well.”
Why a yellow Brexit doesn’t cut the mustard
On Wednesday, as the House of Commons debated a motion which saw everyone except the SNP and the Liberal Democrats (remember them?) agree to trigger Brexit by the end of March, David Davis MP said this: “To be honest, I don’t know what hard Brexit means.”
Now that’s a worry. Davis is Minister for Brexit, so if he doesn’t know, who does? And if he hasn’t a clue what “hard Brexit” means, it stands to reason he’ll be no help explaining the exact shape and consistency of the much-mooted “soft Brexit” either.
Worse, he now has “black Brexit”, “white Brexit” and “grey Brexit” to contend with as well, all of which have been proposed by various members of our political class. Standing up in front of the cameras and trying to explain these baffling terms by saying: “Not sure about black and white but Mrs Davis tells me grey is what happens when you put the first two in a 60 degree wash together” is not going to cut the mustard. Not even that nasty yellow stuff the English produce and which is all we’ll be able to get when the French impose their much-feared relish and condiment tariff.
And just when you thought things couldn’t get any more confusing, up pops Theresa May. “I think what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue Brexit,” she purred in her best Margaret Thatcher voice. “That is the right deal for the United Kingdom.” Stick that in the wash with your smalls and your black and white Brexits and what are you going to get? A load of old pants in shades of lilac, lavender, purple and pink. Other Brexits we can look forward to wrestling with over the next few months include the Dad Brexit (“I will do it, I promise – soon as the car’s back from the garage and those Ikea CD towers are built”), the Scottish Summer BBQ Brexit (“Quick! The sun’s out! Do it now, we won’t get another chance this year”) and – irony of ironies – the David Cameron Brexit. That’s the one where we set off for a lucrative speaking tour of private American universities leaving our kids behind in a service station cafe in Holland. Somewhere near Maastricht, probably.
Man biffs Roo
To paraphrase Martin Luther King, “the arc of our internet search history is long, but it bends towards cat videos”. Or, in my case, towards me Googling the words “kangaroo versus man” then watching a burly Australian getting all Dereck Chisora with a malevolent-looking marsupial. In the grainy video, Skippy’s evil twin has the man’s dog in a headlock – until it receives a right hook from him. Sizing up the man and deciding against a fight, it then hops off into the bush. He’s probably the luckier of the two: thanks to their powerful legs and sharp toenails, a kangaroo can disembowel a human with a well-aimed kick. Even an Australian human who’s so hard he thinks nothing of having a square go with the world’s second weirdest-looking mammal (Michael Gove is the first, though whether he has all the mammalian attributes is a moot point. I’m just not sure about the whole warm blood thing).
Widely shared on social media, the footage has now had many millions of views and opinions are divided as to whether the man – later revealed as one Greig Tonkins – had committed an act of animal cruelty, or had just lived up to every stereotype about Aussie males going, or both. Other revelations since have made the whole story even weirder and actually quite poignant. Tonkins, it turns out, is an elephant keeper at Taronga West Plains Zoo in New South Wales. His dog was actually wearing dog armour (yes, it exists) because it was on a boar hunt, an event organised as a sort of bucket list activity for a friend who had terminal cancer. He has since died.
What’s freaking me out even more, however, is this: type the words “man versus kangaroo” into an internet search engine and Tonkins isn’t the only marsupial battler to have made it to on YouTube. There’s a whole world wide web of “kangaroo versus” stuff out there. Cat videos? They’re just so Noughties.
And now for something very serious ...
Dividing opinion far less than the morality of going toe-to-toe with kangaroos – in fact not dividing opinion at all – is the £84 million fine handed out to drugs giant Pfizer for over-charging the NHS for epilepsy drug phenytoin sodium. According to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which made the ruling, Pfizer had charged “excessive and unfair” prices. If you thought the Marmitegate price row showed commercial opportunism at its most naked, think again: Overnight, Pfizer raised the price of the drug from £2.83 to £67.50, an increase of 2600 per cent. In the UK, around 48,000 people take the drug but the NHS had to cough up because it can be difficult and sometimes dangerous to shift them to a different one. I should know: an epilepsy sufferer myself, I took phenytoin for many years.
As luck would have it, the day before the CMA ruling hit the headlines, veteran Panorama investigator Tom Mangold was on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek talking about the evils of “Big Pharma”, saying: “If you’re going to play Marquess of Queensberry against Big Pharma you’re going to get carried out in the second round,” he warned. “They play dirty”. Sometimes, however, the little guy lands a kangaroo punch right where it hurts.
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