I just watched the clip, and the style she's using for the interview would be appropriate if she were interviewing a politician on the subject of war crimes, but for some reason she felt that this story needed that same level of gravitas rather than considering it a light-hearted fluff piece...
edit: Here's an example of her when not in "I need to look like a super serious journalist for this" mode - https://x.com/KayBurley/status/1846114715312754744/mediaView... - I don't watch her very often, but the impression I have is that she spends quite a lot of time in both these "modes", and my feeling is that she consciously decides which fits the topic more, but maybe I'm being unfair and she's just subconsciously acting however feels like a natural fit.
I can't honestly think of any other British news anchors as high profile as her who I'd expect to conduct that conker interview in such an overly serious manner (but again, I'm hardly an expert in current day TV news people, I only see them in clips here and there I'm not a viewer of their full shows).
The lore ran deep too - conkers were varnished in different ways, hardened in front of fireplaces, secret conker trees were coveted, rules were sometimes broken, airplanes were usually not allowed, disputes were not always mitigated, the occasional teacher grumbled. Fun was had.
Any accidentally dropped conkers were stamped on by any and all in the vicinity.
A conker that survived to the next year was considered "seasoned", although many's the wizened tippex-covered lump of questionable provenance appeared under this explanation.
When a player's conker comes off the string but remains whole, the opponent can call "stamps!!" and attempt to stamp it to pieces.
Actually, we used to have a rhythmic string of rules which were very sayable, which I can't remember, along the lines of "no stamping no biting no _____ no _____ no ...", with a list of things, and a rhyme or two in there. I'm going to ask any old friends I run into and see if I can get the full thing back again.
I'm pretty sure the first two were no stamping and no biting though. If you'd anything like that, I'd love to hear it!
EDIT - and right on time, south London rules show up in today's Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/16/nut-pimping-...
> An "airplane" in conkers is when a player swings their conker in a wide, sweeping, horizontal motion, typically at about shoulder height.
The World Championship seems very fishy to me - firstly someone involved in setting up the conkers (inflating the footballs) should not be a competitor. Second having been caught with a steel imitation conker in his pocket how can he be cleared? He can't prove he didn't use it surreptitiously and so should be disqualified.
So they're kind of related like humans are related to weasels, because they're both mammals.
Clearly, considering the incredible stake at play here, it’s entirely outrageous. /s
> Second having been caught with a steel imitation conker in his pocket how can he be cleared? He can't prove he didn't use it surreptitiously and so should be disqualified.
The game is recorded so you can tell which conker he did or did not use. But just in case you didn’t notice, the reason it’s a media sensation is because the whole thing is ridiculous and therefore funny. There is no point in cheating at conker.
"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.
The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."
Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.
Originally, I figured that conkers were some sort of candy bar.
I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written
So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.
But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?
To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.
It's a British story - it's ostensibly space opera, but really it's more a space-themed Radio 4 comedy. It's British by default. Hence bypasses, council planning departments, stubborn bureaucrats, substances almost entirely unlike tea, solving problems by going to the pub, moaning about the weather, cricket stoppages, getting drunk, implacably morose people, smugly insincere corporate drones, being annoyed at overly flashy Amer... people like Zaphod, and so on. And conkers, of course.
It reminds me of the Twitter thread by an American who had never heard of boarding schools asking "what did you think in Harry Potter was magical but it turned out just to be British?" [to which someone said "Scotland" :(]
Savage reply.
It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.
When he was being absurdist, he was very clear about it. Like you said, he was writing about conkers as if it's just the same in the rest of the galaxy, which is definitely absurd. But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal. He doesn't just drop in complete nonsense.
So the question remains: What part of British culture or Adams personal history am I missing where it's logical for an adult to happen to have a bunch of chestnuts on hand to give to children?
Oh, sure. But his writings weren't.
> But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal.
Maybe we haven't read the same books ? I would not say that conkers are the only absurd element in the book (or even in the paragraph).
In my opinion (as a Brit who isn't an expert on Douglas Adams, but has read his books) the person you replied to was completely right and it's you with the misunderstanding.
Conkers
hmmm, these might be what they call "jokes"
Like I get it, theoretically. But…. Hmmm.
If you want a good in-universe explanation, here’s one: in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Zaphod’s grandfather says that he was friends with Yooden Vranx. He would anticipate the kids would drop by.
You could get a simple “Concker(n), colloquial name for the seeds of the horse chestnut tree” or “Conckers(n), traditional game played mainly in the British Isles with seeds of the horse chestnut tree” – a concise definition of the what without any detail of the game or its cultural significance (it was a big thing for a short time each year back when I was of school age, and had been for generations).
“when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time” suggests this was quite some time ago, so further lookups might have required a physical trip to a library, rather than just clicking a link or throwing a term at an online search engine.
The big honking dictionary on a pedestal at the high school library probably would have had it, and if that was not enlightening then the library in the closest city that we visited monthly would have good encyclopedias that probably would have described it. But I don't remember the conkers reference catching my imagination, and probably wrote it off as a silly made-up sci-fi word.
Its interesting how games and other things like songs, stories etc. persist and/or disappear over time.
- marbles (can you get them anymore?)
- kick the can (where would kids get cans today?)
