Things

I've been a bit busy in the past few days. And things will only get more so, with exams approaching. I'm kinda excited about the things we're learning these days, bar the antics of a certain Statistics teacher who has wild mood swings. We're learning regular expressions next week! Things I've heard about for such a long time, and we're getting to try it out! :D And yes, we've hit the fifth stage by learning Perl. ;) So exciting stuff, albeit very tiring.

I've been keeping a close eye on the destruction in Japan. My mom got the text message about some radioactive rain falling in Sri Lanka or something. Totally agree with Pseudo that children should be taught basic nuclear science so that people don't panic unnecessarily like that. I mean, every time someone mentions the word 'Nuclear', people think of Chernobyl, Hiroshima and cancer. The phobia is so much that MRI scans, which should be called 'Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging', had to drop the N so as not to scare off patients. But seriously, panicking over Nuclear power is so 1950s! People should get with the times already.

And in other news, I will be casting my first vote tomorrow! :D Yep, pretty excited about this. Look for a purple pinky to be my profile pic on Facebook for a couple of weeks to come. ;)

P.S. I broke with tradition and didn't post a big match update this year. I didn't get tickets early for the match, and when it looked like a friend could set me up with some tickets, I fell ill. I should stop this nasty habit of falling sick right before the big match. :( Anyway, it was a wonderful game and I watched a lot of it thanks to the live broadcast on Prime TV (or CSN) and on ThePapare.com. A big "Thank You!" to those guys for making it possible for us unlucky folk to catch the action. :D

Friday Morning

Me-shak and I are sitting side by side in a hall, stuck in a lecture that won't end for another 3 hours. The lecturer drones on and on about some Simpson guy and his law, and how matrices are multiplied or something. As if we care. The brain cells refuse to work, the beat of the papare ring inside our heads. The centre of the universe is calling out to us. And as soon as the lecture finishes, we are off... off to where we should've gone 3 hours earlier!

The centre of the universe: A panoramic view (click to view larger)

It's ROYTHO Taiym!!! :D

I'm about to make a shocking revelation. Recent polls have shown that most people don't go to the Roy-Tho to watch cricket! This might be shocking, but it kinda makes sense too.

 Photo by Indi (http://www.flickr.com/photos/indi/) / CC BY 2.0

A wise man (I can't remember exactly, but I guess it was a blogger) once said "The Roy-Tho isn't a match mate, it's a freaking Carnival!", and I couldn't agree with him more. What sets this 131-year-old annual spectacle (the second longest running continuous series in the history of Cricket) apart from any other match is the carnival-like atmosphere that prevails. The segment of the match that most people really look forward to isn't the cricket, but the breaks - for lunch, for tea and after play has finished - when everybody takes to the field and goes around and around, meeting old friends and making new ones. The huge Royal and Thomian college flags make their laps, and old boys singing their school songs lustily. Everyone joining in on the fun: the old, the new, the Royalists, the Thomians, the boys and of course, the lovely ladies that the big match never fails to attract.

Play will get underway in a couple of hours time, and I'll be missing the first day due to some unfortunate circumstances. But all I can say right now is "I'm glad to be a (tiny) part of this!". May the brotherhood and the friendly rivalry between these two great schools last forever! :)

And that's what they call Thomian grit!

Have you seen the Thomian boys' tent when Thora is almost down and out, and all hope seems lost? If you have, then you'd understand why it's pretty hard to beat these 3000 stubborn little tykes from Mount when it comes to enthusiasm. They're always up and dancing, singing their brilliant old songs backed by the paparé, and doing the Thora paara at regular intervals. And the famed Thomian Grit certainly showed in the second innings, as both Saleem and Nirru made exceptional centuries. Certainly what we needed was a captain's knock, and that's exactly what we got!

So whatever happens tomorrow, and I'm not ruling out a Royal victory, our boys will always be up and cheering, because we do love our lovely lovely STC no matter what!

Special congratulations to my classmate Nirrushan, on a brilliant unbeaten knock of 103. Lead us to a win mate!

Esto Perpetua!!! :)

Rainy Nights and Eddie Rabbitt

*Warning: Explicit Thomian naivete and lameness coming your way*

Well, at the end of play yesterday, we were kinda in dire straits. 54 for 4. This in reply to a mammoth Royalist 1st innings total of 313 for 9. And it rained last night. I DO love rainy nights, and love Eddie's song about rainy nights too. Especially the lines:

"showers washed all my cares away, I wake up to a sunny day"

So hopefully today will be a sunny day for Thomian batting, and our captain will score something substantial this time, something that has eluded him in the past big matches. And maybe some of that magical 'Thomain Grit' will show in today's play ;)

GO THORA!!!
:)

Thora FTW!

The big match is happening in 3 days time, and everyone's getting ready with the essentials: the tents, the papré bands and obviously the booze. Disease has an interesting article about what makes people travel thousands of miles, leaving behind their families and jobs, just to come and watch the spectacle.

The Thomians are definitely the underdogs this year, but aren't we always? :) The outcome of the big match cannot be merely predicted by statistics alone. There's so much passion and expectation going into the match that star players might underperform due to the stress and youngsters might lead their teams to a win. It's like the world cup final of school cricket one might say. All this uncertainty makes the big match one heck of a game of cricket, and even if the action in the middle gets pretty slow and boring, there's plenty more to keep the eyes happy all day... ;)

Enjoy the big match everyone!

Esto Perpetua

A Bad case of blogger's block...

I'm not much of a spontaneous person, so unless something big happens and I feel an urge to write it down, you wouldn't find any posts from me which I hadn't carefully cut and chopped and made as non-offensive to anyone as I can. The post about the news presenter was a kinda joke so it doesn't count... :)

Anyway, since overthinking is my thing, I thought about many things to blog about. My adventures with my friends was the obvious first choice, until I realised that I never accompanied my friends on anything adventurous. This is big match season, and all of them must be climbing over walls and getting chased by angry cops... and I, a free man, a school child no more, can just join 'em right? no problems from school, no suspensions, no scene! But I don't. and I don't know why. It's simply inexplicable.

The second thing I thought about writing was chicks, and how Facebook has changed the mating game. Well, it hasn't for me. If not for the internet I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have missed so many real world opportunities. Here's how picking up a girl with Facebook goes: You see a girl, you find out her name through 'other' sources, you search her up on Facebook, see she's not a member, slap yourself hard and begin to cry... This IM/Facebook culture has destroyed the art of meeting, greeting and getting the phone number. Damn... :S

The third, obviously veering into political territory, was a condemnation of the attack on our cricketers. Here are 15 kids that every freaking Sri Lankan loves... no matter how divided we are, we'd all watch the match on the TV together. We'd cheer together when our boys did well, but would never go and burn their houses if the lost, would we? Unlike some of our neighbours. And according to what Mahela was saying on the Telly yesterday, if that one rocket had hit the bus and not some lamppost, we would've lost them. Our heroes, our symbols of unity... gone in a few seconds! imagine that... I sure don't want to.

Yep, well atleast I blogged about not being able to blog and got a rather decent post out of it. woot! :)