Pretension in Football, Love Island, Fitbit Nonsense

                                              Sport

In 1973 the Yale professor Harold Bloom proposed his theory of the Anxiety of Influence, positing an Oedipal relationship between writers and their literary forbears. John Milton, for instance, he argued could truly excel as a poet only after he had symbolically murdered his great idol Edmund Spenser. William Blake, likewise, had to cast off Milton. A similar dynamic can be seen in football, perhaps most strikingly in the case of (Tottenham manager) Mauricio Pochettino.

(Jonathan Wilson, The Guardian, in Private Eye 1495)

“Know what I mean ‘Arry?”

TV

The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)

Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

What a good article by Sean O’Grady on Love Island (I, 30 May). For Love Island read “sex island”, inhabited by a group of unnatural-looking humans whose bodies have been skewed by Botox, lip injections and unnatural looking whitened (and capped teeth). The men look awful too, with their overblown muscles and fake tans. Perhaps if these contestants allowed us to see them in their natural state they would look more attractive, as many obviously are underneath all the fakery.

Like the Jeremy Kyle Show this is not a “reality” programme at all – far from it. The Jeremy Kyle Show was cruel to the less fortunate than others and Love Island follows suit. I don’t watch them, but know their content and have always thought what a bad influence they were on young people.

                                                                            (M Hepworth, Pocklington, York, in The i, 2019)

Fitbits

Thomas Braithwaite of Ambleside Making His Will, unknown artist
Photo Credit: Lakeland Art Trust [CC BY-NC-SA]

I’m now into my second week of my Fitbit and the relationship is not altogether a happy one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thoroughly addicted to monitoring my daily stats and have already accumulated far more useless data about myself than I could possibly need. The problem is more that I have started to suspect my Fitbit is actually trying to kill me. Not so much while I am working, when it sends me irritating reminders to move – it clearly doesn’t understand the nature of deadlines – or counts how many flights of stairs I have climbed.

The trouble comes when I go to the gym, because the Fitbit’s sole raison d’etre is to urge me on to ever greater acts of physical stupidity. Every 15 minutes or so, it sends me a message congratulating me on something or other and encouraging me to carry on to the next level. No matter how hard I exercise it never seems to be entirely satisfied.

Just to check if it had my best interests at heart, I recently did 90 minutes on the cross trainer at level 15 and the Fitbit still wasn’t remotely impressed. I was a total mess but it still would have been happy to see me carry on until I collapsed.

(John Crace, The Times, 2019)

                  You’re a bit of a Kerry man, aren’t you John?