- British bulldog/chain tig (far too dangerous)
I can't remember the rules of these, but they were very popular in the early 1960s, when I played them.
Almost literally never been cheaper. Under £3 for 50 on AliExpress, free shipping if you buy 150. I don't know if a child gets or loses street cred for having more cheap marbles then you can physically carry in 2024, but they could acquire that many quite easily.
> where would kids get cans today?
Pretty sure cans still exist! They might be a little more likely to contain, say, organic chopped tomatoes now than some gruesome 60s spam creation, but they're still a thing.
Oh, good to know.
Back when I played the most prized ones were steel ball bearings, which the NCO engineers filched them from the RAF Vulcan bombers. Us flight officers kids didn't get access to this stuff.
Somewhat interesting factoid (so I am told - be interested to see a real source), ball bearings were packed into the RAF nuclear weapons to prevent horrible accidents if the aircraft crashed (which quite a few did) - tales of crew skidding around on the tarmac after the balls were dumped after arming the weapon were not unheard of, but probably legend.
My imagination couldn't conceive of a logic behind this (nor could GPT-4, which told me you were talking nonsense), so in case anyone else comes across this and has the same curiosity:
Apparently "the ball bearings were introduced to increase the density of the core, preventing it from being compressed into a critical shape by an accident such as a plane crash", with the balls being removed as part of the arming the weapon ready to be dropped.
Wikipedia has a brief mention and a diagram here, though with "citation needed": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Warhea...
edit: And also there's "Aircraft engines must not be run with Violet Club loaded on the aircraft with the safety device [of steel balls] in place. The engines must not be started until the weapon is prepared for an actual operational sortie [to prevent the steel balls vibrating like a bag of jellybeans]." which does have a couple of apparent sources cited, though not clickable ones that are easy to look up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Club#Controversy
One is an engineering (lite) exercise, the other is a game of vague dexterity to take someone else's marble collection.
I remember football stickers bring banned on day 1 of term, having blown up over summer because someone stole a huge stack from a locker. Presumably the 90s ish was when the Made in Taiwan plastic crap availability really started to make that stuff cheap and fast enough to churn out in huge volumes to start a craze in weeks. Compared to marbles where a collection might represent years of growth, overall marble-econony production being trickled in by kids buying or being gifted just a handful at a time.
That variant was also a gambling type where you could win or lose. The shooting marble was often a metal ball, but the ones you wagered were the nice ones that everyone was after.
Contradict/confirm/what? Please clarify.
An extremely hard but brittle conker would probably make for poor results.
Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.
The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.
I asked my 17 year old this morning and he had never even heard of the game of conkers.
So I think the age of conkers is passing, alas.
I know kids have a lot more money these days but I refuse to believe they are swinging two smartphones together instead of conkers.
Mind you, it's much more likely the two phones involved would be mine and my wife's.
I never really played it when I was a kid, but knew all about it from The Beano and Oor Wullie.
I mean if it's a school where they also have to carry laptops and use digital schedules I don't think it makes a difference, but it's a good first step.
One issue was that each phone also has a camera, so people would seek out / make trouble on purpose, spy on people and post it online, etc.
In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]
e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.
Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.
Yes they are
> tomatoes and bananas are
No they’re not.
The word “berry” is much older and more fundamental to language than the technical botanical definition that a tiny minority of people know or care about.
Strawberries aren't berries and tomatoes are. You can say that's wrong all you like, but in the context of how they are botanically classified rather than what we named them you're incorrect.
If I made up a new, niche meaning of already-existing words, and tried to claim everyone else was using them wrong, you would think I was crazy.
People do this all the time, though it makes me feel old rather than crazy.
They have never heard of object-oriented programming and yet, they're not wrong. You're the one who is wrong by assuming the terms made up by a niche field override common language used by everyone.
I get the point that we call them berries even if they aren't, but your comparison to OOP is apples and oranges.
That wasn’t the point. The point is that they are berries, by the real definition of berries, which is not the different definition used by a tiny minority of mostly irrelevant people in a specific context.
What reason is there to prefer the botanical definition to the common one (that says a berry is a small colorful fruit)? I can see none. On the other hand, I can see many reasons to prefer the common definition: it is older, it is used by far more people, and it more closely corresponds to what we care about in real life (because almost everyone spends more time preparing and eating meals than they do classifying plant parts, so the culinary meaning is more important).
Scientists are not in charge of the whole human experience. They do not get to decide on behalf of everyone else that the salient defining characteristic of berries is not how they taste or what dishes you would use them to prepare, but rather what part of the plant they come from.
I take issue with this, and in fact we can see how the pedantic scientific meaning caused confusion about the actual underlying facts: people with allergies to what are commonly called "nuts" can in fact be allergic to things that according to the pedantic scientific definition are "seeds". So the OP is actually wrong to say it shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy!
Though it would make my day if someone tells me they can't have peanuts because of a legume allergy.
An apple is a pome but an orange is a hesperidium. Different things entirely.
And while I know my son can safely play with conkers, we most certainly have not tried to eat one!
There's also some things with nut in their name. c.f. Nutmeg, coconut.
As others have mentioned, same kind of deal with 'berry'.
