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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| You read the paper Beowulf, the Critical Heritage: Introduction. We found a related paper on Academia: PARADOX AND BALANCE IN THE ANGLO-SAXON MIND OF BEOWULF by Julieta González |
How relaxed I feel now my days with Beowulf are so over.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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As you may have read in the Sport thread, I had assumed a story about a Spanish fan going to the wrong stadium, that I had first heard about on a jokey but serious YouTube channel, was a true account of a real event. My YouTube source cited as its source the authoritative website The Athletic, and was sufficient for me to post up a version in good faith on the AEL.
| Wiley thought it was... um... fake news but didn't say why. |
The Athletic's account was subsequently sent to me as part of my normal feed and corroborated the YouTube bloke's account. It in turn implied its source was the equally authoritative Guardian. I stuck to my guns, Wiley to his. However, I trust his instinct for these things so I decided to comb through the Guardian account for signs
| of it being an urban myth (to put it at its most innocent). |
The origin of this would presumably be the fact that Exeter supporters must be used to mockery for having a venue with the same name as the august stadium of Newcastle United, and would therefore have a number of rueful defensive tales they might deploy.
So let us see if there are signs that this is indeed what happened i.e. a Guardian writer took seriously a completely made up story spun to him by (well-intentioned, if mischievous) Exeter folk. /cont
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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‘He looked devastated’: club tells of Barcelona fan who ended up in Exeter
Supporter mistakenly travelled to St James Park ground instead of Newcastle namesake (save for an apostrophe) |
This tells us that the Guardian sub-editor is treating the whole thing as kosher, though not terribly serious.
| The two stadiums are 366 miles apart. One holds more than 50,000 people, the other less than 10,000. The buzz as you walk up to the two grounds is a little different. |
OK, the scene is set.
| But nevertheless, one Barcelona fan appeared not to have realised that he was at the wrong ground and tried to get through the turnstiles at Exeter City’s modest stadium (St James Park), rather than Newcastle United’s hulking one (St James’ Park). |
Here is the first wrong note. Is it feasible that a football fan of sufficient avidity to fly to England to watch his team would not have noticed he had got off the train at Exeter, rather than Newcastle and arrived at a grubby little stadium rather than a Champion's League ground, and still not have suspected something was wrong. Unlikely but just about possible.
| Staff at Exeter told on Thursday how they gently explained the mistake and gave him a seat for their third-tier match against Lincoln City rather than the Champions League clash he had hoped to watch. |
Unnamed 'staff' would be a red flag but then...
| “He looked absolutely devastated,” said Adam Spencer, supporter experience officer at Exeter City. |
Second discordant note: are there such things as 'supporter experience officers'? There is though someone calling himself Adam Spencer who spoke to the Guardian.
| “I put him in a nice seat in the main stand. I thought, well, he’s closer to the pitch here than he would be in Newcastle, and we’ve got no VAR [top flight football’s video assistant referee system] so I thought he may have had a better night actually.” |
OK. But now we have the celebrated 'Men in Black' episode that are a such a feature of urban myths: the only people who can authenticate the whole thing always disappear without trace. Or in this case person.
| But when Spencer went to check on him in the second half, the supporter had slipped away. News of the mistake has spread far and wide. A well-known opticians is trying to track the fan down to do some publicity about the error, as is a betting company. |
No, I don't believe that. Not in the day or two that has elapsed.
| “He must have seen it by now,” said Spencer, “But from my interaction with him on Tuesday, I would say he’s probably too embarrassed at the moment. I’m sure in years to come he’ll look back on his great night at Exeter City. But maybe not this week.” |
OK. Now for a bit of back-storying.
| Spencer said he was getting ready for the match when a member of the club’s ambassador team popped his head into the office. “They said there’s a guy trying to get in a turnstile with a Newcastle v Barcelona ticket. I thought it was a wind-up. I got them to bring him round to the fan zone. He was probably in his late-20s, early-30s. Dishevelled look on his face. I could tell he had been through the wringer. |
'Adam Spencer' is certainly giving his moneysworth.
