January 2016 – plutoman.com

Tennis

Interclub tennis – Week 6

January 30, 2016

by plutoman 0 Comments

I spent easily more time on court today that in any of my pre-Christmas interclub outings. In the first set of the doubles we never got a game in front and at one stage trailed 5-3, but our opponents fell away a bit and we ended up in a tie-break where we took a 6-3 lead. Unexpectedly they then played three very good points, including two on my serve (what could I have done differently?) to make it 6-6, and the final two points ended with me erring into the net. Great. We’ve just blown three set points in a tie-break, and the only way we can win this match now is in a super bloody tie-break. And they’ll be cock-a-hoop (isn’t that a funny expression?). Surprisingly our opponents’ level dropped in the second set and as we took a 5-2 lead my partner gave me one of those annoying fist bumps. I’m guessing a fist bump is supposed to make you play better. Or something. Our lead was soon cut to 5-4, but we brought up three more set points in the following game. They all came and went, including a sudden-death point, and it was 5-5. A major turning point came in the 11th game when we won a high-intensity rally to get to 30-all. This galvanised us, and we won the set 7-5, taking our fifth opportunity of the set and eighth overall. Super bloody tie-break. We lost the first three points but won the remaining ten. It was nice to win but I didn’t feel I was of much help to my partner until that big point towards the end of the second set which got my intensity level up. We played only two sudden-death points – winning one and losing one – but frankly with those tie-breaks the match was sudden-deathy enough that it didn’t need any more.

In the singles I played a bloke in his sixties with a stronger-than-average backhand for this level, making life difficult for me at times. I was comfortable if a little erratic in the first set which I won 6-2 in under 25 minutes, but the second set was over twice as long as the first and a different beast altogether. I got up 3-0 after some long games, and then won a ridiculously long point to reach deuce in the following game. My opponent stood facing the fence for a minute or more, finally saying “that was a real gut-buster”. I felt sorry for the poor bloke. I hardly gave him the next two points but I certainly eased back a bit, something I can’t ever remember doing before and will avoid doing again. He took advantage, winning that game and the next (yet another deuce game). Suddenly I was struggling, especially on my forehand. We reached 4-4. I hit two winners (they’d been in very short supply) early in the ninth game and he missed some would-be winners by small margins to leave me serving for the match. I led 5-4, 40-15: double match point. On the first of these he got lucky with a net-cord; on the second I served a nervy double fault. Bloody hell. Two more long rallies ensued and I got there somehow. I timed the match at 76 minutes but it felt longer. He was a tenacious opponent and after giving him a sniff in that 3-0 game, I never felt in control. It was a good job I’d built up a lead because I sure as hell needed it. Overall the team won by four matches to two.

I fear that both the Australian Open finals will be short, such is the dominance of Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic (and in the case of Serena, presence too). If Serena does somehow get beaten I’ll need to update this page because Angelique Kerber faced a match point as early as the first round.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

It’s a fix

January 21, 2016

by plutoman 0 Comments

On Saturday I played Risk with a bunch of people from a Meetup group, including my soon-to-be flatmate. We played at my place. Having all these relatively unknown people over caused me some anxiety which didn’t entirely disappear when we started playing. I was playing with some clever people who knew their war history inside out and backwards and could spell and pronounce “hegemony” and even use it in a sentence. Two people brought along far newer copies of the game than mine, which was quickly deemed to be old hat. We played a version I’d never played before where the objective was to complete missions instead of dominating the world. I had the chance to eliminate somebody but decided against it in order to complete a mission. Half an hour later this decision backfired spectacularly as the bloke I could have knocked out knocked me out in last place. I then just wanted to go home, but I already was home. Bugger.

I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety at the moment. The imminent arrival of my new flatmate isn’t helping.

On Tuesday night I watched the second set of Simona Halep’s shock defeat to the 133rd-ranked Chinese qualifier Zhang Shuai in the first round of the Australian Open, with commentary in Romanian. I understood a few words here and there. It was a stunning performance by Zhang who completely overpowered Halep in the last five games. She was in the zone, hardly missing at all, and Halep seemed unwilling to change her game. I think she was just hoping – not unreasonably – that Zhang’s level would drop. This was Zhang’s first win a grand slam in 15 attempts; she was on the verge of quitting the sport. She has since followed that up with a convincing win over Alizé Cornet, ranked exactly 100 places above her.

