I remember watching but can't remember why!

It's 'True Confessions' time, I'm afraid.  Well, be fair, we all have our little guilty secrets and when you reach my age there are just more of them.  Anyway, the fact is that sometime back in the '80s I became hooked on watching enormously fat men in nappies - wrestling - but I can't remember clearly what the attraction was.  Shameful, really, I mean, it makes watching ladies wrestling in mud sound normal.  Sorry, what was that?  Oh, right, I'll get to the point then, shall I?

Years ago I became hooked on sumo wrestling.  I never quite understood the finer points, or even the rules, come to that, but I did enjoy the ritual and the obvious fact that it was a very ancient sport.  At that time the first foreigners, in the form of some huge Hawaiians, were gaining success at the highest level and I shared the unspoken Japanese disapproval because it seemed to me that sumo wrestling is quintessentially Japanese and should have stayed that way.  Anyway, in particular, I remember a wrestler called 'The Wolf' who was not huge by sumo standards, he was just a very big man with an impassive face but deadly cold eyes and he was a terrific wrestler.

Anyway, in the usual way of these things I lost touch with it and so I was sorry to read in today's WSJ (Euro Ed.) that the sport has lost its way and become mired in gambling and criminal activities.  It has fallen in popularity and declined to being a fringe activity, now taken up by scrawny little students at Tokyo University - led by a Czech!  Well, even so, I salute them.  I have a weakness for lost causes and so I wish them well in their efforts to keep a grand tradition alive.

 

 

Comments

[dearieme]

Talking of watching, did you see the new Sherlock Holmes on the telly? I though the first episode superb and the third pretty fine. The second was dud, but that's still an excellent batting average.

[David Duff]

Sorry, 'DM', I watched half an hour of the first episode and because I couldn't catch much of what Sherlock was saying, partly because my hearing is beginning to go and partly because he speaks faster than a Browning machine gun, I gave up.

[dearieme]

Ah, I had difficulties occasionally because the sound recording was poor. Partly the problem was that the volume level wandered, partly that the "background" music was often too foreground. But still, tremendous stuff.

(By way of irony: one of the feebler telly 'tec series, Taggart, has decent sound recording. And it needs it less because the cast isn't whining in estuarial.)

[David Duff]

Sound mixing seems to be a lost art - on both sides of the Atlantic - in films and TV. They will allow the background noise to cover the dialogue. I find it best wearing earphones plugged into the 'telly' but the 'Memsahib' seems to take it badly - can't think why, learn to lip-read, I tell her! Also, what a joy - for me - to watch 'The Wire' with sub-titles!