The Sanger Cricket Club plays in an intramural Cambridge league with other teams from University departments and similar entities. The level of skill is highly variable from former top-tier University and county players to complete amateurs. 
There's a tendency in the UK to make public signs polite to the point of silliness, and it's been grinding my gears lately. Illustration by way of two examples:
Now, in both these cases, the actual message is reasonable, but what annoys me is how they throw in an extra clause to make it sound like it's for your own good, camouflaging the true nature of the request. It may make me marginally safer to not annoy the driver with my inane mobile phone conversation, but it sure as hell has nothing to do with my comfort. And I truly have no idea how I'm going to be "better served" by Tesco if I don't wear my helmet around the store.
Background: I've always moaned about how unfair it is that English blokes get a huge advantage at pulling in the USA because of their accents, whereas nobody finds an American accent particularly sexy.
Scene: I need to call Virgin Media to finalise a payment for my broadband at my old house. Foonyor Barzane [FB] is speaking to a pleasant English saleswoman [PES].
[PES]: Your accent doesn't sound very English...
[FB]: Yes, I'm originally from the States, but I've lived in the UK for a few years.
[PES]: And you've never lost your accent!
[FB]: I guess, not, although I do sometimes wish I could do an English accent on command.
[PES]: (laughing) Oh no, never lose that accent, it's really nice...from a female point of view, anyway.
[FB]: (blushes) Thank you!
The first (of many) papers stemming from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (over which I have laboured for two years) was published today, elucidating the first convincing genetic link to obesity. We all went to the pub at 7PM to watch my semi-boss Mark McCarthy appear on the BBC World News to discuss the finding. And in a cardinal example of how sometimes England is awesome, the landlord of the Butcher's Arms (who knows we often stumble in on a Friday after a long week at work) surprised us with a bottle of champagne on the house. Cheers, and watch out for rs9939609 (if you have two bad copies you have a 70% increased chance of being obese!).
In typical British fashion, the recording at the City Council office tells you very pleasantly:
[pleasant female voice] You are being put in a call queue, and your call will be answered in the order it was received. Your position in the queue is [grim male voice] ONE.
"Excellent", I think, "I won't have to be on hold very long." After a couple of minutes of hold muzak, in even more typical Brit customer service fashion:
[pleasant female voice] We are sorry we have not taken your call. We are currently experiencing high call volume and will be with you shortly.
Pretty impressive that they can simultaneously put me at the front of the queue and claim they have high call volume. Oh well.
After living in this bloody country (as I like to call it) for a year and a half, I've assimilated nearly all of the slang and colloquialisms. I realised today, though, that there is still one expression that gives me trouble. It is common to greet people here with a "You alright?" (nearly always contracted as "ye'alright") as follows:
Limey A: Hello.
Limey B: Ye'alright?
What's not actually clear to me is whether Limey A should respond to the question or not. That is, should I say, "Yeah I'm good", or just keep walking? Aussies seem to have a similar thing with "How ya goin?" that doesn't necessarily require a response. In the USA, if you greet someone with a "how's it going?" you generally expect a "good, thanks" in return. This is what I usually do here, but I have a sneaking suspiscion that it strikes people as odd.
On a slightly related note, I've decided to practice my Brit accent, since it is still shamefully bad. We'll see how it goes.
I found a bit of humour in this BBC headline today: Call for fertility ban for obese. The article is about the health risks of IVF for obese women, alas, and not about stopping fat people from propagating.
To be added to the list of Things Which Are Much Sweeter in Australia than England:
When you bump into somebody, or accidentally queue jump or run over their dog and say, "Sorry about that," Australians will universally respond "No worries mate." and actually mean it, whereas Britons will just glare at you uncomfortably.
I just found out today that in the UK you measure your tire pressure in bars. My flatmate said, "I checked my tire pressure and it was down to 1!"
England is literally chock-a-block full of crappy little villages. You can't walk out your front door without tripping over one. Thankfully the English are a sensible people and have given their crappy villages crappy names. I present for your enjoyment and/or edification, my favourite Crappy English Village Names:
Just take a stroll through google maps some time and you too can experience the crappy English countryside!
People all over Britain annually commemorate great Scottish poet Robbie Burns in late January. Indeed Burns' Day has grown to become a Scottish national holiday. The King's Hall and College of Brasenose had their Burns' night last night, which I attended despite not being vaguely connected with Scotland. As a matter of fact, we had a difficult time drumming up anybody from the college who is properly Scottish. Nonetheless, we all managed to enjoy some kilts, bagpipes and haggis.
