Never Meet Your Hero

The saying "Never meet your hero" is a cautionary advice that suggests it's best to avoid meeting or getting too close to someone you greatly admire or look up to. The underlying idea is that meeting them in person may shatter the idealized image you have of them, leading to disappointment, disillusionment, or a loss of respect.

Here are a few reasons why this saying holds some truth:

1. Idealization: When we admire someone from a distance, we tend to create an idealized version of them in our minds. We focus on their achievements, talents, and positive qualities. However, meeting them in person may reveal their flaws, shortcomings, or simply the fact that they are human like everyone else. This contrast between the idealized image and reality can be disheartening.

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3. Unmet Expectations: Meeting your hero can come with high expectations. You might anticipate an extraordinary experience or hope for a deep personal connection. However, in reality, the interaction may not live up to your expectations. They may not meet your assumptions or be as interested in engaging with you as you had hoped. This discrepancy can be disappointing and lead to a sense of letdown.

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5. Human Imperfection: Heroes, like all humans, have their flaws and make mistakes. By meeting them, you become more aware of their imperfections, which can tarnish the pedestal on which you had placed them. You might discover they hold different beliefs, behave in ways that clash with your values, or have made questionable decisions. This revelation can be disillusioning and alter your perception of them.

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7. Loss of Mystery: Part of the allure of heroes lies in the mystery and intrigue surrounding them. When you meet them and learn more about their personal lives, their struggles, and their everyday routines, the enigma may dissipate. This loss of mystery can diminish the charm and fascination you had felt toward them.

It's important to note that while this saying holds some truth, it doesn't mean that meeting your hero will always result in disappointment. Some people have positive experiences and develop deeper admiration and respect for their heroes after meeting them. However, the saying serves as a reminder to be prepared for the possibility that reality may not match your expectations, and it encourages appreciating and respecting people for their accomplishments while acknowledging their humanity.

Pakistan and Khalistan have infiltrated Canada

 

Spin Bowlers - Going through life as an individual

Suresh Menon in The Hindu


Spin bowlers tend to be like French verbs — they follow rules peculiar to their type, and the exceptions to the rule are fascinating. Often exceptions have rules too. Shane Warne didn’t need to bowl an off-break; Graeme Swann didn’t bowl the leg-break, not even the fashionable doosra. Yet cricket’s great mystery bowlers have been the spinners, not the fast men who might threaten life and limb, but seldom leave the batsman feeling foolish.

It would have been nice to get into the heads of India’s leading batsmen Virat Kohli and K.L. Rahul after they were beaten and bowled in one magical over by Sri Lanka’s latest mystery spinner, Mahamarakkala Kurukulasooriya Patabendige Akila Dananjaya Perera.

It wasn’t the classical duel where the bowler teases and tantalises, torments and mocks over a period before the kill. There isn’t time for that in a limited overs game. Here, speed of execution is of the essence, and both batsmen were fooled by an apparently innocuous delivery. There was something gentle about it all. A slight drift, a final dip, and batsmen with a reputation for dominating spin bowling were done in, playing the wrong line.

Perhaps ‘mystery’ applies to spin bowlers in general. The flighted delivery bowled above the eye line works against the steady head and tricks the batsman into believing the ball will pitch closer to him than it actually does. Then there is the problem of figuring out which way it will turn.

To those watching from the outside it is a cause for wonder that a slow delivery, sometimes spinning, often not, hits the stumps ignoring the bat and pads. It is one of the most satisfying sights in cricket, to watch a Goliath, complete with protective gear fall prey to a bowler whose greatest deception sometimes is that there is no deception at all.

Dananjaya is an off-break bowler who also bowls leg-breaks, doosras and the carom ball. He will be studied with great care by batsmen who will work out where his shoulder and feet and hands are at the time of delivery.

In modern cricket, mystery spinners need to be able to beat both the batsmen and the coaches armed with their computers. The most artistic of deliveries can be reduced to their mathematical specifics. Before the advent of technology, the average spinner sometimes needed to develop ‘mystery’ deliveries to be successful. Now the ‘mystery’ spinner needs to get back to the roots of his craft, focusing on the traditional.

It is a lesson the phenomenally successful Test off-spinner R. Ashwin has to absorb if he hopes to be a permanent fixture in the one-day side.

‘Mystery’ spinners through history, from Jack Iverson to Johnny Gleeson to Ajantha Mendis have tended to have early success, and then faded out. Once the opposition worked them out, they lacked the control over their basic craft to take wickets.

