Monetary theory of cricket

Warning: Americans should not attempt to read the following post.

Browsing through the archives of the unwieldy monster that TofE has become, I happened upon this amusing thread in which I argued that complaints about the relatively low-scoring nature of football missed the point that the soccer goal has a uniquely high value as a sporting currency, and that this has its own advantages – namely, a football goal is a genuinely cheer-worthy event. The contrast is basketball, where games finish with scores like 78-76. If the football goal is a pound, then a basketball point is like the old lira – you need so many to get anything that it’s hard to get excited about any particular one.

This got me thinking, as many things do, about cricket. Perhaps one reason cricket (especially Test cricket) is so confusing for the uninitiated, but so deliciously involving for aficionados, is that it has two currencies: runs and wickets.

I think it is unique in this respect – at least, I can’t think of any other major sport with a similar balance.

Rugby and American football each have multiple ways of getting points, but the currency is still the point. Baseball has runs and outs, but outs are very easy to get, runs are very difficult, and since the result is decided by the number of runs once both sides have had all their outs only scoring or preventing runs really matters.

The relationship between cricket runs and wickets is far more complicated. The currencies can fluctuate in value according to the situation. One wicket is not worth the same as any other: a top batsman might be worth three tailenders or more. Often you won’t really know what a wicket was worth until the end. The team with the most runs wins, but only if all the opposition’s wickets have been taken. So on the last day of a Test Match, with one side way ahead in runs and the other hanging on for the draw, the value of the run drops to almost zero, while wickets become priceless.

This is why it is so vexing when women people ask you “who’s winning?” during a cricket match. What a hopelessly crude question.

A glutton for punishment invites your comments

TofE's resident decent leftist Martpol has completed the long-promised essay which will finally destroy us nasty pro-war types.

You can find it here. Be gentle.

(In all seriousness - this is no Steven Wood-style anti-rational rant. There's no mention of oil at all.)

And the rest is monosodium glutamate

A nine-year-old girl has become a TV chef in China.

Shi Yulan, from Shanghai, is now writing her own recipe book, reports Qianjiang Evening News.

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By thunder, I love Chinese food. But nobody can pretend it’s that technically difficult, as this story demonstrates. You basically chuck it all in a wok and stir it round, adding as much soy sauce as you can tolerate.

An old pal of ours is a lawyer and occasional male model (heh!). He is of Hong Kongian extraction and for his recent birthday bash he took us along to one of Bristol’s best secret restaurants, hidden in a concrete underpass and mostly patronised by Chinese. The night had everything: a rotating table-top like in Indiana Jones; about twenty dishes the like of which you definitely don’t see down the local Chinese Chippy; karaoke songs in logograms and then, completely incongruously for what was a relatively quiet, genteel, mixed party: a stripper - procured as a surprise for our host by his brother. She was a Miss Whiplash, public humiliation-type performer, and we were supposed to laugh as she made him do embarrassing things.

Sense of humour is a very deep cultural fault line. The English sat with fixed grins and tittered awkwardly. The Chinese were roaring, hysterical, on-the-floor. Really, they were uncontrollable. Schadenfreude is a German word but it doesn’t come close to this.

How does he do it?

This picture shows Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum at Davos, flanked, naturally enough, by the President of Liberia and... yes... Bono.

How does Bono do it? No really, how? He is an unstoppable, unembarrassable, impossibly ubiquitous, implausibly righteous, one-man Quango.

The lesser Hitch

Pity poor Mrs Hitchens when her lads were bolshy teens!

Peter Hitchens is the younger brother of the more successful Christopher and unsurprisingly enough they mostly hate each other. Peter (a former Trotskyist) lurks crankily on the hard right, but in true Hitchens style his real role is that of Contrarian. (He opposed the Iraq invasion while lefty Chris supported it.)

Peter’s latest post on his entertaining blog has a bash at hanging. Naturally, he’s pro, and funnily enough he’s trying to fight off precisely the conservative argument against capital punishment that stirred up such a hornet’s nest here. He takes the line that a couple of TofE’s commenters took: that opposing the death penalty on the grounds that irreversible fatal penalties cannot be justified in a fallible system is hypocritical, since we are quite willing to accept the risk of fatalities to innocents in other areas (he brings up the Iraq war and other things, but could equally have mentioned road traffic safety etc).

