I'm too tired to explain everything good about today, but have a bullet point list

[cosmolinguist]

* On the bus to Headingley (specially for the test match and entirely populated by people going to it), one of the two guys sitting behind us was looking out the window, commenting on pedestrians. "They're going. They're going." Then the other guy said of the next cluster of people we saw: "They're waiting at the cashpoint. They're normal people." I just love that he was distinguishing between people going to the cricket and "normal people."

* Zebra's coming home.

* I legitimately thought for a while I was going to get to see Jayawardene and Sangakkara bat for the rest of the day. Which would've been awesome. (But at least Sangakkara reached a momentous 50 before getting out, Jayawardene's still in there and I can foster hopes for Sri Lanka tomorrow.) "Last time that'll happen in this country," one of the TMS lot pointed out. I was glad to have seen it.

* I learned that ice cream is a thing you can put in Yorkshire pudding. I'll stick to the savory ones though, myself.

* A certain Geoffrey Boycott leaving Jennie and I bent double laughing during the hour it was overcast at the beginning of England's bowling. "Look at t' cloud!" he wailed, having surely reached some peak of being his stereotypical self. (England didn't get any wickets until the sun came back out after lunch, by which point the English commentators all seemed to feel entitled to some.)

* At one point something was determined to be wrong with the ball, so the bag of balls had to be brought out. I love this because the idea of finding another used ball that will replicate as closely as possible the state of the current one seems absolutely bonkers to me, like having bishops in the government or clumping all the bank holidays together so there's only one between May and Christmas.

* Okay, we both went home with sunburnt arms, but the sunshine was (to me) totally worth it. Couldn't have been more different from the four-layers-still-cold cricket I saw a month ago.

Comments

[quirkytizzy]

What is a test match? Though I'm giggling at that conversation and I don't even know what it's about!

Also who or what is Zebra?

What is Yorkshire pudding like? Is it like tapioca? Or a custard?

[andrewhickey.info]

A test match is an international cricket match. You often have a series of test matches, so Holly saw part of the first match between England and Sri Lanka last month, and part of the second match today. I say "part of" the match, because each match lasts five days.

Yorkshire pudding is oven-baked batter, traditionally served with roast beef and gravy. "Pudding" in England can also mean anything -- sweet or savoury -- made with suet, and so as well as things like Christmas pudding (a floury, suetty, dessert made with raisins and brandy) you also have black pudding (what would be called in America "blood sausage"), which is where the word originally came from -- it's etymologically related to the Latin for sausage.

(This is why Burns refers to the haggis as "Great chieftain o' the pudding-race")

From that, "pudding" later came to mean any dessert at all, and the American use for gloopy, sweet, confections comes from that. But Yorkshire pudding is from the older meaning. It serves something of the same function that biscuits (USian biscuits, not UK biscuits) do -- something stodgy and filling to mop up the gravy -- but is much, much nicer than them.

[quirkytizzy]

Ah! I've always been confused by how the English - and UK in general - uses the word "pudding", since over here it's mostly just a creamy sort of dessert thing. Your puddings sound WAY more imaginative!

Latin is awesome. It is also strange to see how much words have evolved from what they were originally. Etymology to the rescue!

And lol, now that you mention the cricket thing, I should ahve picked that up from context. But thank you for explaining that to me, I was confused!

[matgb]

My favourite use for a yorkshire batter is what's called toad in the hole. This is a set of sausages baked into a yorkshire pudding batter. You can then, if you want, fill the 'dish' the batter makes with a sauce/gravy/whatever. I sometimes throw in some baked beans, but normally just have it plain.

was also very existed about the zebra, apparently someone in the crowd threw their toy zebra along the line, and it got all the way around the stadium back to its owner. This is, apparently, important. I supposed it had to be more interesting than the cricket, but that's not hard.

[quirkytizzy]

That kind of pudding sounds DELICIOUS. Heavy and hearty, a sort of "stick to yer ribs" kind of meal. Those are my favorite kinds of meals!

And OH - that's actually really sweet about the zebra, then. I think that's adorable! And nice - I'm glad it didn't get stolen or anything!

[cosmolinguist]

I really want toad in the hole now. Thanks. :p

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, there are all kinds of pudding here -- black pudding, Christmas pudding, steak and kidney pudding, bread and butter pudding -- and I hate them all, except yorkshire puddings, which are great. But they're something you have with meat and vegetables and gravy, I do not think they're for ice cream, which is why I thought that was remarkable.

[cosmolinguist]

You often have a series of test matches, so Holly saw part of the first match between England and Sri Lanka last month, and part of the second match today.

Not quite true. What I saw last time wasn't part of a test, it was an ODI (one day international), so what I saw there was that whole match. Usually a visiting country will do several of those as well as a test series on their tour. I think you're right in that this is the second England v Sri Lanka test, though, but the last one was at Lord's.

I would argue that Yorkshire puddings are not much nicer than biscuits if you don't get the biscuits from KFC. :) Nice biscuits are as nice as Yorkshire puddings.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, the zebra's just a toy zebra, and as Mat says it just got flung around the stadium, but what made me laugh is...well, let's take a step back. There were a couple of times in the 90s were big football (soccer) events -- the World Cup in 1990, and Euro 96 -- where a popular band and a comedian or two released a song that was vaguely about football. One of those, "Three Lions", starts (as you can read there) with "it's coming home, it's coming home...football's coming home."

So when the zebra overcame so many what looked like insurmountable obstacles to be thrown from one pair of hands to another all around the crowd, and looked likely to make it back to the most drunk and rowdy part of the stands where it had started, the people there suddenly started singing "it's coming home, it's coming home, zebra's coming home..." which is another thing that got me and Jennie laughing.

It's one of those "you probably had to be there" things, but something about hearing a football song at a cricket match (not to mention one so soon after England's men's football World Cup team continued its fine tradition of losing in the first stage (48 years of hurt now!)) struck me as funny. And Jennie kept wanting to sing "zebra's coming home" after that.

[rmc28]

I'm going to be hard-put not to sing zebra's coming home at times now.

[cosmolinguist]

It's very catchy! :)

[matgb]

I learned that ice cream is a thing you can put in Yorkshire pudding

This had never occured to me. This has to be tried ASAP.

[cosmolinguist]

It was Jennie who was telling me this is a thing, so I'm sure she'd approve. :)

[haggis]

Off topic, but I am fascinated by your journal title. Can you explain?

[cosmolinguist]

I'm gonna change it again in a second. :) But "three electrodes and the truth" is just something I saw in a blog post and it made me laugh. It's a riff off "three chords and the truth" (warning: link is to TV Tropes page so if it sucks up a whole afternoon you can't say you weren't warned). But I don't know what if anything this variant was particularly supposed to mean; I just liked the sound of it and wanted to change the title from being quotes from The Thick of It, because every time I saw those I wanted to watch the episode in question, and I don't have time for that so wanted to save myself some disappointment.