Sephy’s Platzish

Back in August, I had commented on my general dislike of E-books. Well, I have to say that my opinion has changed, albeit just slightly.

I’ve been working on compiling lists of stuff for various uses, and I was given a link to the Top 100 books at Project Gutenberg. I happened to notice that at #10 is a book that has been recommended to me for quite a while now, Pride and Prejudice. If you click on this link, you will see various versions of the book. I believe that the version I had downloaded back in August is one of the Text versions. Those have the words meant to be in italics formatted for newsgroups, with underscores on either side of the italicised word.

You’ll also notice a couple of Adobe PDF files - the first one is the one I downloaded. It’s formatted in the correct paper size for the USA - 8-1/2 × 11 inches, landscape. You’ll also notice that the pages don’t seem to match up correctly. This is by design as it’s meant to be put together using the “perfect binding” method - i.e. mini booklets are formed from groups of, in this case, 8 pages and then folding the group together forms 16 pages of text in the correct order. The other PDF file is simply the pages (at the same size as the ones in the first file after folding) put into correct order, more suitable for screen reading.

The best part? It’s totally free and legal - the book is technically out of copyright here, so it is freely available for the taking. The only challenging part is to devise a method to bind the 18 booklets together into one big mass

…I hope that you brought something with you to entertain yourself. You might have heard that our in-flight entertainment system has been experiencing some minor issues. Unfortunately, these problems are more than intermittent and we don’t know if this flight will be affected. The time now in Sydney is just coming up to 5.30 PM Friday, and we expect a flight time of 14 hours, landing at around 8 o’clock Saturday morning. Once again, we hope that our entertainment system stays active for the duration of the flight. If a situation were to arise, we can attempt to sort it out. On behalf of the crew, many thanks for choosing to fly with Qantas, member of the OneWorld Alliance.

I doubt that this is the actual announcement you’d hear on your next flight on a Qantas 747-400B aircraft, but it is the situation faced by many passengers on their flights in recent months. Admittedly, I would get bored if I didn’t have something else to entertain me (beyond the skymall catalogues). However, if I were on such a flight, I don’t think it would bug me all that much since I would have something to keep myself occupied. Of course, among the stuff I’d have would be little primers on things that I’d already know such as not tipping and the correct pronunciation of words such as pergola (pa-gol-a, not per-go-la as we would say it over here).

In other aircraft related news, Google and Microsoft spent this Australia Day over various parts of the country taking photographs. However, I am concerned that Google’s plane looks a bit, well, fake…those logos certainly don’t look like they belong there, and where’s the rego? Another question - why are there American cars in the background?

…about nothing in particular

Actually, that’s the first phrase in The Zompist Phrasebook. I have been looking for lists of common phrases in other languages - German, French and Spanish in particular, and this one came to me as a surprise.

Among the better ones -

• There’s a corpse on the bed. Please change the sheets.
• That’s not all! I have two more photo albums!
• Where can I rent a camel? and
• One order of fermé le mercredi, please.

Of course, fermé le mercredi means Closed Wednesdays. I will recommend that you visit the page, just for the sheer fun in reading the Intellectual exchanges section - you might need a translator for it, but you should get the jist.

This also brings up Monty Python - particuarily the Hungarian Phrasebook Sketch - take a read through if you hadn’t before

So, the State of the Union address was tonight. I watched classic baseball instead, thanks to one of the channels here airing older games from the Brewers. Tonight’s installment was a game from August 1992, against the Toronto Blue Jays (apparently not Bluejays as I had said yesterday) at Skydome. Of course, since it was on you know that the Brewers end up winning - with a (then) record of 31 hits - 22-2. One comment made by the CBC commentators was that the next day’s game would be much closer. It was, but the Brewers still won, 7-2.

As far as the SOTU goes, it’s not like you don’t hear about these things for days if not weeks to come, especially as the Presidential campaign for next fall has already started. Another thing - we all know what the reaction will be - Democrats will say that the President’s policies are misguided, Republicans will say that the Democrats are full of it and nothing will get done. Just about everyone else (myself included) will say that they’re all full of it and that they all just care about what the people who give them money want.

You’d think that as someone who got a Christmas card from the White House in 2004, I’d care more, but I don’t.

It’s not exactly us managing to get our act together and put ourselves on the map, but there is a movement afoot to run a little experiment here in the States - a 7-match One-day International series between India and Australia. The current idea is to have the seven matches at, and I quote, “an indoor NFL stadium in New York”.

There are a couple of problems, aside from the fact that there’s a tussle over how the earnings are split up, with Australia wanting half of the take, and India not exactly in agreement. First is that cricket is designed to be played in more of an oval-shaped staduim (though they can create the boundaries necessary from any type of field really). Nope, the problem is that there isn’t an indoor NFL stadium in New York. At least one that is ready to host sporting events this year.

Interestingly, the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) claim that they will be able to garner $6 million per match in TV fees, etc. While that’s fine (and proven with the events in Kuala Lumpur in fall), they seem to miss the point.

If they want to promote cricket over here, they should start by finding someone who is willing to pick up the matches on a proper network; they can use the international announcers. As it is now, only people who subscribe to a premium service on top of a satellite service can see any cricket here. By allowing a proper network (ESPN, I’m looking your way, what with having the rights to the Ashes in SE Asia, along with your partnership with CricInfo) to cover the matches, it would be useful as there would be people who would be browsing channels to see this unusual sport with unusual voices speaking, and would stop to watch.

Now, let’s discuss where to actually hold this. The organisers say that they are looking either at New York or Toronto. What isn’t specified is the time of year they would be doing this. It would seem that the most likely time would be in summer, July or August based on the make-up of the Aussie schedule for their winter (Zimbabwe tour in June, T20 Champs in South Africa in September). It will likely be hot, but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue - extra drinks breaks are easy to come by. It would also be baseball season, so that could rule out Toronto (as the most likely venue would be Skydome Rogers Centre, which is also home to both the Bluejays and the Argonauts) based on the scheduling.

In New York, you could feasibly pull it off at at any of three stadia (preferably a combination of the three) - Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium and the Meadowlands. The good news is that the first two are natural grass surfaces (though the sand in the infield would be a concern, as would be pitch placement); the Meadowlands is a synthetic field, albeit one that is meant to be a close replacement for natural grass.

Of course, they could always decide to try an innovative approach - have it around the country. Then you would only have to worry about late flights.

In any case, it is an interesting proposal - one that certainly would have a little bit of interest here, but not too much. Who knows? It might just come to pass that in a few months’ time we *are* discussing the third ODI played at the Meadowlands.