Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

Knowing that Canada really represented this year despite being about a tenth of the size of the US and having far less monetary resources is pretty awesome.

jaimeleigh

Pffft, we don’t even get snow, or have mountains, and we still won one (count ‘em!) gold medal. That is what you call punching above your weight…!

Although that one medal (the only one we won [and this post rhymes a lot]) apparently cost us a total of £6million in funding for winter sports. Money well spent?

Rather shamefully, I’ve only just noticed that it’s British Pie Week this week. I think this needs to be remedied by having a pie as soon as possible!

Mmmm, pie……..

I was just watching QI, a British comedy/quiz TV show that I highly recommend to anyone who loves trivia and believes that most commonly held “facts” are actually quite false indeed. Anyway, in this episode, they mentioned that cock-fighting was England’s national sport for over two thousand years, and that every town/village had its own fighting pit.

So much was this “sport” part of the national psyche that it gave us some elements of language which still survive today, such as:

• “cockpit”: where the fights actually took place

• “show a clean pair of heels”: some fights had weapons attached to the birds’ heels

• “game” (as in ‘I’m game for that’): related to game in the sense of birds in general, I assume

• “to pit someone against someone else”: again, the name of the ring being used

There are others which I’ve found during my brief searches online, including “crestfallen” (from the visual image of the crest on the bird’s head after the fight), and “cocky/cocksure” in general for the opposite.

The transcript of that episode of QI is online, and there’s a little more information about cock-fighting’s cultural impact on medieval England here.

As the title of the programme says, it’s all quite interesting.

Looking at that last post, I’ve realised that I’ve become one of those Londoners who is over-informed about the Tube and public transport network. I’ve got an image of the Tube map in my head, and generally know where to change to get from A to B quickest.

As posted previously, I’m really good at naming the central London Tube stations, and I reckon I could place most of the outer London ones fairly accurately too. It’s a sad talent to possess.

As a result of moving to south-west London, I’ve got to know the overland network a bit better too, which has improved my London geography no end. In fact, having also lived in the north-west and south-east at various times since 2002, it’s only the north-east that I’m a bit shaky on.

I imagine that car-owners are the same, and in fact I know that’s true because whenever you go to a party or barbecue out in the sticks, the conversation (especially between guys) inevitably descends into a “how did you get here?” topic. Discussion of the quickest route(s) always follows, and us London dwellers get similarly animated when it comes to discussing Tube routes!

And don’t even get me started on the weather…

“he got bowled LBW absolutely plum in front of the stumps”

Haha. This is a fun video but the description is awesomely indecipherable to an American with no knowledge of cricket.

Google Translate was worthless for an English-to-English translation (go figure!), so I did a bit of research and found that LBW means ‘leg before wicket’:

LBW: Cricket-a manner of dismissal on the grounds that a batsman has been struck on the leg by a bowled ball that otherwise would have hit the wicket

and ‘plum in front of the stumps’ I guessed to mean ‘right in front of his legs’ but before I could make sense of that I looked up ‘wicket’ (referenced in the definition of LBW) and found that ‘stumps’ refers to the target of the bowler:

wicket: In cricket-Either of the two sets of three stumps, topped by bails, that forms the target of the bowler and is defended by the batsman

So…I’m thinking that what the text meant is that the guy with the bat was struck in the legs by a ball heading directly in line with the target - which would make him out - but for some reason he denied that it was in line, hence the need for the slo-mo replay proving he was wrong.

Did I get that right, Rob? :)

melanyouth

Ha yeah, I guess my writing can sometimes be indecipherable for Yanks, especially when it comes to talking about that most quintessentially English of sports: cricket.

To be fair to melanyouth, she’s got it absolutely correct with regards to the terminology and what it means overall. We’ll make an honorary Brit of you yet!