Ashes

So the Ashes start today! "What's are those?", I hear you cry. Well, it's the regular grudge match between England and Australia. A battle of the titans, good vs evil (either way), red vs blue, that sort of thing. The weapons of choice? A hard round bludgeoning object, and a long hard wooden other bludgeoning object....oh yeah! No kidding. Ok. That was an attempt to have you reading a whole paragraph of this post before I mention that it's a cricket tournament, and then you remember you've got to go and ipod a whole bunch of cds of your (now cheekily ironic) '80's Britpop. The country (England!) is all excited. Well, some people are anyway. I don't really follow cricket much these days (but my sister -cmj to my cvj- does!) but I love the idea that people are still excited about it. I spent part of my youth in the Caribbean, where when the big cricket matches were on, everybody -everybody- needed to know the score, and every other person had a little transistor radio switched on that they carried around with them, so that you could get from one place to another hopping between these crackling sonic stepping stones without every losing touch with the action. On a side note, I recall the look on JoAnne's face many years ago when she took me to a baseball game, when after she explained patiently about the game, and apologized that it seemed to go on a bit long to the uninitiated, I calmly reassured her that we had a similar game in the UK, and they go on for.... five days. -cvj Links: You can listen live(!) courtesy of Radio 5. Be aware of the timezone differences of course. Have a look at the site 334notout for some Ashes information and fun. There's a Wikipedia entry on Lord's Cricket ground, where the first match of the series will be played. For those of you who think this is just boys' silliness, on Radio 4 -arguably the best (non-music) radio station on the planet- on today's "Woman's Hour" program (I kid you not) there is a special today entitled The Women Behind the Ashes. Listen to (or record) the download fast before they take it down within 24 hours and replace it by the next show (a really annoying feature of the otherwise excellent website).