And to follow up, if you're travelling abroad it's worth noting that some countries have different naming structures/separate out the families of 'nuts'. So be careful if you're asking if something has 'nuts' in, there can be a language barrier. e.g. tree nuts vs. Lupins (peanut family).
I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.
This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.
Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).
Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.
It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.
I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.
The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.
----
[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…
https://web.archive.org/web/20211018040605/https://www.hse.g...
Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety."
Certainly there was at least one school that got goggles for pupils to wear while playing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/09/conker...
In more recent years a bus driver complained to me conkers are not legal tender as I placed some down while in search of change. Around this time of year you will find most people have their pockets filled with conkers. </dev/random>
Same, but with peonzas/trompos[0]. It's interesting since it's also about breaking the other player's item thanks to the inertia provided by a string.
In short, they're hardcore spinning tops: large, generally with a metal tip, spun much faster due to the string winding, and as mentioned, the objective is to crack the other player's.
Ours were made from a very tough plastic, either nylon or HDPE.
(When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Ge...
You make a hole through your 'conker' (horse chestnut, not the edible type) and thread a string or a bootlace through it.
Then you take turns.
One holds their string still and lets the conker hang down, the other gets a swing at it with their conker. Whoever's conker lasts the longest is the winner.
There were all sorts of rumours about baking them, or soaking in vinegar or what have you to harden them up, but effectively it's the sort of game that a bunch of kids can play under a horse chestnut tree with relatively few props.
Using a steel 'ringer' in that circumstance would be the worst sort of unsportsmanlike behaviour.
Was it that once you reached six, you stopped counting? Or do you retire it, undefeated?
We've got a ton of horse chestnuts in my neighborhood but I've never heard of this game and I'm eager to introduce it to my kids.
Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
When at school we probably made do with a compass (the drawing kind), as we all had them. I'm sure that resulted in a pretty high rate of conkers being destroyed before they could be strung, and a lot of ruined compasses.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Generally not, though the game isn't without its minor hazards :)
There's a (very sweet) video here that seems to do a good job of showing the process and the game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
Through the exact rules are up to the players and I personally consider the "stamps" rule they mention to be foul play :)
You need to use a long enough string. Old cotton shoe laces are actually perfect as the aglets make threading that much easier.
The force of one conker against another is enough to sometimes make it spin round, but not enough to do any real damage. You just need a long enough string that your fingers are not in the firing range. Obviously there is a vanishingly small risk of a piece of conker ending up in the eye but I never witnessed that or any other injury happening. The biggest problem was usually upset kids when their prized conker got destroyed.
That's brilliant. Why did this never occur to me? That's going on the list of things to tell my younger self when time travel becomes possible.
It does until you learn, usually quite quickly, to do it properly.
Hurting your opponent's hand is a different matter :)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/SpitJack-Trussing-Butchers-Roasting...
Attach string, push through, detach string and remove.
WHen you were a kid, accidentally hitting yourself or the other person was just part of it!
You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.
Not usually in my experience, the string isn't that short and you're holding it at one end. Injury is still possible though, but that's part of the fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
And one from the championship:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5t6ej8Jzew
And here I was thinking that curling was the most ridiculous-looking sport in the world. I stand corrected.
I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
Money has nothing to do with it, most of my friends had computers, some had those mini cars to drive — it was a wealthy area.
It would be nice if we stopped stigmatising play. Growing up doesn't mean we stop playing. Acting grown-up might mean stop playing, but it's just that — an act, and a likely childish one. Real adults don't give up on what brings them joy.
Luckily, I grew out of that and I do not feel self conscious when playing as an adult or being goofy.
- C. S. Lewis
Kids just love to play.
Did you grow up in a city? I'm mid 30s and we used to regularly play conkers in the village where I grew up.
Also, I think this follows how most sports come to be. They are started as child play, when we have the time/leisure/energy, then they eventually become something some of us want to continue with as adults and the rest of us will pay to watch because we enjoy the sport so much (often fostered during youth play).
There are dozens of sports that I have no interest in simply because I wasn’t exposed to them as a kid. As an older American, we did not play Soccer(football) when I was a kid. It’s pretty popular now and my kid has had me go to professional games and such but I still just don’t really understand the game/rules/strategy or fully appreciate the difficulty of things that occur. I could learn I suppose but I still just have little effort in doing so as a middle aged person. I could say the same about Cricket and a handful of other sports that I never played as a kid but know are popular elsewhere. Likewise, when people move to the US, it usually takes them a while and likely never fully get into American Football and Baseball. Basketball has become more global and so I do expats that follow that sport. More likely than not, they follow the sports that interested them as a kid and just live with the time zone issue.
Round here, in the olden days the kids would fashion a crude type of ball called "basse" by cutting up a broken bicycle inner tube into a bunch of small rings, threading all the rings on a piece of string and tying this mess up in a particular way to form a roughly spherical object.
It does not roll well at all, but the kids stand around in a circle and kick the basse around to each other, trying to keep it in the air. If you cause it to fall to the ground, you lose.
Cheating was always rife with people using all manner of techniques to try to preserve and strengthen their conkers: soaking in vinegar, baking them, coating in nail varnish, &c.
Pretty sad to hear it's fallen out of fashion, as it was good, cheap fun and, with long enough string, not very dangerous.
