Not a bad commentary on cricket and especially one by a Maniac :-)
jh
----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Whitmire <bwhitmire@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thursday, May 1, 2008 10:57 am
Subject: [OM] Re: (OT) stopping
>
> Actually, John, it's a term from the game of cricket. You see,
> crickets are very annoying creatures. When they get into the
> house,
> they can make a horrendous racket. But they also have the
> unnerving
> quality of falling silent at just the right moment to prevent the
> seeker from discovering their hiding places. (You wondered where
> the
> seekers came from in the Harry Potter books? That's right, cricket
>
> hunters, or, as we know them, batsmen, though Ms. Rowling took
> some
> liberties with the concept with that whole broom flying thing.)
>
> In Jolly Olde many years ago, some chaps got together to discuss
> their large country manors filled with chirping crickets. Sleep
> depravation was becoming a problem. In true English tradition,
> they
> decided the best approach would be a competition. They dressed in
> white so as to be more easily visible in the dark, and chose as
> their
> weapon a long flat board with a handle, which they called a bat,
> so
> called because one of their number, before the rules of the game
> could be settled upon, thumped a passing bat out of the air with
> his
> stick. (History has taken the identity of this gentleman, but
> tradition holds that he was a progenitor of the later, much
> greater,
> Sir Donald Bradman.)
>
> The bat is particularly well suited not only for squashing
> crickets
> on cold English stone floors, but also swatting them out of the
> air,
> as noted by the bat-swatting incident which resulted in the name
> of
> the device. Because of its shape, it's also useful for smashing
> crickets that hide behind objects of furniture, which are lumped
> into
> the broad category of stumps for purposes of simplicity and clarity.
>
> So after our chaps got dressed in white and tossed back a few gin-
> and-
> tonics, they set out to smash crickets. One person on the team was
>
> designated as the cricket collector. He carried a basket, called a
>
> wicket, to put the shattered corpses in so as to determine which
> team
> won the competition. But crickets are resilient creatures, and
> just
> because one has been smashed flat by a bat does not necessarily
> mean
> it's dead. So the wickets were lined with an adhesive substance to
>
> keep the crickets from being able to crawl out. Hence the term
> "sticky wicket."
>
> At the end of the evening, the wickets were collected and the
> cricket
> corpses counted, and more gin-and-tonics were consumed.
>
> Of course the modern game bears little resemblance to the game of
> its
> origin, but isn't that the way of it all?
>
> I hope all of this clears everything up for you. If you have an
> further questions, you might address them to our brethren from the
>
> Commonwealth. This little note pretty well exhausts my knowledge
> of
> cricket.
>
> Helpfully yours,
>
> --Bob Whitmire
> www.bwp33.com
>
>
>
>
> On May 1, 2008, at 9:05 AM, jgettis81@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> > Batsman. Is that some Australian dude that catches bats with
> his bare
> > hands?
>
>
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