| “He didn’t speak much English. He just told me: ‘Train, London.’ We think he had travelled down from London and just got off the train and walked straight up to the turnstile with his ticket and tried to use it. He told some of the supporters that his ticket cost £100. |
That last sentence is bogus. How did Adam Spencer track down supporters that the bloke talked to?
| “I told him: ‘Look buddy, I’m going to get you a ticket to come in here tonight. You’ve still got to watch some football.’ “I walked him up to the gate. I said, to be honest, mate, I’d rather watch Reece Cole [an Exeter midfielder] than Lamine Yamal [Barcelona superstar] anyway. But I don’t think he understood a word I said.” |
You did nothing of the sort, squire.
| By the second half he had gone. “Whether he was sat in another seat or had popped into the city to watch the Barcelona game on TV or drown his sorrows. I don’t know,” said Spencer. |
Don't stop there...
| “My guess would be he’s put St James Park in his phone. The railway station right next to the station here has the same name. And off he trots. That’s his planning done. He’s on a nice, relaxing journey. Until he gets here and walks up to the stadium and thinks, I thought the Gallowgate [Newcastle’s famous end] would be a bit louder than that.” |
I expect so.
| There has been scepticism about the story from some football fans and commentators. |
The Guardian has canvassed the matter widely, has it?
| Spencer said: “I guess it’s pretty unbelievable that you could make that mistake, but I think the biggest factor was that he didn’t speak much English. Spencer said he didn’t take a picture because the Barcelona fan was so abashed. “I didn’t feel right at the time to ask him.” |
The optician and the betting company must be furious.
| Exeter has never played Barcelona but one link is that they are both fan-owned. Neil Le Milliere, a member of the supporters’ trust board that owns the majority shareholding in the club, said: “It’s typical of our club to sort out someone like that.” |
Is that right, Neil? Do go on.
| Le Milliere said he was pretty sure the fan visited the supporters-run bar, The Famous Exeter City Real Ale and Cider Emporium, on Tuesday. “Lots of away supporters ask us why their clubs don’t have something like that.” |
Can you put that in the Guardian? Oh and this...
| Some have wondered if an apostrophe led to the mistake. St James’ Park in Newcastle has one; Exeter’s is St James Park. Veteran Exeter fan Clive Edmonds-Brown said: “The poor chap’s heart must have sunk. It’s a shame he didn’t bring the Barcelona team with him.” Another supporter, Karen Blundell, said: “I am surprised he didn’t see all the home fans in red and white rather than the black and white of Newcastle United. Bit of a schoolboy error.” |
A bit of vox pop always helps a story go down. Now back to the main man...
| But Spencer can sympathise. By coincidence, he visited Barcelona last weekend, booked for a tour of the club’s Nou Camp – and got lost on the way there. “I got on the wrong tube. I messed up but obviously not as much as him. I didn’t end up in northern Spain.” |
Oh, so Exeter FC's Supporter Experience Officer has a bit of form, does he? Wiley, I take my hat off to you.
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Pete Jones
Site Admin
In: Virginia
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What is the common denominator between the Ukraine and the Football stories?
My first thought was that both involve team sports.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's a significant question (for me, who believed both, not only unsuspectingly but mulishly even after Wiley waved the red flag).
* Neither was expressly designed to be believed. One was a War Combat Library comic, one was an urban myth. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad news for me.
* Both were dead centre in areas of my expertise: military history and football sociology. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad news either. We are all at our doziest when relaxing at home.
* One had no authoritative source, one was awash with them. So that's no help.
* But, the other way round, one was an expensively confected product, one was a free shot at the big time. (By the way, you should google 'Adam Spencer, Exeter', the results are informative.)
I'll think of others as time goes by but for now the obvious common factor is me, whose time has come.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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| Just when you thought it couldn't get crazier, a well-sourced story claims Bush invaded Iraq because of Bible prophecies |
Yeah that only taken the Guardian 6 years.....to discover this....and its really, really crazy.
| In the winter of 2003, when George Bush and Tony Blair were frantically gathering support for their planned invasion, Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government. |
Yep it was via a third party, who didnt tell the expert, who was behind it.........
| President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw "Gog and Magog at work" and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer |
That explains it !! George Bush absolutely desperate to gather support for the invasion of Iraq, has hatched a cunning idea, to quote from the Book of Revelations to gather French support. Genius no?
