Rubens - Old enough to be your Dad

Rubens Barrichello has been signed for another season at Williams, whilst his "look at me, I got a pole" team-mate Nico Hulkenburgerbananarama has been dumped.

I haven't done that maths (and frankly, I'm just too lazy to do that sort of exhaustive research anyway) but this will be the cheery Brazilian's 19th season in F1, won't it?

So, theoretically, some new whipper-snapper joining F1 could actually have been in the process of being born when Rubens first fired up an F1 car and said "I quite like this - maybe I'll stick around for a bit".

Nice one Rubhino - F1 wouldn't be the same without you. Particularly enjoyed your decision not to get bullied by that other old geezer from Germany when he came back after a bit of time in the Old Drivers Home For Bewildered Multiple Champions, where he had been "recuperating" due to his terrible problem of forgetting that it wasn't dodgems, and the idea isn't to push the others off the black staff. Seems the electro-shock treatment didn't work though.

Anyway, I digress (just for a change). I like Rubens. I hope Team Willy carry on rising (did I just type that?) and give him a decent mount (stop it now) so he can show the kids how to do it. But hopefully not like your Dad on the dancefloor at a wedding after 4 pints.

(Tonight's fine tunes supplied by Elvis Costello from 99's "The Very Best Of")

Comments

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog