PC @18, I’ve never had my hands on a swan egg, but my husband and his scaly mates apparently used to go swan-egging when they were kids, rain was plentiful and they used to row a dinghy around a local farm. He says they are particularly good scrambled. I have no desire to tangle with an enraged swan, apart from the moral considerations.

Fran Barlow @38, I recall hearing or reading some time ago (a few years after the Exon Valdez spill if memory serves me correctly), that research was being done on a biological method to clean up oil spills. Someone claimed to have discovered an oil-eating bacteria, but it probably came to nothing, because I’ve heard no more.

Since oil floats on water, it seemed to me that one alternative to
using dispersing chemicals might be to have floating booms with some
sort of vacuum pump capable of skimming oil from the top of the ocean
and transferring it to a ship’s hold nearby might be one way on
minimising the impact of the spill.

Presumably you could filter the oil and return seawater to the sea in
something like real time.

Are there no such devices, and if not why not? Would it not be
technically feasible, even in calm seas?

Just wondering.

Their keeper, Prior, was good.

On the radio I heard a comparison between Broad’s record and Flintoff’s at the same stage of his career. Broad has taken twice as many wickets at a better average and his batting average is more than 50% better than Flintoff’s was.

The English concentrated much of their rotten cricket in two matches, the first, where they took 6 wickets and we took 19, and the fourth, where we ran all over them. If it had rained an hour or two less in the first we would have won.

At Lords every time the English batted, it was fine and warm and when we batted it was cloudy and the ball swung. Pommy commenters said that if we’d won the toss in the last test we probably would have won.

In the Lords test we had a world record 500 plus to make in the last innings and ended up making over 400. That was after having 3 of our top 6 sawn off at low scores by bad umpiring.

So the rub of the green went the home team’s way, but they were certainly better than I expected and if they play to potential they should worry the better teams.

Watson was mainly there in case Johnson failed and because he could bat a bit but his feet don’t move well enough to keep out the LBW soi he was a target on those wickets.

I wouldn’t like to see ‘Pup’ as captain either. If not Katich then Haddin or possible even North.

Hard to think who else would get it. Katich could do a caretaker job for a couple of years but CA would like a longer term prospect.

Hughes was shoved way in the deep end, the Poms figured him out, he had to go as we were already carrying too many players. You know exactly as much as I do about the dynamics of the selection panel when they made that decision: bugger all, consequently there are no grounds for assuming that the decision to omit Hauritz was within Ponting’s power to override.

Dropping Hughes was almost certainly a mistake. Leaving out Hauritz could not have occurred if Ponting had insisted, though to be fair it wasn’t a lay down misere selection — England only picked Swann.

I’d have Katich captain.