The Pub - Discuss Anything

[BlueLyon 9,359]

4 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

Hyptheticaly if you were chased by 10 chickens the size of a lion or 10 lions the size of a chicken, what would you prefer?

[manpe 10,861]

13 minutes ago, BlueLyon said:

Hyptheticaly if you were chased by 10 chickens the size of a lion or 10 lions the size of a chicken, what would you prefer?

10 small lion cubs, ez... 10 giant chickens would kill you.  

[Vesper 28,802]

5 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

We used to be always 1 or 2 (also 1 or 2 in wealth equality)

Then we decided to, in a 15 year period or so, take in the US population-adjusted equivalent of 50 million plus refugees from war shattered countries (thanks US/UK/NATO!!) plus the vast majority have horrific socio-economic/socio cultural backgrounds and positively HATE Sweden's open, pluralistic, democratic, progressive, science-based, secular, tolerant zeitgeist.

Gee.... What could possibly go wrong???

FFS

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

We used to be always 1 or 2 (also 1 or 2 in wealth equality)

Then we decided to, in a 15 year period or so, take in the US population-adjusted equivalent of 50 million plus refugees from war shattered countries (thanks US/UK/NATO!!) plus the vast majority have horrific socio-economic/socio cultural backgrounds and positively HATE Sweden's open, pluralistic, democratic, progressive, science-based, secular, tolerant zeitgeist.

Gee.... What could possibly go wrong???

FFS

Still 7th is very good. But these lists are relative anyway. Finland 1st but I don't know who wants to move there? Sounds boring for young people like you and me and weather is not so good. 

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

4 hours ago, BlueLyon said:

Hyptheticaly if you were chased by 10 chickens the size of a lion or 10 lions the size of a chicken, what would you prefer?

Explain this metaphor please. 

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

No football matches, NBA, betting, even this forum as usual when we have games... I counted I have basically extra 24 hours per week because of this. Also it's lockdown here so I'm not going out for parties and to hang out. Staying at home all the time. Yes it's weird but what can you do? 

So I decided to be as productive as possible from home. I have time to watch so many movies and TV shows, to read books, to workout and I started to learn new language. I was thinking Italian or German. Obviously German gives you a better perspective but I choose Italian because it's beautiful. I'm learning it from YouTube and this app called Duolingo. It's fun. I did study a little bit both these languages before in high school and in college but very little and don't remember much. This time I'll focus on it. 

Maybe something some of you guys should try if you have extra time because of this situation? 

[Vesper 28,802]

The Russian Dolls have transformed figure skating. But at what cost?

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/26/the-russian-dolls-have-transformed-figure-skating-but-at-what-cost

Facade has always been central to figure skating. The sport’s culture dictates that athletes should smile through pain and errors. In the ‘kiss and cry’ area - where skaters wait for their scores – there are rarely dramatic displays. Even when a performance is unfairly marked by the judges, skaters will blow kisses to the camera and wave to the crowd. However peeved they may be, they’ll never reveal it, preferring instead to suffer in silence. Burying true feelings just goes with the territory.

“It’s a vicious cycle when you live inside the bubble,” says Kiira Korpi, a two-time Olympian for Finland who is now a psychology student at the New School in Manhattan and a children’s rights activist. “You don’t even realise how unhealthy or toxic some of the cultural norms are.”

Last week should have seen the world championships take place in Montreal, but the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to that. Unintentionally, it may have shifted the landscape of women’s figure skating in the process.

Barring a minor miracle, three Russian teenagers would have battled it out for the podium places: 16-year-old Alena Kostornaia and a pair of 15-year-olds, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova. The trio have revolutionized figure skating. They only made their senior debuts last year but blitzed through the sport, ensuring a multitude of headlines. In the Grand Prix final last December, Kostornaia claimed gold while Shcherbakova and Trusova rounded out the medals. They repeated the trick at the European championships the following month; their opponents left dumbstruck by their dominance.

