Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Good news for our cricket team as Paddy Foleys registered their first victory of the season over the Predators.

Here is a little snippet from the second innings:

The next man in was one of their chief protagonists and Goldie noticing the lack of helmet promptly put a man close in at leg slip, sure enough a bit of chin music followed and the batsman was looking rather uncomfortable out in the middle. He did manage to stick around for a few overs but never looked like troubling the scorers eventually out bowled by John for a duck. The next pair put on 18 runs before Goldie picked up the next one caught behind. Goldie claimed the 4th as well LBW and we had them on the ropes at 4-30 but with opener Graeme still in and looking dangerous we new the job wasn’t done yet.

You can read the rest of Jeff’s elegant prose here: Match report: vs. Predators, Game 1 Japan Cricket League Division One, 25 April 2010. You can also navigate your way around the site to find out how you too can have a hit out.

I didn’t make it to the game – have been a bit busy with work as per usual. Will have to get out for a hit and add to my momentous tally of about 20 runs in Japan – not bad for 10 years!

Also, had a link from long white cloud meets rising sun : Tokyo Anime Center… and Volunteering in Japan. Looks like there is a new kiwi blogging in Japan. Looking forward to some entertaining tales there. You can check him out here: long white cloud meets rising sun.

Finally – Golden week is almost upon us. Time I think to finally build my first Linux distribution!

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Apparently a round of the World Paragliding Championship 2007 was held in Ibaraki earlier this month. 122 gliders took part in the event which was held on Mt. Tsukuba which is close to where we live. This was the second time that a world championship paragliding event was held in Ibaraki.

I found this video they put together. It has some nice taiko drumming as well as some great shots of the scenery around Ibaragi:

We are going to attempt the third round using a combination of specially imported Christchurch City Council rubbish bags and antique Meccano frames… wish us luck!

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If you come from one of the cricket playing nations of the world – which makes cricket the worlds second most popular sport after football, or soccer, or whatever you call it, then you will know that the Cricket World Cup is being held in the wonderful West Indies.

Of course with Japan still living in the shadow of their defeat during World War II to the nuclear power of the Americans, baseball is very much the mainstream sport in these isles, so it is a tricky proposition to catch any of what is a very minority sport under the haze of American hegemony. One option of course is to vacate oneself to the delightful isles of the West Indies, although for the rest of us mere mortals the best option remains the internet.

Luckily there is another option – p2ptv. With the SopCast system installed, you will be able to watch not just the World Cup, but a wealth of other programming besides. And it is all free.

SopCast, according to their about us file is:

Sopcast Team built on Dec, 2004 and focus on the research and application on P2P streaming technology. The first website http://www.sopcast.org is very famous in China and many other countries, is linked and introduced by many aboard website especially in Europe . The sop protocols, developed by SopCast Team, has some specifications like security, high efficiency, extendable and make it easy to support huge users to view the online channels in a standalone server.

The question does arise over who gets what from this. I am sure that if this was based in a country of limited freedom, in the intellectual sense, then this would be closed down as fast as one could say “attack Egypt”, “attack Sweden” or “attack Oman” or whatever the current flavour of the month was. The advertisers certainly do benefit from this service. They get eyeballs on logos, brand recognition – everything they could dream for. The channels themselves dont get anything, unless they work it into their marketing plans (their ability to do so remains to be tested – getting ads for Indian insurance companies is wonderful, but I don’t really need their services living here in Japan).

If you want an interesting viewing platform download sopcast. If you thought this post was crap, then you probably want to stick to fox (and I am not going to do you the convenience of linking to them).

Enjoy the fours, sixes, and drunk kiwis in ridiculous costumes.

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Despite being introduced late in the nineteenth century by the British in Yokohama, cricket has never been a big thing in Japan. Baseball has always been more popular – probably as a result of the lower cerebral threshold required to play and watch the game.

I know the Japan Cricket Association (日本語）has been doing an excellent job to develop the game throughout Japan, but I didn’t realise it had spread as far as my little neck of the woods. So I was quite happy to discover that Tsukuba has a cricket team. There is a quite a large international population in the area so it isn’t that surprising.

They have a website up – you can check out the Tsukuba Cricket page here. A quick look at the wicket and it suggests plenty of bounce and movement off the seam early on, with prodigious spin by days four and five – depending on the amount of tape on the tennis ball.

Who knows – if any kiwis out there make double figures in a couple of games they should be a shoe-in for a prestigious place in the much vaunted Black Caps top order.

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