Travel funnies 2014 – Dordogne and Bordeaux, France

Torrey Orton

June 21, 2014

 

What’s a brand, really?

 

Arriving on the outskirts of the greatest by price/volume wine region in the world - Bordeaux, and specifically St Emilion - I realised that this is what ‘brand’ means. Anything which can have the brand attached legitimately to it has value, no matter what the scale. The scale can mean a few hundred square meters here and there along the road between houses, or, in towns, spaces which elsewhere would be an undeveloped vacant lot or a sign of local decline, here have vines of manicured looks. They are there because they are Bordeaux vines, and some Grand Cru to boot.

 

Think acquiring the brand of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by taking an address in Cambridge (Mass. that is!) for your start-up private tertiary education establishment. There’s an MIT simulacra in Melbourne, branded MIT. This does work for foreigners needing only a brand label to attach to job apps for positions in countries and companies where Cambridge is as common as Villeneuve or Maisonneuf are in France – namely, every town has one of each of these nearby. But everyone knows they are a place name and not a quality drop, whereas the title ‘MIT’ has recognition value way beyond its place in the daily experience of people in, say, Sri Lanka. You won’t get the branded MIT experience or learning in the simulacra, either.

 

Road works, again…

 

I’ve long been a fan of those “Rough Surface” signs all around Melbourne, often signalling to no obvious effect. That is, attending to the expected distortion of our travel experience yields a nil result. The ‘rough’ fails to put in a perceptible appearance. So, too, in France there’s a nanny state competition already mentioned re: limbs and rocks that may fall. In addition there’s the competing duo of “Chaussees deformees” and “Trous en formation”, which roughly mean there’s a bump ahead whose origin may either be lack of attention to weather effects (the said “trous” arising from freezing subsurface water in winter which creates surface bubbles that break down into holes as things warm up) or be a direct effect of intentional deformation of the road surface to improve it. I particularly like the implication that the trous are the result of some naturally productive (en formation) process, while the rough surface of the “Chaussees deformees” are the real effect of efforts to improve things? Nice one.

 

Then there was Freud again…

 

We were being lined up by a waiter for ordering from a flash menu, when he questioned our respective holdings of allergies, since many local, wholly bio and only slightly distressed by preparation treatments (cooking) components were included in the offerings and …suddenly, he was hit with an attack of the sneezes in a setting (overlooking St Emilion township from a roof top terrace) he’s been working for the last weeks with no clear sources for sneezes in the environment…I fell about laughing which he joined easily, but somewhat less fully than my giving over to the moment…BTW, none of us could come up with an allergy to warn the chef about.

 

Jardins for a moment…

 

…we’ve seen a few in the last few days. About four close up in varying degrees of intensity ranging from the very slight Jardins de Sardy in the back blocks 15 ks. east of St Emilion to the extremely rigorous, classical French style a few days before. The others had tended towards the classical with variations for scale, age, and rehabilitation from original plantings and so on. All had an age of a couple of hundred years as a starting place.

 

What struck me viewing the Jardins de Sardy – a somewhat cobbled together anglo-italian melange, with water features of substance and ingenuity, but altogether only about ten hectares of coverage before folding naturally into pasturage - was how embracing the presentation was, containing many specimens of flowering and towering and climbing and crawling vegetation, any one of which might reach out to attract my attention (noticed because this is what was happening at the time). A low demand and high opportunity experience.

 

What we had faced at Eyrignac Manor Garden at Salignac- Eyvigues, Perigord (Dordogne valley) was the reverse: high visual demand and little choice opportunity except to turn away from the demand. The unrelieved designed views required visual submission through their very consistency, formality and persistence in the visual space of the present moment. Most powerfully this effect was achieved by their justifiably acclaimed hornbeam based planting, rigorously sculpted over a hectare or so, with maintenance requirements of monthly hand clippings of 42,000 square meters of shaped facades as the display placards announced with equally imposing formality and precision.

 

What it’s all about is the unnatural, of course, I just realised in a noddingly reflective moment. Plants don’t grow in regular, clipped forms except under duress. So my amazed shock at the achievements of classical topiary is expressing a perceived impossible forced into its boundaries but unremitting human attention…that which only can be supplied by wealth.

