The Virtual Stoa

From the TMS blog, on the late Bill Frindall:

All our thoughts are obviously with his widow Debbie and his family. But Aggers [= BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew] said to me: “You know Bill would always delight in telling us he was born on the first day of the famous “timeless Test” – the longest ever match between England and South Africa in Durban in 1939 which lasted 10 days.

“Well,” continued Aggers “it just had to be the case that Bill’s funeral was held on the day of the shortest ever Test.”

I think Bill would rather have liked that.

I like that, too.

I’ve often wanted to attach some kind of GPS device to Enkidu, in order to work out where – and how far – he goes at night. It’s good to learn that Reading University scientists want to do something similar, and that even they have “virtually no idea of what they [the cats, not the scientists] get up to outdoors, particularly at night.”

The article also suggests that Enkidu may be wiping out far more wildlife than he brings in to show us, given that the rabbits, weasels (apparently) and water-buffalo that he brings down won’t fit through the catflap, and so they are eaten where they fall. (I may have garbled that last bit.)

Thinking of wildlife, I liked the final image in this gallery. Much better than that stupid white horse (and the duck isn’t bad, either).

UPDATE [Wednesday am]: Socialist Unity weighs in.

Over here. And so we will have to wait to see how the post-Bell England cricket team performs…

Hugh Dalton, Labour politician; born Neath, Glamorgan, 26 August 1887; died St Pancras, 13 February 1962.

Gustav Bergenroth, historian and Saint-Simonian. A ‘48er, he later emigrated to California in 1850 to found an agricultural commune at Pillar Point, 20 miles south of San Francisco, but returned to Europe a year later. He settled in London and became a Tudor historian and an expert on the Spanish state papers of the period. Born in Treuberg, East Prussia, 26 February 1813; died in Madrid, Spain, 13 February 1869.

Click here to hear the President of the United States say something you probably didn’t expect him to.

[Thanks to the hard work of the Boston Phoenix, and with explanation here. Via.]

A friend reports that her spell-checker recently tried to alter ‘jouissance‘ to ‘juiciness’.

There’s a copy of Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right in the window of Blackwells with a “buy one, get one free” sticker on it.

Paul Levi, Spartacist, born 11 March 1883, died 9 February 1930.

Two wonderful things happened this afternoon, while I was watching the rugby. The first is that Ian Bell was out for 4. The second is that the West Indies reduced England, at one point, to 26-7, after a fantastic spell from Jerome Taylor, whose figures are 9-5-11-5, and have just dismissed them for 51, to win by an innings and 23 runs.

The first thing is wonderful, as it really ought to mean that the selectors call time on Ian Bell’s Test career. Since hitting 199 against South Africa, Bell has had a dozen Test innings, with scores of 31, 4, 50, 20, 24, 4, 17, 7, 1, 24*, 28 and now 4, for an average over the period of about 19.5. He’s always been vulnerable to the charge that he gets cheap runs — although his overall Test average is 40.59,  his average against the three strongest sides in world cricket (Australia, India and South Africa) is only 28.66, and (my favourite factoid), although he’s hit eight centuries,  he’s never reached 100 in an innings when someone else hasn’t reached 100 first. So another Bell failure is a good thing, as it would just be embarrassing to have Bell batting in the Ashes this summer.

The second thing is wonderful, insofar as it’s not good for cricket to have an enfeebled West Indian side. They’ve been too poor for too long, and it’s high time series involving the West Indies became competitive again. It’s also a good thing that their fine performance has been based on several individual contributions, batting and bowling, but without anything special from Chanderpaul, who has been their most reliable player over the last couple of years. That bodes well for the future.

The trouble, of course, is that the second thing might counteract the first. If England had batted well, and only Bell had failed badly, it’d be obvious to drop him. But England’s batting was so bad, to the extent that Bell, with his scores of 28 and 4, was in fact the fourth-highest scorer in both innings. And given that the selectors have given Bell far too many chances in the past, this collective batting disaster might give the selectors yet another excuse to keep him in the side. Bugger.

And, given these three, you really don’t have to.

Frost / Nixon is quite fun, and bounces along, but there’s no point making films like this if you’re going to distort what actually happened as much as this one does, and for no terribly good reason, artistic or otherwise. I don’t think I was prepared for a film containing a depiction of a naked John Birt. Perhaps the poster should carry a warning. (“Warning: Contains Scenes Depicting a Naked John Birt”.) I wondered whether it was a problem that it’s impossible to watch Michael Sheen without thinking of Tony Blair, but I don’t think that it is. There is something of Blair in David Frost – the eagerness to suck up to the powerful, in particular – and so it becomes a useful association rather than an irritating distraction.

Slumdog Millionaire is a very bad film. I’m not sure what else to say. It wasn’t dreadful, but when I was trying to think of “films I’d seen in the cinema that were obviously worse”, the two that sprang to mind immediately were Ridicule and Life is Beautiful. Those two were much, much worse than Slumdog, admittedly, but what these have in common is that they are all the kind of foreign films or films about foreigners that get Oscar nominations, and perhaps in future I should make sure I avoid those.

Revolutionary Road isn’t very good, either, which was a bit of a surprise, as I enjoyed American Beauty, and had quite high hopes for this one. There’s very little drama, as what happens once the plot gets going is almost entirely predictable, and the general approach is to pile on every kind of cliché one can think of about suburban life in 1950s America. Michael Shannon’s two short scenes  are easily the best thing in the film, but even he’s just recapitulating another stale topos, the madman who talks more sense than anybody else. Part of me thinks that the suffocating layers of cliché and stereotype on all the various levels in this film must be part of its point – but then one just ends up wondering just what that point is supposed to be.

The Virtual Stoa opposes the new system of the players being able to refer umpires’ decisions to the third umpire. By all means have the umpires able to call in help from the chap in front of the TV screen. But the system they’ve got is silly, and seems to waste a lot of time.

A snow dalek appeared in the quad at Balliol yesterday.