What makes them so good? Well, owing to their remarkable jumps, they maximize the technical points on offer. Trusova and Shcherbakova have both mastered skating’s holy grail: the quad, an exhaustive element – and up until recently an unheard-of feat for ladies, which is four full rotations in the air.

However, there are concerns. First, rather than a skating competition for women, are we now dealing with a jumping competition for girls? Second, and much more importantly, what’s the cost of success – physically, emotionally and psychologically – for this collection of raw, developing children?

“The worst aspect to this is that most of the time, in skating and gymnastics and maybe other sports, you grow up in a culture that’s very authoritarian,” Korpi says. “You grow up to believe if you get injured it’s because you’re weak. Or if your body or psychological state fails it’s because you are weak. But why does the body of a teenager break?

“Obviously, the athlete has responsibility but we never really question if there’s something wrong with the coaching. Has there been a lot of over-training? I hear from doctors about 12-year-olds in America, Finland and Sweden – and I’m sure in Russia it starts even earlier – coming to clinics with stress fractures and things which shouldn’t happen at that age. It points to the fact the training has been too much. And how do they deal with that when they’re so young?”

All three Russian teenagers boast the same coach: Eteri Tutberidze, who has built a stable of female talent. She is a divisive figure, though not much is known about her – unusual for a skating community that can border on the incestuous. She made her name as a coach in 2014 when a 15-year-old girl in a red dress named Yulia Lipnitskaya cast a spell in Sochi and was crucial to Russia winning gold in the team event. She became a star. The following month, she finished second at the world championships but was quickly discarded as her body began to develop. By the end of 2016, she was done with the sport altogether. Drained and disillusioned, the following year she revealed a long-running battle with anorexia. “I’m no longer drawn to the ice,” she said, damningly.

By that stage, Tutberidze had moved on and guided another prodigy, Evgenia Medvedeva, to back-to-back European and world titles. But at the 2018 Olympics, Medvedeva was pipped to first place by her training mate, 15-year-old Alina Zagitova, three years her junior. Tutberidze had a new favorite and within months, Medvedeva made a startling and unprecedented move. She left Russia altogether, deciding to continue her skating career in Canada. “I feel more adult here,” Medvedeva said later in 2018.

And then there’s Zagitova, the reigning Olympic and world champion. Still just 17, she announced in December that she was taking a break from skating for an indefinite period. The previous month, she had admitted finding it difficult to keep up with younger competitors, who she still trained alongside in Moscow. Most worryingly of all, she described how even attempting a quad jump was unrealistic for her until she got slimmer.

“Quads are too dangerous for me for the time being,” she said. “I will need to prepare for them physically and mentally. I will also need to lose some weight, something like 3kg, to decrease the risk of injuries.”

And this is a cornerstone of the debate surrounding the jumping phenomenon in women’s skating and the rise of the so-called Russian Dolls: the female body.

Puberty can vastly change how a skater performs. They grow taller, and heavier. It’s expected. Most critically of all, it’s natural. But in some skating quarters it’s seen as an unwanted development and detrimental to skills such as the quad jump. Physical changes mean tweaking of techniques. And sometimes, coaches don’t have the interest or patience. They’ll merely find a younger skater to shape instead. Somebody who is prepubescent and weighs less. So, it’s a genuine possibility that skaters on the edge of adolescence are buying into a fear and suspicion of puberty. And in a society where body image and the messaging surrounding it is such a hot topic, it seems skating has aligned itself with a deeply unsettling pattern.

“It’s dangerous,” Korpi says. “I was never educated on the effects of not getting your period. The expectation was that it was a good thing. Nobody was talking about the symptoms it can create, the psychological problems, the stress fractures that can happen due to the fact you don’t get enough energy and your hormonal function not working. So we need to call out the community for sending these unhealthy messages. This notion you should always restrict your food and always lose weight and no matter what you must restrict, restrict. That kind of messaging is so concerning.

