FOOD glorious food. Have a look around the eateries of our bustling boulevards and there are folk adopting the cranial kinesis technique of a python swallowing an entire gazelle as they attempt to wolf down some meat-laden monstrosity that is wholly inappropriate for human consumption. Sizzling burgers here, scorched rib cages there, colossal charred carcasses everywhere? It looks like the smouldering aftermath of the meteor strike that obliterated the dinosaurs.
You are what you eat, so they say. Usually this withering aside is spouted by some healthy-living, hand-wringing harridan as she rummages through the messages of some wheezing couch-potato on a TV show just to make them feel even more despairing about their munching, finger-licking life of complete indolence. But wait. Flinging a few burgers and some French fries down your thrapple has helped forge a winning formula for good old Accrington Stanley. The English League Two tabletoppers get a fast-food fillip every time they win with club owner, Andy Holt, giving the team £200 to fund the feeding frenzy. If they lose, the players have to buy the take-aways themselves. Apparently, Brechin City tried this approach but half the squad are now racking up crippling loan repayments. There is a snag. Officials at the EFL have contacted Stanley to say the post-match bonuses don’t form part of the players’ contracts. Sir David Murray, meanwhile, is wishing he told HMRC that his EBTs were merely Employee Burger Treats …
AH, the culture an’ that. With my chin resting on one hand, the diarist can often resemble Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker. A nude man in sombre meditation, battling with a powerful internal struggle? The likeness is uncanny. Well, it was until I was told to put some clothes on by HR. Staying with this high-brow theme, Fife artist David Mach is to fashion a piece made out of five tonnes of old Herald newspapers. Mach is obviously coming into the office to clean the chief sports writer’s desk...
OBVIOUS Jokes part 108: The Major League Baseball match between the LA Dodgers and the LA Angels was stopped when a pipe burst and sewage went spewing and gurgling out onto the pitch. In west Fife, meanwhile, long-suffering fans of Scottish football’s basement club, Cowdenbeath, can sympathise with the pongy palaver. They’ve been gazing at s***e on the park all season.
HOW does The Herald’s head of sport pass the time when away on a stag do in Prague? Why he takes to the back streets to pick up a bargain in the vintage shops of memorabilia and ephemera. Well, that’s what he said he was looking to pick up. Amid the curiosities was a delightful set of Russian Dolls painted in the Motherwell colours. The head of sport got a shock when wee Doogie Arnott popped out.
NOTHING generates more groaning and grousing on a central-belt based sports desk quite like the demand, “we need someone to cover Partick Thistle in Dingwall on Tuesday night.” It could be worse, of course. Imagine being the scribe covering the fitba fortunes of Baltika Kaliningrad? The Russian side recently made the 4,570-mile trek east for a second division match with Luch Vladivostock. Inevitably, it finished 0-0. We hear our scribbling Kaliningrad colleague got back after a 12 hour flight. Meanwhile, the Herald & Times Thistle man, Graeme McGarry, is still stuck behind a caravan on the A9 at Killicrankie.
IN the Q&A world of interviewing, there are bad questions which often get very good answers and bad questions which endure due to the sheer, well, badness of them. It’s 35 years now since the great Seve Ballesteros won his second Masters title in 1983. As he snuggled into the green jacket and took a seat in the Butler Cabin, the then Augusta chairman, Hord Hardin, was charged with asking the first question. “Seve, let me ask you, a lot of people have asked me,” said Hardin with a sense of anticipation akin to the memorable exchanges in the Frost & Nixon interviews. “How tall are you?” Hard-hittin’ Hardin, he was not.
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