Cricket: Ball Tampering, Penalties, Captaincy

No true cricket fan can be happy about the ball tampering incident and its effect on a series between the two top teams in Test cricket. Such meetings occur seldom and this incident has damaged the series beyond repair. On the fourth day at Newlands, a disheartened Aussie team collapsed for 107 to lose the Test by a whopping 322 runs. We can expect more of the same in the final test.

This is not to excuse the Australian team’s behavior. For years, decades even, they have bullied other teams with tactics that straddled the line and now, finally, they have crossed it. As I write, Smith and Warner have been forced to relinquish their positions as captain and vice-captain, Smith is out of the final test and Bancroft has received three demerit points. This is only the beginning and there is talk of Smith and Warner facing lifetime bans. Even otherwise, their reputations are in tatters and it is difficult to see them living this incident down.

These events have only underscored what I’ve always felt about Smith: a great batsman, perhaps the best in the world in Test cricket, but not a great captain and not a natural leader. Under pressure, he folds. I remember the incident in India when he was caught looking at the pavilion for advice on whether to protest an on-field call. It was not what I’d expect from the captain of the Baggy Green. At Newlands, it was bad to have Cameron Bancroft tamper with the ball but it was worse to pass it off as a collective decision by the team’s senior leadership. The “right” thing to do would have been to take full responsibility. Heaven knows how many more players will be tarred by this event. Smith, Warner and Bancroft are only the first casualties.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that Darren Lehmann played no part in the incident. What the TV cameras  captured seems to implicate Lehmann, no surprise considering his unsavory behavior in the past. Neither do I feel sorry for David Warner; I’m not sure what his involvement in this incident was but his past and recent history mark him as an explosion waiting to happen and a poor advertisement for Australian cricket. Whatever happens to him will be richly deserved, a result of his bad karma catching up with him. My sympathies are reserved for Bancroft, a newcomer still trying to cement his place in the team and too new to refuse his captain’s order. I even feel a little sorry for Smith for his precipitous fall from grace and likely the end of his cricketing career.

There are many aspects to this whole fiasco that are puzzling. Why did Smith and Co. try such a high risk – low reward maneuver ? Did they really think they could get away with it knowing full well that so many cameras were trained on them? Was it arrogance that led them to think so or was it a sign of their panic? Did they even stop to think of the consequences of getting caught? Even if they had succeeded in fixing the ball undetected, would the reverse swing they extracted from it been enough to skittle out the South African batsmen? And why was it so important to win this match and the series? This was not a World Cup final. Even had they lost this test and the series, it would have merely meant a drop in the world rankings… bad , yes, but not catastrophic. And , finally, as some have already commented… Was Smith’s contrition genuinely for his actions or was it for getting caught? We’ll never know. What is certain is that this series is as good as over and it is going to take a long time for Australian cricket to live this down.

P.S It will be interesting to note the behavior of Australian cricket spectators when next a visiting team plays Down Under.

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Irish Tea and Customs

Last week I attended a talk on Irish Tea, Customs and Food Lore at the local library. The speaker was Judith Krall-Russo, a Food Historian and Certified Tea specialist who has been giving such talks for the past twenty years and more.

I had thought the talk would be mainly about tea but it was actually about the history of food in Ireland. Ms. Krall- Russo, though not Irish by birth, has an encyclopedic interest in Irish food lore  and had the rapt attention of her audience. In her hour long talk, she gave us an avalanche of information, all of it interesting, some of it new and startling even to those who of us in the audience who considered themselves foodies.

In olden times, Ms. Kraft Russo said, the Irish diet consisted mainly of seafood, particularly eel, herring ( which was plentiful and known as the poor man’s food) and mackerel. With the Norman invasion, food habits underwent a change and meat became more  prominent. At one time, the Irish consumed about 80 lbs. of pork each per year. Each family kept two pigs, one for their own consumption and the other ( which was known as The Gentleman Who Pays the Rent) for sale. Surprisingly, salted meat was more expensive than fresh meat. After Cromwell and his Roundheads defeated Charles I, he rewarded his soldiers by giving them land in Ireland that he expropriated from its Irish owners. The loss of grazing rights meant that cattle could not be raised as hitherto and potatoes became a mainstay of the Irish diet with 40% of the population living exclusively on potatoes, each person consuming on average fourteen pounds of spuds each day. This may seem like an unbelievable statistic but potatoes do not have much nutrition. All went relatively  well until 1845 when the potato blight devastated the potato crop and the Irish peasantry had nothing to eat. In the four years between 1846 and 1850, over a million Irish men, women and children died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated to America. In a time of such privation, food was actually being exported to England, an unconscionable act of inhumanity. Oats and barley were the chief grains grown in Ireland as wheat was unsuited to the Irish climate.

Some interesting sidelights:

Potatoes grown on one acre of land could sustain a family of 6.