I see parents and children collecting horse chestnuts in the local market square and arboretum still today though, and it brings back fond memories of rapped knuckles and entanglement "clingy-niner's" or "clinchies" in some games, depending who you were playing with.
The local ‘conker trees’ were famous!
The main detail I remember was that soaking them in vinegar was supposed to make them stronger!
Extremely common for kids to play this at least into the mid 2000s where i'm from, i moved away so i don't know if they still do
Inner-city kid, same age as you, and it was everywhere. Not universal, I guess.
A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)
I thought that was stupid then as well.
Yes. Picture some British parents and their child on a walk near a pond, river, canal or whatever. The child sees a swan. The parents will say something like "don't get too close dear, it could break your arm".
Swans are aggressive so it's probably not terrible advice, but not because they go around breaking people's arms specifically.
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-24...
Lovely read!
They've got a pretty savage and scary charge to them, it's highly likely they've startled more than one person in a park who've turned to run, tripped and fallen across steps or rockery edges and come out badly injured.
https://outdoorswimmer.com/coach/myth-busting-can-a-swan-bre...
The beak is probably more dangerous, or at least give you a nasty pinch or nibbing.
As I said, and supported by your link, I can't see a swan directly breaking a human bone - but they sure as hell can knock one arse over by charging and causing a step back fall over. That'll do some damge in some cases, easy.
If we play conkers with each other's bones the swan will lose.
Or at least that's the way I heard it, come to think of it I have no idea at all if that's true. Stops people killing and eating swans though. Not that many would anyway these days.
Not all, just mute swans; so not Bewick’s or whoopers (if I remember correctly)
Edit:
“His Majesty specifically owns any unclaimed mute swan in open water in both England and Wales in a ceremonial fashion. This has been a law since medieval times. His ownership is shared with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, granted to them by the Crown in the 1400s.”
https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/king/does-the-king-really-own-...
Absolutely. Very well known.
My Youtube-fu is not with me, so I can't seem to locate this video on Youtube, but see this BBC Archive footage from 1971 that was posted on Instagram[1] from a BBC News Report entitled "Conkers is no longer a kids' game."
On the other hand, we also have competitions such as cheese rolling (trying not to get killed by a giant cheese wheel rolling down a hill), so I'm not that surprised.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-gloucestershire-6...
People have the misapprehension that you're supposed to catch the cheese. No idea why you'd think it's a good idea to catch a rock hard lump whilst running down a hill so fast that if you tense your legs once to slow down you do 3 cartwheels.
Also just remembered - they have local rugby players to catch those who can't stop running from hitting the fence of the house at the bottom. Saw at least one person they missed who smacked into the fence and got carted off by St John's Ambulance.
British coroners know the signs….
Cheating is a bit of an art. Baking the chestnuts at the right temperature was one method; a friend of mine filled his conker with glue.
The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.
The rest are political ads.
Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):
> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."
In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.
Fox hunting, horse riding, polo and skiing... yes. Conkers, No.
I'm sure there are parts of the country where they're less common, but there's huge numbers of conkers falling off trees in big British cities (even if the majority will be in parks) as well as in the countryside. We played with them at my pre-teen city centre school for sure, and the trees are a common sight on roads and in gardens as well as public parks.
edit: the Woodland trust actually says "Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens."
[1] Which kind of sucks for me personally because they cause me really terrible hayfever. I think I'm specifically alergic to their pollen maybe.
I’m from elsewhere in Europe and I know about it from high school and it’s also something that pops up in the world sports section on news websites every now and then.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers, and the participants must select their conker from the collection or given one at random. Prevents tampering I guess.
Going around the conker trees in your area and finding the perfect conker is a huge part of the game. There is also a certain amount of pre-game 'modification' that are generally allowed, like soaking them in various solutions, or baking them in an oven.
Having to use a provided conker would be like showing up to the Tour de France and being assigned a bike by the organisers.
though through the "draft" nature of which spork you would receive, we never had a controversy on the level of the article's:
> "There are also suggestions that King Conker had marked the strings of harder nuts"
Byt then I’ve watched some British costume dramas.
Repeat until one conker is smashed into oblivion.
If your conker wins against multiples it becomes named mythically: a twoer, a threer, and so on.
I once had a niner. a fiver took it down.
Sounds like a British version of pencil break - but with way more scandal, apparently
It seems the suspicious was pretty quick.
I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.
But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.
So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?
Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.
But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.
With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).
So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.
Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.
It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.
Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.
Niemann seems like a jerk, but he's also just a kid. He was 19 at the time of the controversy. I've sure grown a lot since I was 19.
I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.
- maybe "winning" is a special case of "completing"
- "playing a game" in a competitive sense is totally different than "playing" in an undirected sense; e.g. playing with Legos or playing with a cat. Or playing with matches for that matter.
- for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."
We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!)
> for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."
These aren't the only two options. You can also just challenge yourself for the satisfaction of overcoming challenges and not wear a t-shirt. I think when people cheat at something where the outcome is broadcast there is almost always an element of status seeking.
> Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?
Do you remember being a child and just playing with action figures? It was harmless and fun. I wonder where we lose that ability to just chill and have fun without a challenge.
Actually, a lot of people seem to just spend a lot of time watching TV, which is also fun without challenge.
