The Clutch of the Matter

Last week my hire car broke down in the fast lane of the motorway. In the middle of a massive traffic jam. Which cleared pretty much the instant the clutch had snapped.

So we were then holding up an entire motorway's worth of traffic in rush hour just outside Manchester. The police had to block off all of the lanes and then push the car across into the hard shoulder. Then the AA had to tow me half an hour to the car hire place, while I steered and tried to make sure I didn't crash into the back of the van.

It wouldn't have helped in that instant, but it got me thinking about the fact that I would have absolutely no idea how to go about fixing that issue if it happened in a situation where it would even be theoretcally possible to do so. As with almost everything in life, I have no idea how on Earth a clutch works (the mechanics of it, and how I would access them).

Most of the time that's fine, because in general you can find an expert who does know. There's a tweet on this topic that riled me up when I saw it.

The general premise is pretty flawed - these things didn't cause the housing crisis - but the idea that people don't know how to do things that they used to is correct enough.

Back in the day (like, properly back in the day, so prepare for some extremely amateur anthropology), when Homo Sapiens existed exclusively in hunter-gatherer societies, the amount of knowledge you needed just in order to survive was astronomical. You had to be able to know how to hunt, and gather, and which plants were poisonous, what the signs were that a big animal was going to try and kill you, and how to avoid it when it did.

Nowadays, in the West, the list of things you need to know in order to survive is a lot smaller. And the slow crawl towards modern capitalism from the advent of agriculture via the medium of specialisation means that if we don't know how to do something then there's always going to be someone we can pay to do it for us, if that's what we want.

Add this to the fact that we exist in the age of infinite content (this is part of it, so sorry about that) and it makes sense that no one knows how to do anything. Back in the day (not so far back in the day this time), people could muck about with a bit of driveway paving or toilet repairing because things like TikTok or the BBC Sport app didn't exist (or so says the old man yelling at the cloud).

So, in conclusion (because this feels like a poorly researched treatise on knowledge and the attention economy so probably needs some kind of formal wrapping up), we probably know just as much stuff as our poisonous-berry-avoiding and gutter-cleaning ancestors - it's just that all of the stuff we know now is basically useless (for instance, the fact that I know it was Kostas Tsmikas who scored the winning penalty in the 2022 FA Cup final wouldn't keep me alive that long in the wilderness).

Useless that is, in all walks of life except one. And with that in mind, here's your first starter for ten...

Until last week we hadn't had an Oxbridge clash all series, but with Jesus, Cam vs St Catherine's, Ox following on from Christ's vs Oriel we've now had two in a row. Both of tonight's Colleges have sisters with the same name at the other institution (although the St Caths at Cambridge is spelled with an A. Or rather, two As). Jesus have three quarter finals to their name, while its a first showing for Catz since a first round exit in 1998.

Laskowski opened the scoring for St Catherine's, but they could only manage one bonus, and after this Jesus would evicerate them on the buzzer.

Aggarwal got the Cantabrigians going with Moore's Law, and they struggled with a set on baseball, but it didn't matter. Kaye kept them going with Windermere and they nabbed two bonuses on Scottish geography (the last one, Greenockite, being quite a toughie).

The first picture round was on exemplary modern architecture (although I don't think any of the examples looked all that nice) and this too went to Aggarwal. Kaye got another too, then a third, and a single bonus pushed them to within touching distance of three figures. St Catz were nowhere to be seen, and the one hundred point barrier was soon shattered.

Finally, with the scores at 135 to 15, the Oxford quartet got back on the board thanks to Laskowski, who managed to pick up a Kaye fumble.

Unfortunately this wasn't the start of a glorious comeback, and MacGregor got Jesus back on track with the music starter. At 190 to 30, Catz do manage a brief resistance, with three starters back to back, including Buckminsterfullerene from the skipper, an answer he looks very proud of.

This flurry brings them up to 85, but they're still nowhere near a threat, and Aggarwal quickly stamped out any thoughts of it becoming one. They do make it up to a hundred points in the end, which is respectable enough. Its just unfortunate for them that their opponents made it twice as high.

Jesus 225 - 105 St Catz

A fun, if uncompetitive match that. Jesus will probably need to up their bonus rate in the next round as I doubt they'll have it so much their own way on the buzzer. Commiserations to Catz, who came up against a very strong side.