Kevin and I are in New Orleans airport where there is free public wi-fi. We are, as usual, here ridiculously early, because you never know when there might be a huge backup at check-in or terrorization, so we have some time before we have to board. There follows a few reflections on my first visit to New Orleans.
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Sport
Morning, What Morning?
We managed to get out of the hotel by noon. Breakfast, as Kevin reports, was at the lovely Court of the Two Sisters. It is a buffet, so the food wasn’t brilliant, but it was still better than most bunch buffets you could find, and it has a fabulous setting. I determined to find a recipe for Oysters Bienville (which I have since done). It was also half the price of breakfast at Brennans (but possibly not half as good).
Bourbon Street was up and watching the Saints game. Fortunately they were not playing the 49ers, and we managed to get back to our hotel before Campbell and Moss ripped the beat-up Saints secondary to shreds in the 4th quarter. The quarter was a little subdued when we went out for an afternoon walk, but I managed to find several very interesting places, all of which deserve a post of their own.
¡ Vamos Los Gigantes !
Kevin and I spent much of today up in The City at Emperor Norton Field. It was a good day to be there. They unveiled a new statue of Orlando Cepeda. Jose Feliciano performed the national anthem. And Los Gigantes won a tense game 7-6. We had Tony Bennett to serenade us on our way out of the ballpark, and a walk along the waterfront back to Embarcadero afterward. It was a lovely warm night in the beautiful City by the Bay. It is good to be occasionally reminded that, no matter how much our lives appear to be falling apart in other areas, we are still very lucky just to live here.
Going, Going, er… Not Sure…
Instant replay comes to baseball. So far it is only for home runs, but I suspect the ability to challenge base running calls won’t be far behind.
I’m tempted to make a joke about Bud Selig and Neanderthals not being stupid after all, but that would be very unfair to Neanderthals.
Take Me Out…
… to the ballgame. It has been quiet here today because Kevin and I have been in San Francisco. It was a lovely day, and we had superb seats – right next to the left field foul pole. Amongst other things it was a perfect place to watch the bullpen warm up. We were pretty much right behind them as they threw. It was almost a pity, therefore, that Barry Zito pitched eight efficient innings. Indeed, the whole Giants performance was very satisfying. They played in a close game against an opponent with a much better record and they showed that they know how to win.
Kevin has written up his report elsewhere, so Ill just confine myself to noticing something odd. I could not find anywhere in the park where you could buy a glove. Given that we were sat in a place where I’ve seen plenty of balls hit before now, we rather needed one, and it occurred to me that I could get one for Kevin as a surprise birthday present, but they were nowhere to be found. We even tried the main stadium shop after the game, but no gloves there either. Given how much fuss the commentators make about bringing your glove to the game, I have half a mind to write to Kruk and Kuip to complain.
Olympic TV
I’d been managing to ignore the Olympics for some time, but now that Kevin is back home we have the TV on. Something to do with pretty girls in tight, shiny leotards, I suspect. However, NBC’s coverage is pretty underwhelming. We are unhappy because they seem to think that human interest stories and infodump features explaining things like where China is to their audience are more important than the actual sport. On talk radio, on the other hand, listeners are apparently complaining about the focus on non-American competitors just because they happen to be winning medals or something. In order to get a better insight into the views of talk radio listeners I spoke to my old friend Tuff Dimbaugh.
