Lacuna

As in its musical context, particularly this line from wikipedia “it is a purposeful and valid passage used for a specific effect in the context of the overall work.” Actually thats all pretentious BS, I need this time to focus on other things and don’t anticipate posting again before the end of November or later. This means I’ll miss SoaL’s birthday, October 27th I think, so please make sure you come here and wish the blog Happy Birthday, because it tends to get touchy about things like that. I need to look back at this in some sort of context.

Context is people talking about Harsha Bhogle’s hair instead of Pragyan Ojha’s bowling. Context is also ads telling you shampoos are good investments. In these contexts, SoaL has given me worse returns than Enron and Satyam. While gmail tends to catch obvious spam, it has so far been unable to catch that annoying brand of former-e-commerce-business-advisors-turned-social-media-strategists, mostly pretenders living off one of the big six – the only ones who really know what they’re talking about – but usually Pete Cashmore’s content. There is nothing that I hate more than people who can’t take the hint after they’ve been ignored once, received a reply laced with sarcasm the second time and still invite me to write an article about their stupid cricket website associates.

Castrol cricket is one of these websites and I strongly advise you do not visit it because when my “expert fan” voice asks questions like Will Twenty20 cricket finally make vegetarians competitive? and Should the minimum height to play Twenty20 cricket be raised from 5′3″ to 5′9″? and they become “featured questions” you pretty much know what you’re going to get. The strong Bhogle influence is obvious when one of the “expert speakers”, Srinivas Bhogle, comes out with this incredibly daft assessment of the ICC rankings “they tend to cluster teams with similar performances into a tight embrace and fail to adequately reward wins in the big ODI contests.” Of course, what any ranking system should do is ensure teams with similar performances are kept at opposite ends of the spectrum so that they cannot hug each other and everyone should apply their subjective values for what qualifies as a big ODI contest. You should also commentate Srinivas, I’m sure all of India would love to hear about your bad hair days too. Oh, and to all of you who are supporting the site in hope of getting that valuable link from their “expert speak” blogroll, let me know when it finally does go up or when you get the next email to support their big IPL contests, whichever comes first (I’ll give you a clue, one of them should happen around May next year).

I will also miss the India-Australia ODI series, which I fear will interest me just about as much as this Champions League has so far, I’ve caught about 30 minutes of the entire thing so far and can’t get over Somerset’s cheerleaders. I’m not sure if its good form to twist Prince Philip’s quotes to a cricketing context and ask any of them “You are a man, aren’t you?” That would make me a female-chauvanist, I think. I will probably catch the matches at all of your blogs but I’m looking forward in particular to reading about them at Nesta’s 99.94, Soulberry’s TCWJ, Tony’s AGB, Ducking Beamers, Leela’s Maiden Bowling, for a humourous perspective from Som’s Doosra, oh dear I’m never going to fit you all in so let me just say: actually just about any blog that imho cares more about its content than page rank and their cricket blip ranking, and therefore ends up with more readable posts than ones littered with popular search engine keywords*. . I must also urge all of you to hold Sam/Sameer/Chandler of Armball to his word if India do lose the series, and force him to rename his blog to “Mahela Jayawardene is My Cricket God.” for one month. An Indian loss in a meaningless ODI series is probably worth all of Sri Lanka cheering for the Aussies and hopefully my efforts will get me a Noble Peace prize nomination.

So thats that then and till we meet again here at SoaL, Adios. In the meantime, here are a couple of new cricket blogs I’ve chanced upon in the last few days:

1. Tales From The Offside: She’s a saffer who posts pics of her dog and calls him an asshole, whats not to like?
2. A View From The Pavilion: An English medium pacer, who takes comfort from Ricky Ponting’s assurance that ODIs are here to stay.

* Please don’t take offense if I haven’t mentioned you personally here, you know how much I enjoy your blog from my visits and participation in the discussion, and I can’t honestly mention all 30 odd blogs. Please do take offense if you are obsessed with page rank and cb rankings, and leave a comment saying as much so everyone knows who you are!

UPDATE – October 15th 2009

Since that last angry rant, the following changes have taken place:

1. Castrol Cricket have indeed put up the blogroll on their Expert Speak section and SoaL has made the list despite the less than complimentary review
2. The Expert Fan section now has “like” and “dislike” buttons, I’m not sure about whether they play a role in making a question featured or not, but its nice to see them there all the same.
3. I have been given a decent explanation as to why my questions were posted
4. I think my questions have now been removed from the featured list based on an automated email I received

In this case I chose to judge someone based on three emails sent to me that unfortunately seemed to fit the pattern of several in the past, people that wanted a bit of publicity for nothing in return. This was clearly not the case in this instance, and so I want to sincerely apologize to Ms Makhija for anything that I might have written that could have offended her and I also want to say thank you to her for being so understanding.