I'd like to know the rules on which the game of life is based

I'm not surprised people can be vividly enthusiastic fans of cricket players. It's the suspense: any time the ball gets thrown at the batsman, he might hit the ball and then run. Or he might hit the ball and then not run. Or maybe he doesn't hit the ball and then runs anyway. Or he might not hit the ball and then not run. Somehow this adds up to a clearly impossible score listed as something like ''669/9, making it sound like one team was so hopelessly out of it things might have been better if they hadn't shown up.

Clearly, anything may happen. The batsman could start running and spontaneously burst into flame. The spectators could happen to assemble into a circus and parade through the close infield. The scorer could grow an extra head. Dinosaurs in flying saucers could land and begin licking the umpires, which gets scored as a ''leg before wicket'', which I understand is very good, unless it's very bad.

So I understand why Indian cricketing star Sachin Tendulkar has enthusiastic fans. Who wouldn't admire a guy works despite the risk of the ground underneath this run turning into super-bouncy string cheese and flinging him towards Mars, falling short this week by only 9,816,141,730 feet? And keeps at it for twenty years even though Mars is sometimes dozens of feet farther away? Really, we're fortunate he hasn't been abducted mid-game by air conditioner gnomes or sponge bread. He deserves a biography.

The thing that's peculiar is how a special edition of the book is supposed to be published with drops of his blood. This is on purpose, so it's not like he visited the print shop and got too near the spinny blades of manuscript death; they just figured there was a market for blood-fortified cricketeer biographies.

Carl Fowler, the chief executive for publisher Kraken Opus, said about the blood thing, ``Some may think it's a bit weird. But the key thing here is that Sachin Tendulkar to millions of people is a religious icon.''. So it turns out when Kraken Opus interviews potential chief executives they're not looking for the ''knows how to explain weird ideas so they seem less weird'' skill set.

Where Fowler goes wrong is not pointing out all sorts of weird stuff gets done to publicize books, some by authors of publishers. Charles Dickens always used the first copy of his newest book to smack the nearest railroad magnate. That wasn't even promotional, really; Dickens just liked smacking railroad magnates. Sometimes he had to chase them upwards of three weeks. In comparison is a little blood in the text all that strange? Well, yes, although consider that if he were writing today then Dickens would probably smack an airline magnate, what with railroad magnates having gone into hiding in 1952 and not emerging since, except at last year's Ashes, when the Chesapeake and Ohio went 337 for 4 and was carried away by ants.

Pearl Buck, trying to get The Good Earth into print, arranged for China to overthrow the Emperor and boy did that excite sales. She tried repeating the stunt for sequel The Decent Mars, but China felt they had to have thousands of years with an Emperor first, so we won't know how that works put until the year 5224. And the influential No Fun Boring Long Books Association kidnapped everybody's teachers all through school, every year, not releasing them until the teachers agreed to make people read to most boringest books ever written, even for gym class.

Compared with that what's a couple drops of blood in the signature page? Nothing, but what has me curious is the blood special editions are supposed to weigh 80 pounds in total. That doesn't sound like a few drops of blood. That sounds like he's getting rid of unwanted limbs. Unless he's become a giant, like a mile tall, so even tiny drops are huge. That must be what happened, probably during a match. Naturally people would see him as a religious figure if he became a godlike giant in the middle of an innings. That's why people follow cricket.

Trivia: Three-quarters of 19th century baseball teams went out of business within two years of their formation. Source: Labor And Capital In 19th Century Baseball, Robert P Gelzheiser.

Currently Reading: Future Times Three, Rene Barjavel.