Tiny Little Fractures

The most obvious case of this recently was the eagerness of South Africa’s players to play in England despite terror threats which was of course in sharp contrast to the hastiness with which they left Sri Lanka, no doubt leaving a smelly trail of pee from Cinnamon Grand to Katunayake. The other two interesting cases of double standards that I came across in my rather obsessive reading of Cricinfo is the issue of ball tampering and countries influencing the choice of umpires.

The ball tampering issue at the center of the current turmoil has an interesting historical context. Though it apparently has been going on for decades it only reached prominence when the legendary Pakistani bowlers Wakar, Wasim and Imran started reverse swinging the ball and getting shit loads of wickets back in the early nineties. I wonder if the Australian or English teams managed to do this with the same proficiency whether there would have been a similar uproar. After all look at the issue of sledging, its most proficient practitioners are the Australians, yet has it been as serious an issue as ball tampering?

The case of countries influencing the choice of umpires though is the most obviously laughable example of double standards at the moment. The ICC talks tough and the Aussies and Brits chime in with enthusiasm in condemning the Pakistan’s attempts to ensure Darrel Hair doesn’t officiate in any Pakistani games. The vitriol is loud and shrill in this case, but the silence is deafening when Cricket Australia proposes waiving the practice of having neutral umpires officiate for the Ashes. Their excuse is that the “best” umpires in the world are Australian and English, a laughable claim. The ICC elite umpires and their countries of origin are shown below.

Aleem Dar - Jhang, Pakistan

Asad Rauf – Lahore, Pakistan

Mark Benson - Shoreham-by-Sea, England

Brent Bowden – Auckland, New Zealand 

Steve Bucknor - Montego Bay, St James, Jamaica

Billy Doctrove - Marigot, Dominica 

Darrell Hair – Mudgee, Australia

Daryl Harper – Adelaide, Australia 

Rudi Koertzen – Knysna, South Africa

Simon Taufel – apparently somewhere in Australia
 

Now I’m no statistics expert but it looks to me like 6 out of the 10 ‘elite’ umpires are NOT Australian or English, in fact only one of them is English. Three are in fact Australian which is a bit odd, considering the Ashes is being held in Australia this year. 

At the end of the day the two scenarios, one with Pakistan not wanting Hair to officiate in their matches and the other with Australia wanting Australian/British umpires for the Ashes are the same packages with different wrapping. Both are countries trying to influence umpire choices, yet one is met with a slap on the wrist while the other is met nary a protest.The Australian and British media can pontificate until they are blue in the face, it is painfully obvious to anyone with any common sense that racism, prejudice and double standards are all too common in cricket.

Here’s a comment on a “Reader’s feedback” page on Cricinfo regarding the criticism the South Africans have come into for chickening (sorry I couldn’t resist!) out of the Sri Lanka tour due to being targeted by the Tamil Tiger Youth (I’m not really familiar with them but I’m guessing they are Prabha’s equivalent of the boy scouts?)

“The news that the Sri Lankan media have used words such as "chicken" to describe the South Africans does not surprise me at all. This is an extension of the support of the Colombo media for the government’s war efforts with the press openly acting as the mouthpiece for the government and the military. None of the Colombo-based media is capable of independent assessment. N Rabindran”

Wow, I mean just wow! It looks like everybody is just awesome at spin these days. Who would have in their wildest thoughts have conceived of connecting the South African team scurrying off, the Sri Lankan press and the Sri Lankan government’s “insincerity” towards the peace process? Pro LTTE (or rather anti GOSL) propaganda on Cricinfo, now that is definitely a first!

Trinidad here we come! Well…not yet actually. True we did get our match tickets allocated last night which means we have tickets to the Sri Lanka vs. India and Sri Lanka vs. Bangladesh matches in Trinidad. This means we at least get guaranteed one victory (well touch wood on that one, in fact I think I’m going to fondle a couple of tree trunks on the way home just to be safe) and one (hopefully) exciting game unless of course Darrel Hair comes along and tells the brownies to get back to tending the fields.

