Names, Places & Sport

In my last job, there was an online tool to search for someone’s telephone number, address, email. It was a tool to facilitate efficient communication, no time wasted scrabbling around trying to find someone’s address. Do a quick search on whole name, part of a name, nickname (appropriately titled ‘prefers to be called’) and in a second or two you are communicating efficiently. Given the company I worked for had over 100,000 employees it was a very necessary and useful tool.

It was also a lot of fun.

100,000 is a critical mass of people. I’m no statistician but would guess for a population size of 1,000 there would be a lot of John Smiths, some Brian Jones’s and perhaps a smattering of Gillian McKenzie’s. I can also guarantee there would also be at least one poor unfortunate soul with a ridiculous name. Princess Sebastian Adolf or Billy Bum-whole.

So it became a competition.

Who can find the stupidest name in the system? I won with Amy Analzone (a real, genuine, bonafide, no shit name). I sincerely hope she doesn’t stumble upon this entry, poor girl.

Imagine for a minute would you, going through life with such a name. Who in their right mind would choose to keep it? And given there is an Amy, there must be Amy’s mother and father. Assuming they are married, Amy’s mum, lets call her Silky, must have thought, yes I will take on his surname after we are married. 

Why oh why did you do that Silky?

Or it could have been Amy, perhaps it was she who married into the Analzone’s but the question still remains, what on earth convinced you this was a good idea?

Only if the Analzone’s are billionaires would I start to understand.

In any event there must be millions of people out there with such opportunity limiting names. Would you for example even consider dating Billy Bum-whole even if he did look like Brad Pitt or hiring a Princess?

Place names are the same, there are hundreds of examples of stupidly named places. But in some respect these are worse, at least when you are naming a place you can choose it in its entirety, you are not stuck with a surname as in poor Amy’s case.

‘Well at least we’ve given her a nice first name’ I can imagine her parents saying, trying to comfort themselves.

What the fuck were the people of Yorkshire thinking when they named the town WetWang?

Every country has countless examples but my favourites have to be in Pennsylvania. 

I was driving through the state a year or so ago and was so surprised at some of the place names on signs I ended up studying a map and and realized there are loads, the state is full of them. If there is a record for most stupid names in a state (and there should be) Pennsylvania would win it hands down.

Here are some examples:

Deposit. Climax. Lick Run. Walnut Bottom. Lover. Burnt Cabins. Blue Ball. Bottom. Big Beaver. Intercourse.

There is also a town called Jim Thorp, which would probably win the prize for laziest.

Scene: Forest and high mountains. Trees, boulders and snow cover the vertigenous landscape. It’s cold and sunny. We see 3 men all sat on horses, they are deep in conversation. Two are wearing uniforms which proudly proclaim Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

Jim Thorp, sits on his horse, squinting at the two men.

‘Why do we need a name?’ He spits tobacco into the snow as if to underline his distaste at their request.

‘Like I was saying Jim, the railroad is coming’. Replied the buttoned up railroad official.

‘I heard you but why do we need a name?’

‘Becaaaause Jim, when the railroad comes, it will bring mail and addresses, town names are needed for a postal system to work. We need a timetable and a map as well’ the impatience in his voice was clear.

Jim, scratches his head and replaces the sun-bleached hat on his head. ‘But no one has ever written to me’

The official smiles at Jim’s simplistic country ways, progress is coming and Jim is not ready for it.

‘That’s what I’m saying Jim, its because you don’t have an address and the railroad isn’t here yet, but when it is, you can get letters’ he pauses looking round at his clerk and smiling a salesman’s smile ‘wouldn’t you like that Jim?’

‘But no one knows where I live and I don’t know anyone who can write’ He is shaking his head as he speaks and then starts to remake his pipe, stuffing it with tobacco.

The official turns to his clerk and speaks quietly ‘fuck it, lets move to the next town’ he writes JIM THORP on the piece of paper and pulls his horse around touching his hat as he does so.

Jim nods in return.

As they trot off, he turns back shouting

‘Jim, how do we get to that place where all the shagging goes on?’

Place names are great. Here in Switzerland my favourite, without a shadow of doubt, has got to be ‘Wank’ - a leafy suburb of Bern. Every time I pass a road sign with Wank or Wank Dorf in it I giggle the same giggle I used during my sex education classes, aged 12. 

I am sure the good folks of Wank are very aware of how well this translates into English.

The Bern football stadium used to be called the Wankdorf Stadium. Thankfully someone had the foresight to change it before the Euro 2008 football competition. England were playing there, can you imagine the chants? It’s now the much less chant worthy, Stade de Suisse.

Australia is a good place for place names also: Dismal Swamp. Eggs and Bacon & Mount Buggery to name just three of what I would imagine is a very long and colourful list.

I like Australia generally. 

It’s an honest straightforward place and their place naming conventions reflect this. I am, for example, absolutely positive Dismal Swamp doesn’t have a nice lake and I shudder to think why Mount Buggery is named so but am sure it is appropriate.

I think the fact that beach volleyball was invented in Australia encapsulates all of this, it ignores feminism, equal rights, fairness and the like. It simply celebrates the female form and sport. It must be the only sport in the world which, as part of its rules, as accepted into the Olympics, stipulates exactly how high the leg has to be on the female swimwear.

