Kieran Moran plays for Keighley (in Yorkshire) a Rugby League club rather than a Rugby Union one, thus he’ll never pit his skills against the above mentioned players.
Yan Lestrade plays RU with Aviron Bayonnais in SW France. If Lestrade shows enough form to win an international cap it’s quite possible he could meet Holmes and Moriarty in a game against Wales.
Now I can’t help but think of the gripping tactical contest that was the Philosophers’ Football Game.
Change of authors, but Jefferson Poirot has played international rugby for France, including at least once against Moriarty.
I am pleased to note that the company Philosophy Football still exists. They make replica shirts which …er … they…ah… tell you what, I’ll explain in photos:
That’s my ancient shirt, from back in the day when goalkeepers wore number 1 and had to wear green.
Calling themselves Philosophy Football, the company started off with an Albert Camus replica shirt (that’s Albert Camus the noted goalkeeper and Nobel prize winning author) and, to be brutally honest, they never really scaled those heights again. But they do appear to still exist - here’s the current version of that shirt.
j
That’s great! I knew the Camus quote, but I never knew that he had been a keeper (there’s a saying in German that all keepers and left-forwards are nuts. Just like all drummers). I was a goalie myself in my youth, though my shirt was silver, but that was a bit later in the eighties when the norms got eradicated. But tell me, what color did the keepers of the Irish, Cameroon or German (if in their away jerseys) national teams wear in the old times ?
Bloodhounds are rarely bought as pets, which is why they have dropped out of most shows. They are still around, however. The American Kennel Club lists ten kennels and says there are many other breeders who won’t be listed – afraid of poison. Friends or relatives of miscreants tracked by the animals have been known to poison whole packs. That happened to the excellent pack of twenty belonging to the late Dr. Louis G. Knox, of Danbury. All twenty were killed, including the one that took the prize one year as the best dog in the Westminster show, a rare achievement for a hound. Dr. Knox gave up breeding bloodhounds after that. Most of the bloodhounds in the country can be traced back to his stock.
The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 1932
Wasn’t yellow the change color for goalies?
j
And to drag this thread into circles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was also a goalkeeper.
You’re going to need a quote for the front of the replica shirt. I don’t see anything appropriate - closest I got was:
The football match does not come within my horizon at all.
(The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter) - and strictly speaking, that’s Holmes, not Conan Doyle.
j
I was reading something earlier that said that mountaineers can be downright grief-stricken when describing fallen comrades…but for others, they’re pretty dismissive. If they felt the climber was trained, seasoned, prepared, and so on, great; if not, the mountaineers looked at them with disdain. They had no business being there—and understand, if these unprepared folks fell, there was the question of “Do we go in and save them? It could be dangerous, and we spent thousands of dollars for this once-in-a-lifetime chance… ?”
I’m about 80% into the novel. It’s a very good read.
This sounds strangely familiar…like the attitude of test pilots, as described in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.
It was also fascinating to me that socialite Sandy Pittman brought her 9 year old and the child’s nanny to basecamp.
And Beck Weathers, OMG. He’d had eye surgery years before and the air pressure as he ascended messed with his vision to the point he could only follow the boot prints in front of him. Wikipedia says:
Stuart Hutchison, and two Sherpas arrived to check on the status of Weathers and fellow client Yasuko Namba. Believing Weathers and Namba were both near death and would not make it off the mountain alive, Hutchison and the others left them and returned to Camp IV.
Weathers spent the night in an open bivouac, in a blizzard, with his face and hands exposed. When he awoke, he managed to walk down to Camp IV under his own power. His fellow climbers said that his frozen hand and nose looked and felt as if they were made of porcelain, and they did not expect him to survive. With that assumption, they only tried to make him comfortable until he died, but he survived another freezing night alone in a tent, unable to eat, drink, or keep himself covered with the sleeping bags with which he was provided. His cries for help could not be heard above the blizzard, and his companions were surprised to find him alive and coherent the following day.
ETA: Meant to say, he survives to this day, minus some appendages etc.
By the early 1900s, the subject of crystal structures was considered “mature” by material scientists. And as the decades went on, there was not much new to report on the subject.
Not surprisingly, we thought we knew everything about crystal structures by the 1980s. But in 1982, material scientist Dan Shechtman found something interesting while looking at aluminum-iron and aluminum-manganese alloys using a scanning electron microscope: the alloys had an aperiodic structure and displayed a five-fold symmetry. He was ridiculed and scoffed at by crystallographers, as it was considered impossible since it could not provide the basis of a repeating, regular structure and could not generate a space-filling model. Linus Pauling mocked him, saying, “There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” Shechtman was even asked to leave his research group.
Shechtman stuck to his guns, even though all his peers thought he was crazy.
Finally, in 1987, two groups in Japan and France made quasicrystals large enough to be examined via X-rays. And guess what they found? A five-fold symmetry.
The definition of a crystal had to be altered, and gave birth to the field of quasicrystals. (Well, not quite. They had been mathematically predicted before this.)
None-the-less, Pauling continued to hammer Shechtman on the subject, insisting these structures didn’t exist, until he died in 1994.
Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.
As posted previously, pyrite which has a cubic symmetry can nonetheless form pseudo-dodecahedral crystals, which is why it took x-ray diffraction to prove an internal pentagonal structure; and even then some holdouts insisted it was only random clumps of pentagons, not a true space-filling structure.
“The Second Kind of Impossible” is a good book on the subject https://secondkindofimpossible.org/
They used to say most dust in your house is dead human skin cells. (I still find that hard to believe.)
Whoever said that never lived with a cat.
Mike Rowe did a Dirty Jobs episode where he collected mattresses. I forget how much extra they weighed when being discarded vs. when they were new. But I found this:
Luckily it has a statistic. I mean, more things than skin cells end up in your mattress. Like the dust mites:
One of their favorite foods is dead skin, and people shed about one fifth of an ounce of the stuff every week, some of which surely ends up flaking into your mattress. (Also gross: About 80 percent of the material seen floating in a sunbeam is, in fact, flakes of dead skin.)
So we can do that math. One fifth of an ounce times a family of four times 52 weeks in a year, and 16 oz in a lb: they shed 2.6 lbs per year. I like that stat about the sunbeam—the cells can be almost weightless, so your vacuum may not get them. I guess you need hepa filtration or something.
My contribution: Stop! the Love You Save/Jackson 5
Isaac said he kissed you
Beneath the apple tree
When Benji held your hand he felt
Electricity
When Alexander called you
He said he rang your chimes.
Christopher discovered
You’re way ahead of your times!… Stop, the love you save may be your own!
I’m probably the last person to realize it, but: Isaac…Newton. Benji…Franklin. Alexander…Graham Bell. Christopher…Columbus.
Great tune!
According to my allergist, it’s not dust mites that I’m allergic to, but their poop. They live in my mattress and feed off my dead skin, then their poop floats up into the air.
Raises the question of how one might collect dust mite ‘poop’.
…inhales deeply…“Hmm, I have no idea.”
