Today's link brought to you by....

.....our good friends at Amazon.com

Or maybe, anyway. Apparently, if we link to items on their website, and people click through and buy stuff, the club earns money, or gift certificates, or something. Not surprisingly, they are deliberately vague about how much you can earn doing this. My guess is something along the lines of 2 cents for every dollar, or something equally nominal.

Still, what do we have to loose? So expect to see gratuitous ads contained within these pages from now on. Or at least until I can figure out if there's any real money to be made. Here's a couple of books you could all use in your library.

You too can play on the national team...

...of Finland.

I was just thumbing through the IRB World Rankings, as I'm sure you all do from time to time, and bemoaning England's slide from their perch atop the World this time last year. I don't know about you, but I was shocked to see just how many countries even get a world ranking. Andorra, Niue Island, Vanuatu, Kazakhstan...they're all on there. Who lives in these places?

So then I started going to the individual pages for each nation to find out more. Andorra, as it turns out, only has 105 senior male players registered, so unless it happens to be a tax haven for former international rugby stars, I rekon any of us could move there, and stand a pretty good chance of playing rugby at an international level. Not only that, but you could be playing for a team that has a higher World Ranking than a bunch of other much larger, "developed" nations such as Austria, Norway, Isreal or Finland. If that doesn't work out, you can move to another European principality, Monaco, and run for captain.

Well, that got me thinking about the supposed rugby "powers", to see who's really punching their weight, based on their number of registered senior male players. At the top of the list is New Zealand, who show some 38,660 senior players. Not bad. Compare this to Australia's 58,081 players, and you start to get a sense of the level of rugby played by the Kiwi's as a nation. England, by comparison registers a collosal 167,000 senior male players, but only manages 3rd on the World Rankings.

The USA lists 22,490 players, but if the CIPP registration of our club is anything to go by, the number of actual players is probably double that. It might seem like a respectable number of players, for a team ranked 16th in the world, but compare that to the team ranked 15th, Uraguay, who show only 980 senior male players. The team directly below, at 17th, Portugal, list 942 players. Well, we've always known what scrappy little buggers the Portugese are!

So, what does all this prove? I dunno. Each nation probably has different registration policies, and classifies senior players differently. Perhaps more telling might be the length of time the game has been played in each nation. Portugal's rugby federation was established in 1926, and Uruguay's in 1951. The USA? 1975.

So, perhaps the moral of this rather dull story is this: while numbers may be nice, experience counts for a lot. So all you rookies give me an extra lap.

Gorham Sports Center

Gents, in advance of the upcoming training at the beginning of February, here's the link to Gorham Sports Center, where everything will go down. This facility is owned and run by Steve Martin, a former PRFC standout, who no doubt will show us great hospitality. Make sure you show up.

More to follow soon on the exact date and time.

Just when you though it was safe...

Lobster Dip 5
Originally uploaded by tlovering.

By the looks of the picture, this year's Lobster Dip was another success. In fact, Scottie and Ted's sheepish look leads me to believe that they may have been enjoying it a little too much. Still, it's all for a good cause.

Fixtures have been updated to reflect recent additions. Hmmm.....that streak of away games reminds me of the Fall. I'm sure Mike will let me know what kind of a streak I remind him of for saying that.

Hills are still being run on Tuesday by J-Wil and company. Only three weeks before indoor practice begins, so if you can't find a hill to run up, then find some stairs.

Speaking of practice, this will begin, I believe, on Wednesday Feb 2nd, @ 8:30 somewhere in Gorham. Which is great, because then I can get home around midnight. As they say at the Guinness factory, "brilliant!".

The recent club meeting seems to have been a productive affair, with a lot of progress on the fundraising and recruitment front. Also, as the club matures, the search is on for a more kid friendly after-match venue, which I happen to think is a pretty good idea. Another person who thinks it's a good idea is Al Parks. So good in fact that I hear he was checking out Chuck E. Cheese's place every day last week. Another 3,000 tickets and he can get plastic snake.

That's all the news that's fit to print, other than to point out that today is January 10th, the day, in 1994, that Lorena Bobit went on trial for severing her husband's penis because he was "selfish" and "failed to give her an orgasm". Yikes, it's a wonder that any of us have penises left! Her husband later turned the incident to his advantage, by landing the starring role in "Frankenpenis", and Lorena was charged several years later with assault for punching her mother in the face while she was watching telly. Phew, I'm glad that turned out alright!

It also happens to be Linda Lovlace's birthday, or it would have been, if she hadn't smashed her car up a few years ago. Linda, who did not appear in "Frankenpenis", did however appear in several movies that contain mature content, and some that even contain animals. Of course, she was able to leave the barnyard behind when she made the big time in her move "Deep Throat", which, as you know, was a political thriller covering the downfall of the Nixon administration. Since she claimed to never have been paid a cent for her work in the movie, Lovlace then went on to change her name and denounce pornography, no doubt in a shallow attempt to grab the media spotlight and appear on Larry King. For shame!