June 2005

Caught Behind
(Soumya Bhattacharya/The Guardian, 18.6.05)
Book review of "Worth the Wait: An autobiography" by Darren Lehmann.

Launching my Cricket Oggcast, a podcast of downloadble audio files encoded in the Ogg Vorbis format.

I'm starting with a short piece taken from a press conference held in New Delhi on 15 March 2005, when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised to Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh that she would learn to understand cricket. We're going to hold her to that promise.

Coverage from the British Sunday papers of Australia's humiliation by Bangladesh at Sophia Gardens on Saturday:

Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times:

Bangladesh yesterday pulled off one of the greatest upsets in cricket, and possibly all sport

Vic Marks in the Observer:

It's one thing to lose a 20 over-a-side game to England by 100 runs. Losing a 50 over-a-side game to Bangladesh by five wickets takes Australia's incompetence to new levels. Can they be trusted in 5-day Test matches?

And are we witnessing Australia's worst team to England since 1912?

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2005/s1385275.htm

ABC television's weekly rural affairs show Landline did a feature in last Sunday's program on the cricket bat-making industry in Australia. It seems that English willow is the preferred wood for cricket bats, Australian willow not being up to the same quality. But the Australian growers are working on it.

Here's the transcript.

BBC London's coverage of the absurdly high-scoring Middlesex-Glamorgan game at Southgate is available today in real audio.

And I discovered the other day that BBC World Service has a 15 minute program updated every Friday with the descriptive title "World Cricket". Audio link (again, real audio only). This week's program was, primarily, on the tsunami benefit match held at Lord's on Tuesday.

My PostNuke CMS is down again and I'm damned if I know why :-(

Until further notice I'll be running the blog only on this site, but now that I've almost finished chortling about Gilchrist and Ponting's performance against Bangladesh today, I'll put some of the more popular links from the usual home page over to the blog section.

The RSS feeds are unaffected except for the calendar, which I hadn't maintained anyway.

As if you've noticed! (At least I know what to do next time...)

The regular homepage for this website is down at the moment. I'm not sure why, but until I can sort things out (and at this stage there is no evidence of a hack) only the blog will be available.

Which might be encouragement for me to get back and do some writing again!

Apologies for the inconvenience.
Rick.

From The Register:
Robot runs riot at California hospital

Staff and patients at San Francisco’s UCSF Medical Center were left fearful and shaken last week, when a robotic nurse threw off its shackles and went on the rampage.

“Waldo”, a robot used to dispense pills and potions to medical stations at the top notch medical facility, refused to return to the pharmacy to pick up a fresh stash at the end of his rounds, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.