Iverson’s bowling action was characterised as that of a man flicking out a burnt cigarette. That might have been the original carom ball, except that using his long middle finger and thumb he could turn the ball from off to leg. Some batsmen began to play him as an off spinner although he took wickets with his leg break and top spinner. He was sorted out in the inter-state matches in Australia by Arthur Morris and Keith Miller — in the days when players had to think for themselves, who recognised the top spinner as the one tossed up higher and went hard at the bowler.

Gleeson, who also had a long middle finger and could bowl the Iverson delivery in the 1960s, strengthened his fingers by milking cows. Despite their short stints, the game has been the richer for their presence.

Increasingly, cookie-cutter coaching tends to convert the unorthodox spinner into something more comprehensible. As David Frith says, “Every young spinner turned into a colourless medium-pacer constitutes a crime against a beautiful game.”

The one country where the unorthodox is not just accepted but actively encouraged is Sri Lanka. Think Muttiah Muralitharan, or Lasith Malinga or Mendis, bowlers who were allowed to remain themselves with no coach attempting to iron out so-called deficiencies.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but spinners with too many variations tend not to be as successful as those with a few, of which they are the masters. It is the fox versus the hedgehog theory all over again. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Sometimes in cricket, it is smarter to be the hedgehog.

“There seemed to be an absence of orthodoxy about them, and they were able to meander through life as individuals, not civil servants.” That is a line from the Australian spinner Arthur Mailey. He was speaking about spinners in general. It applies equally to Dananjaya and his special kind.

Experts devise formula to crack Agatha Christie's murder mysteries

Victoria Ward in The Telegraph

Her whodunit murder mysteries have confounded millions of armchair detectives, leading them through a literary maze of twists and turns before a super sleuth finally unmasks the culprit.

But scientists who have studied some of Agatha Christie’s best-selling crime novels claim that that they can be solved with a simple formula, based on the language she uses, the murder weapon, the setting and even the type of vehicle being driven.

A panel of experts analysed 26 of the author’s most famous books, including Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, concluding that certain plot structures could help the reader identify the killer some time before he or she is dramatically revealed.

The panel, led by Dr Dominique Jeannerod, senior research fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queens University, found that the culprit was always introduced within the first half of the book, and was likely to be emotionally involved with the victim, most being spouses or blood relatives.

• Agatha Christie's Devon

They said that if there were several land vehicles in the story, the killer was likely to be female. Similarly, a prevalence of nautical vehicles suggests they are more likely to be male.

If the victim is strangled, the perpetrator is more likely to be male and if the setting is a country house, there is a 75 per cent chance they will be female.

Christie’s language tends to be more negative when concerned with female killers, who are normally discovered due to a domestic item, they said.

By comparison, men are normally caught using information or logic.

The panel, which also included Dr James Bernthal from the University of Exeter and data analyst Brett Jacob, found that if Hercule Poirot, the eccentric Belgiun detective, took charge of the investigation, and the cause of death was stabbing, the killer will be mentioned more frequently at the beginning of the book.

If Miss Marple is the detective, and the motive for the murder is money or an affair, the killer will be mentioned more in the later stages of the novel than the beginning.

The experts also found that Christie's novels tended to include a “main clue” which is revealed approximately half way through the text and is usually “highlighted as it appears in the text”, so the reader is likely to remember it and will not feel cheated by its later revelation as a clue.

 They said a key feature of the author’s writing style was simplicity, using middle-range language and repetition.

The panel also found that the structure of a Christie novel could be reduced to a list of key events: the body will be found early on, a closed group of will be presented to the reader, the detective will then be introduced and a series of red herrings will follow and finally, after it is solved, the story will be wrapped up quickly and efficiently, leaving the reader satisfied.

The research was commissioned by UKTV channel Drama to mark the 125th anniversary of her birth.

Adrian Wills, general manager for Drama said "Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, so the television adaptations of her books are hugely popular.

"Given her on-going popularity, we wanted to know her formula for success, especially since the whodunit is such a classic of the crime drama genre.

"We hope that her legions of dedicated fans will revisit their favourite whodunits with a better understanding of how to crack the ultimate code."