“I know many athletes who are emotionally and physically broken because the system doesn’t care how much goes to waste as long as there are a few who make it. But what’s worrying is that those who make it are only there for a few years and then they’re broken too: they’re ‘too old’ or can’t sustain their careers.”

Korpi has a particular academic interest in the abuse of children and sees such behaviour as commonplace within skating circles.

“There can be serious emotional abuse in training and coaching,” Korpi says. “Maybe skating is specifically vulnerable to child abuse because of the way the sport has developed and the way we value those crazy jumps and how it’s easier to do them when you don’t have an adult body yet. So the more robotic you can treat your mind and body the better. The coach is the one that holds the key to success. But if their coaching is emotionally abusive it can have very drastic consequences and has been compared a lot to the abuse between children and parents.”

Some say it’s an overreaction. That skating has always produced exceptional, young talent. And it’s worth mentioning that coaches such as Tutberidze are working within the ISU’s age-limit rules. Ultimately, her job is to develop champions and she would certainly argue that everything else – regardless of the moral implications – is not a coach’s concern.

“Skating has had child stars – Tara Lipinski, Michelle Kwan, Sarah Hughes – but they weren’t pushed out of the sport because they couldn’t keep up with the technical demands,” Korpi says.

Because of the postponed world championships, the trio of Russian teenagers may not compete again competitively until the end of the year. By that stage, their bodies may have changed dramatically and Tutberidze may have moved on to her next project.

“I don’t think Eteri’s child factory is the biggest problem in skating,” Korpi says. “The problem is the sick culture that’s been created. Eteri’s factory is a symptom of this inhumane direction and culture our sport is taking. She’s not the cause. There are many other coaches who work in a similar manner to her and many federations that support this kind of coaching.”

So, it seems like skating has a decision to make: keep the facade in place or start to ask itself some tough questions.

“For many people, it’s not interesting anymore,” says Korpi. “People miss watching emotionally mature women skate instead of girls. It’s almost – and I feel this too – difficult to watch some of these very, very young child stars. Because you can’t help and think of what’s behind that kind of performance and success.”

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

 

[Vesper 28,802]

adidas Originals by Pharrell Williams Stan Smith

https://www.adidas.se/pharrell-williams-stan-smith-shoes/FX8003.html

Pharrell Williams and adidas Originals are back once more with an all-new minimalistic collection. Here, Pharrell's Stan Smith sports smooth leather uppers, triangular perf 3-Stripe detailing, co-branding to the tongue, and pops of colour to the sockliner. | FX8003

[Vesper 28,802]

CAPRI: Serafini's iconic sneaker is back 

https://www.serafinishop.com/eu/flat-capri-ltd-ss20.html

[Vesper 28,802]

Banksy has rats in the loo

[Vesper 28,802]

Cats' Pink House is a holiday home in Taiwan that includes cat ladders, a rotating carousel-shaped climbing frame and a fluffy pink swing for the owner's feline companions.

KC Design Studio made everything pink, even the basketball hoop and court for the human occupants.

 

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

Saw this yesterday, had no idea what is going on 

[Vesper 28,802]

6 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

Saw this yesterday, had no idea what is going on 

Starlink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

Starlink is a satellite constellation being constructed by American company SpaceX^[2][3] to provide satellite Internet access.^[4][5] The constellation will consist of thousands of mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), working in combination with ground transceivers. SpaceX also plans to sell some of the satellites for military,^[6] scientific, or exploratory purposes.^[7]

Concerns have been raised about the long-term danger of space debris resulting from placing thousands of satellites in orbits above 1,000 kilometres (620 mi)^[8] and a possible impact on astronomy,^[9] although SpaceX is reportedly attempting to solve the latter issue. On Starlink 2, one of the satellites has an experimental coating to make it less reflective, and thus impact ground-based astronomical observations less.^[10]

The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in May 2018 to be about US$10 billion.^[11] Product development began in 2015, with the first two prototype test-flight satellites launched in February 2018. A second set of test satellites and the first large deployment of a piece of the constellation occurred on 24 May 2019 UTC when the first 60 operational satellites were launched.^[2][12] The SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington, houses the Starlink research, development, manufacturing, and on-orbit control operations.

