As the third millennium begins, the Sky Times enters its third season. The Y2K bugs were unable to penetrate Ed's word processor (he switched it off), and your Shizuoka Kytes newsletter has now reappeared as a fully-fledged cyberzine available only in the ethereal world of R-G M's rampant website.

For this close season issue there are no matches to report, but there was an AGM, a sighting of Slog on a remote Polynesian atoll, and a poem was received from a little-known bard, all of which can be found in this issue which has a distinctly Kiwi flavour to it.

So why not uncork that vintage Cook's red, take a few slices of good old NZ cheddar, sit back and scroll.
 
 

Sunday 6th February 2000, Media City, Shizuoka Vity, Tenmacho.

Proving that they are quite capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery the Shizuoka Cricket Club AGM was held in the Gotemba Kohgen brewery bar on the ground floor of Media City.

It was a nice sunny day, temperature 15?C, humidity 40%, but chilly gusts and a sprinkling of rain reminded us that we are still in the middle of winter. In a cordial atmosphere of pitchers of Dunkel and Pilsner, wild ribusuteki and roast beef sandos, and some very smiley waitresses the meeting commenced. Below are condensed minutes:

Present: BH, AMcC, HU, KR, TM, FN, R-GM, PH. (Guess who they are?)

Meeting opened at 1.45pm.

Finances: Season 1999
Expenditure:Yen186,625
Income: Yen143,300
Loss: Yen43,325

Bottom line: the club is running at a loss, and is currently being bankrolled by Robert.

Officers:
Robert was unanimously re-elected unopposed as club manager.
Bruce relinquished the team captaincy and was given a big vote of thanks.
Anton was elected team captain and a few provisos were agreed:
Anton will be team captain for all competitive games, will appoint vice-captains as appropriate, and will nominate captains for some friendlies (with Ume high on the list).
The team captain will organise team selection with assistance from Robert.
Kevin will resume his post of finemaster general.

Fund-Raising:
Fantasy Cricket will continue.
Bruce and Francis proposed that a bar be fostered for future social events, possibly two or three times a year. In rough terms a 2-hour drinking session could be arranged at a fee of, say, Yen3,500 per person, of which Yen500 could help reduce the club debt, though it would not be billed as a cricket party. Start times of 8 or 9pm were considered. Bruce and Francis offered to investigate the possibilities.

Kanto Cup:
This season there are two groups of 5 teams each. The first 4 teams qualify for the quarter-finals. Our group includes Yokohama CAC, Indian Engineers, Tokyo Giants and a Japan Selection.

Series:
A 3-game series has been agreed with the Indian Engineers. A 3-game series is being planned again with Nagoya.

The meeting was closed at 2.45pm.
 
 

In this winner-takes-all competition the prizemoney was the enormous sum of Yen10,000, and the winning selection was cunningly made by that wizard of the spin.

1st - Nick Shannon, 104 points

2nd - Yuko Mizui, 99 points

3rd tied - Anna Elias, Tom Forbes, 94 points

For anyone who may be curious to know, the breakdown of Nick's winning selection was: Bruce (58pts), Slog (39pts), and R-G M (7pts).

The 2000 competition details are on a separate page of this same website.
 
 

Ed is surprised and delighted to announce that the first unsolicited contribution to the Sky Times has just been received. It comes in the form of a poem from none other than William Worthless, Poet Laureate of Pitcairn Island (population 51, with one on the way). It is printed here in full, and there is not a daffodil in sight.

Kowo Juice

The use of saliva
That great ball reviver
So relished by Roger G Twose
Can hardly be placed
At the forefront of taste,
But, damn it, what else could he use?

Yet drily reviewing,
The art of bedewing,
A practice one shrinks from condemning,
How strange that the function
Of smarming the unction
Was never entrusted to Fleming.

But none who can whittle
The truth of the spittle
Will ponder its influence lightly.
The ball told a story
Of gloom and of glory,
One side shining much more the brightly.
 
 

Time for the first test of the new series. The theme here is the boundary, the thin line between glory and obscurity.

How many runs are recorded in the following situations?

a) A batsman clears a sightscreen which is fully within the playing area, and the ball subsequently bounces before crossing the boundary.

b) A fielder deliberately kicks the ball over the boundary after the batsmen have crossed on their fifth run.

c) The batsmen have crossed on their third run when a fielder shouts "Lost ball!"

d) A phenomenal bounce from a wide delivery clears the boundary.

e) The batsmen run five before the ball eventually rolls over the boundary.

The answers appear somewhere else in this issue.
 
 

If like Ed you had nothing better to do on December 31st and were glued to your TV set, you would no doubt have seen live pictures from a remote beach on one of the Chatham Islands in New Zealand. Normally uninhabited this particular dot on the globe could be seen swarming with TV crews and Polynesian dancers.

Ed, sipping gently on his Tequila sunrise, saw the dancers perform briefly at midnight local time, take a four hour kip, then do a second turn at precisely 4.13am as the sun was just about to peek over the ocean's horizon, heralding the dawning of the third millennium.

As the camera panned forward Ed could see the likes of Dion Nash and Adam Parore ogling the coconut-covered breasts of the nubile Polynesian maidens, and then, just behind the dancers, Ed caught a glimpse of another infamous face. There could be no mistaking the figure of Sinbad Slog, hand in hand with this babe who was clothed only in the skimpiest white gossamer sheet. In front of them was this huge Maori who was beckoning furiously at the sun while beating himself with a poi ball and stomping madly on the sand.

Then, at the exact moment the first ray of sunlight hit the shoreline, and revealed all through the babe's translucent sheet, the man-mountain froze and the dancers erupted into frenzied cheers. Slog immediately took his angelic-looking nymph behind the nearest palm-tree, which started to rock wildly, losing one or two nuts in the process. And this was on live TV, beamed around the planet.

It was all too much. Ed was on the hard stuff by now and a flagon of Steinlager 2000 was being downed in record time. It had dawned on him that the Polynesian dancers were not there at the behest of the TV crews. In fact the reporters had gatecrashed the first marriage of the new age and, moreover, Slog (and the babe) were the first of Earth's creatures to have a new millennium shag.
A great depression engulfed Ed as he pondered his own lonely life in this new era of civilization. He started searching frantically through his diary to find out when the next millennium begins.
 

Answers:
a) 6
b) 9
c) 6
d) 4
e) 5
 
 

In 1990/91, when playing for Otago v Central Districts, Ken Rutherford hit his first 52 runs in boundaries (2 sixes and 10 fours) before bothering to run. Having played himself in, he went on to make 155 in a memorable innings.