(20-01-2010, 09:16 AM)Sweder Wrote: (19-01-2010, 09:32 PM)Mid Life Crisis Man Wrote: (19-01-2010, 11:14 AM)Seafront Plodder Wrote: And whoever thought it was a good idea to dress the ball-kids in pink, needs shooting. 
It's a breast cancer awareness/fundraising thing. The whole country is pretty much decked out in pink these days. 
Hence that Jane McGrath day during the recent test with Pakistan (hoorah! Cricket!). Slats looked particularly fetching in his full pink suit; Shayne Warne seemed to find this particularly amusing and rattled on about it at every opportunity. Nice touch by the Pakistan team to get in the spirit by wearing pink caps & handing them over to Glenn McGrath on the boundary as they came onto the field. Sometimes sport can warm the cockles.
Am just reading a brilliant and thought-provoking new book, "Smile Or Die" (Barbara Ehrenreich - "How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World"). The author is a breast cancer 'survivor' who rails against the "pink ribbon culture" and the way it, in her view, infantilises women and trivialises the disease. Why are we not angry about it, she asks? Why are we not demanding an answer to the fact that in industrialised countries, breast cancer has increased an astonishing 1% every year since the early 1950s? (Even immigrants from non-industrial nations quickly get pulled into the statistics when they arrive in 'the west'.) Instead we have a passive regression to fluffy childhood with regiments of pink teddy bears, and rules that forbid us from using the word 'victim'.
Highly recommended read, and I haven't even got onto the bit I'm really interest in -- the discussion around the corrosiveness of positive thinking in business which, she argues, is largely responsible for the current economic disaster.
Sorry -- back to your tennis chat.
