Get a job, lose a job

Well, I moved in (mostly) to my new room on Saturday and Sunday. Now I'm suffering through a lack of broadband access, but the room is ok. Plus, Ms. Colombia came back a day early from Barcelona which was most pleasing. Of course, she's going to Madrid tomorrow for the rest of the week (work), but I'll take what I can get.

However, I went to work today and they've pulled the plug on the project I'm working on. So, instead of getting 4 weeks of work, I get 2. At least it's enough money to survive and since we did such a bang up job, they said they'd put a good word in for us at the staffing agency. Hopefully I'll get some work soon. In the meantime, if I'm not working next week, at least I'll be able to work on my thesis.

Today, I was continually assaulted with a great abomination of sporting travesty known as Cricket. As I'm sure 99.9% of the world is unaware, the English and Australians have been playing a 5-day cricket match called the "Ashes Test". We would call it a match or something like that, but in the antiquated language of cricket, it's a test. Apparently, all 3 English cricket fans work with me. They had the live scoring updates on the computer, the radio on at one point, a lengthy discussion about England's chances, and even buggered off early to go watch the end of Day 5 at the local pub. These people love cricket and I can't understand why.

As best I can tell, cricket is a combination of the worst parts of baseball and golf (as in, all parts of baseball and golf). It's slow. It's boring. Fans cheer excessively for extremely limited pieces of action. The rules are indecipherable...probably because there are so many variations of the game that no one is really sure which set of rules are being used at any given "test". And, it's an incredibly soft sport. They stop play if it gets too cloudy, if it rains, if it's getting dark, or for any other reason that they can come up with. As the Roving Alcoholic quipped, "haven't they heard of the modern invention called lighting?" Not only that, they start playing at 10 AM and play until 7 PM with breaks for lunch and, fittingly, tea. You can't get any more soft or sissified than cricket. In fact, owning up to be a cricket player is pretty much a sure way to get your ass kicked in a pub. (Ok, I made that last bit up.)

But, even given all those circumstances, the English are going nuts over cricket right now. My view is that it's sort of like when the US played to success in the World Cup (soccer) a few years ago. There was national pride on the line, people who didn't even know the game came out of nowhere just to cheer on the US team, and the sport seemed to be on the rise. Then, as soon as the US was done, cheering resided, fans returned to the NFL, and soccer was relegated to it's enshrined place in American sports (somewhere distantly behind hockey, aka, nowhere). I fully expect that once the whole cricket business finally concludes (England won), that with the new season of Football (soccer) just starting, that cricket will be relegated to irrelevance in this country, as it should be.

Not really understanding why cricket was still "popular", I asked one of my co-workers. He, in all honesty as an aspiring lawyer, equated knowing cricket in the UK as akin to knowing golf in the US. He lived in the US for a year where he did his LLM, so he's not totally clueless in this regard. At any rate, he explained that people who are aspiring to be posh or to fit into the legal world (big firm legal world) in the UK find cricket very useful as its essentially an old man's game and they have to hobnob with old men in the legal profession (partners, judges, etc). I found his explanation had the ring of truth because, put simply, how could any young person actually find the game interesting compared to the host of alternatives available. I mean, I don't even like tennis, and it's much more entertaining than cricket.

Of course, don't mention any of this to the Indian's or Sri Lankan's. They've taken England's old man sport and made it a national pastime, in the process reducing the UK to a marginal competitor in the cricket world.

And that's the most that I ever thought I would write about cricket, so let's leave it at that.