People, on average, like to do the easiest thing possible and on top of that, they frequently like to brag about what they've achieved and how good they are. Social animals and all that.
[1] By the standards of the time.
Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the school playground. Adults did not play LEGO then, it was the role of the father to read the newspaper and the role of the mother to be 'chained to the sink' in those days, with LEGO just for small children.
Conkers was very much for younger children, once an interest in the opposite sex, playing cards for match sticks or general juvenile delinquency was established, conkers was 'grown out of'.
Much like how fathers could teach their sons to beat up bullies, so it was that fathers could help with the technical aspects of conkers, such as getting the hand drill out (remember those contraptions, before battery power tools).
Conkers was a rite of passage, something that you would be expected to grow out of. It also came with a season, i.e. autumn, and the etiquette was to pick on someone of your own size. Hence, someone playing conkers at the age of 23 has not really got it right.
As for the guy with the steel conker, again we have a problem of age.
Now, as for playing with LEGO as an adult, or playing conkers as an adult, or, for that matter, the retro 8-bit computer scene, this is about regressing from the adult world of today, with all of its problems, and hiding in a recreated childhood. This is sort of understandable for people that were sent off to war, to see things they did not need to see. Those people kind of need the therapy that a return to the child world provides.
But nowadays, I see it as a response to the atomisation of community. If you are not spending your weekends with friends at pubs or at dinner parties, if you don't have an adult hobby such as with a lathe in a shed, if you can't afford big toys such as a boat, then childhood hobbies are a safe space to return to. Apart from anything else, you can buy all the LEGO that you could not buy then. Or, with conkers, you can find a social scene of like minded individuals and get a bit more scientific about winning.
While there is somewhat of a crisis of adulthood, I find it feasible to salvage the concept without carrying forward the sort of smothering social conformity you seem to advocate as a necessary condition.
[1] https://curiousandgeeks.com/conker-animals-autumn-crafts
However even without knowing that I think reading the article makes it clear enough what it's about and that a steel chestnut shattering the other one seems like an unfair advantage :)
I got the gist just from reading the headline, yes. And I'm not even a limey, I just lived there for a few years.
I didn't know and wouldn't have guessed there were world championships, though.
But I get mine for free
I go round my grandmas house
She's got a horse chestnut tree
I love the glimpses that give away the British people on here. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one but this thread has brought them all out
conkers
Also I don’t understand the one paragraph aside about the American who is never mentioned before or after(?)
It is probably the kind of event where the only people who would be willing to do the timely prep work are the contestants.
This American mentioned was the women's champ, who apparently went on to beat him. Which either means he wasn't cheating, or was and then played fairly on the last match?
Part of the "point" of conkers is that conker-prep is just as much as a skill as the technique during the hitting phase.
I think this was just poor scrutineering (or corruption) on the organizers side.
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
Separately, what an absolutely nutty thing to cheat at.
Thanks for sharing the video!
the two conkers hitting each other harder likely will lead to an earlier result, but it will also favor the conker that can withstand few hard blows over one that can withstand many softer ones.
So, assuming you can somehow judge how well your and your opponent’s conker do in this regard, you may want to go either for brute impact or for many rounds.
> What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages?
I think that’s more important. Even idealized conkers are fairly asymmetrical, so possibly, the ‘bottom’ of one hitting the side of another is a winning or losing strategy. If so, it’s more a matter of timing than of being brutal, at least for hypothetical perfect players. Whether humans can do much here, I wouldn’t know.
That was my first thought too, but I don't know if it's true because of the strings they are attached to. The striking conker is at the end of a taut string the entire time, but the receiving conker is hanging loosely and bounces around after being struck. My guess is that the taut string helps with energy dissipation after a collision, but I could be wrong. And either way, it might be a negligible difference.
Not every game needs to have the fun sucked out of it by endless optimization and instrumental play.
Just conk some chestnuts. Simple as.
I personally find a lot of optimization problems very fun and can keep at them for a long time.
For the yanks and elsewhere, yes conkers is well known in Britain. You basically put a chestnut (but its a conker) on a string by making a hole in the middle. Take turns swinging them on the string, whoever's breaks is the loser.
It used to be great fun till it was banned/requires eye protection now. There's an opportunity there, someone could make a perfectly safe conker app. I'm sure that would adequately replace it. /s
Because I can’t see how authorities could ban anyone from picking up a conker from the ground and tying a string to it.
On a different note, if you’re just pulling a random one out of a bag, what is the competitive aspect? Is there a technique involved? Or just RNG?
Believe it or not adults playing conkers or people playing conkers outside of schools isn't a common pass time.
It is pretty much RNG, though you can massively nerf a conkers structural integrity by making the hole through the middle poorly, so there are some techniques. People also used to use thicker shoelaces like in vans, which I think made the centre more solid. I've never run an experiment to verify the difference that might make.
The HSE is pretty clear it doesn't justify it:
> The HSE said the safety risk from playing conkers was "incredibly low and not worth bothering about"
I also hope you see the irony of your ways.
Or that might have just been a tabloid outrage-bait headline.
I have a weird memory of seeing kids in safety glasses on the tv sometime around the turn of the century…
Looks like, as with all good myths, there’s a kernel of something resembling a twisted half-truth that got blown up out of hand - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/09/conker...
