Assorted links

For various reasons I don't want to talk about RL, so have some links snurched from various people.

Cricketing authors - how cool is that? To quote from the linked review:

Peter Pan’s First XI is a study of JM Barrie and the cricket team of dazzling literati (and not quite so dazzling sportsmen) that Barrie ran haphazardly for over 20 years.
[...]
PG Wodehouse was a useful batsman; Jerome K Jerome was rather better at idling; AA Milne liked to watch it even more than to play it; and Arthur Conan Doyle was prodigious: a superb all-rounder who played 10 games at first-class level for the MCC.
[...]
Telfer’s narrative of the team’s travails allows for pleasant asides about [...] the influence of the sport on the literature of its day. Hook, as in Captain, is obviously a cricketing term; Sherlock, as in Holmes, was a conflation of two popular 19th-century county players: Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock.

Remember my puzzled query about so many Americans knitting dish and wash cloths? Well, Lion Brand's weekly newsletter now features a wash cloth of the week.

Purr Avon, or a cat looking rather like him.

MRIs of fruit - these are gorgeous and intriguing, and well worth waiting for the images to load.

Albanian sworn virgin custom - how a very sexist and traditional society allowed women to live and be accepted as men. Hell, if they had that custom here and now, I'd have gone for it as a kid, though I think the women had to replace a lost male. The article includes interviews with several men born female. Absolutely fascinating stuff.