 

There is something off-putting in this visual demand which is perhaps somewhat the experience I was having in Paris a few weeks ago. Where everything is designed, everything is predictable and so, intrinsically boring, or reassuring if you have that feeling arise from certainty. I obviously tend to the former, increased by my inclination to see things slightly from a skewed perspective in order to bring peripheral vision to bear on my world… the vision which is highly geared to threats, disturbances, in brief to pre-empting the unexpected.

 

And here comes Freud again, again…

 

Often, if someone is lecturing me about something (which I accept by remaining present to the lecture, or may have requested it in the first place), I will attend to it by not appearing to listen, by letting it flow by, especially if the information novelty is high. With the gardens of more natural pretence, I look at them as I do a forest or a mountain range – a surveying, sweeping look at the whole, seeking the whole? I don’t know, but the perceptual effort seems on the edge of the unconscious and cannot be forced. It can only be allowed, which requires not trying to see, in a way. This is of a kind with insight, intuition, problem-solving…which just comes and cannot be forced.

 

And so, it is not surprising that I only noticed the gazpacho on the menu board of the fourth restaurant we checked out last night, having been disappointed two nights before by its allure on another establishment’s hoarding which we were then denied, once having chosen to eat there on the basis of that allure, by the sad message that it was off, not on at all. I didn’t even know I was looking for it this time and there it was and it was on and it was good, though not a gazpacho we had ever had before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2014 - Dubai

Torrey Orton

June 1, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange,…this time, weapons out of kitchen utensils

Just a day and a bit pausing here in the midst of so much on the edge of nothing sustained by its paleo-historic treasure of convertible carbons…a place remarkable for its greyness leavened by occasional pastels in typically European 6 story accommodations radiating around two high-rise centres – nominally east and west Dubai, the home of the kilometric Burg Khalifa.

Around the Hyatt where we’ve stopped a second time, the evidence of the encroaching of the Gulf by piles of sand behind various bunkering techniques continues in the creating canals and lagoons for vacation housing. Here, for the unaccountably numerous time, my trekking back pack carried as luggage not carryon, with its contents of various life assisting (first-aid kits, bug defender, eating tools, wet weather stuff) goodies passed through all screening devices without even a squeak of concern in dozens of countries include this one was found to be holding a questionable item by a last gasp check after clearing customs and about to grab a gab. There was something in it (it being inside a large roll around suitcase). After opening the case and finding nothing but an electric razor in a case that might have held a snub-nosed 38 in a  cartoon and pressing on into the backpack to find a camping knife (Swiss Army multi-function type, but no projectile sending capacities of note), I pointed out there was another such scabbarded knife, too, in the mess that is the contents of the pack.

The customs lady opened it and found a beautiful scrimshaw knife of razor sharpness and about 6cm (3 inches?) length with a safety lock once opened to protect unskilled fingers from self-execution in the conduct of serious camping endeavours (which for us amount to cutting quality sausage on the highest ridge we can reach on our daily climbing in France). I had a moments’ sharp despair that this would be confiscated as a half dozen forgotten pen knives have been on passing screenings in Australia. This one, however, is a 25 year old gift from a long-term Chinese friend for some consideration long forgotten but for the gift. My despair was dismissed by a 1 second judgement of the head screener that my weapon was no such thing.

All this took three minutes… and I walked away as full-handed as when I arrived, armed for this season’s sausage, bread and wine after an adventure unexpected for a result unforeseeable as it all was in the eyes of the beholder looking at an x-ray screen with new perspectives unshared even by her co-workers. Imagine what does get through, as the Australian Senator for farming matters and moral righteousness, Bill Heffernan, recently dramatized at Parliament with his pipe bomb infiltration of the high house’s security, perhaps forewarning of future intent of his own since he sees it so much in the minds of others around him!!    

What’s normal now (6)…we are the worlds of our hosted bugs

Torrey Orton

May 25, 2014

 

Levels of life in fact …

 

Recently SBS TV hosted a series on the bugs upon and within us. We provide them with a living and they provide us with life. The uncounted hordes cleaning up our exterior are exceeded in number and diversity by those inside which give tangible meaning to a ‘gut feel’. Even knowing they are there vigorously gathering away does not give access to any perception of their presence in their reality – invisible and intangible things to us which yet succeed in comforting us, or not. We just have to believe they are so until we get a look though a scanning microscope at the myriad creeping and crawling things polishing our armour (skin) and processing our roughage (digestion).