As 3 April 2020 — with 358 satellites of the constellation in orbit ^[13] — SpaceX is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada by late 2020, SpaceX is launching 60 satellites at a time, aiming to deploy more than 1,500 of the quarter-ton spacecraft to provide near-global service by late 2021 or 2022.^[14] However, these are only internal projections and not set dates.

 

2020–2021

As of 16 April 2020, SpaceX has launched 362 Starlink satellites. They plan to launch 60 more per Falcon 9 flight, with launches as often as every two weeks in 2020. In total, nearly 12,000 satellites are planned to be deployed, with a possible later extension to 42,000.^[51] The initial 12,000 satellites are planned to orbit in three orbital shells: first placing approximately 1,600 in a 550 kilometres (340 mi)-altitude shell, then approximately 2,800 K_u- and K_a-band spectrum satellites at 1,150 km (710 mi), and approximately 7,500 V-band satellites at 340 kilometres (210 mi).^[30]

Launches

The deployment of the first 1,584 satellites will be into 72 orbital planes of 22 satellites each, with a requested lower minimum elevation angle of beams to improve reception: 25° rather than the 40° of the other two orbital shells.^[38]:17 SpaceX launched the first 60 satellites of the constellation in May 2019 into a 450 kilometres (280 mi) orbit and expected up to six launches in 2019 at that time, with 720 satellites (12 × 60) for continuous coverage in 2020.^[52][53]

In August 2019, SpaceX expected four more launches in 2019^[54] and at least nine launches in 2020.^[55]

SpaceX expects 24 Starlink launches in 2020.^[56] In March 2020, SpaceX reported producing six satellites per day.^[57]

Starlink satellites are also planned to launch on Starship, an under-development rocket of SpaceX that will launch 400 satellites at a time.^[58]

[1chelsea 864]

We used to be always 1 or 2 (also 1 or 2 in wealth equality)
Then we decided to, in a 15 year period or so, take in the US population-adjusted equivalent of 50 million plus refugees from war shattered countries (thanks US/UK/NATO!!) plus the vast majority have horrific socio-economic/socio cultural backgrounds and positively HATE Sweden's open, pluralistic, democratic, progressive, science-based, secular, tolerant zeitgeist.
Gee.... What could possibly go wrong???
FFS

Would love to come to your country to earn a living.

[Vesper 28,802]

HANON x PADMORE & BARNES HIGGINS

 LAST CHANCE TO ENTER - LIMITED TO 48 PAIRS

https://launches.hanon-shop.com/collections/launch/products/padmore-barnes-higgins-x-hanon-han391824

PADMORE & BARNES HIGGINS X HANON

HANON is proud to present a special edition of the Original Padmore & Barnes with two make-ups of the Higgins silhouette – a lesser known shoe that was originally designed in 1978.Founded in Kilkenny, Ireland, and established in 1934, Padmore & Barnes has an illustrious history in the production of crafted footwear. Renowned as the makers of the original Wallabee, the company is synonymous with a tradition of fine shoemaking and the art of hand-stitched uppers.

Limited to 48 pairs each, these special HANON editions are constructed with No.1 plantation crepe (Beige colourway only) and the finest Italian velour suedes. Each shoe is hand-stitched and crafted to the highest standards evoking the spirit of traditional manufacturing that continues to endure throughout the ages. Each pair is then presented in Padmore’s signature shoebox with gold foil branding on the lid, complete with a custom HANON hangtag.

The online raffle for the Padmore & Barnes Higgins x HANON will be live until Friday 24th April 12:00BST.

HAN3918-24
Beige Suede
Price: £129.00.

 

[Vesper 28,802]

 

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

On 4/28/2020 at 8:07 PM, Vesper said:

 

Leo joke was spot on