July 2008

My final (only) word on WYDstock

Submitted by Rick Eyre on July 30 2008, 5:13 pm

With WYDstock 2008 happily out of the way for ten days now, time for me to make a few comments, having spent most of the WYDstock Week out of town taking my daughter on school holidays.

Firstly, this was a Northern Hemisphere event transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. It's summer vacation time for students in the Global North, but in Sydney it's mid-winter. And, school holiday fortnight notwithstanding, not an especially quiet time for the Central Business District in July either.

Testemunha de terra 3: Acting at a glacial pace

Submitted by Rick Eyre on July 10 2008, 3:49 pm

We're reliably informed that the spectacular breaking of ice from the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina on Monday has little to do with global warming, and more to go with the glacier's alignment.

Still, it's 91 years since ice has broken from this glacier during an Argentine winter. Video from Reuters:

Coming up: the Eurovisioning of cricket?

Submitted by Rick Eyre on July 5 2008, 10:00 am

It's a warm welcome to Bulgaria, Estonia and Turkey. One of the more sensible outcomes from this week's ICC meetings in The Home Of Cricket, Dubai, was the expansion of the governing body's membership by three, to now encompass a total of 104 countries.

This represents cricket's biggest incursion into eastern Europe to date. Estonia is the first state of the former Soviet Union to attain ICC membership, while neighbours Bulgaria and Turkey join Croatia and Greece as south-eastern Europe's representatives in the cricketing community.