ashes

And cold cold moon, apparently. ;-)

Haha. Yay for Douglas Adams. And cricket is a rather strange game. Test cricket matches can be played over 5 days, for example, and I mean all day, for 5 days. In the hot hot sun.

I first discovered this in one of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide books, being completely unfamiliar with the sport of cricket. If I recall correctly, the ashes were actually the remains of some vitally important intergalactic something-or-other, and caused quite the ruckus when the old owners came back for it.

There was also an elaborate explanation for the sport itself, which was actually started millennia ago as a distasteful parody of the slaughtering of an entire alien race on a planet known as Krikkit. Over time humans forgot about the creatures of Krikkit and the origin of the game, and continued to play the barbaric thing; for that reason much of the rest of the galaxy viewed the people of Earth (or at least Britain) as absurdly coarse and insensitive. I might have some of the details wrong, but anything by Douglas Adams is worth reading several times over. ;-)

The Ashes = 'the trophy, in the form of an urn containing a cremated cricket stump, kept permanently in England, played for by England and Australia in test cricket'. - Macquarie dictionary