The Tyranny of Socks

I've never felt much interest in visiting Australia, but I sure wish I'd been there for the last few days.

I promised cofax7 that I would write about Primeval before the next episode, so here I am! One day to go!

( episodes 1 and 2, season 4 )

Fifth test, day five. I keep thinking, "You know, England are perfectly capable of losing this match today. By lunch, even." Goddamn nail-biter Ashes series! But I figure, pessimism is never out of place when you're hoping for an England victory, even when England are clearly the better team, aside from Shane Warne, god among spin-bowlers.

ETA: GODDAMNIT ENGLAND! What is this "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" thing?

The cricket was too stressful to listen to thoday, and so instead of refreshing the scores again and again, BH and I invented Icon Meme Fantasy Test Match Cricket, since (like all sports people, cricket fans are obsessed by making fantasy teams). First, we made a team from the characters who appear in my Icon Pairings Meme:

My Eleven:

Jack Bristow -- veteran, opens batting
Frank Pembleton -- opens batting
Julian Sark -- bats 3, public school, good technique, agressive
Wesley Wyndam-Pryce -- bats 4, ditto
Han Solo -- all rounder, change bowler, bats 5
Bill Adama -- captain, wicket keeper
Julius Caesar -- spin bowler, bats seven
Jack Bauer -- fast bowler, agressive (reverse swing)
Aeryn Sun -- strike bowler
Alex Krycek -- pace bowler, has to outfield due to the lack of one arm.
Marshall Flinkman -- leg spinner, makes Shane Warne look like an amateur, but some press scandals involving ball tampering accusations


There were a number of other capable spin bowlers on my icons, but there wasn't room on the team -- Minerva McGonagall being an obvious example. We thought Arvin might spend a bit too much time trying to rum out members of his own team (similar problem with Nina Myers, and Irina Derevko). We very nearly dropped Krycek, since he only has one arm, but BH reconsidered when he learned that it was his good arm. My icon list is full of wicket keepers and spin bowlers -- both McCoy and Frankie, for example. This probably says something about me.

But of course, a single team is no use at all -- you need another team for them to play, so off we went to look at other versions of the icon pairings meme, to see what teams we could pick from them. The first plausible one we came to was selenak's.

( selena's eleven )

Of course, once you have two teams, you need to have a test match. Picky people will notice that the individual scores don't add up -- this is because a certain number of extra points occur in the course of a test match, for things like "no ball" and other stuff I don't really understand.

( test match special below the cut )

That was so much fun that we made up a whole set of teams from other people's memes. The first one was from sophia_helix's meme

( beneath the cut )

When we got to elishavah, we had to reuse a few players:

( luckily, we remembered who Adam Carter is. I think. )

The last one we did was monanotlisa's version, which produced ( a rather specialized team )

And yes, I know that no one will care about this but us.

ETA: I forgot! We made a list from Nestra's meme, as well. ( BH wanted House to be captain. Crazy. )

And yes, I know, nobody cares.

The Ashes[1] start in less than an hour, and I'm becoming increasingly nervous -- perhaps I should remain in sackcloth throughout the whole test series.

[1] "The Ashes" refers to the cricket test series[2] played between England and Australia. The Australians are the best team in the world, but this year England may have a hope in hell of winning the series. I would very much like for that to happen.

[2] Technically, they refer to the prize in the series (the ashes of... some cricket-related wooden thing, I'm pretty sure, in a silver cup), but you know, metonymy.