Well, I just figured out something about Test Match cricket that I had never understood. There are lots of things that I don’t understand about cricket, because I have never bothered to learn the rules properly, but have just picked up what I have picked up by reading English schoolboy books and reading newspaper coverage of the international matches (which no more elucidate the basic rules of the game than our own newspapers will mention that the home team does not bat in the ninth inning if they are leading). Anyway, I hadn’t somehow realized that a team that bats first only wins a Test Match if they have managed to get the other team all out in both innings by the end of the fifth day. That is, my side can be ahead by a thousand runs, but if the sun goes down on the other side’s innings, it’s scored a draw. That means that I do not<\/I> want my first innings to last for three days, even if I’m scoring like a madman. Which, in turn, leads to the strategy, where my side, having scored three hundred and fifty runs or so, will declare<\/b>, take the ball, and start trying to get the other guys out. Declare too soon, of course, and you risk the other guys scoring more than you did, thus beating you in a particularly embarrassing manner. On the other hand, declare too late and you risk the other guys simply stalling for the rest of the match, leading to the match finishing as a draw with your three or four hundred runs intact.\n
This threw me for a loop (or knocked me for six<\/I>, technically) because I assumed that one similarity between cricket and baseball was that they are leisurely games played without a clock. In fact, now that I study the matter, cricket is a leisurely game played with a clock, or at least with a sundial. All of the strategy is therefore totally different from baseball, not just because of the difference between a good batter scoring a hundred runs a year versus a hundred runs a game, but because clock management (or, rather, daylight management) must be as important in cricket as it is in football. Of course, there is something magnificently English about a five-day game where clock management is important, too.\n
I finally got on the trail of that little rule from reading Vic Marks in The Guardian<\/a>. Also in my reading off the Guardian’s site today was a note from Germaine Greer<\/a> about having received the Golden Bull award from the Plain English Campaign. It’s really a wonderful column, and it’s well worth skimming the comments as well.\n It seems that the PEC wanted to mock the following sentence in Ms. Greer’s Guardian column of 23 October 2006: The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold<\/i>. Now, if I had read the sentence in question (and I don’t think I did), I would, I hope, have immediately recognized that unsynthesised manifold<\/I> must be a term of art, or at least of jargon, having some specific meaning in the field of aesthetics or philosophy. It turns out that it is, and like all good jargon, it is both impenetrable to outsiders and indispensable to insiders. That is, Ms. Greer could not easily have said what she meant in “Plain English”, because what she meant was a complicated reference to a complicated concept she could refer with jargon to rather than explain. Once that is understood, the rest of the sentence is certainly arguable (the first<\/I> attribute? Surely the discontinuity is the least<\/I> attribute?) and not far from clarity.\n One interesting thing about the article and the comments circumjacent is that if the frame through which the Golden Bull is perceived is one of conservative attacks on intellectuals and intellectualism, then the Ms. Greer’s GB was a totally undeserved bit of snark that revealed more about the inadequacies of the PEC than it did about Ms. Greer. If, on the other hand, the frame is one of elite contempt for hoi polloi<\/I> propped up by the timidity of the bullshit-calling boys of the press, then Ms. Greer’s response was a totally undeserved bit of snark that revealed more about the inadequacies of Ms. Greer than it did about the PEC. Hee Hee.\n chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>, Well, I just figured out something about Test Match cricket that I had never understood. There are lots of things that I don\u2019t understand about cricket, because I have never bothered to learn the rules properly, but have just picked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17908,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10377\/revisions\/17908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"