We and they are all alive for a while, but only aware of each other in moments of failure to provide our respective services to each other, such as the result of an unintended injury like an antibiotic attack on a germ which defaults indiscriminately to all bugs and disables digestion in one way or another. However, our communication is indirect, by gesture as it were – ‘I’m sick to my stomach with…’ or, ‘It was a gut wrenching experience…’ from the inner residents to the host and ‘Here’s something soothing for that diarrhoea...’ from the host to the residents. Both are well within reach of the others’ sensibilities, but almost without regard for each other except in an emotional storm driven by objective threats to viability – menaces of death of various kinds.

… and perception

When the bugs’ world is distorted by ours, we, for those moments, are focussed by their collective distress away from our concerns, taking up theirs as if they are ours – which they are, so to speak, but we cannot conduct a life at the microscopic level. When we do so by force of disease we are heading for the doorways of perception’s close. That’s how a serious gastro-enteric stomach bug feels, as it literally lays waste with us.

So, too, do we dally with the brain’s presence to us: we kiss lips, not neuronal networks. If the networks are distorted by injuries physical (blunt force trauma; natural declines of genetic weakness or ageing) or emotional (disregard, deprivation, and the ensuing despairs of our oppression over time), our self in its physical guise is compromised. But it is unhelpful to our management of that compromise to point out its brainy compositions. What do we expect anyone to do with that observation themselves? Well, they can affect their sense of self by a variety of means – meditation, walking, eating right, sleeping OK …– those are the levels of action which are known to affect daily well-being directly already.

What’s neuron’s got to do with us – the lip kissing us - except in that facilitative sense which the bugs also are for us? They are different levels of perception and action, like that between Newtonian and quantum physics. We are in the Newtonian world and it is in the quantum.

Funny things happen travelling

Funny things happen travelling
Torrey Orton, Barcelona, Spain
June 11, 2010

 

Travel isn't always illuminating or diverting, but it seldom has none of these. This trip is no different, though I pay more attention to capturing illuminations than I used to. My pocket note pad is gathering stuff at an alarming rate. I'm about to start investing in those bound "moleskin" ones which will make them collectible. Ah, the pretences.


Anyway, travel to foreign parts is even more likely to have diversions, with occasional illuminations in train, and some of these follow. I call them "funny things" because they are variously strange, surprising, laughable, shockingly unexpected, pathetic….I mean no item to add to the evidence base for those who consider foreign ways impenetrably dopey, immoral, etc. They are presented in the order of their occurrence. For example,


A gluggy tale In the loo of the flat we shared in Cauterets, France (which I recommend to walkers and skiers, the flat that is) there was a well-fitted 20 cm. wide hand basin of recent design and even more recent installation, meeting health expectations, etc. It had a little towel rack next to it and a bar of soap was provided. The thing was this – the bar kept sliding into the bowl and lodging over the drain. It did because the inbuilt soap space (whaddya call such a thing?) was slightly inclined towards the bowl from left to right to allow the residual water to run off the and the bar to retain its barness rather than descending into glug, the prime enemy of happy relationships…. However, the design was ever so slightly off…the wet soap slid relentlessly, as reported above…and we all tried hard to make it stay in its allotted spot and no one could so; we always found the bar slowly descending as said towards the bottom of the basin…a good idea gone wrong or just a bargain purchase failure?



A nice touch to being in a town long enough to go to the croissant shop several mornings in a row is having had the good chance to find the best local one the first time around (confirmed by trying both of the other offerings by chance). On the third morning the management volunteered that they would be closed (as normal, but not advertised because everyone knows when core sustenance providers are open and closed in the neighbourhood in France) and that I could find the desired articles around the corner. An unexpected virtue of having enough French to seem I know what I'm doing.


And a thing that happened on the way to another scenery in the Pyrenees: we drove up the perilously poised Col de Tourmalet passing a small pack of uniformed cyclists halfway, surrounded by a small but diligent filming crew front and back. We made it by with some help from the crew and pushed on towards the top with growing apprehension about the distance from the road edge to the bottom of the ski slope (1000 metres). On arrival, in a temperature of about 5C we savoured the ride and pondered the quick follow up of the cyclists, met by more filmers and shortly thereafter by more cyclists coming from the other direction, more filmers, and a general conflagration of made-my-day joy from one of our foursome! Her joy was Contadorian – as he emerged out of the second arriving group and she got a chance to attach herself to the media scrum for a few minutes. Note that we had NO idea such an event was occurring that day, so the lions of chance were at work for us – chance that we did not fall over the edge and that we did arrive just as the cyclists did; and the rest is family history for her, whose eldest daughter is a cyclist of some standing herself in triathlons and both are serious Tour de France followers just warming up for the annual round shortly which was part of the rationale for the Col visit in the first place! Mum's a fair performer on the wheels herself!