Tuff, as you can imagine, is incensed by the NBC coverage. In his view, showing foreign athletes beating Americans is tantamount to treason, and he is planning to sue NBC for their “unAmerican activities”. He also has plans for a rival sporting tournament that he believes will appeal more directly to the talk radio audience. It will be called the World Series of Olympic Sport. Here’s a quick run-down on how it will work:
- The event will always take place in America to remove any time zone problems
- It will happen every year so that people don’t forget about it
- Only Americans will be allowed to compete; a medal table will be maintained by state
- Because most of the athletes have poor name recognition, celebrities will be added to the mix; Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin will be replaced by Britney Spears and Paris Hilton
- Boring sports, and those for which it is difficult to script the outcome in advance, will be replaced by more TV-friendly contests such as WWE wrestling
- In sports that are dependent on awarding points the expert judges will be replaced by Simon Cowell and online voting by the audience
- To make the event more family-friendly, new sports such as Barbecue Grilling and Car Polishing will be added
- The event will be sponsored by McDonalds and winner will receive golden arches rather than gold medals
Shopping
Central Denver is lovely. Despite the wide roads and grid layout, it is a proper town center with lots of good restaurants and shops, and excellent pubic transit (there’s a free bus going up and down the 16th Street mall). Tattered Cover, who sponsored the goodie bags for the con, turned out to have a beautiful bookstore – photos to follow. I did also try to photograph Coors Field, but my camera, being a loyal Giants fan, promptly ran out of batteries.
Anyway, there was a further reductions sale in Anne Taylor Loft, and the local store, Cira, whose window I had been salivating over all week, turned out to have things that fitted me. I am poorer, but very happy. Gotta rush now. The airport beckons.
Commercial Cuteness
I’m slowly catching up with the Tri-Nations action and I was delighted to see that MediaZone’s coverage of the weekend’s NZ-Australia game included the local advertising. Much of it is very local, but I did see the car ad below, which is so seriously cute I felt obliged to share it. (The music, by the way, is “Come to me” by the very wonderful Koop.)
Gender at the Olympics
Today’s New York Times has a superb article on the idiocy of “gender testing” at the Olympics.
If transgender athletes are now allowed to compete officially [in their chosen gender], and if gender testing has been shown frequently to render false results, then what exactly are the Chinese authorities testing for?
In practice what they are testing for is a rare (1 in 20,000) medical abnormality that can cause people who are physically female, able to bear children, and have been raised female from birth, to be mis-diagnosed as “men” and be thrown out of the tournament. One Indian athlete has already had her life destroyed by this absurd test. I cannot for the life of me understand why it is still happening.
The Economist on Cricket
An article posted to The Economist today makes it very clear why the commentators on Test Match Special (Sir Geoffrey excepted) are so horrified by the idea of Twenty20. There is a meme in the UK that holds that watching cricket is the preserve of upper middle class men (and a few of the more intelligent of the aristocracy). If money is allowed into the game, it will be because cricket starts to be watched by commoners (and perhaps even women), and being common (or female) they won’t know how to behave. Oh horror! (And yes, this is very like HP Lovecraft’s inability to cope with New York.) Needless to say, this sort of class-based attitude is not replicated in other countries where cricket is played.
IT Incompetence
The BBC appear to have done something to their audio feeds so that they only work in Internet Explorer. Idiots.
The Philosophy of Shopping
This morning I took myself off into the big city Taunton. This was not, sadly, to sit and watch Somerset all day, though the boys are doing remarkably well against Kent, having just established a first innings lead of 219. I had shopping to do, and I needed to be back here in the afternoon to do some work. But I am able to report on a notable success for the Cheryl Shopping Method.
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Twenty20 Revolution Stumbles Forward
Today the England & Wales Cricket Board finally made an official announcement about the until-now-mythical English Premier League. The results are something of a mixed bag.
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A Cricket Question
In comments someone asked me to explain the “follow-on” rule in cricket. As my answer was getting quite long I decided to make a separate post of it. You can find it here.
An Opportunity Already!
I am listening to Test Match Special, in which Jonathan Agnew is guilty of extreme misoneism, whereas Sir Geoffrey is remarkably sensible.
Prompt Action
It is always nice to be able to praise people for a job well done. This is a follow-up to my report on yesterday’s cricket. Today the England and New Zealand cricket boards got together and agreed to allow a reduction in the mid-game break if the situation demanded it, and the ICC quickly rubber-stamped the agreement. It is unfortunate that it took a farce to force action, but the speed of the response is admirable.