There is this small matter of sorting out flights, which is a tad bit of a problem considering I’m not only broke but considerably in the red. The fact that my damn laptop considered to kick it and I had to buy a new one doesn’t help much either. Fujitsu is just crap when it comes to repairs and reliability, the bastards want me to mail the laptop in and on top of that charge me a $175 ‘diagnostic fee.’ Yeah sure, fuck that, ended up going and buying a Toshiba which are like rocks compared to Fujitsu. In case you missed my point, don’t buyFujitsu!

I’m hoping for two things now, one a sub $1000 ticket to Trinidad and that the trip will make up for missing Sri Lanka in December. Considering I have some very fun loving friends in Trini, I don’t have to spend on accommodation (which makes my inner miser very happy), mix in copious amounts of rum, cute brown girls (as has been evidenced by my Trinidadian friends) and cricket, March 2007 should (touch wood again here) be quite entertaining.

"We would be delighted to go, we’d jump at the chance," – So says Mickey Arthur the coach of the South African cricket team, as they were very “frustrated at what happened in Sri Lanka.”

The current terror alert status in the UK is SEVERE. This means that though the terror level has been downgraded from CRITICAL a terror attack is still “highly likely.”

Hmmm…do I hear echoes of ‘double standards’ and ‘hypocrisy’ in the wind? Or maybe Mark Boucher’s been taking cues from Dubya with his “bring them on” cry.

Bring ‘em on!! 

Yeah, bring it! 

It’s barely 10.30 in the morning and already I feel like I’ve been slapped across the face with a wet salamander. It all started to slide downhill last night when I had to spend around 4 gazillion hours on the phone with Comcast to transfer the cable and internet over to my name on the account one of the roomies is heading out of San Fran today. Ended up going to sleep at around one in the morning after dealing with the mentally challenged customer service rep at the other end of the line and then proceeded to wake up umpteen times in the night in cold sweats due to the experience.

Add to that this morning I overslept, didn’t have time to grab a coffee, discovered I’d lost my weekly Muni pass and didn’t have exact change for the Muni, all in the space of bout an hour. To add insult to injury I had to see a gorgeous Aston Martin DB9 and a Maserati quattroporte one after another. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the day has to offer.

I can’t dance for shit, which is fine because I rarely dance. I’ve never had the time to go for any sort of dance classes even though I’ve intended to sometime (apparently it really scores brownie points with girls). My dancing experience is mostly limited to shaking my booty to various hip hop stuff when sufficiently drunk and there are only two girls in the world that have the ability to drag me onto the dance floor before I reach that level of inebriation.

Thus it was with some surprise that I found myself at a salsa club of all places on Saturday night. The argument for us hitting this club was free alcohol because N who had driven up from LA for the weekend knew the manager, who also happened to be Sri Lankan. The lure of free booze is generally enough to take me anywhere apart from perhaps a KKK convention, in fact its often the only reason I attend family events with any regularity. So there I was free vodka red bull in hand, in a salsa club.

N’s girl (in a manner of speaking) loves salsa and when her afro’d self came over to me and dragged me onto the dance floor I willingly accompanied her. Suffice to say my blood alcohol level was sufficiently high and I was expecting to move around a bit and then beg off the dance floor with the excuse of thirstiness and/or dizziness, besides S is a pretty funny girl. What I was NOT expecting was her to deliver me to who I can only describe as a slightly more feminine looking version of Serena Williams with the exclamation "here’s the guy I want you to teach how to dance."

"Huh?!" Was my first thought, I then paused for a second to contemplate choosing between scrambling for the nearest fire exit or being a good sport. The tipsiness and the fact I’m usually a good sport swayed me towards the latter, while the finger numbing grip ‘Serena’ had on my hand finally convinced me. It quickly became clear that I couldn’t tell my left foot from my right ear but it was a fun 15 minutes of pathetic salsa studentship. In my defense everytime she twirled I got hit in the face with a monsoonal tide of sweat, distracting to say the least. Also in the background I could see N and R laughing their little heads off. Which in all fairness was probably warranted, imagine Serena Williams giving Romesh Kaluwitharana salsa lessons (though I’m not as short, I think) and you have some idea of what the tableau must have appeared. After the 15 minutes though I had to beg off citing the lack of a snorkel and dizziness from trying to follow her lead (or was she supposed to follow mine?).

