Brett Lee exults after dismissing Kevin Pietersen in the first Ashes Test in Brisbane. (Reuters)

With two Tests still to go, the Ashes has already been won and lost. But that has not put a stop to the entertainment beyond the boundary.

The series has inspired brilliant blogs, many of them mentioning a recent survey by an Australian magazine that found 41 per cent of the country’s men ready to abstain from sex for a month if Ponting’s army stole a march over Flintoff’s force.

Mark (http://reverseswingmanifesto.blogspot.com) has written about the characters in the showdown. Ponting reminds him of “the nervy guy you see in most gangster movies”. Strauss “comes across like a regretful Bond villain, sitting in the dressing room ponderously stroking a white cat, saying stuff like: ‘Personally, I abhor violence on the cricket field Mr Langer, but my colleague Oddjob (Harmy) isn’t so fastidious.’” And when Kevin Pietersen comes up against Brett Lee “the testosterone is visible from the stands”.

Mark predicts that “before the end of the series Sajid Mahmood will provoke Glenn McGrath into such an irrational strop that the Australian’s head will explode in the middle of the pitch... dear old Glenn is the sort who could start an argument in an empty room (and) Saj seems to be a wind-up merchant of the highest order, and we could be in for some entertainment!”

The Sourav Ganguly star turn at Wanderers, too, has attracted plenty of posts. The Greatbong (http://greatbong.net), tongue firmly in cheek, has traced his evolution as a batsman to the bandh culture in Calcutta. That is what gave “Sourav Ganguly vital time away from his student life to practise those sublime off-side shots. As a matter of fact if we had more such strikes and Ganguly was able to devote more time to his cricket, then perhaps he would have been a fielder like Kaif and as severe on the short ball as Gilchrist”, he observes.

Sunita Williams’s space walk also has the blogs abuzz. The Netizens have highlighted little-known aspects of the Indian-American’s trip. Skookumchick (http://feministengineer.blogspot.com) points out that women haven’t often had the opportunity to go to space “because the space suits don’t fit. That’s right — they (NASA) make space suits in M, L, and XL, but not in S...” She feels: “Women would make better astronauts than men because, on an average, they’re smaller and lighter, hence it wouldn’t take so much fuel to get them up there and keep them going.”

Eamon Hickey (http:// www.robgalbraith.com) has written about how the astronaut lost her camera during the space walk (The video of the incident is available on YouTube.com). “In a move that will be familiar to all those who’ve dropped their camera, Sunita Williams didn’t get her digital SLR properly clipped to her space suit during a seven-hour space walk.... Without gravity... the camera was soon a fugitive...”

The NASA website (http://www.nasa.gov) carries the menu aboard Discovery. There was Beef Pattie, Seasoned Scrambled Eggs and Tropical Fruit Salad for breakfast, Chicken with Corn and Black Beans, Cream of Mushroom Soup and Chocolate Pudding for lunch, and Teriyaki Chicken, Beef Tips with Mushroom and Butterscotch Pudding for dinner!

It’s party time in space, folks!