Toss the Burner: June 24, 2008

Going to see Pearl Jam tonight at MSG! That's a big one crossed off the list right there.

• The Idea of Superconferences in College Football (The Big Lead)
• Video Interview with the Refs for the Euro Cup Final (The Guardian)
• Zimbabwe Cricket Tour would be 'Unwelcome' in England (The Guardian)
• What are the Worst Covers Ever (Pop Candy)
• Five 80s Toys That Didn't Kill You, Just Made You Stronger (Deuce of Davenport)
• IFC.com's Jim Shearer has an Unnatural Love for the Beastie Boys (IFC.com's Lunchbox)

cricket gets with it...

When I first read that cricket is going to allow switch-hitting, I thought how archaic is this sport?


Guardian blogger Richard Williams defends employing switch-hitting, citing Mickey Mantle's success switching to bat lefty so that he could pooch balls over the short right field wall in Yankee Stadium.

That was pretty revolutionary, progressive thinking...also happened over 50 years ago.

What these cricket ninnies - and cricket is a game played by ninnies - are actually talking about is if the batter (guh, batsman) jumping across the plate (errr, wickets) mid-pitch and then swinging. See for yourself:



Shoot, that was pretty hard core. After Kevin Pietersen hit those two sixes against New Zealand the other day (they look like garden-variety jimmy jacks to me) the MCC endorsed his improvisation.

One of the guvs was quoted saying: Indeed, the stroke conforms to the Laws of Cricket and will not be legislated against!"

That's great...and geez take it easy, will ya?

According to a Gaurdian poll, 87% of people are against allowing the switch hit (also called the reverse sweep, or the Dominic Monaghan - whose voice it is I hear in my head when I read the Guardian.)


One the commenters on Williams blog asked, who can forget Mike Gatting's disastrous attempt at [a reverse sweep] at the World Cup in 1987?

Gatting, bloody idiot.





Ah yes, there's the fancy lad effeteness we've come to expect from cricket. I feel much better.

Apparently, We Americans Don't Know The Difference Between Cricket and Croquet

Guardian writer Steven Wells is all perturbed that us ugly American don't know the difference between Cricket and Croquet.

This is is tiffed-off face.

Wells claims that the first Cricketeers that came to the U.S. back in the 1800’s were a band of salty, arrogant, muttonchop whiskered bastards look like they've stepped straight off some hell-bound pirate ship. They look like they gouge their own mother's eyeballs out with a rusty cutlass for thruppence.


So if it was Davy Jones who brought us cricket, where could we have gone wrong?

I'll offer Wells this theory on how things went astray...


I believe it was Dennis Leary who said it best when he said: The French gave us the croissant, and we turned that thing into the croissanwich.


I can only assume that England gave the French cricket and they turned it into croquet. And then the French gave it to us around the same time that pizza joints invented the delicious potato croquette, distracting most of the population for a time from even knowing that either of these games existed.


Thus, cricket and croquet get meshed in people's psyches... and like most French imports both get treated nonchalantly (just like pasteurization and braille).

In fact, English people should feel bad for us! Cousteau gave you folks the aqualung, and Jethro Tull proved that to be pretty bad ass, did they not?

To his credit, Wells can't help but admit that croquet is thriving in this country...

As you read this, young Americans are playing eXtreme croquet, colossal croquet and mondo croquet.

Mondo croquet... traditional croquet rules, played with a bowling ball and sledgehammer.



The 11th Annual Mondo Croquet World Championships will indeed take place July 27 at High Noon in Portland Oregon.


It happens during the Mad Hatter festival, so if you go apparently Wonderland dress is encouraged.