Cricket - The fear of the ringer

 

Jonathan Wilson in Cricinfo

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Slow straight bowling can become infused with mystery and terror when you think you're facing a ringer  © PA Photos

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Cricket, probably more than any other sport, encourages the ringer. Everybody who has ever played at any kind of amateur level knows that Sunday morning feeling, either calling round mates and mates of mates to see if anybody fancies making up the numbers, or getting an unexpected phone call from somebody you last saw in a bar at university ten years earlier seeing if you fancy a game.

It happens in other sports as well, of course, but cricket, as an individual sport dressed in a team game's clothing, seems more conducive to the ringer. A footballer or a hockey player suddenly introduced to an unfamiliar team will stand out a mile, the holistic nature of those sports meaning he won't be making a run he needs to, or he'll be providing cover where none is needed. In cricket, though, you pick up the ball and bowl, or pick up the bat and bat, and - apart from knowing the idiosyncrasies of how other batsmen run or the vagaries of who fields best where, essentially you can just get on with it. 

Even better, because of the self-regulatory element of cricket, the way a batsman can retire, or a bowler can be taken off if he's bowling so well he threatens to unbalance the game, it doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far better than everybody else. It doesn't really matter if there's one player who's far worse: even good players score ducks, so the weak link doesn't stand out as he would in another sport.

The best ringer I ever played with was the West Indies offspinner Omari Banks who, aged 16 or 17, for reasons I can't recall, joined our college team for a tour. He was an up-and-coming star, we were told, a bowler who was expected to play Test cricket sooner rather than later.

A first glance was confusing. He belted the ball miles and clearly had a superb eye, but his frequently short offbreaks were remarkably unthreatening. He must be a quick taking it easy on us, we thought; five years later, he was taking three wickets (for lots) and scoring 47 not out as West Indies chased down 418 to beat Australia in Antigua. There was something rather comforting in that: he'd seemed far more like a batsman than a bowler to us.

Clean though his hitting had been, the truth is Banks had been a little bit of a disappointment to us. Hearing we were getting a West Indies bowler, we'd assumed we could play along and then chuck him the ball as soon as a partnership began to get annoying, effectively guaranteeing wins.

Absurdly, the following year, I found myself cast unwittingly in the Banks role - in relative terms; nobody would ever have pretended I was on the verge of a Test debut. I'd just finished my Masters and was temping at a data entry centre in Sunderland. A mate was working at the City of Newcastle Development Agency and called me one day to see if I fancied playing against British Airways the following day. By starting work early and taking only 15 minutes for lunch, I was able to get up to Ponteland, to a bleak field near the airport, in time to play.

"What do you do?" the captain asked. The honest answer would have been, "Nothing very well," but I grunted, "Bits and pieces."

He nodded and, having won the toss and opted to bat, asked me to open. I had occasionally opened for my college Second XI as an undergrad, so it didn't seem that odd, although at Durham I'd tended to bat at seven or eight for the Graduate Society. On a horrible, sticky pitch, I ground my way to 27 at which, having heard the grumbles from the boundary, I slashed at a wide one and was caught at deep cover. My slow start having forced others to play overly aggressively, I ended up top-scoring as we made 90-odd in 20 overs.

That, I assumed, was that. I fielded at backward point and took a catch, but the game seemed to be drifting slowly away from us when the captain suddenly asked me to bowl the 13th over. This seemed very strange, but I wasn't going to say no. The batsman was set, had scored 30 or so, and looked far better than anybody else in the game.

My first ball, a pushed through offbreak, was blocked. The second he clubbed through midwicket for four, although it had turned a little and it had come slightly off the inside edge. The third ball I tossed up, it didn't turn, he played for spin that wasn't there and chipped it to cover. "Thinking cricket," said the captain, apparently in the belief there'd been some element of skill of planning in what had just happened.

What happened next was mystifying. The new batsman blocked out the over. They blocked out the 15th over as well. Ludicrously I had figures of 2-1-4-1. Suddenly they needed over a run a ball. The third over, the batsman, having to force the pace, came down the track, yorked himself and was stumped. Two balls later the new batsman did the same thing. We ended up winning by 12 runs and, without really knowing how, I'd taken 3 for 14.

It later turned out my mate had rather oversold me, or rather, our captain had assumed the level of college cricket at my university was rather higher than it was. After I'd batted so sluggishly, he'd assumed I must be a bowler and so had decided to give me four overs at the death. He'd even let on to the opposing captain that I was a ringer, with a suitably inflated suggestion of my abilities. When I'd then fortuitously dismissed their best player, it confirmed their fears, which explained the nine successive balls nobody had tried to hit. Slow straight bowling had become infused with mystery and terror.

