Sunday saw me bolted into a Formula Silverstone racer and see how badly I can drive round the Stowe test circuit.

After the safety briefing, in which we were told in no uncertain terms that we would crash into something and that we would, in all likelihood, be killed (I may have paraphrased a bit there), it was out onto the track to be strapped in. After five minutes of making a fool of myself stalling, it was out onto the track.

Thankfully, the cameras didn’t catch me spinning off on the North corner.

On the entertainment front, its can often be far more enjoyable than watching the Sky Sports Four in the Premier League: a set of honest lads, playing in front of some genuinely pleasent fans who are enjoying a beer on the terraces. It’s a much more enjoyable way to spend a Saturday afternoon than being forced into holding pens, cramped seats, the wrong train and a grotty pub by the local police when following Leeds’ other football club.

I couldn’t make Saturday’s game but thank’s to the glory of Youtube, I can still see the game’s highlight, an outstanding own-goal from Farsley keeper Piotr Skiba.

Enjoy!

It was also a pretty good weekend for non-league stupidity, thank’s to Rocky Baptiste. If you think you remember the name, he was the star for Havant & Waterlooville when they booked an FA Cup tie against Liverpool in 2007-08.

When it comes to the information superhighway, the printed press is still stuck in the horse and cart, moving along only marginally faster than the music industry.

I’ve long held the belief, and I’m far more qualified people that I hold similar beliefs, that the traditional media’s initial resistance and belated adoption of digital media will ultimately be what kills them off. There are few local newspapers that effectively execute a digital media strategy, with the nationals only marginally better at it.

This week, the tables were turned on the Daily Mail after columnist Jan Moir published a highly offensive, speculative and homophobic slur on the late Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, who passed away last weekend whilst on holiday in Mallorca; “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death“.

Not long after the article was published (and I can’t believe that the term “Moirgate” hasn’t been coined yet), social networks went into meltdown. All of a sudden, this nobody of a journalist was the talk of Twitter, was being vilified on Facebook and was the subject of an unprecedented level of complaints that brought the website if the Press Complaints Commission crashing to its knees.

I’m not going to go into what was wrong with the content of the article itself, plenty of people have done that already and have done it far better that I would have been able to. What I will question is the Mail’s and Moir’s response to the outrage.

The Mail’s online team was faced an impossible damage limitation task on Friday. The headline of the feature was hastily changed and advertisers made it clear that they did not want to be seen to be endorsing such distasteful material.

A defence of Moir’s comments followed soon after, which did little to stem the tide of complaints and demonstrated little other than the Mail’s inherent prejudices and their misunderstanding of how social media works.

Moir claimed that her comments were being taken out of context, that it was “mischievous in the extreme to suggest that [her] article has homophobic and bigoted undertones” and that she was the victim of a “heavily orchestrated” campaign led by people who she doubted had even read the article, cleverly ignoring the Daily Mail’s “heavily orchestrated” campaign against Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand almost exactly twelve months ago. Indeed, there was poetic irony in seeing the Mail squirm after being hit with a huge overdose of its own medicine.

Moir is missing the point however. It is simply not possible to “orchestrate” social media on anything like that scale. No campaign can push a complete nobody to the top trending position on Twitter for more than fourteen hours, ahead of “Follow Friday“, “Balloon Boy” and that bloke from London Underground.

When it’s provoked, Twitter is a bird that can seriously bite back and what the Mail needs to understand is that it is a far more powerful being than any daily newspaper. The Daily Mail appeals to a narrow section of society. It knows who its readers are and it caters to their prejudices. Social media isn’t like that. Social media has no target audience, it has no editorial standpoint and it has no agenda. It is an eclectic mix of people who yesterday became united in their disgust at Jan Moir and her insinuations.

The furore is dying down, Twitterers have moved onto the next big topic of the day and so I think it’s safe to say that we’ve heard the last of this. The PCC are not particularly strong at the best of times and it is unlikely to open an official enquiry unless Gately’s family, partner or his close friends make a formal complain personally. Even if it did, the fact that Paul Dacre, editor of the Mail, is chairman of the Press Compaints Commission’s ethics committee leaves me fairly confident that the whole incident will be allowed to drift away unnoticed.

If there is something to take from this, it is that the mass media realises now, if it didn’t before, that it no longer holds the ability to influence what we think and what we feel is justified. Moir is free to say what she wishes in tune with the laws of the land, but she has no right to complain when the rest of the world bites back over what they believe is right.

It’s the August Bank Holiday and it’s pissing with rain. Evidently, the Leeds Festival is in town.

And that’s where I’ll be spending the weekend, after perhaps foolishly turning down the offer of a plush box at the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final at Wembley, but it should be a good laugh none the less - and the perfect way to back up from last week’s trip to Amsterdam!

The other downside (apart from the whole “camping in shitty weather” thing)? I’ve still not managed to catch any live football so far this season - I could even miss Farsley Celtic wiping out their 10-point deficit this weekend against Gainsborough.

Questions that you never knew existed, let alone needed answering, get examined with a fine toothed comb over at Grauniad Towers and every now and then, they let their faithful readers chip in.

So when a pointless question came up that I actually had an idea about, for no reason that I can think of, it was my time to shine.

So there you have it. Thank’s to me, a small group of people have some even more pointless football trivia relating to Vasco de Gama and the FIFA World Club Championship.

The 22-3 defeat probably supports that theory.

• Crocodile from Sweden - and very nice it is too.
• Keo from Cyprus.
• Singha from Thailand (it is actually Thai, none of this “brewed under licence in Tadcaster” nonsense.
• Steinlager from New Zealand.

I think I might enjoy this!

Having previously just run a simple kick-about with how ever many work colleagues we could get together, it was unanimously agreed that we were probably good enough to join a full-blown competitive league.

Errr, yeah, about that.

Game one and Goals could only find a vacancy in Division One of their Wednesday league and an opening fixture against the current league leaders.

I’m not sure, but the 20-0 defeat probably won’t do our survival hopes much good.

Perhaps we should take heart from the FA’s latest viral ad. A well-worked spoof on the Nike “The Next Level” ads.

And so on to Wakefield, for it was time for Leeds Rhinos’ annual Super League trip to Belle Vue a venue that inexplicably manages to obtain a safety certificate and change it’s name ever other week. From the original name of Belle Vue, it became the Atlantic Solutions Stadium (although the abrevation “ASS” was a more apt description) and today it is known as the Hearwell Stadium - presumably not an endorsement of the echoy PA system.

Wakefield was recently shamed as the worst city in the UK for sporting provision and from the facilities that their only professional sporting play out of, it’s not hard to see why. Plans for a new stadium have been and gone and so it appears as if the club’s Super League licence will expire before a brick is laid.

The current stadium is a complete wreck. At one end is the North Bank, a hill filled in with poor quality concreate, riddled of cracks and weeds. At the other end of the ground is collection of portakabins, stacked up in the style of a Benidorm apartment complex. Along one touchline is the main stand and opposite that, just a paved-over footpath and a bar that manages to run out of beer every time the crowd is in excess of 6,000 people.

The city itself is no better.

I’ve always been sceptical over Wakefield’s city status. For me, cities should have a vibrancy, some character, something different. Wakefield doesn’t have any of those things. For when the cathedral clock strikes 5pm, shop shutters slam to the floor as if it were some well rehersed security alert and the main throughfare throughout the city centre turns silent.

Come to the bottom of the recently block-paved Westgate, yet another part of the UK that has allowed itself to become a clone of every other city centre High Street, and you enter Kirkgate; a concreate jungle that takes you back to the Soviet era. Walking down Kirkgate, you need to remind yourself that you aren’t watching in monochrome. It’s just grey, grey, grey, grey and a bit more grey.

One of the few positives about Wakefield is that, for Leeds at least, it has always been the source of two Super League points. Up to now, Wakefield have never beaten Leeds at Belle Vue in the summer era and this year was no exception. OK, so it took a comeback from 30-16 down with 10 minutes to go and a last second winner, but a win is a win.