The Kids aren't alright

Unlike yesterday's blog, nobody has even vaguely hinted that they want me to write extensively about the most recent changes to the Bash Street Kids in the Beano, but I'm not prepared to let this complete apathy on the subject from my friends and acquaintances stop me from going on about it at length.

Here's an example of what good looks like:

This is taken from the Bash Street Kids Book 1984, but it would have originally appeared in the Beano at some point in the mid-1970s. Probably almost exactly fifty years ago, in fact; it seems to date from shortly after Cuthbert was added as a regular character (he might well have been added in after the comic was drawn, actually - note the front row of desks, which at that point usually went Wilfred-Danny-Smiffy-Spotty-'Erbert, while here Cuthbert has been stuck in the middle with a conspicuous white space behind him. When he was fully established in his position in the class, it normally went Cuthbert-Danny-Smiffy.). And I really think it's a classic example of how to draw slapstick comedy in a static medium like comics! Just look at Teacher destroying the hut with the out-of-control saw!

And I love the little details - hats, bow, glasses and even Sid's hair flying off in shock. The mice infesting the school feeling the cold too. Smiffy covering the back of his head when everyone else covers their eyes. Little silly things like that are what make comics great!

Now here's the latest adventure of the Bash Street Kids:

I mean, it's not terrible, by any means. Danny's awesome plan makes me laugh. And this week's story is actually a bit more of a throwback to the traditional style than they have been of late, although the humour is in the more ironic modern style. But the art is lacking the energy and motion that it used to have - I was going to make a crack about David Sutherland deteriorating in his old age, if this actually is him drawing this one, but I think it's more that he's been forced to move to a different drawing style that doesn't work quite so well.

And then there are the subtle changes to bring the Kids into the twenty-first century - you know, the kind of thing old people like me always moan about. Teacher stopped wearing his mortar board quite some time ago, which I think is a terrible shame. Even when the Kids first started, it was a rather outdated concept, and it suits the idea of Teacher being hopelessly old-fashioned, which has been played for laughs consistently over the years.

Fatty and Spotty, meanwhile, have been renamed Freddy and Scotty. I don't approve of this. Toots, however, remains Toots, and if anything I disapprove of this even more! Could you not give the girl an actual name?

But then, the most significant change is that Toots is no longer the only girl in the class - we've got two extras who have been imported in to redress the balance. A little. Sort of. I'm sorry, but if girls only make up 25% of the cast, it looks even weirder than only having one girl in the series! Maybe they've decided to address things in easy stages, and in another couple of decades we'll have achieved gender equality?

And while we're on the touchy subject of representation, there's the question of skin colour. As you can see from the first comic above, fifty years ago the concept of skin colour didn't exist in the Beano, quite literally. Some strips, like the Bash Street Kids, were in full colour, and others were still black and white line drawings, but nobody's skin was coloured in - everyone had a chalk-white complexion. When colouring techniques advanced, everybody became a uniform pink, which makes things rather a lot worse. I think they've missed a good opportunity to vary the skin tones of the existing kids a little and make things not quite so glaringly incongruent when they introduce other characters drawn in a more modern style. Don't be afraid to vary the classics, just a tiny bit, to keep up with current trends!

And finally, what on Earth is with that joke at the bottom of the second page? It's not only ancient, it's probably incomprehensible to almost every reader who's not familiar with both balls and reels! Maybe it's a teaching experience - modern Beano readers can just go and ask google, after all!

A different league

There are people out there who don't understand how the English football league system works, you know. Or the 'British premier league soccer' system, but that's just the whole two-nations-separated-by-a-common-language thing. It's the kind of thing that needs diagrams to explain, as well as a conscious mental effort to put yourself in the mindset of someone who doesn't understand the concept of promotion and relegation, so here's a detailed blog entry explaining all those things that are universally known to 99% of the world.

I mean, really, it's like having to explain what roast beef and yorkshire pudding is! Or steak and kidney pudding, or rice pudding, or sticky toffee pudding, or "the concept of hundreds of different foodstuffs being called 'pudding' and nobody thinking that's at all strange". It's something we think of as completely normal and self-explanatory over here, and the idea of someone not understanding it is incomprehensible to us.

(Another universally accepted thing over here is talking as if people from countries with different customs are stupid and wrong, as long as we say it in a way that shows we're only joking. I consider myself to have full permission to do that, and intend to indulge to excess. Anyone reading this is welcome to do the same to me and my country in return! That's the way to forge good international relations! Americans tend to have strange customs like 'politeness' that prevent them from doing it, which is a terrible shame.)