The evening began with champagne in the chaple antechamber, which is
the usual routine for black tie affairs at college. In honour of Burns
we also had a kilted bagpiper who drowned out all attempts at
conversation while we milled around sipping champagne. The bagpipes are
definitely an instrument invented for usage across the Scottish
highlands, rather than indoors. The piper led the procession from the chapel to the hall for dinner.
After everyone was seated one of the students rose to recite Burns' poem, "A toast to the Haggis". We had some pretty good fish soup for the first course, followed by the traditional Burns' night dinner of haggis, neeps (turnips) and taties (mashed potatoes). The haggis was actually not too bad, similar in taste and consistency to beef hash. If you mixed a bit with the potatoes or turnips it was pretty good stick-to-your-ribs type fare.
Dinner was followed by a number of recitations, including "A toast to the immortal memory of Robbie Burns", the toast to the Lassies and the reply from the Lassies. Each of these was written and given by one of the BNC undergrads, and they were all pretty impressive. We toasted with some scotch of extremely dubious quality and all had a good laugh. The college Visitor, his Lordship the Bishop of Lincoln gave a few brief comments at the end, including a joke which assuredly must've come from the book of 101 Bishop jokes.
We adjourned from the hall so that the tables could be put up to the side and then returned for a couple of hours of Scottish dancing. There were far too many people for the amount of space available, and of course none of us had any clue how to do Scottish dancing. What resulted wasn't so much a dance as much of a jostling crowd of people crashing into each other and smashing people's toes. It was good fun nonetheless, especially as the crowd thinned a bit, allowing enough room to at least move around.
The phone on my desk is a 1980s era ASCOM Berkshire Select. I wanted to use it on a conference call today so I wanted to be able to mute the phone. Unfortunately the only three buttons (beyond the number pad) are labelled R, LR and S, none of which sound promising for mute functionality. A web search revealed that the "S" button is, in fact, the mute button. Why "S" you ask? Because it stands for "Secret".
While I found that tidbit amusing, I was not amused by the actual functionality of the Secret button. Modern phones toggle on and off so you can set it on mute and ignore it until you want to contribute to the call. The Berkshire series, however, requries you to hold down the Secret button whilst discussing your secrets. I was about halfway through designing a complicated system consisting of some tape, a pound coin and my RAPESCO brand hole punch to keep it depressed, but allow me to toggle it off, but instead I decided to use the phone in Lon's office (he's out of town).
I've been trying to write about this year's Ashes series, but I can't figure out how to do it without also explaining the entire game of cricket, a feat which took me 5 months of living in England to accomplish. At the very least I'll need to give some historical perspective on the Ashes (those interested in more depth can read the lovely wikipedia article on same). The Ashes is a biennial Test Cricket series played between England and Australia which began after the English team lost a Test match for the first time to the Australians in 1882. Local media bemoaned the "death of English Cricket" for having lost in embarrassing fashion to the colonials. The trophy taken back to Australia supposedly contained the ashes of a set of burnt bails (part of the wickets used in Cricket) representing the cremated remains of English pride.
The series is played as 5 Tests spread over the whole summer, each of which lasts 5 days. Without getting into too much gritty detail (although this article is a good one for Americans trying to figure out cricket) it is important to realise that each Test can either result in a victory for one side or a draw if the requisite number of wickets aren't bowled in 5 days' time. Also important is that the trophy is retained by whichever side currently possesses it if the overall series ends in a draw. Well, we're in the middle of the last Test now (today is day 4) and England is currently ahead 2-1 in the series. This means that if this final Test ends in a draw or an English victory (2-1 or 3-1 final results, respectively) then England regains the Ashes. In the case of an Aussie victory the final result would be 2-2 and the current champs (the Aussies) would retain the trophy.
The last tidbit of information required is that time lost to rain/inclement weather is not made up. So if you lose a couple of days to rain the match is likely to end up a draw, which in this case is good for the English. Cricket can be stopped due to rain or "bad light" where the umpires literally walk around the pitch with a photographers light meter to test for how bright it is. Under failing light conditions (like heavily overcast skies) the game is thought to be unfair to the batters who have a tough time picking up the ball coming out of the bowler's hand. So in this case they "offer the light" to the batting side who can elect to sit down for a while until it brightens up.
English fans at the Oval all started opening their umbrellas to encourage the umps to stop play, while Aussie fans took off their shirts in protest that it was a lovely day (in truth it's not raining, but it is a pretty grim day). The Aussie team took the field in sunglasses to show they were ready to play. At the moment play is indeed stopped and looks to remain that way for the rest of today (they stop the game at 6PM in any event). Barring an amazing display of bowling tomorrow, it looks very favourable for England to recover the Ashes.