With the improvement in farming techniques, the potato yield jumped from 2 tons/ acre  in 1590 to 10 tons/ acre in 1840, a five -fold increase. Over the same period, the Irish population jumped from less than a million to 8.2 million. No surprise there.

Brown bread was for the poor, white bread for the gentry. Ironically, brown bread contains much more nutrition than white; the poor got the better of that bargain.

Shepherd’s Pie , a picnic food made with left over lamb or beef, is wrongly thought to have been a poor man’s dish. The poor could not afford any meat at all.

And what about tea, you ask?

The Irish , it turns out, are #1 in the world when it comes to drinking tea, consuming on average about 7 pounds of tea per year. At one time, 20% of the household food budget was spent on tea.  The Irish like their tea strong and hot and milky, sometimes adding up to 1/3 the volume of milk. In Ireland they say,” If it doesn’t burn your tongue, its not hot enough; if it isn’t as black as Guinness, it’s not strong enough”. The Irish also like their tea sweet; sometimes, two or three different types of sugar are laid out with the tea service. Irish hospitality is well known and guests are treated royally. When a guest sits down to tea, he gets more than just a cuppa. Tea is likely to be accompanied by sandwiches, scones, cookies, bread, butter and jam. I read elsewhere that HobKnob biscuits are a tea time favorite. I just loved that name Hob Knob so I looked it up and found that they are digestive biscuits ( similar to McVities) and are available in the U.S though they are pricey. I also read that the Irish like to add a lot of milk to their tea to disguise its poor quality. Until 1960, they bought it from English importers who gave them the worst quality teas, reserving the best for their English customers. After 1960 though, the Irish bought their tea directly from the source and cut out the British middlemen. By that time though, the Irish taste for milky tea was set and it continues to this day.

Before the talk started, we were invited to pour a cup of tea for ourselves and have some biscuits ( cookies). The tea was good and strong and the biscuits went well with it though they were not Hob Knobs. A delightful afternoon.

P.S. Ms. Kraft- Russo is not merely an authority on Irish food and tea. She has also studied Japanese tea ceremony , led a tour called ” Taste the World of Tea” and lectured on sundry food topics including the food and agriculture of New Jersey. A most enterprising lady and one I’m a little jealous of; I’d love to have done  what she is doing.

 

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An Irishman For a Day

This past Sunday, I went to the St. Patrick’s Day party at the clubhouse in our Active Adult community and got to be an Irishman for a day. It was great fun and I had a wonderful time.

St. Paddy’s is one of the most popular parties and the Grand Ballroom was packed with one hundred and fifty celebrants seated at tables of ten people each. Most of the attendees were ” temporary” Irishmen like myself but you couldn’t tell by looking at them. Everyone was wearing green: green hats, green vests,  green dresses etc. At the table next to us was a man with a green hat with tiny green lights that blinked on and off. At the same table was a woman, probably his wife, whose earrings also had similar green lights. Green klieg lights focused on the ceiling and walls turned everything green; the Auld Sod itself could not have been any greener. After an hour of socializing, liberally greased by wine and spirits ( It was a BYOB event), dinner was announced. As our table numbers were announced, we trooped into a nearby room and partook of the sumptuous buffet. The fare consisted of corned beef and cabbage, fried chicken, roast salmon, carrots, potatoes, pasta primavera, salad, bread and soda bread. Because there were servers and because there were four lines, service was a snap and we were tucking into our food scant minutes after we had been called to the buffet. The corned beef and cabbage was very good and my wife told me the salmon was excellent. The food was hearty and fulfilling; I did not feel the need to go back for seconds. Dinner finished, we sat back to listen to the live five – man orchestra as they played a series of Irish favorites. There was ” When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, “Abie’s Irish Rose”, ” It’s a Long Long way to Tipperary”, ” Danny Boy” , ” A Bicycle Built for Two” and others I didn’t know. There was also a whiskey drinking song of which I only caught the chorus” ….. Whisky in a Jar’. The music really livened up the party as people really got into it, singing along and keeping time. And, of course, they were dancing. What fun to see every one happy and having a good time. The piece de resistance of the evening was  a hefty blonde haired woman, who marched in playing the  bagpipes and performed several numbers that were enthusiastically received. Towards the end of her performance, partygoers were invited to march with her. As she played yet another favorite, a conga line formed up behind her and they all sashayed round the room in a miniature St. Patrick’s Day parade.  There is something plaintive yet appealing about the sound of bagpipes that makes listeners sentimental. And so it was with us as we watched and listened and sang along.  The final number , in which the band joined in and everyone stood, was America the Beautiful , a fitting end to a most enjoyable evening. BTW, before you ask” Aren’t bagpipes Scottish rather than Irish?, let me repeat what we were all told ” The Irish invented bagpipes, the Scottish perfected them”. So, there.