While I'm on bathroom stuff, there was the hotel of the Mercure brand in Toulouse where we spent a couple of nights in support of the Millau Viaduc visit ( a 200+ Ks drive away). A wonder of cleanly modernity including both loo and bidet all packed nicely into a good space with normally restrictive shower for lads of my proportions (but then I wonder about really big guys whose heads could hardly be got under the rose). The loo however had been designed by true midgets so there was about 15 cm. between the bowl and the wall, into which space a doubler role dispenser of vital papers was also squeezed at a height about 30 cms above the bowl. You, too, can calculate already that this is a tight fit, even for less disproportionate types than myself. I've seen similar in China in earlier years where there had been no social history of private loos to instruct builders with appropriate proportioning of loo spaces. But in France, in the third largest city in an international hotel chain, in a very generous allinone bathroom space by five star standards in a three star hotel?? Weird funny. There was not that much funny in the utilisation struggle but some physical training effects were achieved over a few days.


We had passed thru Irun station on the way home to Paris from Torremolinos, Spain, in 1972 with a lasting impression of Franco's ever ready search for the enemy embodied in the coldest looking eyes we'd ever seen on a secret policeman searching each carriage for enemies of the state. On the way to San Sebastian, that impression, without the eyes, was recreated a few days ago in arriving at Irun around 10pm – a station of astonishing blankness, greyness and enclosedness. Only one way led out of the platform into a room with no directions and a couple of customs agents sort of manning an X-ray machine (turned off). A small crowd of arrivals gathered in the small hall, a few oriented towards the machine and all of us needing to get on the next train to Lisbon, from which a scad of other ends could be reached, amongst which ours of San Sebastian - next stop on the line! Having gotten on the train to Lisbon and travelled 15 minutes, we arrived in San Sebastian unannounced by anyone. If we had not known the first stop was San Sebastian we might still be trying to get back there from Lisbon now. A little consultation with other passengers confirmed what we knew must be true: this was San Sebastian. It was an introduction we could not recognise to a serious low grade glitch in directions in Spain. The glitch has stood up for five days in Bilbao, Bermeo, Bakio, Gernika, and eventually Barcelona. It appeared in trains, busses, undergrounds, funiculars, museums, shops in a plethora of forms with a constant threat of misleading, though never quite really getting us into trouble. We eventually began to develop a work around – basically, assuming that whatever directions there were would be faulty to some degree. Not an irritation after a bit just something funny, like user directions in IT applications and tools which never seem able to take a naive user's viewpoint.


While in Bakio, a seaside resortish spot principally for Spaniards I suspect, I had another kind of funny, the potentially highly embarrassing sort. After a lunch of disappointing ordinariness in a spot masquerading as the local eatery of choice, I sought out the loo. It was quite passable, as had been true in Cauterets and various other places. Especially, since it was in a cellar, it was well lighted. So I went in for serious business and a minute later all the lights went out. I had failed to notice that they were on automatic – they were a self-starting minuterie. Fortunately, I had scanned the service available and checked off against a notional required list before even setting to. Paper source was remembered, roughly, though not checked for fill level. Double fortunately, paper fill was good and access was manageable with some contortion of left shoulder, arm and hand. In brief, I escaped with all needs satisfied and no self-regards injured. But, what a joke on a supposedly knowledgeable traveller.


After visiting some new acquaintances in Gernika we moved towards parting, powered by their need to see their kids who had been in the care of a "kangaroo". It turns out that the local term for a baby-sitter is kangaroo. Strange. They said it had to do with the pouch. Skippy, what have you done? Their only previous exposure to things Oz is an artist friend - Bill Kelly - who's been involved for ten years in the memorialising of the 1937 Gernika bombings. I don't think he's even drawn a roo…but ?


