Some years ago a friend recommended to me the band The Duckworth Lewis Method, and their self-titled album. He described it as a “cricket concept album”, which made sense, as it was named after what has become the most common rule governing run targets in rain-affected one-day cricket matches. I bought the album, and I enjoyed it – it’s a folky mix of songs about cricket, with lyrics full of cricket jargon and a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humour.
Anyway, yesterday I was browsing around on iTunes, and I tried entering “Duckworth Lewis Method”, and I discovered they’d released a second album – back in 2013 – called Sticky Wickets. Since I liked the first album so much, I decided to buy it.
I was listening to the album for the first time, and the 8th track began, a song called Line and Length. As I listened to the lyrics, an odd feeling of recognition came over me. The lyrics seemed to be using the definitions of the cricket jargon terms “line” and “length” from Wikipedia.
The line of a delivery is the direction of its trajectory measured in the horizontal axis.
The length of a delivery is how far down the pitch towards the batsman the ball bounces.
Then I realised why the words sounded so familiar. I checked the edit history of the Wikipedia article.
I had created that article, on 5 November 2005. I had written those lines. Here’s the exact edit where I added those lines.
Holy cow. I wrote the lyrics to a song by The Duckworth Lewis Method.
That’s really, really neat!
I have a similar reaction whenever I see someone use the term “post-credits scene”. When I created the Wikipedia article for “a scene that comes after the credits of a movie”, I sat there thinking, “Well, what should I call it?” I finally just came up with some random term for it – even though I thought it had too many s’s and sounded terrible – and posted it, assuring myself that someone would eventually change it to the real term used by the film industry. But 11 years later, it’s still there, and it’s become possibly the most common term for the scene.
Have you tried to contact the band? Maybe you can get a shout-out in the liner notes :)
I did try to contact them, but their website has no contact details whatsoever, so I resorted to tagging them in Twitter.