The reason I think this game is so popular is horse chestnut trees are very popular in the UK. For about a month each year, where I grew up the ground would be littered with conkers, both on my route to school and on school grounds. It's natural when walking around to try to find particularly large / impressive looking ones.
Conkers is half about cheating anyway - baking it to make it rock hard, or soaking in vinegar to make it rubbery and resilient.
I remember in the nineties when I noticed Horse Chestnuts laying on the pavement, and felt a tinge of sadness kids would normally by scouting areas to pick up all the chestnuts like competitive squirrels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
You and your opponent each attach a chestnut to a shoestring. You try to destroy your opponent's stringed chestnut by swinging your own stringed chestnut at it. The video explains different ways to cheat, such as coating the chestnut with nail varnish.
Dang, please update the link title to reflect that.
So the "judge" who prepped the conkers for everyone and stringed them also competed in the competition and won
I suspect there are handful of entrants each year, a few obsessives and 'people around at the time it happens to be on. Hence this guy who has been around long enough he gets asked to help out.
UK law generally is based on previous screw-ups.
Doubtless next year they will add a rule, but in general abusing such power would fall under the general "good sportsmanship" rule and be dealt with far more seriously than just 'banned from a tiny competition with a grand sounding name'.
I guess it could be that each country can only send at most one representative (making her the US Conker Champion) but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's a little unlikely.
Now that I have children, they, too, are feeling the grim disatisfaction of a stacked competition by losing to the other kids' parents in the pinewood derby.
I genuinely credit that experience with my attitude toward life (don't take anything too seriously, because everything we do is temporary, competition (I will work on my own when possible, to do my best, and if I win it is a reflection on my own skills and abilities), and helped me understand that no matter how good I am at something there is always someone who takes that thing far too seriously and will cheat to win.
Now, I’m not talking about anything on the level of Boris slipping through a political pickle. No, no. We're going full Del Boy here, a right dodgy geezer's guide to giving your conker a bit of extra “oomph” without your opponent being any the wiser.
First thing’s first, get yourself a conker that’s already hard as nails. If you rock up with a squishy, fresh-from-the-tree conker, you might as well bring a soggy chip to a fistfight. So, what’s the plan, Stan? You do what any self-respecting trickster does: you cheat. But in the most British way possible—subtle, sneaky, and with enough charm to get away with it.
The Vinegar Trick
Ah, the vinegar trick! An old-school classic, passed down from generation to generation like your nan’s dodgy trifle recipe. You soak your conker in vinegar overnight, let it dry out, and voilà! Hard as a rock. This trick’s so crafty, you’d think it was devised by the fox that pinched the farmer’s best hen. Just make sure it doesn’t reek like a fish and chip shop, or your mates will twig faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle!”
The Oven Gambit Now,
if you’re really feeling a bit more “James Bond,” you can stick your conker in the oven. But let’s not go burning the house down like a right muppet. Give it a low and slow roast, just enough to toughen it up. Just don’t let your mum catch you, or you’ll be in for a bollocking. Nothing says “I’ve been up to no good” quite like the smell of chargrilled conker wafting through the kitchen at half-past ten.
Nail Varnish Shenanigans
Feeling a bit flash, are we? Maybe you’re one of those who likes to add a touch of sparkle to your dastardly deeds. A sly coat of clear nail varnish will do the trick. It gives your conker an unbreakable shell—like a Ford Fiesta that somehow survives every banger race. Your opponent won’t know what hit ‘em, and you’ll be grinning like a Cheshire cat when your conker smashes theirs to smithereens.
Dodgy Drilling
If you’re the type who thinks “go big or go home,” then this one’s for you, mate. Hollow out the inside of your conker and fill it with something solid—maybe a bit of lead or, if you’re feeling particularly sneaky, a cheeky bit of cement. Just make sure your drill work isn’t as dodgy as the bloke who sold you that knock-off Rolex down the market, or you’ll end up in the doghouse faster than a footballer caught with his pants down.
The Ol’ Switcheroo
This one’s for the true legends of skulduggery. You show up with your ordinary, bog-standard conker, all innocent-like. Then, when your mate’s not looking—probably distracted by some bloke in the corner shouting about the price of pints—you whip out your pre-hardened, vinegar-soaked, oven-baked, nail-varnished super conker. It’s the ultimate con, and if you pull it off, you’ll feel like you’ve just nicked the crown jewels.
AI ones don't have the same juice :c
This seems like a pretty big shift that has happened pretty fast, that any blocks of long text are automatically assumed to be AI.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. Also, if you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844648, I don't think you've characterized that comment accurately or fairly. As the site guidelines ask, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Is probably from the USA.
For sure it is. Every boy (and probably some girls, but never seen myself) plays conkers and likely puts their life in great peril climbing horse chestnut trees to gather the best conkers before anyone else gets them.
When I think back now to some of the massive (old) trees I used to climb and the action of shaking the branches to try to get the chestnuts to drop (whilst the branch is breaking underneath you, 100ft up), I’m surprised I’m here to talk about it!
This is a serious business.
Conkers is good fun. Though a bit dangerous for modern sensibilities perhaps.
A horse chestnut tree can reach heights of approximately 30 to 40 meters (about 98 to 131 feet) [1].