While one of the above said roo users was showing us around Gernika, one stop in the rain included a last minute (the present Basque police officials in charge of the Basque parliament site were trying to close it down for the day) stop at the Tree of Basque. There at the edge of the fenced in ground was a 100 year old blue gum ( I think). The mountains of the Basque area are now half given to gum plantations for wood pulp, so the species is very common, just not huge examples. Our history follows us around, or more likely we are constantly awakened to the fact it is always there.


Walking down a main drag in Bilbao three days ago brought us in reach of a demo breaking up around midday. We had seen outliers of it in another part of town earlier in the morning, so the fact was not surprising. The stunner was not that they left a trail of promotional handouts behind them; it was the tune they were chanting: a Spanish version of "workers united will never be defeated" in the exact rhythm and tune we are so acquainted with. Not a few were carrying some red banners and the local news reported the next day that 150,000 marched in Barcelona the same day in protest over proposed reduction of public sector pay to cover GFC debts incurred by the usual suspects (hmm, that just slipped out naturally, 'the usual suspects', so it must be appropriate in this context!).


There seems to have been a strong loo theme here. When I first noticed it, I shied away from it in slight embarrassment. Then giving the fact some space to display itself I noticed that loos have three significant features: they offer little space to avoid what's present, they are concerned with core business and any variation from standard core business protocols stick out baldly. Variations in more everyday matters more easily escape notice until they coalesce into persistent deviations from expectations. Or, so I suppose.


So, a final funny. Somewhere in Toulouse I was in front of the smallest urinal I'd ever seen. While there are many wonders which can be elicited from such facts, the one I want to note is that it had a perfectly situated porcelain fly in it to assist aim – a really good idea if the container is slight and aim is known to be flagging.


Enjoy.

Appreciation (25) … Mountains & water = beauty!?

Appreciation (25) … Mountains & water = beauty!?
Torrey Orton,
Barcelona, Spain
June 10, 2010

 

Where there's mountains and there's water, there's beauty

• 
  
  Rough translation of traditional Chinese saying
  
   

As we walked along our fourth snowmelt powered stream in the Pyrenees a week ago, I became aware that the rhythm of its downhill rush had an undercurrent to the foreground roar of water on stone and water. This was a persistent low rumble, a susurration maybe, which recalled the background voice of our favourite beach respite, Eastern View. We spend a week a year looking out into the steady but highly varying roar and rumblings of the ocean surf. It's the auditory respite of our resort from the city. The noise counterpoints the view in that case, and so maybe that was what was happening in the mountains. It is ever-present to some degree, lingering while the waters of stream or sea come and go with thunder or slush (hear it).


While the views of the mountains in their ever changing variations were moment to moment present to us, the fact of their slow degradation by the waters rested in the background of my awareness. And so, perhaps, in starting this post my first awareness of its topic was aural, not visual. This came, as topics usually do, in the early morning seeking words for the difference between the noise of clashing waters and the sound of flowing waters – a search as yet incomplete! The undercurrent sound was delicate and could only be heard at certain spots on the mountain path, to be as suddenly overwhelmed by noise as it had appeared out of the noise moments earlier. Their expressions, the undercurrents and the topics, are similarly reluctant. But, on to the mountains, and the questionable eminence of the visual over the aural, unlike that of taste over touch ….


Primary senses?
The attraction of attractions in real mountains (we haven't any in Oz, though we have competitive heights – a reminder of the eventual dominance of the waters over the lands) is the appearance of having a great view of this or that snow-garnished, rising wonder…great until we move from this point of view to the next one a few steps over or up from here. We seem to produce the new view by moving, without knowing what it will be only that it will be. As we were walking one of these perception-making paths, I encouraged us not to stop for lunch until we went around one more corner, out of my certainty that a better view was there, as it was to some others' surprise. It has so often, so long been so for me that I don't even think about proposing it.


Attracted attention
This is the attraction of mountains, and of waters, for me. They attract my attention; incite my interest…..as much if not more than I invest them with attractiveness by creating the changing views. That any scene/setting can be attractive is attested by the capacity to see views which people have in the most unpromising visual and auditory environments – the two apparent perceptual deserts of permanent sand and snow. Languages notoriously reflect this capacity to invest attractiveness with, to others, incredible refinements of descriptive power for their dominant environments. What's snow for us is a dozen distinctions in the character of its surface and composition for Inuit, as is sand a palette of colours to the Tuareg, who lack our variety of greens for good reason.


