My last cricket blog!

In my last blog, I tried to describe the excitement and tension surrounding a cricket Test Match that ended having no result.

That match – the second Test Match between South Africa and Australia – was (somewhat surprisingly) followed by the third Test Match.  This turned out to be another thriller, particularly for South Africa.  The match saw South Africa give Australia a drubbing, winning by over 300 runs.  This kept South Africa as the top team in cricket.

Judging by the flood of emails I received enquiring about the rules of cricket, I will devote this blog to a brief synopsis of them.  I’m sure this will clarify things for you.

Here they are:

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.

Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in, and the next man goes in until he’s out.

When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in, and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out.

Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in.

There are two men called umpires, who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!

Got it?

Actually these rules were dreamed up in the 1970’s by an enterprising English marketing genius as something to sell, printed on tea towels or parchment paper, to the type of American tourist who, when visiting London, buys plastic bobby helmets as a memento of their visit.  The same tourist who believes that 98% of England speaks Cockney and the rest are relatives of the queen.

Everyone who enjoys cricket has been given these rules as a Christmas present at one time or another, usually by some well-meaning soul, usually an aunt.  The appropriate response, of course, is to immediately burn said present and scatter the ashes in the garden.

‘Nuff said.

Wishing you all a very fine festive season and a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2013.

Cheers – hic!

Stan - Thursday

A dozen

Today is the 12th day of the 12th month of the 12th year of this century. Not bad. Although I can‘t say what it is supposed to do for us earthlings. Just one of those things that is interesting without merit. A curio.

I have never really gotten or understood the popularity of dozens. Who came up with the idea to use 12 as a benchmark when you have 10 so very close by? I guess the same guys that organized the clock face. Cousins of the people that made the week 7 days.  

I also think that the term “dozen” is on its way out. In twenty years it will be a word like “burlap”, conjuring up images of olden times when mentioned in passing. The reason has little to do with the clunkiness of the number and that it is illfitting to the decimal system. It has more to do with corporate greed/genius. Egg producers as an example have now managed to reduce a dozen eggs to ten. Florists will probably end up being the last outpost for this term, if you sell roses by the piece you have no inclination to get people to buy ten rather than twelve.

MacDonalds left Iceland soon after the banking collapse/fiasco. They packed up all of their happy meals and took the next plane out. This was just around the time people began to realize the economy imploding was not a bad dream and there would be no shrugging the situation off to continue spending like crazy. This was one of the few times that our most precious saying, laden with wisdom, did not apply. This saying is: Þetta reddast” meaning: “It’ll be ok.” We say this no matter what and usually it works. But it is not a slogan that will carry you far in the banking business.   

Dominos pizza did not leave however. They stuck with us having been here a lot longer and probably become accustomed to the “þetta reddast” mentality. "What the hell, they’ll recover. The pizza business will be fine. It’ll be ok”.

Every now and again Dominos throws what is know here as a mega-week. It involves lowering of prices, not really enough to warrant the connection to “mega” but still. When mega-week hit town they dust off a cardboard cut-out superhero named Megaman and put him outside to advertise. I am unsure if this is a global thing or if Megaman is an Icelandic invention. I would venture a guess as to him being an immigrant.

Now if you have been wondering what happened to al Qaeda, wonder no more. They are here now. In Akureyri. And they have kidnapped Megaman. Until their demands are met they have threatened to chop off one of his limbs – one a day. Being loosely modeled from the human blueprint Megaman’s limbs will not take a week to chop off.

This astonishing and shocking development has been in the news here – first an announcement that Megaman had been stolen in a drive-by kidnapping. Then the below video from the kidnappers was made public and it became clear who was behind it all. Al Qaeda of course. Who else would stoop so low? Poor Megaman, trying to look chipper despite the annoying tape sealing his trap shut.

 

 

The kidnappers want free pizza. For a year. Not sure where they want it delivered. Maybe to a cave on the outskirts of Akureyri.

I think Dominos should pay up. Þetta reddast. It will be ok. After all, it is 12.12.12 now. Only nine days left to 21.12.12. Can’t deliver pizza after the world ends.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Paris Fountains

Let's talk l'eau pronounced 'loow' water.

 On Paris streets you'll find many types of fountains: les Wallace, les Bornes, les Millénaire, fontaines de l'Albien and fontaines eau pétillante. That's not counting the fountains in the squares or in the 14 Paris cemetaries which hold 81 fountains.

But Les fontaines Wallace were named after the British philanthropist and art collector  Sir Richard Wallace, who financed the installation of 50 fountains throughout Paris after the Franco-Prussian war left the city with almost no clean drinking water. Designed by a French man, these iconic fountains of the Paris streetscape. They are uniformly painted a deep emerald green.

The largest model, nicknamed the 'Brasserie des quatre femmes'  (brewery of the four women), sports four caryatides each symbolizing kindness, simplicity, charity and sobriety.

Cara - Tuesday

Piranha

In Brazil,  the word can mean a prostitute...

…or a fish.

This post is about the latter.

Their name in Tupi-Guarani simply means “toothed fish”.

They are found in many of the rivers of Brazil and can grow to a length exceeding forty centimeters.  

Most, however, are a good deal smaller, the average being about half that.

I have written earlier in this space about President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1913 expedition up the River of Doubt:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2011/11/theodore-roosevelt-and-river-of-doubt.html

When he returned to the United States, he published a book about his experiences.

Here’s what he had to say about Piranha:

“They are the most ferocious fish in the world. Even the most formidable fish, the sharks or the barracudas, usually attack things smaller than themselves. But the piranhas habitually attack things much larger than themselves. They will snap a finger off a hand incautiously trailed in the water; they mutilate swimmers—in every river town in Paraguay there are men who have been thus mutilated; they will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water excites them to madness.”

He wasn't wrong. Attacks on humans are recurring in the Amazon basin. The photograph below was taken in that area. The sign reads, Attention bathers. Area subject to piranha attack. Careful!

In the city of Palmas, Tocantins, 190 piranha attacks were reported in the first half of 2007. In 2011, a drunk eighteen-year-old man was attacked and killed in Rosario del Yata, Bolivia. In 2012, a five-year-old Brazilian girl met the same fate in Piauí.

But while shoals of piranha can consist of as many as 1,000 fish, the stories about them being capable of reducing a human being to a skeleton in a matter of minutes are vast exaggerations.

That voracious, they are not.

If, however, you’re into gruesome images, try Googling the words mordidas de piranhas.

And click on images.

Most, I warn you, are pretty horrible – the reason I didn't want to reproduce them here.

And then there’s the boi de piranha.

The literal meaning is “piranha ox”.

It’s a technique invented by people like this fellow.

Brazilian cowboys.

If they had to drive a herd of cattle across a river they knew to be infested with piranha they’d commonly sacrifice a weak or diseased animal by opening its veins and putting it in the water.

The piranhas, sensing the blood, would gather to attack.

And while the greedy little creatures were busy devouring one unfortunate beast, the others could cross safely upstream.

The expression has entered the vernacular.

And come to mean sacrificing any person or thing for another person or thing, generally of higher value for the person doing the sacrificing.

Scapegoat would be a good translation for some of the usages, but not for all. It’s a very useful phrase if you speak Portuguese, virtually incomprehensible, in a literal translation, for people who don’t.

But now that you know what it means, you’ll be able to appreciate this cartoon:

Substitute the names on the cattle for some of your own least-favorite politicians.

Leighton - Monday

In Living Black-and-White

Consider the glories of classic Hollywood in black-and-white.

I'm going out on a limb to say the the greatest lighting and photography in the history of motion pictures was put on film before the advent of color.  Look at the picture of Alan Ladd above.  Not only is it brilliantly lighted, composed, and shot, but it also tells you every single thing you'd need to know if you're trying to  decide whether to see that movie.

To find color motion pictures that compete in terms of image quality, you really have to ransack the catalogue.  David Lean's movies, especially "Lawrence of Arabia" (but that's no better pictorially than his "Great Expectations" in black-and-white), Rueben Mamoulian's musicals, and (obviously) a bunch of others.

Gloria "We had faces then" Swanson in "Queen Kelly"

But--and here's part of the point--films where the color photography really stands out tend to be "big" pictures.  In the days of black and white, they created miracle images on a daily basis for B pictures.  In some cases (film noir, for example) some of the most creative lighting was designed to hide the fact that there was barely enough budget to dress the set.

The same held for portraits.  What mattered was the picture, not the importance of the subject.  Anna May Wong, the first major Asian-American film actress, was never really a star.  But the most creative still photographers of the 1920s could not stop pointing their cameras at her, and I think you could argue that she was one of the best-photographed of them all.

Look at the composition, look at the light.  I mean, come on.

Why was black and white so great?  I think it's mostly because they didn't have color.

Max Reinhhardt's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

I don't mean that in a flip way.  What they had to draw the eye, identify the star, set the mood, and hold the audience were light, shadow, and movement.  In color you have a million variables, whole color themes, hues with emotional value, color contrasts that make it impossible to look at anything other than what the colors say.

In black and white, they had light, shadow, and movement.  At the beginning, they didn't even have dialogue.  From the '20s into the mid-'40s, every film had directors, lighting directors and camera operators who had worked in silents.  They knew how many things a single shot had to do to be worth shooting; it had to please the audience, tell them where to look, show them who was important, convey the mood, clarify relationships, further the story.

Is there anything important you don't know about the couple in this shot from "Citizen Kane"?

Orson Welles famously said that black and white was an historical accident--that if color had been invented first, we never would have bothered with black and white; it would have been too abstract.  We only grew to like it because we were forced to get used to it--it was all we had.

But he went back to B&W over and over again.  And I think there's something for artists of all kinds, writers included, to be drawn from the best of black and white.  Every element in your picture/paragraph/poem has to pull its weight -- draw the eye, set the mood, show the reader where to focus, further the story.  Every element.

As long as this piece is, I could do four more that are all pictures.  I love these images.

Tim -- Sundays

The Only Way For Greece is Up.

I read a Reuters article by Gareth Jones about the 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index released this week by Transparency International, a non-partisan global coalition against corruption founded in 1993.  What first caught my attention was the headline, “Greece ranks worst in EU in global corruption index.”  My first reaction was the traditional Greek expression: Oy vey. More bad news for the old country.

I decided not to write about it.  Why pile on when the place is already reeling from all the body blows to its economy? There’s real suffering going on over there. Besides, the report was based on year-old data and is not measuring actual established levels of graft (though, how could it since those transaction are done in secret) but rather perceptions of graft.  So, I decided to shut my eyes and write something about the ancient Greek gods.

But the fates weren’t up for that idea.  Yesterday, I received an email from my friend, George Anthou, a delightful Greek-American living in the wilds of southwestern Pennsylvania close by our shared alma mater of Washington & Jefferson College.  George is a few years older than I (hard as it may be to believe there are any out there), a lawyer, and proud to the core of his Hellenic heritage.  Attached to his email was a different newspaper article on the same subject, this one headlined “Greece slips to 94th in corruption index as austerity makes it EU’s weakest link.” I’m sure it pained him to read that article, because it sure as hell(enic) pained me with how distinctly non-complimentary it was to a country we both love.

That’s when I knew I had to write this. You can’t run from a story making headlines around the world that ranks your country on a par for corruption with Benin, Columbia, Djibouti, India, Moldova, Mongolia and Senegal, and puts you twenty to thirty places behind Romania and Bulgaria, respectively, two countries the EU forbids from passport-free travel to other member states due to concerns over their corruption.

The “traditional” Greek way for dealing with such a story would be to attack the source (and/or the messenger), deny the facts, find someone else to blame, or dismiss it as part of some international conspiracy. But this time newspapers aren’t reporting that as the “Greek” reaction.  

A Greek political commentator is reported as saying, “To survive in such a hostile situation, you have to bend the rules.  There is no other way when things are so hard—you are forced to resort to corruption to deal with the state mechanism.”  And a Greek economics professor said, “People have been pushed to their limits [by wage cuts and unexpected taxes]. We should not be at all surprised by the report’s findings.” 

And the story goes downhill from there, fueling those who would like to say (as the article reports) that “Greece is not just an economic basket case that is only barely keeping bankruptcy at bay but entrenched in a crisis of values that, like its debt drama, refused to go away.”

OUCH. 

So, what’s the root problem?   And how does one begin to deal with it?  If you ask me the cause isn’t the financial crisis.  Corruption has been entrenched in Greece for decades.  For most it’s the only way they’ve known to get things done. In fact, if you find a Greek still willing to show a sense of humor on the subject, you’re likely to hear him complain that his politicians deserve to have the country ranked right down there at the bottom with North Korea, Afghanistan and Somalia (#174).

And don’t get them started on “perception.” To Greeks all of their politicians and most of the public servants they deal with are corrupt.  The recent highly publicized arrest of a former Defense Minister is dismissed with a wave of the hand as window dressing to let the rest of the crooks—some still in Parliament they’ll quickly say—get away.  

The Greek perception is “nothing will ever change.”

But wait.  Is it possible the times are in fact a changin’ there?

This week another story broke in the Greek newspapers.  The current and former mayors of Mykonos, two deputy mayors, and six employees of the municipality’s financial department are facing criminal charges in connection with a major fraud probe and tax evasion scheme.  Allegedly, between 2002 and 2009 six million euros of occupancy taxes were diverted from municipal coffers into the accused’s pockets—and that’s thought to be just a fraction of what was actually embezzled.  Eleven hotel owners are facing misdemeanor charges in the same case.

Mykonos Town Hall and Municipal Building

Mykonians are not surprised by the allegations, but I’m certain most are at the prosecutions.   Although guilt and innocence have yet to be determined, many who never before thought it possible that a politician would be called to account, are now openly wondering who might be next.  Could the unexpected ever happen and the “really big ones”—i.e., those tied to Parliament—be the next to fall?

Bringing the corrupt to task is the surest way of improving Greece’s image in the eyes of the world, but more important is the effect it would have on the Greek people.  Greece’s only way of regaining financial stability without suffering irreparable harm along the way is by the government regaining the confidence of its people.

But as long as “nothing will ever change” remains the national mantra, how can Greeks be expected to behave any differently than the “crooks” they perceive in power?  The public’s trust must be earned by the government, and to my way of thinking the best place to start doing that is by putting those who’ve betrayed that trust in jail.

‘Nuf said.  For now.

And for the curious among you, the least corrupt places on the index were Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, and among my MIE compatriots, here’s how their countries ranked:

Iceland 11, United Kingdom 17, United States 19, France 22, Brazil 69, South Africa 69, and Thailand 88.

Jeff—Saturday