Clearly it was invented by men, Aussie men.

Scene: Tin roofed bar somewhere in the outback. Flies and oppressive heat. The beer is warm and three men stand against a roughly made bar, each have a large glass half filled in front of them. The barman is not in sight.

George ‘I’m bored’

Jason ’Me too’

Phil ‘We need some women’

Long pause.

George ‘Lets invent a sport’

And so it went, beach volleyball was invented in that tin shed, probably, and I, like most men on earth, am eternally grateful to the hard work and creativity of George, Jason and Phil.

I also think the male version came out of this discussion but as I understand it men can play dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi should they wish, the rules are very loose according to the Olympic rule book.

Extract from the official Olympic beach volleyball rule book:

Dress code, article 24c, paragraph 57:

Rule 327 ……is shaved so no hairs are visible.

End Female dress code.

Male official dress:

Rule 1 : Doesn’t matter.

End Male dress code

Phenomenologist

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics.

My physics teacher at school was rumored to be an alcoholic, apparently he would drink vodka in a white painted milk bottle in class so everyone would think it was milk. This was my explanation for receiving the mark I did for Physics. It all seemed to make sense at the time, I couldn’t learn physics as a direct result of him being an alcoholic. He would say things to the class which I simply assumed to be the ramblings of a drunken man. It was a foreign language. He would scribble things on the blackboard, little symbols, small apostrophes, lots of X & Y’s with little numbers above them and then turn to the class.

 ‘Any questions?’

Hmmm, how about fuck yes?

Lets start at the top left hand corner of the board and explain to me what that little angled dash means, if its not just a piece of chalk dust settling on your vodka laced spit.

A good team moves at the speed of the slowest member and in Physics I always felt I was bringing up the rear. It didn’t help that I was sat next to a young boy who ended up lecturing the subject in one of the cloistered establishments down south. I felt inferior, inadequate, thick, stupid and simply blamed it on Mr drunken milkman.

Looking back now, it’s clear to me where the blame lies for my abject failure in Physics. To be clear I never once saw him drink from a milk bottle. 

I know the reason and find it quite frustrating when reading, multiple times, the first sentence of this entry as I still cannot understand a single thing they are saying. It is a constant frustration given I know, I absolutely know, that science is cool and that the work a lot of them are doing is unbelievably interesting. 

Understanding it first however is an important prerequisite to getting a job in a scientific discipline and I always fall at this early hurdle. I probably need to know what a massive elementary particle is first I think. I am assuming here that ‘massive’ is a relative adjective, given the use of particle after it. This, I think you will agree, is a problem, is the Higgs Bosun massive? Like Elephant massive? Or simply massive relative to other particles which are smaller than, well, everything?

The folks not far from here at CERN buried under Geneva are pushing the boundaries of science, finding shit out about stuff which mankind has been searching for years. Take the search for the illustrious God Particle (aka the Higgs bosun), I have absolutely no idea or even the slightest inkling or what it might be or look like but with a name like that…….come on, who doesn’t want to search for it? 

Even Indiana Jones would be tempted.

I just glaze over, ignorant from it all. I try to understand, I really do, but just cant. It’s like someone has built a heavy lead door between me and this knowledge.

Nowadays science is cool, it gets headlines in the papers and the men at the forefront of it aren’t the bearded, wooly jumper types of old, no they are young and good-looking. They like the things I do, football, women, drinking, outdoor stuff but they have the added cool factor of being at the diamond tipped cutting edge of knowledge creation. Had I known what I know now it would have been a close call between football player, rock star or particle physicist as my preferred career choices.

In short, they don’t learn stuff from others, they discover stuff. Going boldly where no man has gone before and I for one am insanely jealous of them.

Every morning I sit at my desk, turn on my computer with a mouthful of croissant and a cup of coffee. I check my agenda for the day and start dealing with mundane emails about mundane things.

They sit at their desks with a mouthful of croissant and coffee and wonder what particle, bosun or space worm hole they will discover today. They get to name stuff, important things like the building blocks of everything we know and can touch – they name the universe.

As I am wondering how to right align all my bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation they are discovering what black holes are made of. I am talking about financial statements and they are figuring out how the big bang happened.

A good proportion of the population believe in creation. They believe that god created everything and put man, in his image, on earth. Everything happens for a reason, normally because god wills it. This is simple and a nice story. I actually wish I had the faith to believe in something so simple and which helps explain everything which happens to me and to the people around me.

Science does not proclaim to have the ultimate answer and I like this. Its much more believable. For every theory developed another one comes along to try to prove it wrong. Its like a welcome competition, an evolving belief system to find the truth. 

Perhaps, ironically, at some point in the future it will become a new religion in itself.

I believe that anything which challenges the existent beliefs or thinking of its time has to be a good thing. Rock and roll did it, moving pictures did it, archeology has done it, the railways did it, Darwin certainly did it and science has always been doing it, it just seems to me to be doing it a lot more now. Or at least the people doing it look better.

Is science the new rock and roll?

Probably not but its not that far removed and looking back its close enough to wish I hadn’t giggled at my teachers drunken ramblings and took the time to work out what the little ç sign meant.

Then, and only then, would I even have stood a chance of understanding 'quantum chromodynamics' and maybe if I was really good I would be able to pronounce 'phenomenologist' correctly.