This is of course a nonsense argument, first because it is not a zero sum game (life imprisonment offers an alternative), and second because in each area of public life – be it road traffic, war or criminal justice – you must attempt to have the least worst possible arrangement, and unavoidable flaws in one do not excuse you from having similar flaws in another if they are easily escaped.

The fact that most of Hitchens’s commenters – themselves right-wing Daily Mail readers – patiently take him apart on the issue illustrates the power of this conservative argument for abolition.

Capital punishment is a knee-jerk issue that traditionally divides two sets of people who can’t stand each other: the it’s-all-society’s-fault bleeding hearts; versus the hangers and floggers. Because of this, it’s an emotionally difficult one to let go, which is why pro-hangers will take a leaf out of the leftist book and scattergun everything they can think of at the faillibility argument. In fact, the argument is often not particularly emphasised by true bleeding hearts because it is about limiting the power of the state over the individual.

There are two types of pro-hanging conservatives: those who haven’t encountered the fallibility argument; and those who haven’t thought about it for long enough.

New blogger oddities

TofE has finally been shifted to the new blogger format, having previously been too large and ponderous to attempt the leap, and a few odd things are happening with signing in for the comments. I expect they'll sort themselves out in the fullness of time.

In the meantime, if you come up as 'Anonymous' don't take offence or have an existentialist crisis - no commenter will ever be anonymous in my eyes - TofE loves you all almost equally.

Slipsliding down the slopes

Today is a day for real-life reductio ad absurdams for some common blogworld bugbears.

First comes news from Belgium about a school going the extra mile in warning student smokers about the dangers inherent in their unhealthy habit:

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Pupils allowed to smoke - in a cage
A Belgian school is to let pupils smoke - but only if they stand in a cage and wear a graphic badge.

The badge shows an x-ray image of a pair of lungs, blackened by smoking, reports De Morgen.

The new rule will be introduced for pupils over the age of 16 at the Vesalius Institute in Ostende in February.

Assistant-director Claudine Lesaffre said: "We do a lot to promote a healthy lifestyle in our school. One third of our 600 students smoke. We've been trying to motivate the youngsters over the years, encouraged teachers to attend smoke free courses. But nothing seems to help. By wearing the badge, students expresses it is by their own free will they are damaging their health. If this won't help, I don't know what to do anymore."

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Given that cigarette packets now come emblazoned with large stark warnings like Smoking these cancerous fatal deathsticks will kill you dead, deader than a dodo, and will also kill to death everyone you love and their children and their children’s children, you murdering bastard, nobody with the minimum mental capacity required to enter a shop, purchase the fags and successfully light one of them can be unaware of the ‘message’ that smoking isn’t very good for you.

If you give kids a badge for being bad, they’re all going to want one. To discourage teenagers, reverse psychology is the only psychology. Perhaps they should try a completely different tack and go back to the old days when tobacco ads could make outrageous health-benefit claims like “Nine out of ten doctors recommend Camel for asthmatics and long-distance runners”

Meanwhile, a man in China has married himself:

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A Chinese man has married himself to express his "dissatisfaction with reality".

Liu Ye, 39, from Zhuhai city, married a life sized foam cut-out of himself wearing a woman's bridal dress.

"There are many reasons for marrying myself, but mainly to express my dissatisfaction with reality," he said. "This marriage makes me whole again. My definition of marriage is different from others."

The ceremony was held at a traditional courtyard packed with more than 100 guests. The 'couple' were led out by a bridesmaid and a groomsman and bowed to ancestors and senior guests for blessings.

Liu says he is not gay, but admits he's "maybe a bit narcissistic", reports New Express.

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He’s getting married for all the wrong reasons: it’ll never last.

Well, she did tell us she was trouble

Amy Winehouse was kicked out of the Savoy Hotel’s bar – because her singing was upsetting the regular customers.

Having attended the South Bank Awards earlier on, which were held in the hotel’s ballroom, Amy had been hanging around all day.

It's reported that Winehouse and some famous pals were grouped around the piano, and managed to get through about eight songs until the complaints became too numerous to ignore.

She was then ordered out of the famous American Bar back to her room...

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...but she's definitely not no good. Philistines.

The end of race

In today's Times:

How to make my child feel like a black sheep
Jamie Whyte

I am white, my wife is black and our daughter, unsurprisingly, is brown. I think she is lucky. Her skin is almost golden and her hair falls in beautiful black ringlets that, thanks to my Celtic ancestors, reveal copper undertones when caught by the sun.

But according to Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, my daughter may be in grave peril. In a recent speech he claimed that, as a person of mixed race, she is at risk of “identity stripping”. She may “grow up marooned between two communities”.

Like many others in the race industry, Mr Phillips is a racialist. He thinks that your race is the most important fact about you. It is so important that it determines your identity and your community. If you are mixed race, you will have neither.

Mr Phillips is mistaken. Despite her brown skin, my daughter is no harder to identify than her white father or her black mother. She is a no more vague, nebulous or otherwise indefinite creature than any other human being.

Nor is she marooned between two communities. For I do not live in the white community and my wife does not live in the black community. As far as I know, there are no such communities. Despite our different colours, all three members of the Whyte family live in the same community, a nice bourgeois suburb.

My daughter knows she is brown but, at the age of 3, she does not believe it to be the most important thing about her. If anything, she is currently obsessed with her sex. She points to the characters of her illustrated books and declares: “I’m that one.” She often identifies herself with a blonde princess, but never with a dark-haired prince.

Alas, this state of blissful racial naivety will not be allowed to persist. She will hear people like Mr Phillips talking about “racial identity”, as if this absurd notion signified something real and important. One day someone will assure her that there is nothing wrong with being mixed-race, thereby suggesting to her for the first time that perhaps there might be.

I do not worry about my brown daughter suffering racist discrimination. That is rare in our community. I am more worried that she fall for the idea that her skin is her identity, and believe herself the victim of fantastical injuries such as identity-stripping. Then her “racial identity”, or lack of one, really will become a problem for her.

The interests of do-gooding organisations are always at odds with their goals. Succeed and you put yourself out of business. With racism in rapid retreat and mixed-race children on the rise, there is one great contribution the Commission for Racial Equality could make to its official cause. Stop existing.

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Races don't exist, but physical variations (principally in skin pigmentation, eye shape and build) among groups have arisen over the thousands of years of human history, usually because people have had no choice but to mate with people who live in the same geographical vicinity.

Unless human societies change dramatically, this general state of affairs will continue for the forseeable future in most places of the world - China, central Africa, etc.

But in heavily multi-ethnic societies like Britain, that multi-millennia process of physical change will be largely wiped out within a few hundred years at most. The number of people calling themselves 'mixed race' rises exponentially with every new generation, both through more mixed marriages, and because the children of those marriages have their own children.

Ethnic cultures will probably survive longer than 'race'. That is, skin colour, eye shape etc will be increasingly poor indicators of ethnic group. People will essentially be able to choose which cultures they wish to 'belong' to, or slip between them as the mood takes.

It is important that even good 'racialists' like the CRE come to realise this - not just racists.

More irony abuse

A man who led a 30-year campaign for a new bypass has become the first person to crash on it.

Jim Burley fought for the bypass in Pegswood, Northumberland, to reduce heavy traffic through the village.

Parish council chairman Jim, 70, and his wife Eunice, 69, were not seriously hurt when their Vauxhall van was in a head-on collision with another van.

Jim told the Sun: "I can certainly see the irony in being involved in the first accident on a bypass for which I have been campaigning for 20 to 30 years."

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Not ironic.

Of foxholes and vox humana

In Westminster Abbey
By John Betjeman

Let me take this other glove off
As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.

Keep our Empire undismembered
Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.

Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown.
And do not let my shares go down.

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white flowers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the Steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

Now I feel a little better,
What a treat to hear Thy word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen,
Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

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Never bloody works, does it?

Sharpe dressers

Of all the wars, the Crimean had the coolest uniforms.

A city of scaffolding

The Dulwich Picture Gallery has an exhibition of the great Venetian artist Canaletto’s portraits of England, where he lived for nine years from 1746.

The best ones are of London. This is a brand spanking new London, built by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire. St Paul’s is gleaming and clean. There is scaffolding on Westminster Bridge.

In fact, the scaffolding is a truer symbol of London than the bridge itself. Nobody can paint a picture of ‘London’. It moves too quickly. All you can do is take a snapshot of a moment in its evolution. London is a constantly regenerating monster. It’s like one of those speeded up nature films of blooming fields of flowers. Or possibly, mouldering corpses.

Martin Gayford writes: “[This is the] difference between Canaletto's Venetian work and his images of London. Already in the 18th century, Venice was a tourist destination. People went to view it as a curiosity. Similarly, travellers went to Rome - another much-painted place - to admire the ruins of antiquity. But in London, Canaletto was painting the present…It's always been like that with London. Nothing stays the same for very long. As Peter Ackroyd has pointed out, London buildings tend to be ugly, inelegant and vandalised. The best often disappear. "It's a constant flux. You can walk down a street after six months and it's completely changed its character. There's too much power and wealth here for it to stand still." Nonetheless, somehow it does remain the same.”

Canaletto’s painting The City from the Terrace of Somerset House is like looking at some weird fairytale version of London – familiar and unfamiliar. It’s as if each new generation of buildings since Londinium was founded had been painted on transparent film and superimposed on the last, and then Canaletto peeled them all off again until he got to the most beautiful one.

But it isn't merely that London’s constant evolution desecrated Canaletto’s version with the graffiti of car parks and modernism and office blocks. We can also blame the Hun, as Richard Dorment reveals:

When you look at his panoramic The City from the Terrace of Somerset House it breaks your heart to see scores of steeples dotting the skyline like minarets, making London look as exotic as Istanbul.

All belong to Wren churches destroyed in the Blitz.

The Decent Left (and other Endangered Species)

Over at Diversely We Sail, Peter links to an outstanding article in the Guardian, where a decent leftist takes on “the disgrace of the anti-war movement”:


On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime.

….A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile, published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?'

His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups. It would lead to more despots 'pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to Armageddon'. Dorfman also worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit to sign off with 'heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children'.

….I don't think any open-minded observer who wasn't caught up in the anger could say that Dorfman was typical. Jose Ramos-Horta, the leader of the struggle for the freedom of East Timor, noticed that at none of the demonstrations in hundreds of cities did you see banners or hear speeches denouncing Saddam Hussein. If this was 'the left' on the march, it was the new left of the 21st century, which had abandoned old notions of camaraderie and internationalism in favour of opposition to the capricious American hegemony. They didn't support fascism, but they didn't oppose it either, and their silence boded ill for the future.

….In Saturday, his novel set on the day of the march, Ian McEwan caught the almost frivolous mood: 'All this happiness on display is suspect. Everyone is thrilled to be together out on the streets - people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view.'

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Dorfmans are vanishingly rare. The defining, universal feature of today’s ‘left’ is not, as it once was, opposition to fascism, but opposition to American foreign policy, even to the extent where when American foreign policy is to forcibly remove a genuinely fascist, genocidal dictator, the case against America can be presented as black-and-white.

How we came to this strange position is the subject for countless articles, but individuals who took this line pre-war could only do so by being intellectually dishonest – that is, by refusing to acknowledge the consequences of their own arguments.

If you opposed the invasion, you necessarily accepted that the consequences of leaving in power arguably the most brutal dictator in the world were morally and materially less bad than the consequences of war, either in terms of political stability or casualties. That takes some serious arguing. Black-and-white isn’t in the equation. Waving banners and blowing whistles and popstars are just not appropriate.

Out of the many anti-war people who harangued me post-war, virtually none were capable of admitting this obvious truism. They talked about oil, George Bush’s psychology and ‘international law’ instead. The only other path would be to explain how Saddam could be practically removed without an invasion. Even now, nobody is interested in doing that.

The deeper meaning of irony

The best way to get new people onto your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. Most of the time they’ll click on your name to see which particular brand of lunacy you subscribe to. It was via this process that I wandered over to Mike Beversluis’s winsome site, and found his link to a US ‘College Humor’ site’s attempt to improve Alanis Morissette’s well-known song, Ironic.

This put me in mind of an amusing routine on the BBC by Irish comic Ed Byrne from some years ago, in which he pointed out that none of the Morisette lyrics intended to show irony actually do, which is in itself ironic. And thanks to the wonders of Youtube, I found this routine (see below).

It could be that the college ‘humorists’ behind this latest attempt somehow saw the Byrne routine and attempted to ape it. The problem is that a large number of their attempts to be ironic are not very ironic, merely absurd.

Which is in itself pretty darn ironic.

Some of them are ok: “A black fly in your Chardonnay... poured to celebrate the successful fumigation of your recently purchased vineyard in southern France”; and “A traffic jam when you're already late... to receive an award from the Municipal Planning Board for reducing the city's automobile congestion 80 percent.”

These would both be thoroughly irony-riddled situations.

But: “Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife... with which to kill your spouse for sleeping with the young soup chef who works at the Au Bon Pain” isn’t ironic at all – merely stupid (see the Byrne video for how to make that line ironic – it’s really quite simple).

All of this made me wonder if irony is an exclusively British (and Irish) concept, and that we’ve done a Humpty Dumpty on the word ‘irony’ to give it a meaning only we understand.

The dictionary isn’t much help. It’s easy enough to understand irony in a case of straightforward “use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning” but half the time that’s just sarcasm. What about ironic situations?

And irony can be a matter of degree. Something can be mildly ironic (speeding past a sign saying “Thank you for not speeding”); or very ironic (speeding past a sign saying “Thank you for not speeding” and, being distracted by it, taking your eyes off the road and crashing); or, extremely ironic (speeding past a sign saying “Thank you for not speeding” and, being distracted by it, taking your eyes off the road and crashing into another sign saying “Our excellent road safety record and ‘Thank you for not speeding signs’ have ensured that this is a crash-free zone” and you were the person responsible for putting the sign there having long argued that its presence would help prevent crashes).

Perhaps you just have to give examples of irony, and you either get it or you don’t.

So, going back to the College Humor attempt to rewrite Morisette, let’s look at their effort here:

“A free ride when you've already paid... all of your money to the good-natured cab driver when you mistook him for a mugger.”

Pure rubbish. A much more ironic ending for that line would be:

“A free ride when you've already paid... out on the £100 wager you had with your friend while on a night out, in which he bet that there were no free rides to be had, you bet that there were, subsequently admitted defeat because you were unable to find any free rides, gave him the £100 and, having no cash and being forced to go home, pleaded with him to lend you £10 to get this (free, it turns out) ride home, which he did, but at extortionate interest.”

And how about this effort by the College boys:

"A death row pardon two minutes too late... because the governor was too busy watching Dead Man Walking to grant clemency any earlier".

That’s not really very ironic, unless you’re specifying that the influence of the film Dead Man Walking changed the governer’s views on capital punishment and was the reason he decided to grant clemency. And even then the fact of it being two minutes too late wouldn’t be that ironic, merely unfortunate, unless the only reason the governer was watching the film was because it started two minutes later than scheduled, and, being a man who will only watch films all the way through if he sees it from the very start, this late start was the only reason he caught it in the first place and changed his views on capital punishment.

This would work better:

"A death row pardon two minutes too late...to save the life of the inmate, because his friends had planted a remotely-controlled bomb inside a carriage clock designed to explode at precisely 11am and had given it to the governor as a pretend gift because they hated him for refusing to grant clemency. But the governor then did decide to grant clemency that morning, and furthermore in all innocence gave the inmate the clock as a gift, but in doing so he accidentally moved the hands forward by two minutes, just before going public at exactly 10.59am – a minute after the exploding clock killed the inmate at 10.58am (11am on the now fast clock) - to make the announcement of the pardon that would have prompted the terrorists to disarm the clock bomb before the real 11am and thus save the inmate’s life when they thought they were sparing the governor’s life."

Admittedly, this would be somewhat more awkward to set to music than the original lyrics, but it would be irony!

Here’s Ed Byrne:

Dodgy Links

A German driver caused chaos - after his satnav system directed him onto a tram line.

The 46-year-old - who has not been named - tried to back up and got stuck.

A dozen trams were held up in Bremen, before the car was towed to safety.

According to the Mirror, police said: "The friendly voice from his satnav told him to turn left. He did what he was ordered to do and turned his Audi up the curb on to the track of a streetcar."

Police said it was one of several incidents recently where drivers claimed they were only obeying orders.

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Ignoring the crude national stereotype joke about Germans and orders that is screaming ‘Achtung!’ at me here, I shall merely observe that I am torn about whether to invest in a satnav.

On the one hand, they are really cool toys.

On the other, they are a serious threat to the art of Getting Hopelessly Lost and Having a Row because You’re Supposed to be Navigating, Well I Could Do if You Didn’t Go So Fast, I’m Not Going Fast You Just Can’t Read a Map Look You Even Have to Turn it Upside Down Just Because We’re Heading South.

And which subsequently threaten to undermine the entire industry of club circuit stand up comedy – an industry which depends almost wholly on the fact that men can’t ask for directions.