I watched the IPL (India Premier League) Cricket games which, as far as I could tell, took place in only three stadiums in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if there were other games being played elsewhere, but only IPLs were shown on Willow, Spectrum channel 835.
Did you know that we have Cricket teams of our own? Sixteen at last count, and they have been around since the eighteenth century. A name I keep running across is American Cricket Enterprises or ACE. And they are playing all the time. I need more Cricket channels.
My wife is always talking about getting rid of the cable boxes and replacing them with some sort of dish that provides free TV, after the cost of the equipment. Since I am not impressed by anything on television, I agreed we might do that. There are over eighty channels, I’m told, but I’d have to look at what’s available. I would prefer two channels of opposing news, a channel each of history, science, and sci-fi, and seventy-five channels of Cricket. More and more that’s all I want to watch, live games and highlights.
But I’m still not sure of all the Cricket rules. Can someone who catches a thrown ball knock the wicket with an outstretched foot? And how many throwing techniques are there? I think I’ve identified two: Pace (or Seam) bowler, and Spin bowler, of which Googly is a technique, thrown from the outside of the hand. I could be wrong; I have no one to ask. Sure, I could look them up, and I probably will eventually as I have for other questions, but I’d rather learn such things as I watch, or at a Cricket pub. (Hey, there’s my new entrepreneurial adventure!) I did finally figure out, by rewinding, what LB stands for: Leg Bye. That’s when a batsman scores when the ball bounces off his leg (or any part of his body?). And another mystery was solved about why the total score is sometimes more than the combined total of the batsmen. Turns out that while an LB is added to the total, it is not added to the batsman’s individual score—because he didn’t hit the ball with the bat. Well, well.
I briefly looked online for books about Cricket and found six, one of which was “Cricket for Dummies.” I clicked to see the first pages and discovered that you need at least a grade 15 reading level to make sense of it. The “dummies” in the title is misleading, completely inaccurate, and offensive. I’m convinced there should be a whole other line of books that are CliffsNotes-like. I’m sure I could rewrite Julian Knight’s 352 pages about Cricket down to about 30. Probably less. I’d call such books “…for the…”
I know one book I’d buy (unless I wrote it, and therefore it would be free for me): “How to operate your smart TV…for the Impatient.” It would be uncomprehensive, with simple instructions and brief answers, just the nuts and bolts—or buttons to push. Page one would explain that you can plug your keyboard into the TV and use it to type in all the information, instead of encouraging the growth of arthritis in your thumb with the remote.
And I would love other versions: “How to quickly remove washing machine water from your wooden floor… for the Panicked,”—which should be short and mainly talk about how to not hide the hose of your wet/dry vac from yourself. I’d also buy several copies of “How to keep your wife from complaining to you about her job…for the Desperate” and mail them to friends and family. Mostly I’d love a book called “How to hypnotize your wife’s pets so they always stand perfectly still somewhere out of the way like they’re stuffed…for the Annoyed.”