There has been a lot of talk about match fixing in tennis in the last few days. This should come as no surprise. It’s an extremely easy sport to fix (much easier even than other individual sports like boxing), and with the array of bets available on sites like Bet365 that go right down to point-by-point level, you don’t even need to fix the whole match. It’s also a ridiculously top-heavy sport. The top ten amass vast fortunes, while those ranked in the 150 to 200 range struggle to make ends meet. If you’re ranked 200th in the world, you’re an incredible player. If I played the 200th best player in my country of just two million blokes, I’d probably win six or eight points in the entire (two-set, twelve-game) match. Now extend that to the whole world, and you get a player who eats, sleeps and breathes tennis, someone who spends many hours at the gym, on the practice courts, travelling to play tournaments in tinpot towns like Timișoara that nobody has heard of, and he can’t make a living from it. But you’re able to bet on his matches, and you can understand why the temptation to tip the very unbalanced tennis scales a little would be so strong for him.

I’ve got friend, of sorts, in Auckland who if I’m honest does my head in. But we had a chat last night on the phone and he was genuinely interested in my plans to go overseas, dropping the little man in Google Maps and telling me what he saw at his end. It was nice that someone was taking an interest.

Language learning - Life :)

Romanian commentary 7 (and a bit of Bowie)

January 14, 2016

by plutoman 0 Comments

I had absolutely no idea David Bowie was so ill, so I was shocked and saddened to hear that he had died of liver cancer at the age of 69. Most rock stars don’t really appeal to me as people: stardom is a long way from anything I’ve ever aspired to. But Bowie is an exception; I wouldn’t have minded at all being him. He was always reinventing himself, visually as much as in his music (who was your favourite David Bowie?), and he must have had a helluva lot of fun doing that, but he also seemed a thoroughly nice bloke. My dad told me that his first TV appearance in 1964 at the age of 17 caused quite a stir, mainly because his hair was a bit long. That would be laughable now. So Bowie was lucky I guess that he was around in a time when you could still make an impact.

On Tuesday I looked for articles about David Bowie on Romanian websites. I printed off three. The first two articles gave you the facts and figures: that he died after an 18-month battle with cancer, that his career spanned 50 years, and that his latest album, Blackstar, was released on his birthday two days before he died. I didn’t have too much problem understanding them. But the third article was on a different plane entirely; the author told us how, as a very emotional 20-year-old student, he was affected by Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, and similarly how he felt when Freddie Mercury died three years earlier. In comparing those experiences to hearing of Bowie’s death, he used a lot of flowery language and complex constructions that left me all at sea, even with the aid of Google Translate (which, admittedly, is some way short of perfect). I’ve got a long, long way to go in learning this language.

To improve my listening skills I’ve taken to watching the Romanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on YouTube. It’s great for a whole raft of reasons. The questions and possible answers appear on the screen, so you can try and figure out what the question means (and sometimes attempt to answer it), or you can pause the video and look a word up. The contestant often spends considerable time on a particular question; that’s to my advantage too. The same phrases come up all the time: “are you sure?”, “final answer”, “phone a friend” (which is “sună un prieten“; they annoyingly call the 50:50 lifeline “fifty-fifty”) and so on, so I try and pick them out. Amounts of money of course come up regularly, and I can now pick out stuff like “Marius is 36 years old and he’s a lawyer from Bucharest.” You learn quite a lot about Romanian culture from watching it too; questions on sport are far rarer than in the UK (and certainly the Aussie) version, while questions on art and the Bible are far more common. One particular question from the last programme I watched was about monkeys (maimuțe). Which of these monkeys doesn’t exist: vervet, owl, spider or rabbit? The contestant (who did well in the end) used two lifelines on that question, and I could tell that he and the host were making jokes about monkeys throughout the rest of the game, but I was nowhere near being able to understand the jokes.

Talking of monkeys, it will soon be Chinese New Year: the Year of the Monkey (anul maimuței – to say “of something”, instead of using the word for of you change the ending of the something). I’m a Monkey, born in 1980, and here’s hoping that this will be my lucky year. Pity my poor brother: he’s a Cock. (Outside Chinese culture most people aren’t going to know the full zodiac – I don’t think I do – so it would be fun to think up an animal at random and say that you’re the Year of the Alligator or something, and see if you get away with it.)