The Irish are my favorite ethnic group. I get along with everyone but with Irish better than the others. My feelings are no doubt highly colored that for 22 years my boss was an Irish American who took me under his wing and is one of the finest people I know. But it is more than that. I find the Irish highly sentimental, poetic, literate and emotional, less driven and more interested in the finer things of life. Yet, as each St. Patrick’s Day celebration proves, they know how to have a good time. I’ll sign up for the 2019 party as soon as the flyers are out and , next year, I’ll be wearing a green hat too. Perhaps one with blinking green lights.

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Two Newspapers in One

Last November, we were in Henderson, Nevada for a wedding. We stayed with a close family friend and one of the pleasures each morning was reading the newspaper, an actual printed newspaper. I get the digital version of the New York Times at home and it is great but, as I realized in Henderson, there is something to be said for the “real” thing, something you can hold in your hands and turn the pages. I love the digitized version of the Times but it has its drawbacks. One of them: you very soon fall into the habit of skimming , reading only the highlights or the headlines. Very rarely do I bother to turn to the sections and read the lesser stories.

When I started reading the Las Vegas Review Journal, I found myself reverting to my earlier habits. I skimmed it from the first page to the last and found myself reading not just the news but the columns and the restaurant reviews and doing the crossword puzzle. Almost immediately, however, I found myself puzzled. The Review Journal is a conservative paper with a conservative platform but I found the inner pages to be decidedly liberal, often taking positions contradicting those on the front pages. Then, I noticed that the inside of the newspaper was titled The Las Vegas Sun. I checked with my host and found that what I was reading was actually two newspapers in one. Back in 2005, the Review Journal and the Sun signed a joint operating agreement and the Sun became a section of ( and an insert in) the Review Journal. The two continued to have independent staffs and operated their own websites.  In doing so, they both saved a bundle in operating and distribution costs and have managed to stay afloat even in these days of declining newspaper readership.

What I find amazing is that the two newspapers have managed to preserve their independence despite being joined at the hip. They had been battering each other for over 50 years and have continued to do so, often attacking each others positions on the issues of the day. Even after the Review Journal was bought by the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the Sun has been able to maintain its independence thanks to the joint operating agreement. (It must be an ironclad one!) The Review Journal meanwhile has seen increasing interference from Adelson with several news-stories pertaining to the casino industry having been killed or changed on an almost daily basis.

For readers though, this unique two in one newspaper is a boon. The Sun would definitely not been able to survive on its own and even the Review Journal would have been under financial pressure. The other advantage is that readers get to know both sides of the issue, an important benefit for all but those at the far ends of the political spectrum. Readers like myself who are closer to the middle can pick and choose what they want to read and thus obtain a more balanced viewpoint on the issues. I just wish that it were possible for those who rely on TV for news. Fox News is so far apart from almost everyone else that viewers who watch it  are in a world of their own.

To get back to the Las Vegas newspapers: In addition to the contrasting viewpoints, it was great to see a daily bridge column, an advice column by Ann Landers and two different crossword puzzles. The one in the Review Journal was more difficult than the Sun but both were doable for one with my limited skills. Too bad I can’t have those with the Times but I do have two New York Times books of Sunday puzzles which will keep me occupied until the end of the year.

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On Hunters and Hunting

I write a feature called Your Turn for our community newsletter in which I ask fellow residents their opinion on a topic of general interest. A couple of months ago, the topic was ” Which do you like better… Hamburgers or hot dogs?” As you might expect, the answers were varied and interesting and were split down the middle.

One of those responses was from Tom ( not his real name). He said he preferred hamburgers and told me how he liked them cooked. Then he added” What I really love are venison burgers. I hunt in season and when I bag a deer, I field dress it and grind up the meat to make burgers. Because deer forage for themselves and are constantly on the move, the meat is very lean, so I add a little chopped bacon to the mix to make the burgers moist.” His response was freely volunteered. I took down his words verbatim and readied my article. One day before the issue was sent to the printers, I got a somewhat panicky call from him asking me to delete that part of the interview. He was concerned , he said, that his friends might find his hunting activities objectionable and give him grief about them. I thought of telling him that he was worrying too much, but then decided against it. I didn’t want to talk him into something he wasn’t comfortable with.

I admit that, many years ago, I would have been upset with Tom because he hunted. That is not true any more. I myself have never hunted, never wanted to and never will but I recognize that hunting is a necessary evil. In today’s environment, deer have no natural enemies and their population would increase exponentially if unchecked. I read about an estate owner in France who was staunchly opposed to hunting and posted her fenced in property to forbid it. The deer herds on her grounds quickly  grew unmanageable, ate up all the shrubbery and even the leaves of trees as high as they could reach. Soon, they were starving and the local government tried to get her to allow them to thin the herds on humanitarian grounds. She refused, even when the deer began dying of starvation. Only when she herself died were the local authorities able to bring in professional hunters to cull the herd.

