Bite the dust

This came to my attention this week:


 
The person who shared the information had reservations:


 
I don’t know whether Tony is seeing what I am seeing, but for me the nub of the problem is very clear. It is this:

‘Written loosely to the tune “My old man’s a dustman”’

Let that sink in. I don’t know the song “My old man’s a dustman.” And yet I do. If you look deep within yourself you will find you do too. You know this song, you can feel it in your bones, and you know it to be a terrible, terrible song. Details flash across your consciousness from another dimension. It is sung in a cockney accent. There is ribaldry - oh, the ribaldry. There is a singalong chorus and lots of “laffs”. It must be stopped.

I resent the fact that the song is mentioned as though it will be a familiar reference to me in any way but the nightmarish race memory way described above. I don’t know how I feel about Denis Carnahan now, knowing that he knows and makes use of this song, and I don’t care how “loosely” the new song is based on this one, I know where that song has been.
I may have got the wrong end of the stick completely and “My old man’s a dustman” is actually an old Radiohead album track (“Creep” has potential, come to think of it). But I am too scared to go and find out.

It is of course all part of the perennial “problem” of Australia not having a real counterpart to the Barmy Army. People always talk about this like it is a bad thing, but maybe, just maybe, the existence of the Barmy Army has a tiny little bit to do with a propensity to sing songs like “My old man’s a dustman” and we are well to keep out of it.

PS.
“Barbie Army” is a very weak name, unless you are an actual army of pink Barbies waving tongs. I agree that any name would be stronger than “Fanatics”, but you can do better than this. If you really must do this sort of thing, how about “BBQ HQ”? “Vegemite Regiment”? I’ll stop there.



Super bass

There was some discussion in the Grandstand commentary box about the expression “eye like a dead fish”. I didn’t catch all of it - it extended over several shifts - but Simon Katich and Jim Maxwell knew the expression, Jonathan Agnew and his BBC friends had never heard of it, and Jim tried to explain it to Chris Rogers, who may or may not have known the expression but was highly sceptical of Jim’s guesses as to where it came from. I didn’t blame him, they were very bad guesses, stuff to do with the eyes on a dead fish “sticking out”.

So, I know this expression, and it makes sense that it came up with Simon Katich because he is the model of the cricketer with an “eye like a dead fish”. Here is my attempt to explain what it means and why. It is a theory pulled out of my arse and then I will do some homework to see if it is right.

When you say a cricketer has an eye like a dead fish it means they are unblinking. They see the ball and they don’t flinch. So:

Fish have no eyelids and don’t blink. 
Dead people have open eyes and don’t blink. 
Dead fish = unblinking squared.

You have to forget about things like the fact that anything dead is also blind.

Now I will have a look.

Result: I am very good at this. I also learned that some of the things Jim was saying, to do with shell shock and the thousand-yard stare, seemed to have been gleaned from the Urban Dictionary. I suspect they were notes handed to him from a producer, but the idea that Jim Maxwell regularly consults the Urban Dictionary pleases me very much.






Beam me up

There was a lot of talk about DRS in the Adelaide Test, because there were a lot of reviews and a lot of reviews overturned. This always leads to a lot of angst about the Rise of the Machines.

Part of it is aesthetic: ‘spoils the flow of the game’. Some of it is moral: Won’t Somebody Think of the Children. A lot of it is what I like to call the Epistemological Circle: a computer can’t know better than me because I know better than a computer. (I have already addressed one version of this argument – “you know when you’ve hit it” – here.)

It all tends to merge together into what I think of as the Star Trek argument. Humans: they’re great because they’re rational, but not too rational. It is an amalgam of tolerance/intolerance of human/machine error/accuracy that goes something like this:

Humans get things right.
BUT it is ok if we sometimes get things wrong, because: human.
BUT it is NOT okay if technology sometimes gets things wrong, because LACKS CHARM.
AND it is ALSO not really okay if technology gets things right because LACKS CHARM.

I tend to be systematically on the side of technology in these kinds of things because I am suspicious of gut instinct/common sense arguments in general. They also tend to be mixed up in good old days/when I was a boy arguments, which I flat-out loathe. It is also true however that my own personal ball tracking ability would never come into conflict with a computer because it doesn’t exist. I have the eye of a stunned mullet.