Meanwhile Somerset appear to have found a winning formula at last in the Twenty20. The middle order is starting to make some runs, and they are now routinely fielding three spins bowlers: Blackwell, Banks and Suppiah. More importantly, however, they have worked out how to use Alfonso Thomas. In the last two games he has bowled brilliantly at the end of the innings. Against Glamorgan he took 1-21 from 4 overs and kept Herschelle Gibbs quiet to win the match, and tonight he took 4-27 from 4 overs, including the crucial wicket of Grame Hick. If he keeps turning in performances like that we could yet qualify for the quarter-finals.
And one final note: it seems that Shaun Marsh has been called up into the Australian squad for the Twenty20 game against West Indies. I’m delighted for him. He played really well in the IPL and deserves this chance.
Abandoned Due to Rain
Because I have been asked (see, some people do read the cricket posts).
Yesterday should have seen a 50-over-a-side match between England and New Zealand in Birmingham. In practice it rained much of the day. There are rules to cope with this sort of thing. They eventually started play around 3:00pm, and England managed 24 overs of batting. After the break, New Zealand came out knowing they were operating under the infamous Duckworth-Lewis rules for shortened games. They would have less overs to bat than England. A minimum of 23 were possible in the time available, but if the game could be further shortened and the D/L algorithm would decide who won when the game was stopped. The main concern was that at least 20 overs had to be bowled, otherwise the game would be declared abandoned. (Baseball has a similar rule about the minimum number of innings that must be played.)
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Wishing the Rain Would Stop
Not particularly because I want to go out, or even because I want the cricket at Edgbaston to be played, but simply because it would stop Agnew and his friends from talking nonsense.
This morning we had two new reasons why Twenty20 was a bad thing. They boiled down to:
- Players will be upset if they lose close games
- All of the additional people now coming to watch cricket might not stay forever
And now we have someone, I think Dougie Brown, going on as if no sportsman had ever been paid to play before. All this stuff about team mates falling out over errors on the pitch, or getting angry with managers, or lying about injuries, is just plain ludicrous. Are the Yankees afraid to play in the World Series in case ARod gets paid more than Jetter? Would Alex Ferguson turn down a Champions League final place because he didn’t want to upset some of his players by leaving them out of the side? Does Ron Dennis spend all his time worrying about whether Lewis Hamilton might have a niggle knee injury that he hasn’t told him about? It is just absurd. The only conclusion anyone can take away from this is that while cricketers might have been paid to play before, they have certainly never treated the game like professionals, because they clearly don’t have a clue how to do so and are driven into a gibbering panic by the idea that they might have to.
Today, for the first time ever, I have turned off the BBC’s cricket commentary in disgust; not once, but twice. For goodness sake, BBC, get some people with brains on the program (like the folks at Sky Sports who did a really excellent feature of the Pietersen switch hit this morning).
An American Cricket Hero
Alex Massie has been running an intermittent series of posts in which he selects a cricket team from history based on the first letter of the players’ last name. His latest post is the K team, and it includes an American. Bart King played for the Philadelphians and the USA in the early 20th Century and was one of the pioneers of swing bowling. One of his best achievement was a tour of England in 1908 in which he took 87 wickets in only 10 matches at an average of 11.01. If only the USA had players like that these days.
Switch Hitting in Cricket
All you baseball fans know what switch hitting is, right? You bat right-handed or left-handed, depending on whether you are facing a right-handed pitcher or a left-handed pitcher. Simple. Cricket is a bit more complicated.
I don’t know of any cricketers who are genuine switch hitters in the baseball sense of the term. However, a standard tactic in the shorter forms of cricket is to place most of your fielders on one side of the field, and bowl the ball in such a way as to make it difficult for the batsman to hit the ball to the side of the field that is open. So today Kevin Pietersen invented (or at least introduced to the international scene) a new batting tactic. While the bowler is delivering the ball, you change your stance, and your grip on the bat, allowing you to easily whack the ball through the less-defended side of the field. He did it twice, both times hitting the ball for 6 (a home run in baseball terms). Awesome.
Update: Sky Sports has a brief highlights clip including one of the switch-hit shots here.