None of it was real, of course. The wickets had been conjured by fear of the ringer. It was a valuable lesson: pretend you know what you're doing, and opponents might just destroy themselves by believing you.

Pritish Nandy - My separated at birth twin

The pleasures of being a bore

Pritish Nandy
29 May 2012, 12:03 AM IST

I am an itinerant presence on Twitter. I am not on Facebook. I rarely trawl malls and try out new brands, new restaurants. I avoid pulp fiction and Hollywood blockbusters don't excite me overmuch. Dating a celebrity is not exactly my idea of a great evening out. And no, I don't go to Ibiza to party or Bahrain for F1. I don't even own a Blackberry or an iPad. I haven't worn a watch in years but am almost always on time. And no, I don't consider myself famous, never did.
Now doesn't this make me the perfect bore?

I write for my livelihood, paint for my pleasure. I make movies because they are fun. I work out because it makes me feel good. I yoga because it wakes me up early and allows me to watch the city come to life. I tweet when I feel like and I enjoy the response of others to what I say, even when they are not always polite. The interplay of ideas sharpens my thoughts. I walk into bookshops, sit in a corner and read. I travel a lot because it allows me to escape the ennui of routine. You can recognise me anywhere by my faded jeans and white shirt. A grey waistcoat and sneakers complete the ensemble. I never dyed my beard which greyed in my thirties. I shaved my head by accident and liked it so much I never grew my hair back.

I listen to all music, enjoy them all. From Elvis to Gangubai Hangal to Nusrat to Adele. But yes, I love music where the words touch my heart. I love Sahir and Kaifi. I re-read old classics. But I enjoy watching The Simpsons too. It bothers me when Inception tests my intelligence, and my patience. But that doesn't mean I watch Houseful 2. I would rather watch ZNMD or Kahaani. My idea of a perfect date would be in a tiny café in a place where I have never been with someone I have never met and am unlikely to ever meet again. Mystery and magic are what I seek from life, and the occasional miracle of love.

So rarely do I go to parties that people have stopped inviting me. The company of one beautiful or intelligent person excites me far more than people in the collective trying very hard to enjoy themselves. I find the world a charming place, best savoured on one's own or with someone you love. Group celebration is as unexciting to me as group sex. I find both tedious. Sex, like love, is at its best when you experience it with someone of the opposite sex, which makes me doubly boring in a world where almost everyone is bisexual or (in Samantha's memorable coinage) trysexual. I really wouldn't know what to do with a naked man. Only women exist in my sexual universe.

Even there I am deadly boring. S&M doesn't titillate me. Mozart may. I passed on drugs when I passed out of school. Alcohol makes me drowsy. And the current obsession over food I find gross. I eat little, speak less, grab the passing moment. Neither greed nor gluttony excite me. I wouldn't notice if Gordon Ramsay was in the kitchen. It's the person I am with who makes it happen. I never eat alone. The only food I miss is what I don't get. Ergo, nostalgia food. A meal I had on a steamer in Bangladesh. My mother's cooking, even though it was never great. I miss food from little known places that have shut down. I remember a city by what I ate there, usually happenstance street food.
I believe our hearts teach us how to react. A book, a film, a song may move me to tears at a special moment. On another, they could leave me untouched. That's why it's so tough being a critic. You have to carry your moment with you. Trees, dogs, cats, birds, flowers, squirrels running on the fence, the sound of laughter work any time for me, and the delight of walking through unknown streets, empty fields, unseen dreams. I love them all and wish I could pass on the memories to those I care for instead of the trinkets we gift each other and so easily forget.

The great age of Britain's popular press is drawing squalidly to its close

by Ian Jack in The Guardian

Who will mourn the passing of the News of the World? The staff will, especially those not recruited by the Sun on Sunday. A pure-minded lover of Pakistani cricket might, thanking "the fake sheikh" for exposing the national team's easy corruption. This week everyone hates the News of the World, and yet only last Sunday around 2.6 million people liked it enough to buy a copy. They didn't mind what they were reading, so long as they didn't know how some of it came to be written. And they didn't mind that too much, either – if they knew about phone hacking, they overlooked it – until it came to the case of the abducted and then murdered girl, Milly Dowler.

