Bob-buh

Bobb-buh

Earlier this season Rich and I helped out a local club who were short of players when our club's opponents couldn't get a side out. The report in the paper got everything wrong. I got credited with Rich's wicket and his catch, and his name was reported as Bob. In our next game, he was exclusively and unanimously referred to as Bob. Or, Blackader style, as Bobb-buh.

Yesterday, weeks after the newspaper report, this casual conversation:

AD: Where's Bob?

ME: France.

AD: Oh.

Margin Call

I watched Margin Call last night, it's an atmospheric, twitchy, tightly-wound take on one of the first nights of the banking crisis, when the figures first start to unravel and the fact that there's nothing underpinning the money appearing on traders screens comes to light.

Milo Minderbinder

Got onto talking about Catch 22 with BLISS in the morning. Milo Minderbinder's chapters, written sometime in the 1950's and first published in 1961, predate the banking crisis by some time, but I remembered the part where M&M Enterprises (with the '&' between the 'M's for Milo and Minderbinder so that people would not think that his one-man band was a one-man operation) ships the mess' eggs to somewhere, sells them for (say) four cents each, then buys them back for (say) seven cents each (no more 'says' now, to be taken as read) and ships them somewhere else and sells for ten cents and buys back again for twelve before returning them to the starting point apparently having made bundles of money in the process.

Another MM and congratulations

LPL has passed her theory test. Well done kid! Only two wrong, one better than MM, who reckons that, now he's passed the theory test twice, he's not far away from driving a car by thought alone. I remain in the family dunce's driving seat, one wrong answer away from failing the test altogether.

MM played cricket for us yesterday, and I really enjoy the games he's available to play. He adds a lot of banter to the changing room, most directed at me.

G, recently discharged after surgery, was bent over his kit bag rummaging around for some of the pills and potions he depends on. He was changed and in his whites, but the room's cramped, and his arse wasn't so far away. He's blessed with plenty of arse, too, so his whites were stretched. “I see the NHS have done well, and the operation was a complete success” I said. “Look at that” said Dave, “a total eclipse of the entire universe.” “They've done a nice job on his ceramics.” I had to throw in the old Anita Harris line. There was some more talk about the surgeon’s danger money, bonus, and post-operative trauma, and about the theatre staff having to push two tables together.