Language learning

Romanian commentary 6 – some challenges

January 11, 2016

by plutoman 0 Comments

I’ve made reasonably good progress with Romanian so far, I think. Off the top of my head I know how to say I’m happy or sad or bored or tired or proud or ashamed or tall or short. I don’t remember knowing any of that after the same length of time learning French. I’ve spent a good number of hours in the last ten weeks reading and listening to Romanian, and a smaller but still significant amount of time writing it. What I haven’t done yet, and what I really need to do, is speak it. (OK, I have spoken it a bit, to myself, but I’ll soon be getting a flatmate and he might think I’m nuts.) So far what I’ve done is the equivalent of learning how to play tennis by hitting against a wall. I can now hit a half-decent forehand, backhand and volley, but I’m buggered if I have to react to someone else’s forehands, backhands and volleys. Problem number one: how do I find someone in Wellington to speak Romanian with? My best bet was the Romanian lady who turns up to the tennis club every six months or so, but she never replied to my email. It looks like I’ll have to go online, and for me that will take cojones or whatever the Romanian word is. I haven’t got that far yet.

Problem number two: as a native English speaker, the bar is constantly being raised. By that, I mean that the standard of Romanian I’d need to reach before it becomes really useful gets higher by the day. That’s because the average Romanian’s English gets better by the day, and unless I get fairly good at Romanian, people are likely to just respond to me in English if and when I get over there. Interestingly when I last went to Italy in 2010 I didn’t have this problem, even though my Italian was only at a high basic (or low intermediate) level; if you speak German at that sort of level you don’t stand a chance. I expect Romanian to be somewhere in between. A day will probably come when it is no longer worth an English speaker’s while to learn any foreign language; that will be a sad day.

Problem number three: there aren’t a ton of textbooks, phrase books, CDs or websites to help me learn the language. This isn’t French or Spanish or German or even Mandarin. It just isn’t very popular. But there is a lot of real-life material out there like YouTube videos and online articles. After all, over 20 million people speak Romanian and a great many of them have large digital footprints. In a way, having to use “proper” material makes the learning experience more fun. It reminds me of the time I tried to figure out badugi, a relatively obscure poker game, with the aid of a spreadsheet. I made enough money from that game to pay for a month-long trip to America. I hope Romanian treats me as well as badugi did.

I’ll talk about exactly what real-life material I have been using in my next post.

Life :) - My big plan

Not a lot to lose

January 10, 2016

by plutoman 0 Comments

This has all happened out of the blue, but my flatmate will be moving in, perhaps next weekend but more likely the one after. I think – hope – this experience will be a lot less exhausting than the last one.

I’m looking forward to having some company as well as, obviously, the extra income. Having a mortgage hasn’t made life easy financially. In the last four years I’ve spent next to nothing on clothes, next to nothing on eating out, next to nothing on entertainment, next to nothing on my car (but see below), and next to nothing on my apartment itself. That’s five line items that a lot of people take for granted, but which for me are pretty much blank cells in the spreadsheet, not that I feel in any way deprived. There was the small matter of my trip to America a few months ago, but that was my first overseas trip since 2010. (Travelling overseas gave me such a boost that I simply have to do it again. For a good length of time. And soon. I just wish I could have made that boost last a bit longer.)

Those aren’t the only “blank cell items” in my life that many of us take for granted; I can add in a partner, a family, a career, and a real sense of identity, whatever that’s supposed to mean. And it’s because of all these blank cells that I can do what I’m planning to do later in the year. I don’t have much to lose. But I do have a British passport and an apartment I can hopefully rent out for $500 a week, and those are two positive reasons that I can do this. I’ll get a rental assessment soon and find out just how much I can get.

As for my car, I took it in last week and they told me the clutch and master cylinder would need to be completely replaced. I was quoted $1150, more than the car is worth, so that’s that. I can still drive it for a while, but it’ll only get worse. My parents have a spare car – a ’95 Mitsubishi RVR – and I might fly down there and drive it up here. There’s no point in buying anything if I can help it, when I only plan to be in the country for another eight months.

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. Yesterday I was shocking, today a bit less shocking.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Didn’t think I’d do the flatmate thing again, but…

January 3, 2016

by plutoman 0 Comments

My potential new flatmate is about to come over. He’s the same age as my previous one (born in 1977) and about the same height, but that’s where the similarities end (I hope). He might not be here for long: he intends to go to the UK soon, probably before I embark on my adventure. Anything to get my mortgage down, even by a small amount, before I go away would be really helpful.

Here are some pictures of the big futon move at Makara last weekend. It was a beautiful day there: