1980s West Indies versus 1980s VFL?

Eleven years ago, I reacted in what I now recognise as a ridiculous manner to the discovery of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that discussed the losses suffered by the 1984 Australian cricket tour of the West Indies. Having during the 1990s discovered an apparent pervasive anticorrelation between fast bowling strength and the profitability of first-class cricket, I long assumed the West Indies were an exception. Thus, my discovery that tours there were losing money made me emphasise beliefs established as a teenager, though others around me denied their truth.

Absence of evidence re the profitability of Caribbean tours before Lloyd worked out that spin was an unnecessary luxury precluded refutation of the argument that their extreme fast bowling strength caused the financial losses. Even people outside my family were unable to offer an answer with which I was satisfied — and they themselves never discussed the profitability of previous Caribbean tours.

Today when discussing the issue of how 1980s Wisdens overemphasised how bad England was and did not discuss what the West Indies were doing well, I received an interesting idea. This was that the financial losses of West Indian cricket during the 1980s were due to the increasing financial demands of their star players.

I had never thought of this argument before, but it is eerily similar to the situation faced by [Australian Rules] football during exactly the same era. With the VFL’s zoning and clearance rules declared illegal, and clubs in an era of inflation seeking to gain top players at any price, player costs continued to rise even when governments put the brakes on inflation, with the result that real wages of players increased at an increasing rate. Consequently, declining attendances as more and more people relocated to suburbs remote from the public transport essential to move large numbers of people to grounds produced much heavier losses than occasional attendance declines in previous eras. Clubs could not cut expenses as they previously could because of the demands players were making. These demands were further increased by a greater demand to win at any price (at least by most top football clubs). At the same time ruling classes who formerly patronised football turned to basketball, which was very easy to televise to people remote from public transport. The VFA, the WAFL, and lower leagues suffered even more than did the VFL. Ultimately, football had to reform on basketball’s terms — rationalised grounds and standardised conditions that made the game much easier to televise.

1980s West Indian cricket managers, no doubt, would have liked to reduce payments to star players to lower costs, but the Sydney Morning Herald implied that they knew this to be impossible. Also, exactly like [Australian Rules] football, cricket in the West Indies was struggling to compete with the rapidly growing National Basketball Association — based much closer than the MCC or Kerry Packer. Another similarity was that the West Indies were taking cricket to all grounds although only Queen’s Park in Trinidad was economically profitable, while football was played on unprofitable suburban ovals on which league-fixed ticket prices meant more popular clubs could not generate sufficient revenue from home games to improve facilities. The ruling classes of the West Indies, increasingly linked to the United States, had little interest in patronising better and cheaper accommodation at cricket venues.

A major difference is that the VFL by 1984 recognised for exactly this reason that suburban grounds needed to be phased out, whereas the West Indies Cricket Board was expanding first-class cricket to these very loss-making venues. Nonetheless, the similarities are both interesting and surprising — increasing demands from players and a shift of ruling class patrons to basketball are almost certainly behind the heavy losses of all [Australian Rules] football competitions in the 1980s and may well be behind the financial losses suffered by the West Indies while it dominated world cricket on the field.

Stupid computers or not the point?

When I studied in Melbourne University, I was outraged at the rude graffiti I discovered on virtually every toilet wall. Almost all if it was sexual in nature, and I always felt it encouraged violence towards women or towards men perceived as not strong enough. This latter tendency was aided by the fact that as a university student at the end of the 1990s I had strong memories of bullying both at school and on the street.

Coarse (or violent) language on films or in music seemed to me like a natural culprit for bullying behaviour. When I first heard of film ratings, I presumed their purpose must be safety — preventing children learning that violence is acceptable behaviour or naïvely thinking thus.

At the same time, I was learning to use Microsoft Word, and one function I quickly discovered was AutoCorrect. I quite quickly began to check spelling on Word, and soon discovered that I could add to and delete from AutoCorrect. Given my dislike of rude language, it felt entirely natural to add to AutoCorrect any rude word whose meaning in less coarse language was known. I did this a lot for a while, often repeatedly because my additions in the Melbourne University computer laboratories were probably not retained when the computers shut down at the end of each day.

All seemingly went well for a while, until I made, merely testing, a discovery that was truly shocking — that AutoCorrect was not case sensitive! This meant that “Dick” was corrected even when intended as someone’s name (I intended and assumed it would only correct when uncapitalised, but was shocked when “Dick Tyldesley”, a former Lancashire bowler, became “Penis Tyldesley”!). Following this, I assumed that the inability of AutoCorrect to be case sensitive meant computers really were not nearly so intelligent as everybody presumed. I consistently laughed at how something so specialised as a computer could be unable to distinguish capitalised from uncapitalised words and (in this case) correct only the uncapitalised. At the same time my brother said, critically but not aggressively, that by adding swear words I was turning AutoCorrect into “AutoCensor”. “AutoCensor” remains a really funny joke, much less gratuitous than the renaming of people called “Dick” by an addition intended only to AutoCorrect with a small initial letter.

After a while, the contrived nature of my additions to AutoCorrect made me think my original idea was silly because it was so difficult a job to accurately rewrite rude words as something less nasty and more often than not grauitously violent.

Then, I was told rather quietly one day by a university official than I had been banned from the computer labs for “tampering with AutoCorrect”. I was told that my tampering with AutoCorrect had ruined some other student’s essays — completely changing texts in such a way that they could not be mended. Unlike later cases at RMIT where I reacted extremely violently and angrily, I accepted this punishment because I knew very clearly that I had been altering AutoCorrect. Even if I felt my intentions were good, I had already realised that tampering with AutoCorrect simply could not do what I wanted it to.

Until recently I largely forgot about this, although I still thought of computers as really stupid because AutoCorrect was not and could not be made case-sensitive as I always assumed it should be. However, a discussion with my brother confirmed what he had said to be a quarter of a century ago — that AutoCorrect exists purely to correct typos, and is not designed to correct swearing (my brother’s “AutoCensor”). Although it ought to be simply enough to have separate AutoCorrect entries with different capitalisations, that has never been done because it would be more complex and the purpose was and is always corrections whose necessity is independent of capitalisation. If that be recognised, then computers that correct “Dick” when capitalised are simply doing what they are ask, whether it was my intention or not, and are not totally stupid as I have always thought!

The problem of “don’t ask” just from fearing no

This evening I went into a terrible temper tantrum when my mother complained that I left cooking rissoles for tonight’s dinner until they were seriously overcooked and smelling.

The tantrum, with familiar phrases (mantras) like:

“get the word “can” out of your head”

“there’s no such word as “can””

and less familiar mantras like

“I used to be able to [remember to come down] but I can’t now”

and gestures like trying to place the word “can” in the rubbish bin in the kitchen [by pointing to the rubbish bin in a terribly agitated manner], became so bad that I even walked out of the house without my mobile phone! Outside I was just as angry and agitated — trying basically to make my mother recognise that I was totally incapable of reminding myself that I had cooking to remember when I was sitting at the very computer where I am writing this post.

My mother was just as upset as I was — and I might note that she has not been well in recent weeks, having mucus-y coughs for the past week or more. It has been difficult for me to appreciate her troubles, but I hope I becoming less bad at it.

After I came back — deliberately knocking softly in order to, as it were, persuade my mother that I had calmed down — I did speak much more calmly about the issue. I enjoy cooking, but my mother had said that I might have to give it up if I forget it time and time again as I have been doing for the past few weeks.

When I look at it logically, I recognise how I was obsessed with watching football and possessed zero desire to do the cooking. I simply wished to watch the football and listen to music as I had been doing for many hours before I went out to walk the dog, but feared my mother’s opinion too much to say “no”. So, I did the cooking as quickly as possible and was quite lucky in fact not to burn the spring onion, celery and mushroom mix that was to be mixed with the mince to make the rissoles. Although I said to Mummy that I would come back when I put the rissoles in the oven, I immediately and totally forgot as soon as I was back settled at the computer watching football. There was not the slightest thought about what was happening inside the oven until the DVD was finished. So unconcerned was I that I was actually surprised that the rissoles had nearly burned over!

Once I came back, realising that I could not keep screaming and screaming outside, and even feeling my vocal cords somewhat weakened, I tried to talk to my mother about what needs to be done to give some hope this will not happen as consistently as it has been of late. I am probably reasonably convinced that there is no hope I can be instructed to remember to come down when I am totally focused on listening to music or on watching football (of course, anything I am watching on the computer would have the same effect as football!). Both of us were extremely upset at the way I expected my mother to be a “lackey” upon whom we can fall back whenever I forget cooking jobs that I do just to please her when my actual desire is to listen to music or watch something on the computer. I actually say I want to cook to appease my mother when I actually want to spend all day doing exactly what I want — which, today, was to watch football.

However, the most notable lesson from tonight’s tempera tantrum was that my consistent refusal to ask my mother whether she would either:

1. remind me by coming up to the study or
2. look after my cooking

out of fear of being told “no” is really, really bad. It might be wise because I know all too well that if my mother said “no” I would most likely go straight into a meltdown as bad as today’s. However, my deliberate silence has meant that my mother and I are both left ignoring the cooking with risks of burning. When I look at it, I thought of the many old English cricketers — for example Walter Brearley or George Louden — who would likely have greatly improved England’s prospects in Australia but were never questioned about touring because MCC was sufficiently aware they had zero possibility of being away from business for so long. My case is different because I have never tried — out of partially justifiable fear of being told “no” — to ask my mother to watch over my cooking. Instead, I assume she will do so as my slave. When in a tantrum, of course, I justify it as a “one-way street” where I can do and get exactly what I want one hundred percent of the time, although logically this “one-way street” is totally selfish and makes everybody else totally immaterial. It is clear to me — whether I cam capable of change or not (and I have zero belief I am) — that I must do something to prevent me forgetting my cooking, or develop some sort of compromise where I do the preparation and my mother agrees to watch over the cooking. In a logical mood these compromises are terribly unfair to my mother, but given my lack of genuine interest in cooking it is unclear what else we can do??

Another sign of the runaway — Melbourne’s first rainless August

Today was a rather difficult sleep for me due to the strong winds overnight. I was later to bed than I had been over the previous few days when I have been affected by a headache and went to bed extremely early a few nights ago.

Given that there is no rain in the forecast apart from today, I was eagerly awaiting rain from the moment I first briefly woke up around 7 o‘clock to go to the toilet — before getting a very interrupted sleep. I was looking for signs of rain all the time this morning and afternoon, trying half-heartedly to not discuss or look at the weather to see if it was going to rain. BOM forecasts are very unfavourable for significant rain but not so extreme as I was already anticipating from reading them about a week ago, when Melbourne was in danger of its driest July on record.

All along until around 4 P.M. I was anticipating rain, but when I finally bit the bullet and had a look at BOM’s forecast I found what I feared all along — that Melbourne was not going to get rainfall predicted with a ninety percent chance in the early morning forecast. There is no confident rain in the weekly forecast either, and I have no desire checking further ahead as the seasonal outlook is for very dry and hot weather.

Probable Weather for Remainder of 2023:

1. Melbourne will have its first ever rainless August
• the previous record dry August is 12.4 millimetres in 1903
• in fact there has never previously been an August with no rain in the first eight days, but none is forecasted from Saturday until well after that
2. Melbourne will not get any rainfall in September or October either, or maximally a small fraction of the sum of the monthly record lows of 19.4 millimetres
3. Melbourne’s dry spell record of forty days — ironically set following a record wet spell of 374 millimetres in 42 days and during the city’s wettest ever twelve months with 1,045.5 millimetres between October 1954 and September 1955 — will be beaten by a large margin during the normally rainy winter months
• if Melbourne beats it by the margin Sydney did in 1995 — 47 days vis-à-vis a previous record of 34 — Melbourne would go without rain for at least 55 days from 1 August until 24 September
• Even during the extreme droughts of 1914, 1982 and 2006, there was no rainless spell longer than 28 days
4. Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be below 332 millimetres virtually every year from 2024, and below 166 millimetres most years
5. Melbourne’s dams will be permanently dry soon after 2024, with the last runoff-producing rain having occurred this June

It has long occurred to me that runaway poleward movement of the frontal systems to well south of Tasmania is long overdue based on circulation changes observed since 1964. These changes would, as I noted four-and-a-half years ago, mean that Melbourne receives no more than 180 millimetres of rainfall per year — and possibly given topographic effects much less than that. With more frequent positive Indian Ocean Dipoles, that figure should decline still further to under 100 millimetres per year.

Such a rapid “catch-up decline” would put an end to most of the attractive feature of Melbourne that the Public Transport Users’ Association noted as already threatened a quarter of a century ago. It shows that runaway climate change was already a danger then. Moreover, the PTUA’s proposals were in fact not nearly radical enough. What was needed was 100 percent reduction in car use and a 100 percent reduction in Australia emissions no later than 2005. This was and is — via rational planning and expropriation of the rich polluters — achievable without mobility loss and indeed with mobility gain by eliminating congestion. In addition, even if this rational planning cannot does not reverse runaway climate change and the transformation of Melbourne into a hyperarid desert, it will mean that the polluters responsible are made to pay the cost.

The thing that must never be said – it overlooks the issue

Today, Mummy and I went on a train ride to pick up the new Peugeot, which had a major fault in its brake control that had to be repaired at a workshop near the bend of Hawthorn Road into Camberwell Road. In earlier years, this area was familiar, but since COVID we have never been there.

On the whole, I enjoyed the return trip with my mother to pick up the car — a 2018 Peugeot 208 which was bought in Balwyn last summer. I was really very reactive to any complaint about the standard of Melbourne’s public transport, which by global standards is exceedingly bad. There remains the problem of loud, one-way “mantras” about the need to end all spending on roads and to transfer it to public transport. Nevertheless, so early as 1990, Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated the potential benefits to the immense majority of such a policy, while much more recently Richard Smith had demonstrated the urgent necessity of radically reducing car production and banning the manufacture of all but the smallest road vehicles.

Given what Smith reveals about the energy costs of car production, one must never say that cars are a necessary benefit when criticising Australia’s woeful public transport. Cars’ environmental cost is far too great to, even given the standard of public transport in Australia, excuse their use.

The fact is — as known for over three decades — that a rational plan could with 100 percent public transport modal share and resultant vastly reduced greenhouse emissions and pollution nevertheless produce the same (or greater) mobility cars provide, and at far less financial cost than the sum currently wasted on roads. Plainly put, such a plan is in every way except reduction in profit to wealthy corporations much fairer, cheaper and more rational than the present transport system. There should be no tolerance (personally or politically) for any policy other than 100 percent of spending on public transport, and not a solitary cent on roads.

The problem of testing and of capitalism – as Victoria moves towards a completely failed lockdown

The past three weeks have been depressing as COVID-19 numbers in Victoria continue to rise without the slightest sign that they will ever fall. Yesterday – a day of reduced testing as is supposedly typical fo weekends – there were 73 cases in the community, and there is not the slightest sign that mystery cases are falling. What is worse still is that there is no academic study of why Victoria’s lockdown has failed, and I am quite suspicious academics attempting to do so will say something politically taboo (as I will discuss later).

It is virtually certain that this lockdown, originally scheduled for a week. is likely to be indefinite and most likely to last for a year or longer, with catastrophic effects on all but the biggest businesses. COVID case numbers are almost certain, as one commentator on Twitter said, to rise far above the present horrific 1,218 seen in New South Wales yesterday. The predicted number by November – when the state came out of a lockdown against a much less contagious COVID variant that was caused like the present one by a negligently prematurely easing restrictions whilst COVID was abundant in the community – is over 2,000 per day. However, with numbers doubling every week or so under restrictions similar to last year, COVID numbers in Victoria would actually reach 23,000 cases per day by the end of October!

Politicians are repetitively saying that the government is doing its best, despite the fact that personal experience says clearly that rules are not being enforced and that there is inadequate effort to test residents as soon as COVID-19 is detected in wastewater. The number of people lying around parks that are supposed to be closed is quite alarming, and what is needed is to have steel fences so that people cannot lie around parks. Reports I have read say that closed parks have been bound with tape and plastic that people can cut in the simplest manner with household scissors!

The belief is that once the supply of vaccines against COVID is improved, then restrictions will be able to be eliminated and businesses return to normal. However, Red Flag (the current version of Socialist Alternative, which I read extensively as a student two decades ago) and the World Socialist Web Site here and here have demonstrated that it is a lie that the government is doing everything possible. The WSWS demonstrate that vaccines will be at best a very short-term solution as increasing resistance and an increasing number of even more virulent and contagious strains means that in a very short time numbers will rise even more rapidly than they are today, at least under imperfectly enforced lockdown measures without full wage payment to all workers. Without full wage payment until COVID is eradicated, it is difficult or impossible for workers to get test before they have spent multiple weeks infectious in the community. Commentators much more conservative than Red Flag or the WSWS have argued that the abolition of Jobkeeper this very month may be an important factor preventing numbers going down.

The WSWS demonstrate that if all resources held by the richest 1 percent were transferred globally to eradication of COVID at a global scale, such eradication could easily be achieved before even more potent, contagious and vaccine-resistant strains emerge. The WSWS demonstrate that there is no way strains even more contagious and potent than the currently dominant Delta will not emerge. As Red Flag said in the aftermath of the Trump victory in 2017, public support for much higher taxes, possibly even for expropriation, of the rich has zero effect on policies that are entirely controlled by business. Red Flag show that the only way the immense majority can have their voices heard is by

“...revolutionary organising centres, where striking workers and mutinying soldiers can coordinate their defiance, robbing our exploiters of the ability to wield economic and political force against us [workers]”

What is clear is that COVID can only be stopped by a complete expropriation of the world’s capitalists – and that without it the world’s poor will face a complete and permanent loss of freedoms taken for granted in nominally democratic countries – most critically freedom to travel and freedom of choice in food and other products. Without expropriation to the final cent of the wealth of the super-rich, and its transfer to pay for essential health for the poor at no cost, the COVID pandemic will never end.

A fault in my understanding of Woodcock

In three recent posts, I have looked

1. firstly at the death of John Woodcock, whose writings in the 1985 and 1986 Wisden Notes by the Editor pushed me into a long-standing obsession with old county cricket
2. secondly at the views I acquired from my initial reading in the early to middle 1990s,
3. thirdly at how these have evolved as I have read more about old county cricket in older Wisdens and The Times

My brother, from whom I acquired the original 1985 Wisden, has always been somewhat critical of what I said ever since I first became obsessed with Woodcock’s 1985 Notes by the Editor. However, it has only been in the past few years, especially since the COVID pandemic has restricted me to reading online from the SLV and newspapers.com websites, that I have listened at all to my brother’s criticism.

Starting at the earliest writings of Woodcock, it is striking that his Times criticisms of the declining amount of spin bowling, which can be read on the first post in this series, do not appear related to the most rapid declines in the amount of spin bowled. In 1955, seventeen spinners were amongst 27 takers of 100 or more wickets. Five spinners in Tony Lock, Johnny Wardle, George Tribe, Bruce Dooland, and Fred Titmus took over 150 wickets, with Lock, Wardle, Titmus and Tribe being the four top wicket-takers with over 175. Three seasons later in 1958, there were only five spinners — Lock, Jim Laker, Tribe, Brian Langford and Cecil Cook – amongst eighteen bowlers with 100 wickets. By 1962 there were only four spinners — Titmus with 136 wickets, Ray Illingworth with 117, Don Shepherd with 114 and Lock with 108 — amongst 23 bowlers who took 100 wickets. Three pace bowlers in Derek Shackleton, Fred Truman and Len Coldwell took at least fifteen more wickets than Titmus, and five more pacemen took more wickets than Illingworth. Nevertheless, 1962 issues of The Times and The Guardian contain zero lamentations about declining spin bowling, although an aware cricket historian could have easily seen the replacement of spin bowling by short-of-a-length seam as an important cause of rapidly deteriorating county finances. Contrariwise, the following year’s Times issues contained many such lamentations, two of which I attached to the first post in this series.

All this begs a question: why did The Times start lamenting declining spin bowling in 1963, and not 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959 or 1958? Those seasons already exhibited the same decline in spin bowling Woodcock lamented in 1963 and continuously for a third of a century afterwards. The answer, my brother and I concluded, was that declining spin bowling was not the true concern of Woodcock, Norman Preston, Evelyn Wellings and other English cricket writers of the era. Rather, English cricket writers of the last third of the twentieth century were concerned that England was not winning. During the Thatcher era, the prospects of England regaining supremacy in the cricket world appeared dimmer and dimmer with each passing year, while the ruling class was deeply nostalgic for the days when England did rule the roost. The ruling class viewed England beating non-white nations as the order dictated by natural law, and abundant spin bowling became seen as the missing ingredient. Declining spin bowling thus became an excuse to explain England’s failure to match the West Indies in the middle 1960s, and most international opponents in the 1980s and 1990s. In reality, after World War Two spin bowling was never decisive in actual England series victories over India, Pakistan or the West Indies. Nevertheless, under the above presumption that a greatly reduced quantity of spin bowling in England constituted the critical difference, it paid for Wisden writers to lament the decline in spin as much as possible, and to imagine — if not explicitly, — that ancient spin bowlers could have broken the West Indies’ apparent invincibility because no 1980s team was exposed to anything beyond third-class spin bowling, and that on pitches rigged against the spinner.

How my established views on English cricket developed, 1995-2019

In my previous post I noted how reading 1980s and 1990s Wisdens, most especially the Notes by the Editor in the 1985 Wisden, during the 1990s provided me with a clearly defined worldview that has both cultivated a deep attachment to old county cricket and continued to shape my perception of the history of the game.

Reading older Wisdens, alongside further reading of 1990s Wisdens, certainly did alter my views somewhat, if never deeply.

‘Back to Grass Roots’ by David Green in the 2001 Wisden demonstrated that covered pitches were/are sufficiently rigged against the spin bowler that it is by no means certain that older spinners would have done any better than the exceedingly poor records of English spinners of the late 1990s. Green’s solitary concession was that he hinted that if spinners were able to use flighty trajectories – forbidden because of abundant limited-overs cricket – they might have been less unsuccessful. Later, reading from The Times in the State Library of Victoria, the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University and the Mathieson Library at Monash University would frequently show that pitches I had assumed favourable to batting because Wisden said nothing about them were actually highly favourable to the spin, and also pace, bowlers who obtained large numbers of wickets thereon.

As I collected 1950s and 1960s Wisdens during the 2000s, I made a more critical discovery: how declines in spin bowling were as pronounced and consistent in the years before one-day cricket became dominant as afterwards, and not something began by one-day cricket. 1960s Wisdens under Woodcock’s predecessor Norman Preston were equally alarmed at the declining number of spin bowlers as 1980s and 1990s issues. Most revealing is how Preston demonstrated that short-sighted changes aimed to make cricket more attractive – most especially the standard 75-yard (68.58-metre) boundary introduced in 1957 – actually made the game more defensive. This is because, as Bob Wyatt predicted before their introduction, they provided equal incentive for bowlers to bowl defensively as for batsmen to attack. Even then, cricket history showed attacking bowling as the prerequisite for attracting the requisite crowds for first-class cricket to pay its way. Preston also said that the lush green outfields which writers like Mike Selvey were so critical of in 1980s and 1990s Wisdens were well established by 1963. Dennis Compton in his 1968 ‘Batsmen Must Hit the Ball Again’ showed that the negative bowling so deplored by Woodcock in the 1980s was already dominant in the 1960s. This made it clear to me that English cricket administrators inadvertently accelerated declining attendances through hasty changes that encouraged crowd-repelling short-of-a-length medium pace bowlers and did not encourage crowd-attracting attacking spinners. These historical facts were omitted not only from Wisdens under the editorship of John Woodcock, Graeme Wright and Matthew Engel, but also from Wisden-published cricket histories which I read during the 1990s. In fact, the assumption of Vic Marks’ The Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket, which was as critical as the 1985 Wisden Notes by the Editor in cementing my views on old county cricket, was that negative bowling as a trend only began after one-day cricket started. So early as the 1956 and 1957 Wisdens – when English bowling was at its strongest during the twentieth century – there was concern about negative bowling with packed leg-side fields and bowling far outside leg stump. It became clear to me that English administrators were making mistakes even before one-day cricket was introduced. It was also clear to me that:

1. short-of-a-length medium pace became dominant in part because it was the easiest form of bowling to master
2. spin bowling declined because it was the most difficult form of bowling to master
3. social changes after the war, especially reduced leisure time and increased taxes, made it much more difficult for young Englishmen, Australians and New Zealanders to acquire the time needed to learn to bowl attacking spin really well

My next significant read was Derek Birley’s A Social History of English Cricket, in the middle 2010s at Latrobe Library and at the Baillieu. A Social History of English Cricket demonstrated that apart from the years immediately following the two World Wars county cricket’s financial position was always precarious. For instance the Northamptonshire and Gloucestershire county clubs would have almost certainly folded had first-class cricket continued into the 1915 season, rather than being halted by World War One. One can hint from the 1915 Wisden which I had read as my final 1894 to 1991 peacetime acquisitionthat several other clubs – particularly Worcestershire, Derbyshire and Somerset – would also have folded in the next few seasons. However, this failed to alter my perception radically, because:

1. the relative financial prosperity of county cricket after World War I and World War II agrees well with the theory that fast bowlers repel crowds and spin bowlers attract them, as fast bowling was unusually weak in both postwar periods
2. the financial decline of county cricket during the first half of the 1910s occurred during a period when England was stronger in fast and fast-medium bowling than at any point subsequently until the 1950s
3. county clubs had previously departed from first-class cricket
• Cambridgeshire in the late 1860s and 1870s
• Hampshire, Somerset and Derbyshire in the 1880s

The belief system that Woodcock (and Evelyn Wellings) gave me

In my previous post to commemorate the passing of former Wisden editor John Woodcock I noted how his aggressive criticism of contemporary English and Australian cricket in the 1985 and 1986 Wisden Notes by the Editor led me into a longstanding obsession with old county cricket.

What I want to discuss here is the belief system I have inherited from reading those Notes. Today, indeed, I will admit that my reaction, essentially amounting to

“Hey! This is something I did not know!”

and based on the notion that what was written was plain fact that the editors had directly observed – was too rapid and even thoughtless.

 More than that, my speeches mouthing 1980s Wisdens’ Notes By the Editor (alongside other comments) actually went far beyond what Woodcock or other Wisden writers like Evelyn Maitland Wellings said. The most memorable example of this was when in the 1990s I said that:

“if the 1985 Australians would not have finished in the first four in the [1985] County Championship, they [the 1985 Australians] would have finished last in the 1956 County Championship” [1956 being the year when Jim Laker achieved his record-breaking performances against the Australians]

The quote above reflects my assumption that standards in 1956 – when Jim Laker took 46 wickets in five Tests – were at least in spin bowling so much superior to 1985 that no 1985 team, not even Lloyd’s all-conquering West Indians, would have had the smallest chance of defeating the English spin bowlers of 1956. Don Bradman in the 1986 Wisden, and Ashley Mallett a dozen years later, both implicitly said that at all events on the pitches of 1956, Jim Laker and Tony Lock would definitely have defeated Lloyd’s West Indians. (What they actually said was that on pitches favourable to spin at the SCG, the Windies had failed against far less skilled spin bowlers than Laker, Lock or many other pre-1970 spinners were).

I would say loudly to those around me:

“it would take years for any 1980s team to adapt to the genuine tweaking spinners that existed in the 1950s. Laker and Lock would have demolished the West Indies’ invincibility”

Beyond the emotive rants and mouthings, I might summarise in point form what Woodcock told me, reinforced by other articles like the late Jack Bannister’s ‘Don’t Blame the Ball’ from the 1991 Wisden:

1. standards of cricket in England and Australia were much higher before one-day cricket became dominant
2. one-day cricket destroyed the extremely skilled batting technique that older batsmen were required to develop
3. modern [1980s and 1990s] players would be hopeless if they had had to play against older bowlers on uncovered pitches
4. modern bowlers would never bowl the exceptionally skilled old batsmen out, even with the best possible luck
   
1. I frequently said that Herbert Sutcliffe on his 1931 form would if he played upon 1990 pitches have been either “run out” or “not out” in every innings he batted in
   
5. many old batsmen would on 1980s and 1990s pitches consistently gain far higher batting averages than Don Bradman’s 1938 record average of 115.62
6. some older English bowlers would have done far better than any modern ones
1. for instance I frequently said that the Harold Larwood of 1928 and the Brian Statham of 1959 would have averaged under 20 in 1990, and that Bill Bowes would surely have averaged under 26
7. that spin bowlers were what attracted crowds and that this was evident from the figures
8. that radical reforms were needed – regardless of how commercially unviable they were – to restore the amount of spin bowling and increase attendances at first-class games

Although I have modified these views over time, the emotional attachment to the idea of a sport with vastly more spin bowling has never disappeared for a variety of reasons.

Farewell to the man who made my obsession

In my teens, reading the 1985 Wisden, after a period of just looking at the statistics of the county and Test matches, I had a look at the Notes By the Editor.

Knowing little about sport, and nothing about cricket history, I was surprised and taken by what I read. What the Notes By the Editor said, plainly, was that one-day cricket had dramatically lowered the standards of play in England. This contradicted previous assumptions that standards would consistently rise due to improved technology. The 1986 Wisden, which I did not read until a couple of years later, reached identical conclusions regarding the 1985 Australian team’s standard of cricket, whilst admitting that England had barely improved.

More importantly, these Notes By the Editor led me to an obsession with finding out why one-day cricket was introduced, and what old cricketers could do that 1980s and 1990s cricketers could not. Very quickly, via Vic Marks’ 1988 Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket, I discovered that before one-day cricket had been introduced, first-class cricket was consistently losing money due to declining attendances. I also noticed – without quantitative study – an apparent strong inverse correlation between fast bowling strength and first-class cricket attendances, alongside strong direct correlation between abundance of attacking spin bowling and first-class cricket attendances. I immediately concluded that declining spin bowling and increasing pace bowling was what drove the dramatic attendance declines that led to the introduction of limited-overs cricket. This led me to an immediate interest in reading about those old English spin bowlers who dominate(d) the list of leading first-class wicket-takers – A.P. Freeman, Tom Goddard, Charlie Parker, Colin Blythe, Hedley Verity, Wilfred Rhodes – and even about faster bowlers who took large numbers of wickets. By the middle 1990s, I was frequently telling my school mates that one-day cricket was terrible for the game, although many said:

“Test cricket (expletive) [is bad]”

“One-day cricket (expletive) [is good]”

Today has seen the death of the man who wrote those Notes – John Woodcock – at age ninety-five.

John Woodcock, editor of Wisden from 1981 to 1986, died yesterday at ninety-five. Woodcock’s 1985 and 1986 Notes drove me into a lasting obsession with old county cricket because he said standards were much higher before the 1960s.

The 1986 Wisden was Woodcock’s last as editor. However, I first heard of Woodcock in the late 1990s out of school when his The Times One Hundred Greatest Cricketers appeared in the 1998 Wisden. The very first thing I noticed about Woodcock’s Hundred (as I knew it via Wisden) was that extremely few of the top first-class wicket-takers were included and that apart from Rhodes, Derek Underwood, and Jim Laker, there were virtually no English spin bowlers on the list. Of the thirteen bowlers with over 2,500 first class wickets, only three were included, and all these – Wilfrid Rhodes, George Hirst and W.G. Grace – were outstanding batsmen as well as bowlers. In fact, Grace’s 1871 season rivals Herbert Sutcliffe’s 1931 performance as the best batting performance over a full English season, and only Richard Hadlee’s 1984 and 1987 seasons rival Hirst’s all-round record from 1903 to 1906.

The lack of English spin bowlers on Woodcock’s list did somewhat alter on my thinking, as did an article in the 2000 Wisden about the problems of English pitches, which demonstrated just how unfairly rigged against spin bowling covered pitches were. It implied that no old English spin bowler would on modern covered pitches surpass the poor performances of what English spinners remained in 1999.

Discovering that Woodcock was the author of those 1985 and 1986 Notes has recently led me study his history as a Times editor, often anonymously, with the striking revelation that his lamentations about the decline of spin bowling in England began in the 1960s:

This article, written anonymously by Woodcock (at least that is what I read) from 1963 laments the decline of spin bowling before one-day cricket would accelerate it

The complaints about English cricket here after a 1—3 loss to the West Indies in 1963 do have a strong ring of being the direct predecessor of what I read as a teenager in the 1985 Wisden, and subsequently in almost every other 1980s and 1990s issue:

This article was written in the Times (I have heard by the late John Woodcock) after the close of the 1963 season, and laments the direction of English cricket due to the decline in spin bowling

Similar complaints were made again in the Times after the West Indies again defeated England in the 1966 Test series. Although the West Indies again won 3—1, the 1967 Wisden said they were a weaker team than in 1963, implying that England had also become worse:

Another Times article apparently written by the late John Woodcock – though not under his name – lamenting the trends of English cricket, especially less spin bowling, as far back as the 1960s.

Recent conversations with my brother have suggested alternative explanations for what Woodcock and many other English cricket writers wrote in the last third of the twentieth century, but would need another post to discuss. My attachment to old county cricket, even if my opinions are not as simple as when I first discovered the 1985 Wisden Notes by the Editor three decades ago, remains extremely strong because of the extremely detailed statistics.

If Andrews was really honest...

The revelation of 723 new cases of COVID-19 in Victoria – after two days of reduced cases but also reduced testing – led me into the most abhorrent temper outburst I have had since I was banned from RMIT for biting a security guard. The meltdown was so bad that I was hitting the cupboard doors of my bedroom, and my mother’s dog was jumping at me and trying to scratch me. My mother ultimately poured water on me to try and calm my temper whilst I was still in my pyjamas.

At the same time I admitted that I did not want to change my behaviour when it a meltdown. I also admitted that, ever since I first read Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly in the late 1990s, I had entwined abhorrent behaviour with the issues (global warming, now COVID-19) driving this behaviour so completely that I cannot express their opinions any other way. More than that, when I feel convinced by their arguments – and the current COVID-19 disaster in Victoria makes the World Socialist Web Site’s arguments appear irrefutable – I cannot ever contain myself expressing these views by screaming at the top of my voice, plus often hitting hard surfaces, and breaking even valuable things in the inability to contain rage. The aim of this rage is undoubtedly to alarm people enough to make them fight for the policies of socialist groups – complete confiscation of bosses’ profits to solve global warming and now COVID-19. However, it is logically obvious that the most extreme rage inside my home cannot attract the attention needed to mobilise the masses to achieve what the socialist groups desire.

During the previous two days of reduced testing and case numbers, when my temper was generally calm despite poor sleep and not getting to bed until 1:00 A.M., I planned to write on this blog what Premier Andrews would be saying if he were truly honest about the total failure of what, two days ago, Oscar Grenfell of the Socialist Equality Party conclusively demonstrated as a total sham “lockdown”. That Grenfell is 100 percent correct today’s figures give not the tiniest doubt. Unless the severest restrictions on business – proposed by not merely the WSWS but also epidemiologists like Julian Rait and journals like Australian Journal of Pharmacy – are implemented, case numbers will rise and rise indefinitely until improved medications are discovered. If we judge from HIV – admittedly an imperfect analogy – it could take up to six years before Victorians can be reasonably safe from COVID-19. Like COVID, attempts to discover a vaccine against HIV began at a very early stage in the virus’ history. Again analogously, there was early promise of an HIV vaccine that has never materialised even today when antiviral medications make HIV much less deadly. Like HIV, COVID-19 is a type of virus for which vaccine development is exceedingly difficult (though for different reasons than with HIV).

Here is, point by point, what Premier Andrews would say if he were radically honest about the total failure of his “targetted lockdown” policies:

1. “Today, sad to say, Victoria has observed 723 new cases of COVID-19, easily the highest on record since the pandemic began”
2. “This huge spike in cases is definitive proof that our lockdown policies have failed completely”
3. “It is clear that under the present lockdown case numbers are never going to fall”
4. “Victoria will be faced with four- and even five-digit case numbers for a very long time during August and into the spring if present policies are maintained”
5. “We have no doubt that a totally new policy is required if there is any hope for the state to ever recover from this disaster”
6. “Given that 659 of 723 new cases are community transmission, it is clear we must do something completely different to stop spread outside known sources”
7. “It is clear that we must severely rethink keeping workplaces open, given that 80 percent of cases are from workplaces”
8. “We must place the public’s safety above profits of big business owners, given that the escalation of cases proved beyond any doubt that the two are absolutely opposed and, verifiably, no compromise is possible”
9. “We must intensify our effort to hospitalise all inmates of infected aged care centres, and isolate  inmates for at least 14 days or until they test negative”
10. “We must develop policy that makes sure that working people in nonessential industries can gain an income until it becomes absolutely safe to reopen those industries”
11. “We must develop the strictest and most scientific criteria for what workplaces are absolutely essential to be kept open until the virus has been completely eliminated from Victoria”

If he really said something like this, Andrews would be being honest and truthful, and recognising he has presided over one of the most disastrous health failures in the world. As things stand, Andrews is simply playing by the rigidly limiting rules of protecting corporate profits above public health, when Oscar Grenfell demonstrates conclusively that protecting one is mutually exclusive of protecting the other.

The only alternative would be for Premier Andrews to honestly admit he is primarily concerned to protect corporate profits even when that stands verifiably incompatible with protecting public health. However, if he said that, one can admit the public reaction – a reaction the Premier would fear, but one his utter dishonesty makes by no means undeserved.

The world’s first failed lockdown, part III

Tonight, after I had been relatively calm over another record 484 cases in Victoria today compared to numerous nasty tantrums in the past few weeks, I had been playing the old Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego game from my childhood on My Abandonware, which I had discovered looking precisely for it on Google Images a couple of days ago.

Depressing news has become de riguer in Victoria this July, and my mother and brother have consistently said

“things will get worse before they get better”

So has Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton in his now-familiar daily addresses. However, with case numbers having risen threefold since the beginning of the lockdown, and Sutton forecasting that they will rise very soon to 500 or 600 per day, it is virtually certain that any reductions – let alone reductions below pre-lockdown totals – in case numbers in Victoria are a very long way away indeed. My mother and brother dismissed my prediction a couple of weeks ago that case numbers would never fall below 100 before the scheduled end of the present lockdown on 19 August, but the possibility they will fall that low so soon is becoming remoter by day.

In fact, Chief Medical Officer Sutton’s prediction of numbers of 500 to 600 in coming days constitute a tacit admission that the present lockdown is too weak to have the smallest long-term impact on exponential growth of COVID-19. This would mean quadruple-digit or higher totals are merely delayed by the lockdown and will be reached in August without any fall into the spring and beyond. Under this mapped-out future, saying “things will get worse before they get better” is a euphemism for a reality where things get worse and worse with improvement becoming a remoter and remoter possibility with each passing day. If quadruple-digit case numbers are already certain to be reached in August and beyond, then the impact on Victoria’s medical system would be incomprehensibly horrific, especially as nursing homes constitute a major source of infection spread.

In ‘Maximizing the probability that the 6-week lock-down in Victoria delivers a COVID-19-free Australia’ – published a week ago by the Medical Journal of Australia and authored by Tony Blakely, Jason Thompson, Natalie Carvalho, Laxman Bablani, Nick Wilson, and Mark Stevenson – it is argued that far stricter rules were necessary. The authors argued that:

“Under the ‘Standard’ [actual Andrews Government] policy approach, there is no chance that all infected people will have cleared their SARS-CoV-2 infection by 19 August (six-weeks after lock-down started).”

The rapid and continuing escalation of COVID-19 in Victoria since the article was written suggests that the authors, like Premier Andrews and Chief Health Officer Sutton, is exceedingly, even unrealistically, optimistic about the long-term effects of the present lockdown. It is abundantly clear to me that any reduction in case numbers, even in the long term, requires that all but the most essential workplaces – the source of 80 percent of current infections – be closed until at least six weeks with no new cases has passed. The World Socialist Web Site convincingly argue that enough money – by completely eliminating government bailouts to corporations – exists to pay workers’ wages in full until such a date passes.

The Medical Journal of Australia also argues that Australia’s economy will be adversely effected by

“public health measures necessary to prevent and control recurrent outbreaks arising from resurgent community transmission”

if the virus is not eliminated as it has been in the Territories, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. Professor Blakely had previously argued in the June 17 Lancet article ‘Integrated quantification of the health and economic impacts of differing strategies to control the COVID-19 pandemic’ that Morrison’s preferred “suppression” strategy is never optimal, with “mitigation” optimal at low levels of willingness to pay and elimination at high levels.

For Australia’s ruling class, willingness to pay is undoubtedly very small relative to numbers of “life years” gained, since the ruling class can afford expensive private health cover and protective living environments that effectively immunise them against the dangers of the virus. Logically, then, mitigation would be the ruling class’ preferred option. Mitigation has been officially rejected by politicians due to the high inherent morbidity and mortality – if 60 percent of Victoria’s population were infected the number of deaths could exceed 25,000. However, both Andrews’ premature easing of restrictions and his refusal to close down non-essential workplaces suggest that Australia’s major parties do privately prefer a mitigation strategy, despite knowing that extreme numbers of deaths would necessarily result. An exception to preference for mitigation would occur where elimination proves achievable via minimal lockdowns, as happened in most of Australia.

Assuming Australia’s ruling classes prefer a mitigation strategy whenever weak lockdowns fail to eliminate COVID-19 accounts for the behaviour of the Andrews Government amidst the recurrence of the past five weeks. Refusing to close department and hardware stores when numbers began rising, and refusal to close schools, amounts, as the World Socialist Web Site have demonstrated in numerous articles this month, to demonstrating that the Andrews Government is not willing to do what it takes to reduce case numbers. It is only willing to do what it takes to marginally slow growth whilst keeping as many private businesses as possible open.

If numbers continue to rise into four figures and even higher in August and beyond, and Premier Andrews fails to introduce tighter restrictions on what businesses can operate, it would be clear that he is in effect pursuing a mitigation strategy rather than a suppression strategy. What Andrews will do when the medical system is overwhelmed by four-figure case numbers is even now hard to imagine, but all choices are truly frightening.

“The Incompetent Security Game”

As a child, I read three of the eight Famous Five Adventure Games (see a discussion of another aspect here) – The Sinister Lake Game, The Whispering Island Game and The Secret Airfield Game. I was probably attracted by the numbers of the paragraphs in the games working out the games’ structure, which is quite logical but not explained anywhere on the web as far as I know.

Even back in my childhood, my brother always said the games were contrived – something I will admit without a grudge and which still gives me a bit of humour even in my forties. Since my unsuccessful librarianship course, I have collected the five remaining titles, although I have not been able to get the full cards for The Wreckers’ Tower Game or The Shuddering Mountain Game.

I always could recognise Blyton’s xenophobia in most of these books. Most although not all the villians are Italian (The Whispering Island Game) or Russian. No doubt this xenophobia reflects Blyton’s upper-middle-class hostility to the internationalism of Europe’s socialist working classes, and of course Russian international power and the spread of Stalinism was an especially salient issue in the 1950s.

Often, and still today, I have imagined whilst knowing it wrong that the Famous Five is fact rather than children’s fiction written by a middle-class woman undoubtedly hostile to the urban lower classes. However, despite having known the problems of the stories for a long time, today my brother offered a new twist on many jokes we tell about them. He argued that the story of Jeff being abducted by two men was entirely unrealistic because a secret military airfield would be much better guarded than the story in The Secret Airfield Game (and the related story in Five Go to Billycock Hill) implies. He also said that theft of a top secret military jet would have been investigated by military police much more quickly than implied in the stories, where there is no evidence of any investigation other than by the airfield’s ordinary guards. My brother made a really funny joke of calling the game “The Incompetent Security Game”, arguing that a secret military airfield would never be left unguarded even in the dark of night. Even with the limited technology of the 1950s, I agreed and agree enough to see that I had overlooked entirely unlikely elements in the plots of the Famous Five Adventure Games.

The name “The Incompetent Security Game” is really, really funny, unlike my brother’s “Child Labor Game” which implies that the Famous Five did not enjoy what they were doing. Its only problem is that it would imply that the mystery is to be solved in government negligence, which Blyton would not have wanted to convey. In fact, she likely wanted to convey the idea that ordinary people should take responsibility for crises as deep and as specialised as theft of critical military equipment or of minerals or old treasures.

The end of public transport in Melbourne?

The reality noted in my previous post that Victoria is faced with an explosion of new COVID-19 cases and a much more restrictive lockdown that will last most likely many years – Premier Daniel Andrews admitted this even when cases looked like they would fall to zero – hides something much deeper and darker.

The World Socialist Web Site – which I have known for almost two decades since its exposé on the death of gridiron lineman Korey Stringer back in 2001 – has pointed out that even in less car-dependent Britain and Ireland, bus drivers have worked without personal protective equipment, arguing that this is untenable given that twenty-nine have died in the UK. Although I have not been allowed to ride a bus since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I have zero evidence that any protective equipment has been made available to drivers, let alone to passengers, for whom it would minimise or eliminate the risk of public transport travel during a pandemic if all vehicles were sanitised. Un-sanitised public transport vehicles are a highly plausible source of the new wave of COVID-19 infections beginning to his Victoria and certain to dwarf the state’s peak in late March and early April. This is further argument that some government funds must be redirected to sanitise public transport vehicles and provide protective equipment free of extra charge for passengers as well as drivers. In the case of trains this would be difficult with so many stations un-staffed, but it would be easy with trams if entry were limited only to the front door – highly feasible with patronage as low as it is now.

From the other side of politics, the rural Weekly Times argued last Wednesday (I actually discovered the article in the Coles at Caulfield Plaza) that public transport services should be at least temporarily cut to offset the heavy losses it is incurring with patronage down by 78 percent. The Times noted public transport was already making losses before COVID-19 hit.

With COVID-19 infections in Victoria certain to grow much faster in the next weeks and months than at the first peak in late March and early April, the public is bound to perceive public transport as unsafe to a much greater degree than even then. Patronage could well decline to not 22 percent, but 2.2 percent, of pre-pandemic levels. Under such conditions, calls for “temporary” service cuts would become much louder and extent more widely amongst the ruling class and small business owners who wish to be relieved of paying taxes for services they do not use. However, there is real danger, as the WSWS have noted and experience from the previous economic downturn in the early 1990s reveals, that these services cuts will be permanent or at the very least long-term.

The demands for service cuts from rural and suburban small business owners, from wealthy businessmen and from the frustrated lower middle class is in fact likely to be so great that Melbourne’s public transport as I have known it – and deplored it as an example of what is causing global warming even as it serves as an outlet for my own recreation and exploration – is almost certain to become a true “thing of the past”. The plain facts are that:

1. politically influential groups are unlikely to accept paying for public transport under the long-term economic crisis caused by escalating COVID-19
2. road capacity is far too large for public transport to pay its way even with the cheapest and most bare-bones service (at least outside of the most “captive” patronage of all, schoolchildren who are too young to drive) possible
3. people who have given up on public transport due to COVID-19 are not likely to return to it even if restrictions are completely eliminated – a situation that even Premier Andrews admits is  many years away as I write this

Given these things, public transport trips are certain to be a permanent casualty of COVID-19, even if it is not easy to see where Victoria really went so wrong, with the only possibilities being inadequate early testing and purchase of protective equipment to operate such essential services.

Are the ‘Famous Five Adventure Games’ a repeat of ‘Time Machine’?

In addition to the Choose Your Own Adventure and Time Machine books, as a child I also read the Famous Five Adventure Games, of which eight were published based on one of Enid Blyton’s original Famous Five series.

Readers of the Famous Five Adventure Games were required to attempt to solve the mystery themselves via “equipment cards” and “picnic cards”. The reader had three picnic cards and the game was over if all were removed from the “lunchbox” card. A “picnic card” was removed whenever the reader was directed to where Five ate or lost provisions – through losing the lunchbox, having food stolen by a wild animal, or, most often, through having bottles of ginger beer broken. In most cases a “picnic card” would be lost whenever a clue to the mystery was not solved.

In addition to losing picnic cards, less commonly the reader would lose the “equipment cards” needed to solve the clues and avoid losing “picnic cards”. There were four equipment cards for each game:

1. a map (different for each game)
2. either of
• a torch
• a pair of binoculars
3. either of
• a measuring tape
• a compass
4. a codebook (different for each game)

When I first read The Sinister Lake Game and then found The Whispering Island Game and The Secret Airfield Game, I noticed that in the latter two games there were only three paragraphs which said:

“If you have, it, remove the MAP CARD from your RUCKSACK”

whereas in The Sinister Lake Game there were as many as seven. Until I recaptured interest in these old children’s books during my ill-fated librarianship course at RMIT, I never considered the remaining five books that were published in the series at the tail end of the 1980s, but since then I have collected them all and now tabulate the number of “paragraphs” in each game of being asked to give up “equipment cards”:

Game	Map	Torch	Binoculars	Measure	Compass	Codebook	Total
Wreckers’ Tower	6	6		6		5	23	7.37%	312
Haunted Railway	6		5		5	5	21	6.60%	318
Whispering Island	3	5			5	4	17	5.38%	316
Sinister Lake	7		4	5		5	21	6.58%	319
Wailing Lighthouse	2	6		3		3	14	4.59%	305
Secret Airfield	3		6		5	3	17	5.65%	301
Shuddering Mountain	3	7			5	4	19	6.05%	314
Missing Scientist	3		4	6		4	17	5.54%	307
Total	33	43		40		33	149	5.98%	2,492

As you can see, there is a definite downward trend over the series as a whole, although this is substantially due to the anomalous initial Wreckers’ Tower Game – which is rather different in game structure and also codebook lettering from the subsequent seven games in the series.

Nevertheless, this result reminds me very strongly of the slightly older Time Machine series, wherein backward loops that could cause a reader to never reach the end were frequent in the initial seven books but virtually disappeared subsequently. I have suspected that this reduced “quality control” reduced the popularity of Time Machine, and it may have had the same effect on the Famous Five Adventure Games – although to a lesser degree as opportunities are naturally more limited.

A 34-year-old joke is just that

For most of my life (my later school years excepted) I have always joked about “Fighting Hill” for the actual suburb of Box Hill, assuming the name “Box Hill” comes from the sport of boxing which I was learning about from the old Rules of the Game as a seven-year-old boy circa 1984. At this time I first read Melway and discovered “Box Hill” as one of the more conspicuous suburbs in that street directory. I probably was not thinking for a second about the logical origin of “Box Hill” when I started assuming it was named after boxing, although both in 1984 and now I knew there were no boxing rings in Box Hill.

My parents always said “Box Hill” had nothing to do with boxing, just as “Richmond” – which I jokingly called “Moneymond” and found really illogical given it was then and traditionally a poor area – had nothing to do with people there being rich. These jokes disappeared after a while, but recurred to me when I watched the 5:00 [from Melbourne Central] Mooroolbark train and others go express from Richmond to Box Hill, as I described in an earlier post here, although my mother consistently says this is anti-social and in calmer moods I agree it is not “done” to gesticulate by punching.

A few years ago when watching a documentary about a bout between late boxers Muḥammad Ali and Joe Frazier, my mother said that boxing should be banned because it causes brain damage as observed with Ali himself. I then joked that if boxing were banned “Box Hill” would need to be renamed to “Whitehorse”, although knowing the joke as utterly silly.

However, a survey done by the Herald Sun during the summer of 2013/2014 compiled the etymology of almost all place names in and around the Melbourne metropolitan area. For Box Hill it said:

• Box Hill

• This name was selected at a meeting of residents in 1861. “Box Hill” was chosen because of the large number of yellow box [Eucalyptus melliodora] trees growing among local forest.

There is nothing whatsoever to do with boxing in that! Nor is there anything to do with a box-shaped hill, as some people including my brother have at times imagined and which when in a calm mood makes more sense to me than being named for the sport of boxing.

This fact – a confirmation of what was already obvious to me whenever in a serious mood – still does not stop me from thinking of funny stories whereby Box Hill was named for the sport of boxing, and having it renamed “Whitehorse” if and when boxing were banned. Sometimes titillating humour really overshadows sense!

Who is responsible for oceanic pollution

The end of this financial year has seen all the major chain supermarkets phase out single-use plastic bags, in an effort to deal with the problem their ingestion poses to extremely long-lived marine mammals and birds like whales and albatrosses.

Most species of whale and albatross are “Endangered” and many are “Critically Endangered” or even “Possibly Extinct”

In reality, I have taken the change with a grain of salt – in our home, plastic bags invariably have a life cycle of being used as shopping bags and ending either when they rupture. Rupture ultimately happens even to the less fragile cloth bags we use for major shopping trips to Barkly Square, but it can happen extremely easily to bags not designed for heavy items like milk, as I discovered a week ago when shopping for coffee in Balaclava. All that had changed it that we have to pay fifteen cents for a bag every time we shop, or take a used plastic bag for small shaping trips.

This morning, however, I have read a list compiled from the article ‘Plastic Waste Inputs from Land into Ocean’ that had been published in the journal Science three years ago. Although it is undeniable Australia is the planet’s worst offender regarding greenhouse gas emissions, at least when one factors in per capita and indirect emissions, it does not rank amongst the top twenty nations in ocean pollution despite its large coastal area:

As we can see, Australia does not rank amongst the top twenty nations in terms of plastic waste emissions into the ocean. Almost all the actual top twenty are Tropical World nations where waste is mismanaged. Only South Africa is a comparable Unenriched World nation, and even it does not mismanage so large a proportion of its waste. However, alongside its high total greenhouse gas emissions (higher than any single EU nation), South Africa’s figure for a nation which borders on large areas of cold nutrient-rich sea containing many endangered marine mammals and birds suggests it bears considerable responsibility for whale, albatross and penguin declines.

It is untenable that South Africa and the mineral-rich Middle Eastern states were missing from the Kyōtō Protocol in 1996 – their per capita emissions and even total emissions were and are much higher than many EU nations who were part of that botched treaty. Their absence is already affecting the Earth’s climate, by spreading the Hadley cell at such a rate that – according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘“Time bomb”: Tropics expansion nudges cyclone formation into new areas’ – in 2090 Perth is likely to possess the climate Onslow did before the expansion began five decades ago. Matt Walsh and J.R. Jambeck show that the globe’s ignorance of and inability to rein in the pollution produced by these powerful states – which began not with Kyōtō but with apartheid in the 1950s and the energy crisis of the 1970s – is costing all of us.

