Stacey's Mom has got it going on

The Americans may not to where they should use a letter 'u', but I bet it made writing that particular song easier. Somehow, 'Stacey's Mum has a really nice bum' doesn't quite have that same catchy ring to it (sounds pretty Kiwi though).

That's certainly nothing to do with the rest of this post.

You know, looking at it, 2005 really was a crap year for this blog. Just poor. We need to get back to the glory days of 2003 and 2004, where there were veritable treasure troves of long rambling entries about how drunk I got in the weekend. And that starts with me getting this post I've been fiddling with forever out of the way. Since parts of it date back to the beginning of December, and events have moved past it and keep doing so, and I've been up to one or two or twelve or thirty-three things since last I made any kind of substantial effort, I'm just going to post what I have right now without making it better / trying to catch everything up or make it relevant to much going on right now. Sorry about that, chief. But we've got to get this albatross off my neck before it drags us all down permanently into the murky depths of never updating ever.

Here then out of the blue are some cricket related rants I wrote after attending a couple of matches, and then modified, and then pissed about with, and then modified again a number of times - all way too slowly. If I kept up the pace, I would be writing about things that happened when I was 30 when I was actually 60. So no more mucking about; here's the words as they are now. If you want a broader context to put the whole thing into, I'll give you: cricket's great, I'm pretty obsessed with it, I went to some one day internationals late last year. But you knew all this (or perhaps you're in deluded denial on the first point. Not to worry, you folks will be first against the wall come the revolution.)

Anyway, onwards:

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Primarily I guess the first thing that leaps to mind, as a fan of that best of all sports, cricket, is my attendance at the 3rd one dayer in the Chappell-Hadlee series at Jade Stadium on December 9th or so I think it was, where in defiance of all logical probabilty we chased down 332 (a world record) to beat Australia by 2 wickets. Wow. Oh wow, wow, wow. I mean that sincerely. It was certainly the best live sporting event I've ever attended, and possibly the best ever event full stop. I mean, it was a really good game of cricket, and my ticket stub duly went into the old souvenir box (straight to the pool room) so I can look back in later years and recall going absolutely freakin' bananas with Si, my brothers, and everyone else in the stadium as somehow, somehow, we conjured a win through McCallum and Vettori in the last few overs. This followed the really rather good run a ball century by Scott Styris and some big blows from Jake Oram, who at one point hit the ball onto the roof of the number 3 stand. Just for clarification, it's not a short roof. It is in fact about 5 stories high (if anything a conservative estimate, since the new West stand is about 12 stories high, and the front edge of the roofs of the old stands, which are their highest point, are probably about half the total height of the West stand). When you also take into account the fact that the top of the 5 storey building is probably some 60 metres away at least, that's a pretty big hit, like a 'how can he possibly make the ball go that far?' kind of a hit. I mean, I can recognise that what we have going on there are some serious physics, involving the ball approaching the batsman at 135 to 140 kms/hour, his bat moving in a roughly opposite direction at some high airspeed (propelled by some pretty big arms) to potentially produce a pretty good Newtonian reaction, and there being a sort of optimal (for the batsman) point in the bat at which striking the leather and cork ball with the willow bat produces the maximum amount of spring, and I don't know, let's use torque as a random term that probably isn't the right one, so that's all (semi) understandable - but nevertheless, he hit it over a 5 story building that was 60 metres away. I'm more inclined to believe on occasions like this that there's some kind of mystical force at work. I have experienced (and written here about) before the kind of zen-like trance state you can sometimes find yourself in when batting really well, where the bowler comes in, bowls, you make some body movements, and then ball seems to be sailing over point or midwicket or cover for 4 or 6 and then you stop and think: what was it exactly that I did then? I can only imagine how awesome that sort of feeling must be when you look up at find you have not just hit a six, but in fact that the ball is sailing well beyond the expansive arena in which the game is played and out into the dark cricketless void somewhere, while 10,000+ people look on. This is surely the time, if ever there was one, to look down the pitch at the bowler and intone in the Voice of the Ages: "Foolish and insolent mortal! Bow down before the God of Cricket, who has manifested himself in this humble vessel, his faithful follower, so that he may personally propel your pitiful offering directly into Hell itself!"

Cricket being cricket though, Oram ended up playing on a full toss not too long after that shot, so I guess it just shows that you have to watch it with those sort of blasphemous comments (and that the God of Cricket is a fickle deity). Having rocked back and somewhat unexpectedly deposited the fastest opposition bowler over midwicket for 6 myself (my own shot didn't go 5 stories up, but still) in the course of a win for team yesterday, I can tell you that basking in the immediate afterglow of that sort of thing during an innings more than makes up for the eventual comedown of getting out. The correct procedure after playing such an emphatic shot is to hold your follow through for a second or two in a classical MCC coaching manual pose, giving the rapidly departing ball not much more than a casual glance, just enough to appraise the arc of it's flight in your mind's eye - no need to stare too hard or worry about where it's going to land after all, you know exactly how hard you've just hit it - and then, equally casually, put just the merest hint of a smug smile on your face and look down the pitch to try and meet the eyes of the bowler - which will be impossible, because as soon as you look at him, his eyes will desperately look anywhere else, often down to the ground as if he was one of those mountain goats signifying submission following a loss in a territorial head-butting contest.