So, as everyone knows, the Premier League looks something like this:

A couple of important points of terminology here - it's not the British Premier League, it's the English Premier League. With a sort of asterisked footnote that Welsh teams are allowed to play in it too, but it's still definitely English. Scotland has its own football league, and Scottish people don't like it if you don't know that.

Also, it's "PREM-ee-er", not "pre-MEER".

So, there are twenty teams in the premier league, and they each play all the others twice in the season - once at each team's home ground. This system must seem strange and unfathomable to Americans - I don't understand American football at all, but as far as I can gather, each team plays seventeen games a season; two against some teams, one against others, and none at all against the rest. I find it difficult to comprehend who could have invented an arrangement like that, or why.

It's three points for a win, one point for a draw. A draw is what some people call a 'tie'. When both teams score the same number of goals in a game. Or no goals at all. Yes, match results of 0-0 are not uncommon - why would anyone think that's weird?

Anyway, you can ignore the colours at the top of the table; that's about European qualification, which is a whole different essay for another time. The interesting thing is the bottom three teams, highlighted in red. The teams that finish in the bottom three places won't play in the Premier League next season; they are relegated to the division below. 

Another important point about how to talk about football - a team is plural, not singular. "Manchester City HAVE won the league this year," not "Manchester City HAS won the league this year." Likewise, Burnley ARE going to play in the Championship next season.

Also, if you're talking about Wolverhampton Wanderers, it's "Wolves", not "the Wolves". Wolves have finished tenth.

Wait, "the Championship", you say? Yes, I'll admit this is a bit confusing. The Championship is the name of the league that sits below the Premier League. This is what the Championship table looks like this season:

There are 24 teams in this one, so they play more games in a season. And next season Burnley, Watford and Norwich will be playing in the Championship, and the Premier League will have Fulham, Bournemouth and the winner of the playoff tournament held between the four teams who finished below them. The final's on Sunday, between Huddersfield and Forest.

And the three teams that finished at the bottom of the Championship are relegated to the division below that, which is called (and I admit that this is rather confusing) League One. And they're replaced by the teams who finished at the top of League One this season, in the same way.

The structure looks like this:

These four divisions are still generally described as "the league" - it's a leftover from the days when all four were run by an organisation called the Football League (the Premier League is a separate entity nowadays), they were much more sensibly called Division One, Division Two, Division Three and Division Four, and the whole thing was more of a closed shop. There were more leagues underneath, but only on rare occasions would a team from them be allowed to join the 'league'.

But the 'English football league pyramid' in modern times keeps on going down, with automatic relegation and promotion to the levels below. Two teams are relegated from League Two, into the top of the 'non-league' divisions, which is called (again, rather confusingly) the National League.

And below that, we start to see why it's called a 'pyramid' (although some might say a 'triangle' would make more sense. It's not like it's three-dimensional.)

At level six of the pyramid (which is also called "Step 2" of the non-league league system. Yes, really.) it splits into a North and South. Each division has 22 teams (or should have - when we get down this low in the pyramid, we start to have issues with teams going out of business, so the numbers aren't always the same), and every year four teams are relegated from the National League and replaced by two from the North and two from the South.

If for example all four relegated teams are from the far north of England, then those all fall into the National League North next season, and two of the more southern teams from there are moved across to the National League South to keep the numbers even. And of course there's also relegation from the National Leagues North and South, down to the level below...

And now it gets a bit more confusing. At this level, there are three different governing bodies. They're called (for reasons owing as much to tradition as geography) the Northern Premier League, the Southern League and the Isthmian League. The latter basically covers the south-east of England, including London. It's not an isthmus.

Until very recently, each of these three leagues had one 'premier league' at level seven, and two regional divisions at level eight. But the Football Association, which is in overall charge of the whole pyramid, decided it would be better if the number of divisions at each level went in a more logical 1-2-4-8-16 progression, and so the Southern League created an extra premier division, and the other two each created an extra 'division one'. And a lot of teams were shuffled around from one league to another so that they could all have roughly twenty teams in each - it's entirely possible for a team to move from Northern Premier to Southern, for example, in order to keep the distribution equal, even though there are three different leagues with their own bosses and staff in charge.

And below those three leagues, it all gets a lot more local...

Yes, fifteen different governing bodies run the 33 divisions at levels nine and ten of the pyramid. Most of them have one division at each level, but there are various exceptions. There are 17 divisions at level ten instead of 16 - the two run by the South West Peninsula League (which covers Devon and Cornwall and is the only remaining league to be in level ten but not level nine; there used to be a couple of others) promote only one team at the end of the season, while all the other level ten divisions promote two. And of course each of these divisions has roughly twenty teams in it, just like all the ones above and below.

