The Book, The Bear, The Podcast, the Mag and Dresden Cricket Club.

While we've been waiting for Australia to get this damned ODI series over and done with and onto the T20s (which should be marginally more interesting, despite the fact that they are T20s), some stuff has been going on.

As you may or may not have known, we all had a chance to win a copy of Jrod's book When Freddie Became Jesus. There were two copies going begging, courtesy of Jrod's buddy Iain O'Brien and they were indeed won by two lucky buggers. What I bet you really didn't know (and I'm not actually sure I do either) is that is may have been our lovely Purna who won it. If it was you, Purna, congrats. If not, then some lucky bugger who also uses the name "CM" on blogs should be rather chuffed right about now.

In a fairly irrelevant, but quite cute, aside a certain gentleman has written a new Winnie the Pooh book. The author of the book, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, spent a great deal of time researching A.A. Milne (the original author) and his works in order to make this book as authentic as possible. One of the things he discovered was that Milne was a great cricket fan. In his honour there is a scene in the book in which Christoper Robin teaches the "animals" to play cricket. I had hoped to have a picture of the cricket page scanned in, but for various reasons this has not happened, so here is the best I could do:

 

Worth buying just for a picture of some animated stuffed toys playing cricket? Probably not. But I thought it was worth a mention here. Plus, I am a librarian ... I thought I should occasionaly mention a book or two.

If you haven't yet listened to the Test Match Sofa podcast, which you can now subscribe to through itunes, you definitely should. They are pretty English and, as such, seem to think that Andrew Strauss is some type of God (he's really, really not) but otherwise they're high on the comedy factor. Jarrod Kimber has been involved in the first two and that gives them a slight Aussie-ness to balance out the English-ness, but in all fairness they do try to cover things going on in the whole cricket world.


If you feel more confident than I do about your cricket writing, you should submit something to the new cricket sadist's magazine ... erm ... Cricket Sadist's Monthly (does exactly what it says on the tin, I'm guessing). It's been set up by various people, including the guys at CWB and there's room for everyone, so get writing.

And finally, a big hello to Karl at Dresden Cricket Club who reads this blog ... that makes two readers so far from Dresden (Wes being the other one). Who knew Germans were into cricket? We'll have them all here, yet.