I used to go pretty damn far up, one time really shitting myself up as the thinner weaker branches started breaking away as I was climbing higher.
It genuinely felt like, even if probably not entirely true, that I was sticking my head out of the top of the tree before it started giving way. It’s a memory that will stick with me forever!
Of course I can’t prove this, but it’s not entirely implausible that a very old horse chestnut tree could be over 100 feet high and it’s not entirely implausible that it’s possible to climb up a tree of that size. So I guess either take my word for it or not, your call ;)
[1] https://directree.org/horse-chestnut-aesculus-hippocastanum/
It certainly is a mainstay. A yearly treat which children love. In Ireland I was taught this song in school: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bhebvq0O4GY (and I still remember all the words)
You say this as if you were British, but then the rest of your comment seems to suggest that you're not (in which case it's not surprising that you might be unaware of some aspects of British playground culture).
It is a part of our culture, like pubs, pooh sticks, morriss dancing or cheese rolling.
It would be a totally valid citizenship question.
Maybe you're a city child?
It's a load of different morriss dancing troops dancing around the town with a parade with the lot of them. And there are a lot. Bloody freezing some years though!
Also, in the same vein, this weekend I think there's the annual Sea Shanty festival in my home town.
https://harwichshantyfestival.co.uk/
The videos are quite bad at conveying how great some of the groups are, especially sitting in a smallish pub with a pint listening to some amazing singers do sea shanties. Quite magical.
I don't see the commenter expressing displeasure but rather only curiosity
In Britain you’re not allowed to be.
It's clearly the implication that you shouldn't have to Google for it. That isn't directness, it's passive aggressiveness, which the Dutch are not stereotypically known for.
In any case, the comment I replied to already made the claim. I deliberately weakened it by saying it was a stereotype rather than talking as if it were unconditionally true.
No need to be passively aggressive if you can be actively aggressive ;)
Well it is the author's expectation, isn't it? I also left the article wondering what in the world conker was. I don't think it matters where the game is from or where the reader lives. It's just good writing to do a bit of explaining for the foreign readers, of which The Guardian knows they have.
I have no clue about american football rules - I barely know the sport exists, the ball has a funny shape, and that it's popular in the states. Still it would be absolute nonsense to explain their basics every time someone talks about them and I won't expect anyone to do so. Explanations like that will just annoy the vast majority of readers, who will have a preexisting interest in the sport and thus will already be familiar with the rules.
That said, I had even less of a clue what the hell conkers is. Luckily I have basic technological literacy and was able to find the wikipedia article[1] in a fraction of the time it takes one to complain.
I guess your point makes sense, though. There isn't the obligation to explain anything. I just personally think it's good writing to anticipate what your readers may not likely understand.
Then I learned that it was a game from an episode of Kipper the Dog, in which his cheeky friend Tiger cheats at the game by painting something to look like a chestnut.
i guess HN is out of kleptocoin or infinitesimal LLM overoptimization war stories today and had to find something to plug the top story spot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP3AAjsiqY
"Show HN: Two purple Conkers.. and one yellow honker. In Python using PyBangSwackThump With Fleshy Bits"
I for one am here for the random things that pop up on occasion. I have zero interest in LLMs and crypto-bollocks (mainly because I'm not earning money off of it)
[1] For varied definitions of "amazing", such as "conquer countries 10x your size", "invent 20 sports the entire world plays", etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(there's probably room for a conquer <-> conker joke though)
> What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
The UK has the exact opposite of this. Everything that's for sale here is finely graded according to the buyer's budget and taste. Where someone chooses to do something as innocuous as their grocery shopping in the UK says an awful lot about them.
If you visit the UK without an awareness of all these little class indicators, you'll probably find yourself frequenting establishments that target the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, because discretion is highly valued by those at the top. There is truly excellent food to be had here - British cheeses win more international awards than French ones, for example - but if you don't know where to find the good stuff, you'll end up getting the slop the lower orders have to put up with.
Just sayin', I went shopping in... Denver? Let's just say that there was a mall with a bunch of shops and further down the street another bunch of shops.
The public at Nordstrom was wildly different than at the Gap which was also different than the one at Ross.
Similar story for stuff like Walmart versus Whole Foods.
The US has a lot of social stratification, too. They just like to ignore those parts, especially in their advertising.
Everywhere does social stratification, but nowhere does it like Britain.
I still think doing your whole food shop at M&S is 'higher class' than doing it at Waitrose, but it's weird because of the M&S Simply Food shops which are more geared I think to somebody in a city buying a day or two's food.
And you are right, class is much much more complicated than just money :-)
In the US class distinction is (almost) entirely down to money. If you’re rich you can buy nicer things than someone poorer and so you can be immediately sorted into a higher social class.
In the UK just because you’re rich that doesn’t make you upper class. British society is riddled with subtle dress coding, language, and social cues designed to trip people up and differentiate the nouveau riche from the real old money aristocracy.
It's just slower and doesn't include you directly, true.
Having money doesn’t easily buy you a hereditary lordship. You might be able to buy a load of land but probably not a prestigious ancient estate because the families that own them would usually rather let them fall into disrepair than sell them.