But there was a fatal flaw.
Chirac, not being an Evangelical didnt get it........he needed to request expert help, to work out whether Bush was crazy or not.......
| Can it be believed? We have calls out to Professor Römer and to the Protestant Federation of France. I'll report back if or when they get back to us. But Römer story was published in the Lausanne University magazine in 2007, and looks perfectly credible there. It was repeated independently in a French book of interviews with Chirac this spring. I'm certainly inclined to believe it myself: it makes as much sense as anything else about Bush's policy in Iraq. |
Err it would have been good practice to wait, to see if you could confirm it, but as I see you didnt bother...........
Thats how total bollox enters the historical record.
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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| Wile E. Coyote wrote: | | Thats how total bollox enters the historical record. |
And dozens of SubStack articles and posts.
Including my own.
But I'm safely in Harpo territory here.
Six views, no likes, no subscriptions.
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Pete Jones
Site Admin
In: Virginia
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Interesting! Seeing how exactly the press lies or passes lies on to the rest of us is always fascinating to me.
More interesting (to me) is that I heard this Gog-Magog story from none other than Noam Chomsky, in some lecture on YouTube. Given that he made propaganda analysis one of the tentpoles of his whole life's work, we seem to have a case of confirmation bias on his part and a case of reverse argument-from-authority on my part. I believed it because Chomsky said it.
I made this mistake 15 years ago, but still embarrassing.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Borry wrote: | | And dozens of SubStack articles and posts. Including my own. But I'm safely in Harpo territory here. Six views, no likes, no subscriptions. |
I have now (mostly) shifted from Medium to Substack and am currently getting two views and no likes. This is surprising given the two people are 'Mick Harper' and 'Pete Jones'. If you join that select band, Borry, I'll run myself up your flagpole as well.
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Pete Jones
Site Admin
In: Virginia
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Wouldn't everyone here consider this to be a smoking gun that Darwin was a fraud and a thief?
| Before long Darwin realized that what was missing: how could one species evolve into another? As early as 1844, he prepared an article that encapsulated the main tenet of his answer to this question - natural selection. |
Aren't the key words "as early as"? Why don't we know?
| But he did not publish his work... |
Was it not up to snuff?
| he showed it only to a friend, the celebrated botanist Joseph Hooker. |
I'm sure they both swore on a stack of Bibles.
| After 1844 Darwin continued to collect data to support his theory. |
And then he got busy! Who could let an epoch-making idea like Darwinism langour?
| As part of this work he produced a highly detailed and definitive study of barna-cles. |
Which blew us away with its Darwinian argument about barnacles!!!
| It contains no mention of his ideas on evolution. |
The epoch must keep waiting.
This next piece of fawning is especially sickening:
| Darwin's theory of evolution did not come to him fully formed as he stood on the shores of the Galapagos Islands. Rather, his conversion proceeded grad-ually and in close co-operation with numerous celebrated specialists in taxonomy and systematics. But it was he, not they, who perceived the wood and not just a scatter of trees. At the beginning of his work, he was as preju-diced against evolutionary ideas as they, but something in his make-up, some hard-to-define 'genius in science, allowed him to see connections that escaped the meticulous inspection of others. |
Evolution didn't strike him like a bolt from the blue as early as 1844, it seems. It must sort of tickled him, perhaps.
| Then came a decisive moment. |
He found a woman he wanted to impress?
| On 18 June 1858, Darwin received an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), a naturalist who was then 12,000 miles away in the Moluccas Islands. Wallace's essay was entitled On the Tendencies of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. Darwin's previous correspondence with Wallace had not prepared him for the content of the article. |
Shit.
| For Darwin, it was 'a bolt from the blue. He realized that Wallace's ideas about how species changed and evolved into other species were very similar, even identical, to those on which he had been brooding for so long. |
"Even identical."
So we have Darwin and Hooker's word for Darwinism, and somehow history allowed it to happen (to Wallace).
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Pete Jones
Site Admin
In: Virginia
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On the Origin of Species holds a world record. It sold out on the first day of its release.
This despite Darwin's initial paper on natural selection being presented a year earlier to the Linnean Society to zero fanfare, even from the Society.
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