West Indies legend Brian Lara arrived in the country this afternoon to attend the CBZ 2010 Cricket awards as the guest of honour. The awards will be held in Harare on Friday evening.
“It was a very easy decision for me to come as a guest of honour to the awards, I am happy to be out here and Zimbabwean cricket is very close to my heart. I know the chairman well Peter Chingoka and I just looked forward to being here again, obviously in a non-playing capacity, still it is going to be a very exciting three days,” said Lara.
Lara’s first visit to Zimbabwe was in 1989 as captain of the West Indies team, before he started playing international cricket for the West Indies.
“I recall great memories from the tour and a couple of tours since then. I enjoyed playing in Harare, Bulawayo, Triangle and different areas of the country; I have very fond memories of the place.”
“Zimbabwean cricket is close to me because I started here before I even started playing international cricket. I know it has been an uphill struggle for the Zimbabwe team but obviously everybody has been optimistic about Zimbabwean cricket and we want to see them back in the test arena,” said Lara.
Lara is by far one of the most decorated cricketers of all time and grand ambassador of the spirit of cricket. His last visit to Zimbabwe was the West Indies national team visit in 2004 when he officially opened Takashinga Sports Club in the Highfields suburb of Harare.
[Source: ZC]
To the archives, Batman! Although to be fair, I can't see the dark and moody one watching this one. Hailing from way back in 2000, Vandread was one of the first of the new generation of shiny CG-animated shows, and with FUNimation re-releasing the series now, it's a good excuse for me to indulge again. Let's see if time has been kind to Hibiki and Dita...
UK satellite channel Pop Girl (Sky channel 626 / Freesat channel 604) will begin airing the English dub version of Pretty Cure on Monday 6th September. Daily showing will be at 7:00am, 5:30pm and 8:30pm (with the channel's +1 variant screening them one hour later, as you'd expect). My love for the Japanese original means I'll probably only watch out of a morbid sense of curiosity as to how bad the adaptation can be (memories of Tokyo Mew Mew's hackjob still pain me), but at least one channel is giving anime a decent outing...
Scotland Loves Anime have now released their guestlist for their upcoming events in Glasgow (8-10 October) and Edinburgh (15-17 October), with Jonathan Clements, Satoshi Nishiura and Shigeru Kitayama all appearing. Read on for full details..
I think the Shounen Jump shows are out to get me at the moment, as between Bleach and Naruto Shippuden I seem to be stuck in some sort of Eternal Battle Hell. Ichigo's battle with the Bounts kicked off in episode 69 - the two discs in this release take us up to episode 99, and there's still no end in sight. With the battle having moved to Sereitei, though, at least the scenery has changed...
End of the line for Paniponi Dash, and according to the instructions that Becky's alien observers have just received, it may well be the end of the line for the Earth, too. Fortunately, there are a myriad of genre references on hand to help the girls of 1-C save the day. How convenient...
You could say that Blassreiter was the start of a new era in anime - it was one of a pair of shows from GONZO that were made available for legal download & streaming with English subtitles on the same day that they were broadcast in Japan, in doing so kicking off the simulcast business that Crunchyroll and others are now exploiting to varying levels of success. I can safely say, though, that the rise of simulcasting doesn't owe much thanks to the quality of this series...
Here's a new release from a new series that will still seem horribly familiar to some. Brotherhood is a reboot of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime, and as such this volume covers a lot of the same territory as the original show - albeit a lot more quickly. Fortunately, that doesn't mean that it's not worth watching - far from it...
Using Anime Network's website if you're in the UK is an exercise in frustration - while there's a decent selection of titles available to the UK, there's no way of telling on the site (even the .co.uk version) what's region-locked and what isn't without loading an episode - and as often as not that's met by the dreaded "IP Blocked by Region" message. Some determined effort, though, and it's possible to create a list of what's available - so for the benefit of everyone else, below the cut you can find a list of what's available to us UK folk...
