Monday, 27 May 2019

Soul, baby...



Monday, 5 November 2018

Press-up Challenge

Press-ups (or push-ups), 200 per day. Simple. Earlier in the year, inspired by something I saw online @gymfcks I thought I'd pump the pecs and sort out my lower back lordosis in one fell swoop; spring was coming, planks are boring, and this is a great way (for me) to get through the day; interspersing it with endorphin-boosting intervals.

If you'd like to join me, just go for it! Film each set on your phone or action-cam (with or without toddler hindrance) join 'em together and speed it up - tag me @itsmattos on Instagram, Twitter, FB or whatever you have! Looking forward to seeing other people's sets. Any type of press-up - you might be a minor deity doing one-arm push-ups on a TRX strap or a starter for ten doing them on your knees. I'm going for a mix of wide, narrow, assymetric, incline and decline - doing about twenty on the hour through the day. It works wonders for my mental health and it can't hurt on the fitness front, either!

Thursday, 29 March 2018

The mainstream news media is usually wrong. But it's the best we have.

The mainstream news media is usually wrong. We know this. Well, I do, anyway - because every single time I've read or heard an article that I had insider knowledge of (like I witnessed the event myself, for instance), the coverage has been woefully inaccurate or downright wrong. Every. Single. Time.

Not a scientific study, I realise, but the consistency of my experience leads me to believe that I cannot (or should not) treat any news report as gospel truth. It's just too unlikely to be right.

Enter the "new" news. Social media has spawned myriad dotcom news pages that the cynical and the conspiracy theorists love to share, because they appear to be the antidote to the dry, old and reputedly biased media. These pages, according to popular belief, are a breath of fresh air, telling us the truth behind the lies and blowing away the smoke and mirrors of the bastard political elite.


I'm not talking about stupid memes that people share because they reflect their own political agenda. Those are all bollocks, but no. I mean serious sounding websites, usually with "art", "science" or "health" in the title, which purport to educate and inform. I have bad news for you...

Many, if not all of those articles are written by pillocks like me. For next to no money. With little or no regard for fact-checking or in fact anything except hitting the word count in the shortest possible time.

Back in the day when  was a bit desperate for cash, I would take any writing gig I could get, so I stumbled across these "agencies" that provide writing work to freelancers. You have to pass an infantile writing test and then, boom! The editor emailed me a list of subjects:

Deodorant - 800wds
Space Exploration - 700wds
Is the taxpayer footing the bill for the Royal Wedding? - 1000wds
The Large Hadron Collider turns up another new particle - 500wds
The world's banks are really run by the Rothschilds - 700wds
I made these up, but you get the picture...

You have about two days to write ten to twenty articles and you get paid a set amount for the lot, if and only if they all conform to a set of guidelines, which was a bigger document than the contracts for any of the books I've written! The point is that I know nothing about these subjects and just Google quickly and write them quicker still; I worked out that if I wrote as fast as I can I could earn about £3 per hour. The editor pastes the words in and the content goes out as informative material. But, with the best will in the world, it's crap.

The purpose of these articles is only to get you to the site and expose you to advertising. That is almost exactly the same business model as a newspaper, but the perpetrators do not care at all about accuracy when it comes to social media. If a few people rubbish the claims and start an argument that just means more exposure and more ad clicks.

If I was writing for The Independent or something, they'd only use me for work that I knew something about. Like kayaking. Or snow. These "agencies" would just send a list of seemingly random subjects to me and say "Do it."

I realised pretty quickly that I didn't want to do this work, but there are a lot of unemployed, stay-at-home parents, wannabe writers, or just desperate people who are still doing it. I suppose that by not sharing this nonsense on social media, we are potentially depriving people of their income, but for the greater good I suspect that perhaps we shouldn't.

Thursday, 22 March 2018

Winter is, ahem... winter.




Now, that ice thing. Here's a video:






Summer tyres
All-season tyres
M+S tyres
4x4 SUV's
Driving fast
and the brains of non-snow-dwellers, apparently.

Saturday, 23 December 2017

Sitting, standing, kneeling...

Canoe & Kayak UK - photo © Pierre Mellows 
Only because I  found it on the internet, to be quite honest, but this lovely photo by the talented Pierre Mellows was shot for my first foray into writing about SUP for print. Interesting composition works really well here (it's a DPS so there's a fold down the middle), and the canoe shot is not what anyone expected. Thus lulling the canoeing and kayaking readers into something or another and circumventing the expected backlash from the anti-stand-up-community... maybe. Why people can't all play nicely together is beyond me. Sitting, standing or kneeling, it's all fun...

Saturday, 16 December 2017

Dynamic Duo Paddling

I thought it would be a marvellous idea to take my buddy Mitch down some rapids in a double kayak. He's been kayaking before, of course, but never on moving water. And I've never paddled a duo with someone in the front who weighs as much as me (or a bit more even)...

So, with very high water levels on the Dart (through the third arch if that means anything to you) it was always going to be an adventure.

Safety boating, filming, commentary and wind-ups by Steve Whetman (Ugg) from Whetman Equipment

My favourite part is actually Ugg running the somewhat rowdy Lover's Leap rapid backwards so that he could film our descent. Awesome work!

Tuesday, 17 October 2017

Hammerhead Land SUP Boards

Land-based training and lots of fun!



All the colours we have


Big thanks to Kiah from Instagram @kiahskate