Have you tried Gmail offline? It is quite good. What I don’t like though is that it downloads attachments automatically to your local drive. I wish they had an option to disable it.
Manchester United have been swashbuckling ever since I wrote a draft entitled “WTF is wrong at United?” It is still unpublished, and I hope I won’t ever need to publish it. If they win tomorrow against Everton (who might be without Cahill and Fellaini), and Liverpool and Chelsea cancel out each other, United would be firmly in the driver’s seat to make it a hat-trick of League titles.
Simon Barnes has this fantastic piece in The Times on why ruthlessness is the most important characteristic in sport. A really good read.
… every victory in sport is based on a willingness – an eagerness – to see the other guys lose. Victory in sport has its basis in a readiness to cause disappointment, suffering, pain and, yes, humiliation. This is not entirely admirable, it must be admitted, but the fine and admirable things we find in sport would not be possible without it.
Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, had other ideas. For him, sport was a religion, a source of inner improvement. Sport for him was a meeting between the body and the soul. Up to a point, Baron. Sport can showcase and even encourage great virtues, but it can do a great many more things as well.
… victory in sport doesn’t go to the most virtuous contestant. It goes to the best player, the best team, the one that had the luck, the right decisions, the strength, the speed, the bloody-mindedness. We like to think that the good guys win, especially when they’re England or British or they are a team or an individual we have an interest in.
But sport doesn’t reward virtue. Virtuous people sometimes win, but never because of their virtuousness. Nasty people sometimes lose, but not as a punishment for their nastiness. Sport is not a morality play… there is a sense in which the quest for achievement acquires its own morality. If you look too long at sport, you find yourself seeing such things as obsessive preparation, narrowness of vision, uncompromising competitiveness, willingness to cause misery and a taste for playing the flat-track bully as virtues in themselves.
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Tags: GMail, Google Gears, Manchester United, offline, ruthlessness, Simon Barnes, The Times
Escape.