A younger version of me used to watch cricket 🏏 on a satellite dish, and I’d normally get to see the West Indies (which I assume is some combine of Carribean nations) play back around 1991.
When I worked overnights in the radio business, I’d get radio from New Zealand overnight Saturday nights into Sunday morning. They’d air cricket matches from one of their domestic leagues.
Now American cricket is having a boom after the US defeated Pakistan in a recent T20 World Cup match. (T20 is a match with limited batting time, designed to take up a few hours. Normal cricket matches can last five days.)
I think Willow, the app and website that covers cricket, missed a huge opportunity not to offer the US-India tournament bout for free. For cricket to get attention in the US, you have to make it available to the masses.
Since YouTube has numerous channels describing the action, but all in foreign languages, I looked for an audio stream, and found one on ABC. No, not our ABC, but the Australian media consortium.
The coin toss seems to be a big part of cricket – whoever wins usually wants to be the last team to bat. The US XI (eleven players, who bat two at a time until either 20 overs are gone through, or 10 wickets occur) got off to a slow start but put up 110 runs.
For most of India’s half of the inning, it seemed the US did a good job holding them off. But a 5-run penalty, followed by a barrage of runs, did in the Americans. The India squad surpassed 110 in the 19th over, winning by seven wickets.
The US gets Ireland, another upstart nation in the cricket world, on Friday. If the Americans win, they move to the second stage of the tournament.
I’m sure many cricket enthusiasts never thought that would happen, but here we are.
Before yesterday’s church service, I got an explanation about how running the slide presentation works – but I didn’t get any practice time or a trial by fire. And that was fine.
I was ready regardless of how much they were going to use me.
The information I got did lay a good foundation down. They use an earlier version of Pro Presenter, and I think it was the sixth version or perhaps earlier.
When I got home after church, I started pouring over everything on YouTube about Pro Presenter.
I was given about ten printed pages of procedures, and I’m studying them daily until Sunday.
I still think this is doable for me, and nothing I learned yesterday changed my opinion. But it is a task that requires a bit of concentration and the ability to pay attention at all times for about 60-90 minutes.
One of my favorite pastimes of when I went to school was the days off you’d get. My parents both worked, so when I was old enough not to have a babysitter at 9, you’d probably find me in the mornings and early afternoon watching the menagerie of game shows the networks had.
This was back in an era when Tampa Bay had 6 or 7 TV stations. In the 70’s, game shows would also air in the afternoon.
I always gravitated to shows that we’re relatively new. The Price Is Right was already the king of the game shows on CBS. Wheel Of Fortune wasn’t a big thing yet, and it was on NBC the same time TPIR was on CBS. When it came to game shows, I tended to root for lesser known shows – because who knows when they’d be on again?
I was in fifth grade when Wheel made the switch from Chuck Woolery to Pat Sajak on December 28, 1981. Who is this guy, I wondered?
Well, Wheel would go to syndication a couple of years later – and when Vanna White replaced Susan Stafford, the show became iconic, along side the 1984 revival of Jeopardy! that still airs four decades later.
When Bob Barker retired in 2007 after nearly 35 years hosting TPIR, I didn’t think anyone would surpass that kind of longevity. I was wrong – twice: with Sajak and the late Alex Trebek.
I was listening to another book on Audible this afternoon that required going to a website.
Entering it in the browser caused alarms and constant chatter to erupt from my computer. It suggested I’d been hit by ransomware.
One of the axioms I’ve learned over nearly three decades on the Internet is this: if someone says something bad has happened, and they tell you this in some sort of urgent fashion, it’s probably false.
Resetting my computer, one thing came to mind. It was time to change browsers again.
I used to use Mozilla Firefox religiously but switched to Chrome around a decade ago. Guess I wanted to be a “cool kid” or something.
It’s good to be with an old friend or the browsing equalivient of it.
I had another interesting experience at my church yesterday – no, this did not involve bodily functions. It’s more of a promotion.
One of my colleagues at church who I enjoy talking to is a younger woman – my guess is she’s somewhere in her 20’s. We talk about TV shows we stream, and share an interest in The Chosen.
I told her had some experience in radio and streaming, and since she runs the video presentation on various Sundays, I asked if they needed someone to back them up. She suggested I get in touch with the executive pastor, who is basically the second in command.
The friends I live with in Leesburg love to camp and travel on vacations, and I usually house sit when they’re away, and have their friends take me to the church that’s about a half hour away. Last Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, They usually get there around 9:45 for a 10:00 service. When my friends go to church and take, they are usually there around 9:15, as the wife of my friend sings at the beginning and end of the service.
Long story short – I’m wondering when is the best time to ask.
Yesterday at the end of the sermon on Proverbs 16, I go to the bulletin board, and there it was:
I crossed out the name of the contact – but it was the executive pastor.
Time to go for it. Nerves kicked in – but why? I suddenly had this feeling of peace about me. Well, I was in church after all.
I mentioned my audio and streaming background – and next week, I’m training to work their visual presentation.
There will probably be a learning curve, as their system is on a Mac computer, and I’ve been a PC guy all of my life. It sounds like a cross between a Power Point and an old-fashioned slide projector.
With my Asperger Syndrome and the different wiring of my brain, I can probably do this well, or I hope so at least. It’s for a church and not a radio network – so I guess the bar is pretty low.
A Slice Of Big Pauly 