Money will buy your kids a place in prestigious public (read: private) school so they can rub shoulders with upper class kids and have connections when they grow up. But those upper class friends will always know that you and your kids are really just jumped up middle class since your great great great great grandfather wasn’t the Duke of Norfolk or some such.
For reference Kate Middleton’s family are wealthy multi-millionaires, and have been wealthy going back to the 19th century. When she married Prince William the press still waxed lyrical about the fact that the Prince of Wales was marrying a “commoner”.
Really the only rock solid way to wash away the middle class stink from your kids is to marry into the real top level of the upper class.
I find it fascinating that being viewed as nuveau riche is a bad thing or 'lesser than' old money, when the money all buys the same access and privilege.
In the states we have New England waspy types that have families that go back to the mayflower or whatever. But it's pretty easy to ingrain yourself in their small society (as long as you have assloads of money), and flat out lie about your background if needed. I'm wondering if it's the same in the UK or not.
* Noblesse Oblige[0] Mostly about vocabulary, and very outdated (1950s)
* The English Gentleman[1] Only about aristocratic men, and comedic in style
* Class: A View from Middle England (Jilly Cooper) Very 1970s
* Watching the English[2] Not specifically about social class, but class comes up a lot.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_Oblige_(book)
They’ll be friendly, may even invite you to things, but they aren’t confused about who is who.
I grew up in the UK but I've lived for 15 years all over the US, and it's always confused me that Americans are convinced that British food is bad. On a whole, British supermarkets have far better produce, in both quality and diversity. UK restaurants run the gamut from cutting edge fine dining and wonderful traditional food to home-grown variants of immigrant cuisine. It's a great place to eat.
My home town is legendary for Indian restaurants—to the extent that Birmingham-style Balti curries have made their way back to India. Before you claim that this is Indian food, not British, can you name an American dish that wasn't developed by immigrants?
Home cooking is far more popular in the UK than the US: anecdotally, most British people cook most meals at home, while few of my American friends know how to boil an egg and rely almost entirely on take-out. British celebrity chefs and cooking shows are famous worldwide. It's odd to claim that British food sucks while binge-watching our prime-time baking show!
I love America and a lot of things are better over here, but food—unfortunately for me—is not one of them.
FWIW, I'd say that while Gordon Ramsey is a good cook, obviously, he's a celebrity because he's hilarious. That is definitely something I will give credit to the British for.
I'm not sure I made a generalization about America besides the quality and diversity of supermarket food, and an anecdote about how many of my friends cook at home.
I consider Tex-Mex as American and home grown. It also depends on your definition of "immigrants" since that path looks different everywhere (and across time). Texas was at one time Mexico (and even its own country plus a few others). But tortillas, beans, corn, cornbread are Native American. Many have simply lived here through generations and name changes.
I would also argue for BBQ[0]. I had to double check, but according to that wiki page it was from the Taíno who had inhabited Puerto Rico, which is part of America; which was acquired by Columbus, then brought to the mainland by the Spanish. Since Texas was a part of Spain for some time, there is a case to be made that the dish was not by immigrants if looked at from that angle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbecue_in_the_United_States
The difference with Tex-Mex is that its foundational items are Native American, so the distinction, imo, is that the main ingredients and how they are used is from America. Even though the Americas were populated by pacific islanders/Asians, no one would call Tex-Mex Asian food.
I don't know a lot about the making of Indian food, but I have not yet heard the argument that the base ingredients/spices and how they are used come from the British Isles. That's how I would "draw the line" in determining if it's British or Indian food.
That said, the best Indian food I have had was in London
So while I see your point, I wouldn't say a cuisine is always "from" the same place as its ingredients.
I highly recommend you check out this book:
https://www.phaidon.com/store/cookbooks-food-and-drink/the-b...
My Romanian grandma, born in the 1920s, that never traveled more than 100km from her birthplace and never saw even the Black Sea, would beg to differ :-p
And since most American food has also made its way to the UK, there's really not a great deal of difference.
Still, can't beat a good British fried breakfast.
I do love a chippy tea.
> invent 20 sports the entire world plays
I mean, the two are kind of related, causally...
The UK never conquered Argentina or Brazil yet if you'd look at football fans in both countries you'd think Argentina or Brazil not only invented football itself, but they also built an entire cult around it :-p
If you claim otherwise (and claim that Wikipedia is an inadequate source), that's fine, but show your evidence.
"Association football in itself does not have a classical history.[26] Notwithstanding any similarities to other ball games played around the world, FIFA has described that no historical connection exists with any game played in antiquity outside Europe.[3] The history of football in England dates back to at least the eighth century.[33] The modern rules of association football are based on the mid-19th century efforts to standardise the widely varying forms of football played in the public schools of England."
So, yeah. There are similar games. But the game in England is not an import.
The above link resolves to this, so folks don't have to indulge in the click-tracking:
There's a school called St. Andrews in Buenos Aires. If you know, you know.
Britain didn't actually "overpower" India as much as gain traction by presenting themselves as a less bad alternative than some of the existing ones, for several major regions they conquered. They were even financed by major Bengali bankers for their conquest.
India was possibly the big outlier in this regard, ergo the whole "crown jewel of the empire" angle.
Read this: https://a.co/d/7r25CnA - The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.
At least they left SSB