Some lads purchase overpowered cars and drive up and down Colombo Street. I prefer to play cricket.

Anyway, Dan and I returned to watch the Sri Lankan game on the 3rd, which was a pretty good match as well, although it could hardly live up to the previous one. Notable features of that particular game were Astle getting out twice off no-balls, Cairns hitting the ball on to the roof of the stand (they need a higher roof it seems) and silly, silly, silly levels of security. The security had been heavy-handed enough at the Australian game, but for the Sri Lankan one, they decided that drink containers larger than one litre were not allowed into the ground. As most people get dropped off there or park some distance away, this meant many wheelie bins were filled with confiscated unopened soft drink and water bottles at the gates. This wasn't really aimed at preventing people from bringing in alcohol, you understand - I had Dan's opened and half drunk 750ml Pump bottle in my hands as we went through, which may as well have contained straight vodka, since no-one looked twice at it - but apparently because of the dangers that vessels larger than 1 litre posed as potential missiles. Your one litre bottle of Coke is fine - but your 1.5 variety becomes a deadly weapon. There was no arguing this rule, although many tried, and the ticket line crawled ahead because of this. A bit ahead of us in line for example was a guy with 4 kids ranging in age from about 8 to about 13 who was unimpressed that he had to surrender his 3 Just Juice Bubbles bottles because otherwise the crowd would not be safe if he, I don't know, went insane during the day's proceedings, and decided for no reason to hurl a full bottle of the soft drink he brought for his kids wildly into the air... soooooo stupid. I stand to be corrected, but I don't know of anyone seriously injured, or indeed non-seriously injured, by any full flying drink bottle of any size at Jade Stadium while I was (or wasn't) in attendance. Daft. Our own problem came from Dan having brought a vaccum flask made of stainless steel (of the type I nearly killed myself with once), filled with juice - 1 litre capacity, so no problem there, but made of stainless steel, so not allowed in. This was fair enough I suppose, since after all we may have well lobbed it into the midst of the unsuspecting crowd if we were psychos. We had been dropped off and had nowhere to stow the thermos during the game, so Dan backtracked to prominently chuck it into some handy bushes to the general amusement / disbelief / head-shaking of the ticket line, and luckily we found it again following a brief search after the game. While Dan was consigning the thermos to its uncertain fate, I asked the security people if it was OK for him to come in, since he only weighs 56 kilos or something ridiculous like that, and I'm fairly sure I could heft him at least a little way into the air, but my question was met with stony silence. As ridiculous as all this carry-on was, as we read the conditions of entry to the ground, we decided that the security staff weren't actually doing their job strictly enough, since the signs said something like:

No items that may be used as projectiles, weapons, or litter are to be brought into the ground.

Wait on, No items that may be used as litter are to be brought into the ground? Hmmm. To the dictionary:

litter: 1 a : a covered and curtained couch provided with shafts and used for carrying a single passenger

Hmmm, that certainly makes it hard for the likes of your average ancient Egyptian monarch to get in and enjoy a day at the game, but I think that they were perhaps referring more to this one:

litter: 4 a : trash, wastepaper, or garbage lying scattered about b : an untidy accumulation of objects

...and if we cross-reference garbage, we get 'discarded or useless material', so a condition of entry into the ground would seem to be that you are not allowed to bring anything into it that can be discarded. The list of items, nay, things, that cannot be discarded, is a short one. If they boil that rule right down and start enforcing it, in fact, there's going to be 10,000 naked people at the next cricket game, each nursing whatever metaphysical concepts they personally consider indisposable, like 'love' and 'religious tolerance'. Shaved naked people, mind you, since, although scissors are in violation of all manner of the conditions of entry, you can always pluck your various hairs out and use them as litter. But then...oh no, a significant percentage of household dust is human skin, and I guess dust would count as litter, so really there's no letting anyone in without some kind of all over body fissure sealant treatment...

Are we getting that I think that their policies are ridiculous yet? The was a second bag search just to get into the DB Draught stand as well, mind you. After that we were incensed enough that we, 2 of the more non-trouble causing young male cricket fans you are likely to meet, spent the first hour or so of the game thinking up ways to stick it to The Man as he is represented by Red Badge security (a cleaned-out sunscreen bottle filled with the hard liquor of your choice was the best idea we came up with). Really though, in light of their 'no potential projectiles, weapons or litter' policy, the ultimate defiance would be to smuggle in a disposable rocket launcher, and then perhaps use it to take out Brett Lee at the top of his mark. I'm sure a certain grunt in the Royal Marines can hook us up.

***

Interestingly enough, (or perhaps more accurately not really interestingly enough at all...oh well, sentence started, too late now) after I wrote that I ended up talking to someone (or listening to someone, anyway) in some technical detail about the relative merits of disposable rocket launchers.

Using one to blow away Brett Lee was not discussed, however.

Right. To bed. What witticisms I may be lucky enough to produce shall not be wasted here and now; instead posting every day for a week is to now follow in a concerted Blog revival attempt. The Blog is dead, long live the Blog.

You heard me.