Unfortunately it's hard to explain much more of the excitement of watching the match (this morning featured some brilliant bowling by England's Andrew Flintoff). The strategy of Test match cricket is so subtle that yesterday morning I went from thinking England didn't stand a chance to thinking that the Aussies couldn't possibly win. Anyway, Sox-Yankees in an hour, so I'll have had my fill of bat & ball sports today.
Channel 5 (the fifth "terrestrial" channel on UK TV) is renowned for showing crappy television. In fact, they're renowned for showing crappy American television (the upcoming lineup includes Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Joey, and Two and a Half Men). They also show American sports in the middle of the night, twice a week (baseball in the summer, football in the fall).
Normally I couldn't care less, but this Monday at 1AM they're showing the Cubs-Sox live (!!)
The weather is gorgeous here right now. It's sunny and warm. We spent our drawn-out lunch break basking in the sun in the courtyard.
Moments ago a centre-wide email was sent out announcing that water service has failed everywhere in the building and non-essential personnel are encouraged to take the rest of the afternoon off.
And I so far have convinced zero of my coworkers to go down to the garden at the White Hart for an afternoon pint. What is wrong with this country?!
I'm struggling to find an analogy to explain how a typical Brit might feel about watching an English team in the European Cup final. To be honest I don't really understand it that well myself. I guess it must be something like watching the Olympic team, but a bigger deal. For a real Liverpool fan, like my coworker Rob, however, it's much more like watching your team in the World Series or Superbowl. It's a bit difficult from my perspective to understand the concept of winning or losing in your own league (the English Premiership) and then seperately playing in an equally important tournament (the European Cup). Rob said winning in your league shows better consistency as a team, but winning the European Cup is a bigger deal because the competition is stiffer. Anyway, on to the game
AC Milan scored a goal off a free kick 51 seconds into the match last night, which I gather is something like giving up 6 runs in the first inning of a baseball game. The University Club bar was completely packed well before kickoff, but interestingly it was a more evenly divided crowd than you might expect, given the international composition of the Oxford graduate community. Midway through the first half the ref missed a call against Milan in their own territory which led to a breakaway goal and Rob screaming "You've got to f**king book him for that! Book him!" It felt just like watching a Pats game at Jamie's house. Yet another Milan goal left us at 3-0 at halftime and the attitude was very much the same as it was in Boston before game 4 of the ALCS; people were joking about putting money up for Liverpool. Rob was talking about "going for it, play some football. I'd rather lose 6-nil than just give up," much as Bostonians were talking about "preventing the sweep" and "not letting them celebrate in Fenway."
Starting about ten minutes into the second half were 6 minutes of pretty amazing football. Liverpool scored three unanswered goals (continuing my Sox analogy, no team had ever recovered from a 3 point deficit in Euro Cup history) and everybody was suddenly jumping up and down and high-fiving and hugging each other. Javier, this small 40-ish Spanish guy from the office was yelling his head off and pounding me on the back.
The game stayed knotted 3-3 for the remainder of regulation and through 30 minutes of extra time. This meant that the match would be decided by penalty kicks, which is about the most nerve-wracking invention of any sport I've seen; far worse than sudden-death OT in the NFL. A striker lines up completely alone and just fires a shot at the goalkeeper while the other players stand along the sidelines watching. Evidently the current style for Dudek, the Liverpool goalie, to avoid giving away which direction he'll dive in is for him to jump up and down and wave his arms like a freak.
Milan had first shot (each team gets 5) and Javier said, "First one's over the bar." Dudek started dancing and the Milan striker fired high and wide; the crowd erupted. Liverpool lined up for their first shot and one of Rob's mates said, "Never trust a Brazilian keeper, they're rubbish." Bang, he dove the wrong way and Liverpool was up 1-0 with everyone in the bar screaming like crazy. Dudek saved the next shot and Liverpool made another. 2-0 now which meant Liverpool only needed one more to save themselves from losing in this round.
Milan scored and then their keeper saved a shot, leaving it 2-1 Liverpool after 3 shots apiece. Dudek made another save on the next shot meaning that Liverpool needed to hit either of their final two to clinch the greatest comeback in Euro Cup history. Let me pause briefly to say that as somebody who had never watched 125 minutes of consecutive soccer in his life I was hanging on the edge of my seat along with everybody else. Liverpool shot and scored, and the bar went crazy. Strangers hugging each other, high fives all around and it felt just like Boston in October. The papers have been saying it's the greatest comeback in Euro Cup history, and that people will be talking about it in 30 years. I've been lucky lately in that respect...
A couple other observations made while watching the game:
