I was reading a favourite blog the other day that is, quite frankly, much better than mine on the subject of what Americans think of the English. The writer is a Brit who lives in New York and has experienced something I have always found odd too; the propensity for North Americans to assume that being from the UK somehow makes me posh and a bit smarter.
I used to get annoyed at the whole “You have a cute accent” thing . I suspect it was a fear that it was just the first part of a longer comment that concluded “Just as well because you are an ugly git.” But, I eventually learned to accept it and use it for nefarious dating purposes, which probably explains why it has stuck around like a mutated wart. Anything that makes you stand out from the crowd i guess, is a good thing too.
The English have a myriad accents — from Geordie, to Brummie to Scouse to Esturine. My accent has flattened out a little from being over here but most Brits would place me somewhere in the south – Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Hampshire maybe. I’ve been told it changes depending on my mood. Somewhat posh when calm a bit more cockney when angry. Imagine Roger Moore morphing into Jason Statham.
But over here, even if I came from Sunderland, everyone would think my accent was very posh and hoity toity. I guess it is all about ear….it took me some time to discern that the Ontario accent is slightly different than that of the west. They really do say “oot and aboot” down there.
As opposed to us Brits who all say “ieght and abieght.”
I get “what part of Australia are you from?” a lot. Now, maybe you have a hard time between Australia and New Zealand. But c’mon, a British and Australian accent is as different an accent as Boston is from Arkansas. I usually tell people I am from Zimbabwe just to screw them up.
Some Brits over here do “posh-up” their accents. You talk to some ex-pat and they sound like they just stepped out of their Lined Rovah after arhftanun tea at Asscut with aych are aych. The look on their falling faces as you ask where in Yorkshire are they from is priceless. “Aye up yar right, how thee guess?”
One of things I hated about England is that whole accent-defining-who-and-what-you-are thing. You have to be English to understand it. But open your mouth and your education, class and status is instantly communicated. And it is rubbish. That’s the great thing about Canada — aside from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the North End of Winnipeg, there are no accents and they certainly have no bearing on you education level or status in life. But when people try to lord it up over the rest of us with some fake Oxbridge banter, well then you have to prick that balloon don’t you?
People accept that if you have an English accent you must inherently be smarter. Ability to list at least one of the colleges at Oxford or Cambridge is tantamount to being accepted as having gone there. People are a little puzzled that there are actually other universities in England. I dont know where this comes from but it is endemic.
And people don’t believe you when you tell them people from England are just as stupid as everyone else. Well, people who have never met English package tourists anyway.
The flip side of the positive assumptions of being identified as being English is that you are emotionally remote, cold, crap in bed with really bad teeth. I fight the good fight by pointing to the works of Henry Fielding and Byron et al to dispel the bad in bed thing. The bad teeth thing is slightly harder. But the English are very emotional. You should see how I got when Stoke scored that crap goal the other day. But the English are, I admit, not as sentimental as North Americans. I’ve lived here for ages and I still can’t figure out why people cry on television when they win 200 bucks on Wheel of Fortune.
Now to work on my Terry Thomas impression. “Absolute Shah!”
The premier league has hit the one quarter mark and Tottenham are about to face the dreaded rivals from up the road, so it seems as good a time as any to look at where Spurs are and where they are likely to go.
What a difference a year makes. At this time last year, Spurs were bottom of the table, had just fired the coach and director of football (where are those twits today??) had two points in total and were flopping around like an epileptic seal on an ice floe. Today, Spurs sit fourth and had it not been for a really crap game on Saturday could have spent a couple of hours in first place.
So what is the difference? One word – organization. The team appears to know what it is doing now. People do their jobs and there is a shape and form to the team. It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. But perhaps it is.
Last year, no one knew the formation or what they were supposed to be doing, the team folded during adversity, got kicked off the park by whatever Lancastrian team was on the pitch were simply out played or just got stuck with floaters like Bentley and Bale. This year, Palacios and Huddlestone have given the midfield some bite; there might be kicking but at least they give as good as they get. Another key change is non-striker scoring, last season, Tottenham got a lot of goals but few from midfield. That is the difference between the big boys and the others. Those top four teams get lots of goals from midfield. Spurs are even getting them from the defence.
Other positive things include Gomes getting his groove back and not being an accident prone pratt like last year. Bassong proving to be a solid stand in for King or Woodgate and boy do you need that with the balsa-twins, and Assou-Ekotto turning from Tottenham’s worst player of recent memory into a solid if not spectacular regular. He even scored this year, although he stepped back into it on Saturday.
Worrying is the drop-off in form since Modric got injured. A couple of those games were tough ones, but Modric really has become an important part of the team system. Last week against Stoke, Tottenham lacked that creative spark to open up The Potters. It is the sort of thing a Gerrard or Fabregas gives you. Modric is the type of player who can do something different and unexpected that can turn plodders like Stoke inside out. But on Saturday Spurs ended up trying to out plod Stoke and got burned. It highlights what is infuriating about Jenas and Krancjar. They are fine players who can score and kick things around but they lack that little bit of genius that takes the team up a notch. Spurs have a superstar winger in Lennon and great strikers in Crouch, Keane and Defoe but they don’t have a solid enough creative back up to Modric.
Tottenham were clearly outplayed by Man U and Chelsea (although a penalty call the other way may have changed things), so there is still a long way to go. But against other teams, Spurs are proving to be solid contender for top four. Spurs are in the last eight of the Carling Cup too after last night’s pedestrian beating of Everton. The match against the Gooners, however will be a sterner test and will a better indication of how the team is progressing. COYS.
Last post, I mused upon the origin of the The Blue Bombers name. That leads me to the origin of Spurs’ moniker.
Tottenham Hotspur’s name is a convoluted one. During the 15th century, the Duke of Northumberland owned considerable land in the Tottenham area of north London. The Duke’s son was named Sir Henry Percy, nicknamed Harry Hotspur after his courageous cavalry charges. He is famous for leading one of the rebellions that make up the Wars of the Roses. He appears as a major character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, where he and young Prince Hal do man-to-man combat. Prince Hal kills Hotspur, saves the kingdom and in doing so becomes a man and is ready to become the future Henry V. In reality, Prince Hal would have been about four when Percy was leading his rebellion against Henry IV. He didn’t die at the hands of a Stewie-like Prince Hal, but was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury, where after leading a typical charge he lifted his visor to catch his breath and got an arrow down the throat. Owch.
The Tottenham Cricket Club met and played at Northumberland Park (named after the Duke) and began calling themselves the Hotspur Club. Cricket Club became Football Club and Tottenham Hostspur was born (and not Hotspurs you North American loogins).
Harry Hotspur’s favourite pastime was cockfighting (stop sniggering back row…(didn’t we just use that joke?)) and the team adopted the logo of a spur-wearing cockerel. “Awriight, it’s a chicken but one that could do you up a treat mate, so watchit!”
I also happened to listen to a podcast from the UK last week that was talking about clichés and idioms and the English phrase “as sick as a parrot” came up. Apparently, its birth as a phrase lay with events surrounding Tottenham Hostspur’s past.
In 1908, Tottenham went on a playing tour of Argentina. On the boat ride home, a fancy dress party was organized by the passengers and crew and a couple of Spurs players showed up as Robinson Crusoe and Friday. The captain, to make the outfits more complete, gave Crusoe the ship’s parrot as a prop for his shoulder. As you do.
The outfits were a great success and the parrot became the player’s companion for the rest of the trip. Upon reaching England, the Captain gave the parrot to the team and it lived at White Hart Lane for the next eleven years.
Enter the nomads Arsenal into the story. The Gooners began life in south London as the Royal Arsenal, made up of guys who worked at the army’s Royal Arsenal. Useless as they are, they failed to attract much attention in south London. They changed their name to Woolwich Arsenal to no avail and then the team relocated into Tottenham’s backyard in 1913after being bought by some shifty bastard who changed the name to plain ole Arsenal. World War I decimated many teams and organizations, and so the Football League was reformatted in 1919. Arsenal, who finished sixth in the second division in 1918, basically conned the League into letting them into the new First Division and having Tottenham demoted because it would be impossible to have two teams so close to each other drawing on the same fans. Or so the argument went. The League accepted the Arsenal argument and probably some brown paper envelopes and Tottenham were relegated and the gooners prompted. Thus was born the bitter hatred that continues to this day.
But more interestingly, while all this was going on, Tottenham’s parrot was getting noticeably sicker and died on the very day the Football League announced that Tottenham were going down. The parrot didn’t give a squark about The Great War, but relegation? Thump…he’s dead, he has ceased to be, shuffled off this mortal coil and rung down the choir invisibule…(OK stop). From this episode was born the phrase “As Sick as a Parrot,” meaning worrying about impending doom.
Strange but true.
Blue Bombers playing at Osborne Stadium c. 1950
Shameful plug and rambling post alert.
First the plug. I have been working for the last year with my animator friend on three documentaries on aspects of Winnipeg History or more specifically buildings in Winnipeg that have been lost to the wrecker’s ball. The documentary shorts, Reconstructing Winnipeg, are now playing on MTS television. One of the shows is on the old Osborne Stadium, which was home to many of Winnipeg’s sport teams both football and baseball.
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers played at Osbourne Stadium, which sat where the Great West Life Building now sits. The Bombers, along with baseball teams like the Maroons and Goldeyes, played there for many years and it was their success that ultimately doomed the old barn. That and trying to play Canadian football on a soccer field. The Osborne featured ten-yard end zones. I’d like to see how today’s players would have handled that.
But in my research for the doc I answered a question that had always bothered me. What is a “Blue Bomber” anyway?
It has to be one of the oddest names in sport. I always thought it was something to do with the city’s aerospace industry; that being the reason for the name of the old hockey team the Winnipeg Jets. But the name has a really odd beginning.
Winnipeg originally had two teams: the Winnipeg Johnnies (stop snickering back row) named because they originally played at St. John’s Park and then moved to the Osborne, and the imaginatively named Winnipeg Winnipegs, who played at Wesley Park Stadium behind what is now the U of W. Both teams were regularly smoked by the Regina Roughriders and so merged and called themselves the Winnipegs, or the Pegs. A little later, American boxer Joe Louis was being called The Brown Bomber, in a vaguely racist short of way down south. Local Winnipeg sports writer Vince Leah saw the combative style of the Pegs and likened them to Louis and just started calling them the Blue Bombers (after their shirt colours) in his stories. It was a case of the public preferring the weird nickname over the lame official name and the Blue Bombers were born.
It got me thinking about the entire CFL. I always thought the name Hamilton Tiger Cats was a bit redundant. Aren’t all Tigers cats? But again, it was a merger of two teams that created the name; the Hamilton Tigers and the Hamilton Flying Wildcats joined in the 50s. How could you dump Flying Wildcats? Now, that is a team name.
And when you think about it, the Toronto Argonauts is another strange one. What does Toronto have to do with Greek myths, especially seafairing ones? Turns out the team was born from the Argonaut Rowing Club, which makes more sense.
The Roughriders of Saskatchewan and Rough Riders of Ottawa are both named after the guys who ride logs down the river. Makes sense for Ottawa, but not so much for prairie, treeless, flatland around Regina. The BC Lions take their name from two mountain peaks over Vancouver, The Lions, while the Montreal Alouettes (which is skylark in French) take their name from the old Quebecois working song “Alouette.”
Stampeders is pretty obvious, but tell me, is Eskimo the best name they could have come up with? Still, it could have been worse, they could have stuck with the original spelling of the team — Edmonton Esquimaux.
Mrs Stalin's Fashion Emporium
So, further to my earlier post about historical revisionism and lily-livered political correctness and this whole not offending anyone crap. Cue grumpy rant.
In this morning’s Ottawa Citizen this story appears. Apparently, the leader of the Communist Party of Canada is decidedly unhappy about a proposed monument in Ottawa that will honour “victims of totalitarian communism.”
Party leader Miguel Figueroa is asking other “left and progressive organizations” to urge the National Capital Commission to reverse its approval for the project, which Figueroa describes as “defamatory.”
This of course begs the question if you can’t defame a communist who can you defame? Now, I am all for free speech, and if you want to be a communist then good on you. Keep those red flags flying. Not being a communist myself, I would not want to see any party banned or in any way prevented from fully participating in democracy.
But if you are a member of the communist party, being defamed once in a while sort of comes with the territory. Sort of like being a member of the Fascist Party. “Why do you people keep bringing up Hitler? He was a German Fascist. We are Canadian Fascists. We are more modern, have coffee mornings and bake sales and today, are really not all that anti-Semitic.”