Shooting wild creatures, particularly lovable ones like deer, seems cruel but consider the alternative. As areas get built up. deer habitats get more and more tenuous. In the suburban area where I live, deer are constantly getting hit by automobiles. Almost on a daily basis, I see deer carcasses lying by the roadside and it gives me a pang each time. And what of the deer who manage to avoid being hit by a car? What happens to them? Well, in winter they die of cold and starvation. We don’t see this happen and aren’t aware of it, don’t think about it. Much as we might like to deny it, being a prey of hunters is a better alternative.

This is not to say that I fully endorse hunting and hunters. I have nothing but contempt for those who kill wantonly, for the sake of killing. Back in the late 1800’s, a titled Englishman undertook a train journey across the Great Plains. In the rear of the train was a open sided car which served as his shooting platform. With him was a man servant whose duty it was to re-load and pass the guns to him. In the space of about two months, this sub-human POS shot over 7,000 animals, mostly bison, leaving them to rot where they fell. No condemnation can be too strong for him or for those buffalo hunters who shot bison mainly to harvest their tongues which were considered a delicacy.

I draw the line too at those big game hunters who kill elephants for their tusks or those who hunt rhinos for their horns because powdered rhino horn is considered an aphrodisiac. Nor do I care for those trophy hunters, ” sportsmen” who hunt game on fenced in ranchlands in Texas and elsewhere.

The hunters I respect are those who hunt for food, who follow the rules and who do not kill indiscriminately. Good examples of such hunters are the Lapps for whom reindeer are a large part of their diet, Eskimo seal hunters and the Native Americans who used to hunt buffalo. All of them, after they had downed their prey, said a prayer for the soul of the departed animal and thanked it for its sacrifice. This may sound corny , even silly to some of you but, in acting as they did, these hunters exhibited a reverence for life and Nature that is sadly lacking today.

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Long Island Pains

Recently, on Netflix streaming, I watched three episodes of Royal Pains  which ran for 8 seasons on the USA Network. It’s the story of Frank Lawson M.D, a talented and well-respected physician whose career is cut short because of a moral decision… he leaves the bedside of a rich donor to operate on and save the life of another patient. The rich patient dies because of an unusual set of circumstances and Lawson is let go. In the Hamptons to recover from his setback, Lawson saves the life of a partygoer at one of the island’s McMansions and, before he knows it, becomes an on-call physician _a so-called concierge doctor _ to Long Island’s rich and famous. In some ways, the series seemed like Bay Watch: lots of nubile young girls in swim wear, parties , booze and attractive locales, many of them beaches.

I’ve lived in the New Jersey- New York area for almost fifty years but , in all that time, visited Long Island just half a dozen times. I went to Sagamore Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s summer home, to Nets and Islanders games, to Jones Beach and for a wedding. Jones Beach was nice, but nothing in Long Island was so distinctive as to make the long trip worthwhile. So, I was largely ignorant about Long Island. Seen from New Jersey suburbia, it did not seem attractive. When I was working in NYC, I constantly heard  my Long Island colleagues complain about the difficulties of their commute. They were always complaining about the vagaries of the Long Island Rail road and the bottlenecks on the Long Island Expressway. If it wasn’t the traffic or the railroads, it was the weather they were moaning about. Storms seemed to linger over Long Island; if NYC got three inches of snow, Long Island got twice as much. Likewise, hurricanes saved their worst for Long Island. When I considered that in order to drive anywhere in the tristate area, Long Islanders had to first go through NYC, I wondered why they had chosen to live in L.I. Granted that summertime in  the Hamptons was wonderful, I still didn’t think it made up for all the long winters, the  long commutes and the high taxes.

I knew about the Hamptons, the favored playground of newly rich dot-com millionaires, but I had no idea about the lavishness of their palatial estates until I saw Royal Pains. The size and opulence of the houses shown in the TV series took my breath away. Some of the mansions rivalled those on Newport, R.I, only these were modern. In addition to umpteen bedrooms and bathrooms, they had Great Rooms with huge dance floors, tennis courts, helipads and extensive  gardens. And the lifestyle depicted consisted of nonstop partying with lots of drugs and booze and casual sex.

At one time, the optics of such a series might have made it worth watching. Thirty-five years ago, Baywatch was a hit. Now, however, the aimlessness of the lives that are depicted is a turnoff. Back in the eighties, this was still a middle-class society. Nowadays,  many are living from paycheck to paycheck and several are drifting into poverty and homelessness. In such times, the antics of the rich difficult to watch without a sense of outrage.

Royal pains has its moments and Mark Fuerstein is appealing in the role of Frank Lawson but I won’t be watching it any more.

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