The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Friday, December 13

Hello, all.

Above is forward Angela Addison, who joined Tottenham in 2018. She’s 19 years old and, like me, is short: Wikipedia says she’s five feet tall exactly.

Ramble of the Day

I’d wish you a happy Friday the 13th, but I don’t want to project feelings onto any of you. If I really did, it’d be slightly tongue-in-cheek, anyway, but it is a little funny to reflect on the paradoxical connotations of the number 13.

Clearly, Friday the 13th is associated with bad luck, so much so that plenty of buildings don’t have a 13th floor. There are other 13s people avoid, and per Wikipedia, the oldest of influencers did it and had their reasons. From culture to culture, people regard the number 13 as inherently bad, and at the same time, multiple groups of people also find it to be ... lucky.

What remains the most funny, though, is that we have a phrase for it in English, too, despite the fact that so many English speaking people find 13 unlucky. “Lucky 13” is ingrained in the English-thinking brain, as is “Friday the 13th” (my brain adds, “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”) The phrase will come out of the same types of people at different times; it might be fair, but it is also slightly funny.

I suppose it’s like anything else, though. The meaning’s always flexible, which like I said, could be valid. It could also be that people think contradictory things and don’t check themselves, or maybe it’s that individuals do feel one way or another, but a group is hard to judge.

You could call it funny, or something else; the interpretation of the contradiction is up to you, too.

tl;dr: Why is 13 lucky and unlucky, I asked and maybe answered?

Links of the Day

The Premier League will make Richard Masters its chief executive after serving as the interim for a year.

Peter Crouch will host Crouch’s Euro Fest 2020, a live post-match show on BBC One combining comedy, entertainment, and football during Euro 2020.

Today’s longer read: Sid Lowe interviews Roberto Soldado on going from a “dickhead” to a role model over the course of his career and being replaced by Harry Kane for The Guardian