A severe indictment of Melburnians’ knowledge

Over the past two days, searching for a bookshelf for my brother’s new home and even for my mother’s birthday, I have undergone some quite substantial travels around Melbourne – to Ringwood, Watsonia, and Williamstown.

In comparison to the “galloping round the countryside” of twenty years ago, these trips have been rather less undisciplined and I have come home to actually eat dinner with my mother – something exceptionally rare even in the days before the Queen’s Birthday.

“Lack of public transport that can compete with the car leads to heavy car traffic” (Public Transport Users’ Association; ‘Driven around the bend Melbourne’s meandering bus routes’, May 2012)

Even if I have not been randomly “galloping round the countryside”, the desire in me to travel on as many bus routes as possible has never really been lost. With increasing runaway climate change observed everywhere, I have often joked that riding Melbourne’s awful bus services can show where global warming is coming from. Although it is true that all one-occupant car journeys being replaced by public transport would save a lot of energy, with age I have come to realise that almost exclusive focus on roads at the expense of rail is not the cause of Australia’s almost uniquely dreadful record when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, cars account for only about one-fifth of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, and both coal power and land clearing stand as equal culprits in giving the country the worst emissions record in the world, especially considering its uniquely low-energy ecology amongst extant continents.

What really struck me hard about these trips to inspect bookcases was that none of the sellers knew even the local bus routes whose stops they must have seen when driving! This ignorance is rendered easier by the extremely low frequencies (never more than every forty minutes) of many if not most buses in Melbourne, so that casual drivers may never see a bus when not looking. This gives the illusion that there is no public transport whatsoever away from rail lines and the old inner suburbs.

In fact, public transport more often than not does exist, but is of such abysmal quality that nobody with a car would dream of using it even if concerned about the effect of cars on out climate. Nonetheless, having to use such extremely bad public transport is something people from countries where road lobbies are less politically dominant needs to experience. It will show them how vested interests can ruin the environment and create traffic congestion, and how fortunate most of the Enriched World is regarding its public transport, and how I have had to sacrifice proposed library trips today to do shopping to pay for my brother’s new bookcase because of the slow and very infrequent public transport in Melbourne.

‘Time’ has knowledge I knew from two decades ago

During my time living at Keilor Downs between 1989 and 1996, perhaps the most memorable incident was when I went to Keilor Downs Plaza to look at the video shop (I was then obsessed with movie ratings and the possibility that violence was due to young children watching violent or rude films – a view I have by no means entirely discarded) and tied as I usually did our pet border collie, Minty, outside the shop.

After a brief stay in the shop – a shop I have no recollection of ever visiting again – I found that Minty had forced the leash loose and had run off. I thought with considerable sense that Minty would go back to our house in Daimler Avenue. When I went back there, my family, including my late uncle and father, said Minty had gone up to the north along Rodney Drive and Belmont Avenue where there were two places I frequently visited. One was a small milk bar, where I often looked at the movie ratings of the VHS tapes in the store as I bought milk. The other was a large reserve at the northern end of Belmont Avenue, where I occasionally played on the swing (and was even then seen as too old for that though I had not put on the vast amount of mass I have now). When I found the playground, Minty had gone and I was very worried.

My assumption was that if Minty had left the park where my family said he had gone, then Minty would have kept walking in the same direction since at the time he had not returned. Thus I kept walking, following my instinct on this line (and my recollections from over two decades ago) up Belmont Avenue and then Copernicus Way, Chichester Drive and up to what was then known to me as Keilor-Melton Road. There was no sign of Minty at the time, and having neither a mobile telephone nor coins for a public phone, I was really worried but I still kept walking, expecting Minty would be somewhere around Calder Park Thunderdome. I never found the dog, and I could not imagine how worried my parents would have been (I had no money and it was the pre-mobile era), but I knew only to keep going and going in hope. By the time I was at Keilor-Melton Road, I did not know whether to walk further north or just keep looking, but there was never a sign of Minty. Eventually, I was so tired I felt I had to walk back home, and I found, to my shock, that Minty had come back soon after I went off looking for him! My mother said he was not a “north-heading dog” as I had naïvely assumed from when she said Minty went after escaping the leash.

Within my family, this story has long been a legend, but the amazing thing is that Time in ‘The Amazing Science Behind Pets That Find Their Way Home’ has shown that the knowledge discovered from this old family incident is widespread. Mummy said to me when I came home very tired that Minty actually knew his way home, and Time’s tale of a dog walking much further than from the park on Belmont Avenue certainly verifies what my mother said to me more than twenty years ago! According to Bonnie Beaver’s research which was quoted in Time, dogs create overlapping scents – which in the case of Minty would no doubt have been acquired while my brother and I walked him to and from the park for a few years before he escaped the leash. No doubt, when Minty escaped the leash he knew where the familiar scent of home was, and went back to that and then to the park on Belmont Avenue.

A horrible accident on a horrible day

Although I knew that today was going to be very hot – and thus a great day to wash my delicate bamboo summer sheets that require low spin and hence more natural drying – I had a moment of virtual madness a couple of hours ago that I feared would cost me a great deal and left me in the worst of quandries.

It is a familiar practice on uncomfortably hot days to move the clothes horse out to the balcony to aid drying – and necessary with bamboo sheets that must be spun at 400 revs per minute instead of 800 (I am careful about these instructions, although my mother urges me not to be).

This morning, as I was discovering that one sock was missing, I went back from the balcony to get the other sock which I assumed (correctly) remained in the washing machine. However, to my dreadful shock, I found that I could not get out of the balcony as I had locked the door from the inside by tuning the latch! The first inclination I had was to try to climb down from the balcony to the courtyard below and get back inside from there. However, with my fat stomach and bare feet I knew three things:

1. it would be tough to climb down the narrow holes
2. I would risk breaking the ledges if I tried
3. I would risk an ankle injury from landing on the hard bricks

Consequently, I shouted “HELP, HELP, HELP” southward towards Coleman Place, whose houses (though not the actual lane) can be seen directly from the balcony. At first there was no response and I – imaging extreme ascetics I have been reading about like the eighteenth-century Ephrata Cloister who slept on hard wood – I tried to fall asleep in the hope I would be able to get enough sleep even in the hot weather to forget that I was locked out in a hot balcony.

This is the bed of a Brother or Sister (celibate) in the eighteenth-century Ephrata Cloister. I imagine it easier to sleep on than the outdoors balcony I tried to sleep the day on waiting for my mother.

For a little while I did sleep, but the hot air and wind eventually woke me up and I resumed calling “HELP, HELP” towards Coleman Place. Eventually, a man by the name of Chris (at first when I heard I though his name to be “Cress”) caught my call and I told him – without even seeing – that I was locked out on my balcony. After an error, I managed to get my mother’s mobile number, but although Chris did manage to call it my mother was busy teaching. I thus asked Chris to message my mother with an urgent notice that I was locked out on the balcony, and to get the police in case there was no way she could come home. I also gave my half-sister’s number (the only other one I could remember) but there was no answer either. So, I was desperate and unable to rest as Chris left, saying that he was going around to try to get the police in by the front door, which I was not sure practicable because they might not have had the appropriate tool to get locked-in people back in like locksmiths do.

I remained fidgety all along until I saw Chris’ neighbour, Lorraine, and a Chilean woman called “Coca” (full name “Catherina”). I told them what had happened and Lorraine said that being locked out was not a unique problem for me. When it was inquired how the police – who were slow to the point of some worry – would get in, I suggested that they climb the wall at the back of our house and Lorraine tried herself with a ladder she had – hoping in fact that the builders (rebuilding the Carlton Baths) would offer the police one for the emergency! It was thought that a big person could do it easily – and indeed when the police came they had no trouble at all and soon unlocked me, the weather already horribly hot!

I feel from this that I was dreadfully careless – and was in a daydream when I went out to the balcony! What lessons can be learnt from this unfortunate accident I do not know – since in many circumstances I would not have been able to call for help as I did.