The pyramid keeps on going beyond that level, naturally. By this time we're well into the part-time amateur game, and teams and leagues down this low are prone to breaking up and re-forming as brand new ones, but there's still promotion and relegation going on. At level eleven there are a whole FIFTY divisions, and I don't think anyone could really want to keep track of them all. But they're very important to the people who play in them, against all the other small teams in their local area!

How far down does the pyramid go? It's really hard to say. It disappears into a morass of small local leagues, in a way that no American could ever hope to understand. Some people say it goes down to level 23 or 24, and try to track the potential route a team could take to reach the Premier League in a quarter of a century's worth of promotions. But I'm fairly sure I've lost everyone's attention by this point already, and I'm certainly not going to try to compile them all into a diagram.

So that's how football works! Simple, isn't it? Why can't American Football be so straightforward and common-sense?

A memorable match

The Online Memory League Championship is a great thing. Here's an example of a fun match I had today, just in case anyone reading this was still on the fence about joining the fun next season.

I'm up against Islomxo'ja from Uzbekistan, a new territory for memory games! We've played once before, in a relegation playoff at the end of last season - I won that one 4-1 (he was rather unlucky), but a shortage of players signed up for this season has led to us both in division 2 this time around.

The way Memory League Championship matches work nowadays is the opponents take turns to choose one of the five disciplines, and the first to 4 (with a lead of two or more) is the winner. Maximum of eight games, so a match can end 4-4 or 4½-3½ or 5-3.

I had the first choice today, so went for cards as usual - I can normally safely do a full 52 cards in under 30 seconds, and not many other people in division 2 can do that. This time, though, I started very sluggishly and forgot what one of my images was - which you'd think I wouldn't do after nearly twenty years of using these images, but that's a lack of practice for you. So it took me thirty-seven and a half seconds - but luckily, Islom was playing it safe and went more slowly, so I still got the first point.

Second game, Islomxo'ja's choice was of course names. I can't do names, it's universally known. So that made it 1-1. This is how my first two games in any memory match almost invariably start.

So my usual next choice, numbers, is a little bit more risky - it's easier to forget one images in numbers, because unlike in cards, you can't go back and make sure you've used each of the 52 cards once. But I memorised these ones smoothly in 24 seconds... but made a mistake at the end. I 'grab' the last six images (18 digits - or rather 17 with an imaginary zero on the end, since 80 digits doesn't divide neatly by three), just reading them quickly to myself and saying the name of the images to myself. And the problem is, 286 and 386 have basically the same names, and I wasn't certain whether I'd seen the one that starts with M or the one that starts with N. It's rather sloppy on my part there. Islom was playing it safe again, and took a 2-1 lead.

And he then chose images, which he's generally faster at than I am, and won with a very nice 18 seconds. 3-1, match point, and we're down to my third choice of discipline...

I chose words - and I'd got some terrible results in my previous match against Guillaume, just because I'm out of practice. I'd done a bit more training since then, but I found this set of words tricky, and didn't get up to the end of the list in the sixty seconds. Islom seemed to do the same, though, and I managed to get the win. 3-2. Still match point!

So Islom chose words again, and this time we both found it easier - which is interesting, since I normally have troubles when I do two words games in a row. 40 isn't a world-beating score by any means, but I was happy with it. I finished before Islom did, and watched his score ticking up - I thought it might be a draw, but I just barely won, 40 to 39, levelling the match.

So my fourth and final choice of discipline could only be images - I'm never going to choose names, am I? And I think we were both getting a bit tired after all this exertion! I was annoyed to get two pairs of images swapped around - I memorise them in groups of three, but I knew one couplet had interacted over the last of one group and the first of the next. I just forgot which one it was. So I ended up dropping four points, and Islom only dropped three, taking him to 4-3 and guaranteed at least a draw.

He had to choose numbers or cards for the last one, and sensibly went for numbers. I figured he'd go slowly, and decided to look at them all twice instead of once. And I still couldn't remember one image! Actually, I tend to make just as many mistakes if I review the data, so I don't know why I ever think it would be a good idea. It was all academic, anyway - far from going slow, Islom did a fast 27-second time and got them all right! So he ended up a very deserving 5-3 winner!

The day might eventually come when people who beat me in memory competitions no longer tell me I'm a legend who they admire, but it hasn't happened yet. I'll need to train harder to catch up with these new young legends again!