A motion picture can show that this process occurs, that there are views to be produced by what's present in the terrain of our passage – the objective mountains of life. I'm exploring the subjective ones of our experience, what keeps us seeking them perhaps. Maybe, too , it's not 'us', just me who does this, though I suspect a greater generality of experience because my capacity is not mine it's human, with the variation arising from my particular biopsychosocial heritages.


Novelty and interest
Staying with representations (photos, videos, paintings) a bit more: I noticed at Millau, France, that the viaduct was less compelling alive, so to speak, than some of its web images, particularly the moving ones done from a helicopter on perfect days, etc. I was a little disappointed, though Jane was not. She had a different investment in the event, the thing. From close up my disappointment melted without mention because I was seeing aspects of the viaduct inaccessible to the helicoptered eye. We were seeing it at moments from the inside as when we entered one of the pillars at its base to find it was two pillars designed to reduce wind resistance by circulating the passing winds to create a counter pressure to that applied by their hitting the exposed flanks of the pillars. And, we could see that the other six pillars, over their 2.5 Ks carriage of the roadway, were similar great things scaled down by distance.


What we saw on arriving is also not what we mostly saw in the recent Richard Hammond treatment of the viaduct's engineering wonders, and their historical origins (another reason for my diminished joy with the eventual reality – too much exposure?).


A missing picture
Another take on perception driving objectivity: two days ago I followed Jane into the Bilbao (Gehry) Guggenheim which is quite wondrously intrusive on the outside and enclosing on the inside. That's a double in most books. This is another place she has wanted to be in and around for a while. Among the offers inside was an Henri Rousseau historical from start to finish. I enjoyed wandering through with a mild sense of 'I know what's going on here' which derived from a competent exposure to the visual arts in college, backed by a fair photo recall memory for pictures and words. This has done me OK for a general grip on the visual art world.



 
But, towards the end of the review I realised I was on the edge of a slight disappointment - that the most characteristic Rousseau (The Dream, 1910) was not on show, though a small photo of it in somebody else's museum was on show. I had actually been going through the show to get to that pic, to revisit in the real an image I had collected 45 years ago in Art 102 (101 was everything up the renaissance, or so, I think). Not, of course, that I consciously knew I was doing so until the awareness struck. It only slightly surprised me when I looked the picture up to discover that I had cropped it in my memory, leaving out the dreamer.


This event opens a Pandora's worth of wonder about underlying motivations in all manner of settings…but that's for another day. Yet on this day I have to notice that this event points the finger of probability at unseen influences distorting our everyday perceptions …which a number of people have noticed before. What they do not say is that the motivation of the unknown, but not unknowable, may also be the very force which drags us into the light of unexperienced objects as with Rousseau above. So, a reality undistorted by consciousness may not be available.

And I haven't even started to describe the mountain / water mix with any fineness!

Appreciation (23) … A little byplay thanks to Mark

Appreciation (23) … A little byplay thanks to Mark
Torrey Orton April 11, 2010

Catch this…

From Mark in Hudson, NY

"I heard about this play on NPR this morning. After looking at the video, especially the slo-mo replay ,,,,, i thought I had better pass it along to a few fans who might otherwise have missed it."

I commend the video to your attention. Watch it through because the best view of the event is about the last in the series. Strange they didn't put it first.
To which I replied, after watching the video -
I would have missed it, and having seen it, won't miss it BUT am glad I saw it..if you know what I mean!?


A reflection: things like this didn't happen before because:

1) they did but we weren't there;

2) they didn't because no one would have thought of something so silly; they wouldn't have allowed themselves to be so silly;

3) whoever the first tennis pro was who did the same on global telly hadn't arrived yet?? Since then at least one Agassi (was it Henri who perfected the blind between the legs return from the baseline?) a game seems to be required in pro circles. And it's a more guys than gals thing it seems.

4) smallball players have always unconsciously lusted after the largeball grand moves of basketball and the various footballs?

5) smallball players have always underestimated the superiority of their skills over largeball ones – anyone can catch a basketball / football; kicking's a bit harder, but getting a ball to the right place by using a wing extension (racket, bat, stick) clearly geometrically multiplies the difficulty doesn't it?…

6) So, they, the 'silly' effective ballgame antics, are a triumph of fashion, not capacity?

Thanks for the exercise!!
T.

http://ballhype.com/video/mark-buehrle-amazing-play/