We own what the Victorians knew as our baser selves. When the News of the World first appeared in 1843, Britain was embarking on a long age of public respectability in which salacious accounts of sex and violence were hard to find. The News of the World made this a specialism, mainly by reporting court cases no other paper would touch. The education acts of 1870 and 1880 spread literacy through every social class and hugely expanded the reading public. By 1914, the paper was selling a couple of million copies a week, all of them deliciously published on a day nominally devoted to worship and quiet reflection. In its peak year, 1949, the circulation averaged close to 8.5m and required not a parcels van or two but a whole train to take Scottish copies north from the presses in Manchester.

It was, by then, the world's biggest-selling newspaper – a publishing triumph owned by an English family, the Carrs, that exploited an otherwise unsatisfied appetite for sexual voyeurism and scandal. At 11 o'clock in church: remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Behind one's lavatory door at 12: Vicar Denies Weekend in Caravan. "As British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding," was how its then editor described his paper during the takeover battle of 1969 (and everyone knew that the loser, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech).

Whether hypocrisy is a peculiarly British vice is debatable; other societies may be just as two-faced in different ways. But understanding the difference between how people were supposed to be and how they actually were became a key weapon for the pioneers of British popular newspaper journalism when universal primary education delivered new audiences in the late 19th century. Social reformers and educationalists thought of reading in terms of self-improvement and a more skilled workforce – a moral and economic good. A new breed of newspaper publishers, of which Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) was by far the most inventive, saw a less worthy side. He spread the message to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial.
"Crime exclusives are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news," Northcliffe told his news editor at the Daily Mail, Tom Clarke, in 1921. "They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sort of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read. Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."

Northcliffe first put his "only human" principle to work as the 22-year-old editor-publisher of a little weekly, Answers to Correspondents, which told its readers how many MPs had glass eyes (three) or cork legs (one), and how tall Gladstone was (5ft 9ins!), and adjudicated debates over whether women lived longer than men and if snakes could kill pigs. Later he would say that his fortune had been founded on useless information, but by then he could afford to make jokes about his youth, having in the meantime launched the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), and bought the Observer (1905) and the Times (1908). No one did more to shape the future of British journalism. Northcliffe divided news into two main divisions – reports of happenings and what he called "talking points", where his reporters would develop the topics people were discussing, or stimulate new ones. "What a great talking point," he told Clarke when he read that Paris had decided skirts should be long. "Every woman in the country will be excited about it. We must start an illustrated discussion on 'THE BATTLE OF THE SKIRTS: LONG v SHORT.' Get different people's views. Cable to New York and Paris, get plenty of sketches by well-known artists … print as many as you can … plenty of legs."

Such enterprising devotion to the frivolous – and to women – had never before been heard in a newspaper office. In this, he prefigured the modern British editor; similarly, his close relationships with politicians made him the model for the modern British proprietor. During the first world war he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, and adopted him as a kind of editorial pupil. Promoted to an editorship in Melbourne, Murdoch emulated the maestro's techniques and forged his own political alliances, so much so he got the nickname Lord Southcliffe. His only son, Rupert, learned the trade at his knee.

Northcliffe had an unhappy end. He became paranoid and issued bewildering instructions that his staff, trained to oblige his imperiousness, never knew how to disobey. He appointed a Daily Mail concierge as the censor of advertisements, he saw two moons in the sky at Biarritz, at Boulogne he tried to push a railway porter into the sea. Perrier water became an obsession, and on the train from Dover to London he drank 13 bottles of it. (In the spirit of Answers, I can't resist the information that his brother, St John Harmsworth, bought the French spring that was then in the custody of a Dr Perrier. St John bottled the water in bottles shaped like Indian clubs and gave a few to Sir Thomas Lipton, which the grocery magnate pressed on King Edward VII, who gave Perrier a royal warrant. Bingo.)

He died under the supervision of two nurses in a hut on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens. Neurosyphilis has always been strongly rumoured, but never proved. It was an organic psychosis of some sort, in a mind that had been unsteadied by power. In his last days, he ordered hundreds of sackings, but he had always been a brisk sacker: "My dear Tom Clarke, Fire [name deleted]. Chief" is a memo reproduced by Clarke in his fascinating memoir. An editor who said she wasn't to blame for her paper's criminal behaviour because she'd been on holiday at the time? Her feet (I like to think) would never have touched the ground.

For the moment Rebekah Brooks stays, but all around her the great age of Britain's popular press is tumbling squalidly to its close.