The rest of the night passed like the usual blur, there was a cute, small latino girl somewhere, I refused to play wingman at some point of the night (I was the only single guy there!?) and I suddenly found myself in a different club trying to chat up two or three chinky pinky badu. All in all one of the more random nights out I’ve had, but refreshingly funny.

Must make a mental note to learn salsa sometime, I’ve heard it helps with the chicks.

I lamented in a previous post about how the stupidest 1% of Sri Lanka’s population holds the reigns of power in the country and some of my readers kindly pointed out that that’s because the “geniuses who make up the other 99% vote the dumb cunts in.” Sad but true I guess though there has always been a lack of decent people in politics (or they get knocked off very early in their careers) so the choice has in all fairness been limited.

What is a bit disheartening, or possibly heartening depending on ones view of the world is that the countries in the developed region of the world are suffering similar problems. This is an excerpt from an article by Mark Morford, a SF Gate columnist (Check out that link for a truly orgasmic electric super car),

“Did you already calculate that if even a fraction of the $300 billion — a truly staggering amount — we’ve wasted on BushCo’s failed and disgusting war could have gone to revolutionizing our nation’s energy infrastructure (like, say, funding large-scale development of the Roadster’s technology), instead of annihilating a pip-squeak nonthreatening nation over its oil reserves while simultaneously serving as the most successful terrorist-recruitment poster in world history, the United States could be considered the epicenter of integrity and invention once again? Of course you did.

But oh wait. Such an obvious, lucid redirection of resources and ideology would require someone with true vision in the White House. Someone with integrity. And intelligence. And fearlessness. And an articulate understanding of complex ideas. And a Congress to match. Never mind.”

So obviously the lament for quality leadership is not just confined to us ‘Third Worlders’. I remember back in 2000 I was talking to an American fellow about Dubya’s chances of getting elected. He said rather ominously “the American people are voting someone in who thinks just like them.” The weird thing is I haven’t met too many Americans who think like Bush though this could possibly be a reflection of the fact I live on the relatively liberal West coast and not say deep in the heartland of Kansas.

My question is where does this leave us? Us individuals who are concerned about social justice, the environment, equal rights and who just want to live in a decent, safe world so we can enjoy the pleasures of life and bring up little versions of ourselves, what do we do in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles to normalcy. I’m open to ideas to this semi-rhetorical question but I do have some sort of answer. That is that we are aware of what goes on in the world, that we use every opportunity to speak up against injustice whether to another person, on a blog or even in your head.

Ignorance, sticking your head in the sand and disowning the fight is not enough unless you are willing to take bombs in your backyard, threats to your health, assaults on the environment and your culture without nary a complaint. It’s not easy and can’t be done 100% of the time, thinking about and analyzing such things is exhausting. Writing this post was emotionally exhausting, but it has to be done. Sometimes I sit on a Sunday and wish I had the energy to write about an injustice I read about, to make people aware about it but just don’t have the willpower. I just file that away for later and hope I can get to it when I have the emotional fortitude to address it.

We the individuals make up the global democracy and despite what Bush, Blair, Mahinda, Prabha, GE, Newscorp or any of those entities that make up the system in our part of the globe do or say the only way they will win is if we keep quiet. Speak up; act out once a week and you are helping form a new world.

P.S. on a completely unrelated subject, I’ve posted before about the travails of my early morning bus ride. Well today I had a reasonably cute blonde sit next to me. After about five minutes I noticed a strange odour piercing my early morning haze. It was with something approaching horror that I realized it was the girl.

Now this to me was like the laws of physics being upended or evolution being disproved. I like girls because they smell nice, it’s not the only reason I like them but it’s a major reason and the concept of a pretty, smelly girl just doesn’t gel with me. Now before I have a load of feminists deluge me with hate-mail I would like to point out that I find anybody being smelly objectionable, its jus that girls usually do smell nice (and dare I say should). It was just too much to handle that early in the morning. She did get out a few stops later and got replaced by a 300 pound, fat, sweaty executive type who kept sliding into me when the bus climbed the hilly routes of San Francisco.

All in all not the best start to a morning.