When you wear the button with the Hammer and Sickle or sport the Red Star, unfortunately, you are going to get lumped in with Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung Ill and Pol Pot. Mass murders all and thoroughly bad chaps all round. You might want to talk about workers control of the means of production and syndicalist communes, but the rest of us want to talk about the cultural revolution, secret police states, gulags and killing fields. One of those “apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play”sort of things.
One hopes that no one kowtows to Mr Figerola and does what was suggested and remove ‘communist’ from the name and make it a tribute to the victims of all totalitarian regimes.
Two private groups, made up of mostly eastern Europeans and supported by other organizations and politicians, want to put the monument up. They are not Central Americans, and their experience of oppression and murder is at the hands of communist totalitarian regimes. Hence the monument, which I might add makes no mention of Canadian communists.
Mr Figerola goes on to add that this monument “smacks of the type of vicious anti-communism which plagued our country (among others) during much of the latter half of the last century.”
Well, there was a reason for this. Russia and China sort of wanted to invade us. They certainly invaded places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Korea. Certainly they wanted bring our system down and impose their way of toilet paper distribution on us. Kind of gets people’s back up. Invasion, oppression, mass murder and all that. But then people in the west never really got to experience communism up close so who are they to judge. At least under communism I get to rat out that neighbour who pisses me off. I swear that guy next door is a closet fascist, or intellectual or degenerate or something. A quick word to the block captain and it’s off to the police station and then north to Thompson for some reeducation. And I get more lawn. Sweet.
For all our faults and mistakes and crimes, western democracy’s don’t amount to a hill of beans next to the millions who perished in China alone.
So, while I do respect your right to speak out and respect you right to voice an opinion and dream of a worker’s paradise, I also have the right to tell you, Mr Figerola, to just suck it up. For most of the world, communism sucked, really sucked, and if someone wants to point out that inconvenient truth then good on them.
Adrian Belew rocks Winnipeg
Today, the chances of seeing something musically significant is both easier, as great musicians find themselves playing at small venues, and more difficult, as fewer great musicians are finding a way to get their music out and get themselves into any venue at all. I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but while many of today’s “rock stars” for want of a better term are interesting performers, there are precious few real musicians; musicians with the sort of discipline and technical expertise that was on show last night at the Adrian Belew Power Trio show.
The Power Trio lived up to the name last night and blew everyone’s socks off at the West End Cultural Centre with a set that mixed new songs, experimental stuff and some classics. While he is approaching sixty and sports a hair-do one could politely call ‘ironic,’ Belew was spectacular. The other two members of the band are a couple of kids in their early 20s and boy can they play.
Belew lived up to his billing as one of the most innovative guitarists of the last 30 years. He has played with everyone from David Bowie to Laurie Anderson, The Talking Heads to Nine Inch Nails to Frank Zappa and of course is best known for his stints with the later incarnations of King Crimson. Belew’s distinctive style and sound and that were in evidence last night. The Crimson songs he played (including a second encore rendition of Elephant Talk) seamlessly fit with his solo work. I don’t know whether that indicates how much Crimson’s later sound was down to him, or the fact that the rest of the trio sounded distinctly like Bruford and Levin. Apparently Robert Fripp can be done away with after all.
The kids in the band, Eric Slick on drums and his sister Julie Slick (both related distantly to Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane) were awesome. And I don’t mean just for kids. They more than held their own with Belew. On one hand I was very impressed and then on the other melancholic. If these two had emerged in the 1970s, they would as well known as Chris Squire or Bill Bruford and have an army of followers. But these days are not easy on the prog rockers and I suspect they will end up doing session work with some ditzy 17 year-old Rhianna clone.
Bassist Julie Slick of the Adrian Belew Trio.
I hope not, for their sake and, who knows, maybe there will be a revival of prog rock music as guys (and I’m not being sexist here but let’s face it, there were 20 women at the concert last night which was about 21 more than I expected) finally decide they don’t like dance floor fluff and want some decent , difficult music.
A great show. And well worth seeing. As i get older i am increasingly more interested in hunting out this type of show than seeing the like of Fleetwood Mac doing yet another rendition of Rhiannon for 200 bucks a ticket.
Now I have seen three of the four members of King Crimson albeit it at different venues. If only we could get them in the one room, now that would be great.
