April 25 is ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. It is the anniversary of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps troops (ANZACs) landing on a beach at Gallipoli, Turkey, on April 25, 1915.
Australia became a nation on January 1, 1901. Prior to that we were six self-governing colonies of the British realm, even if we acted like a nation in many respects.
The Gallipoli landing in 1915 was the first military action by ANZAC troops during the first world war and is generally regarded here in Australia as the point in time that we ‘grew up’ as a nation.
We don’t celebrate ANZAC Day because Gallipoli was a wonderful military victory. In fact, it was a disastrous defeat.
We remember ANZAC Day because it was the first time that we, as a nation, learned about the collective pain, sacrifice and heartbreak of war. We honor the sacrifice made by those who serve and choose to reflect with sobriety on the tasks our servicemen and women have undertaken in various theatres of war since Gallipoli.
The objective of the Gallipoli campaign was to take Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman empire (they were chummy with the German enemy at the time) and make the straits of the Dardanelles available to the allied naval forces. What ensued was an eight month campaign in an area now called ANZAC Cove – the Turkish government officially recognised the name in the 1980’s – that saw more than 10,000 ANZACs killed, along with 21,000 British soldiers, 10,000 French and over 1,000 British Indian troops. There were tens of thousands of casualties on the Ottoman side, too.
I’m not a pro-war person, but I do recognise the need to protect our borders, support our allies and be present and accounted for in a time of need. Today we remember those who have placed themselves in harm’s way on behalf of our nation. Some have returned, many have not.
The following verse, originally written by Laurence Binyon, will be recited in services all around Australia today.
They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Australia is not a traditional soccer nation. We are sports crazy, however, so we’ll watch absolutely anything. It’s been said that in Melbourne, you can get a crowd to watch two flies crawling up a wall.
Personally speaking, I had quite a few 1AM and 3AM alarm calls back in 2010 so I could watch the world’s best actors footballers play for the World Cup. And that was despite the most annoying sports soundtrack in history – the vuvuzela. I’ll most likely watch a lot of the European Championships this year, too. Why? Because like most Aussies, I’ll watch just about anything if it’s being played to a high standard.
It must be said that soccer is growing here at the grassroots level, thanks mainly to a generation of ‘helicopter parents’ who like the fact that their precious little darlings are less likely to scrape a knee or be touched by another human being (!) during the game. Maybe one day that generation of young, bruise-free athletes will lead soccer in a complete takeover of the Australian sports landscape.
Hopefully it won’t be during my lifetime, though.
Last weekend saw the Grand Final, the championship game, for our domestic soccer league here in Australia – the A-League. Let me tell you something; if this is truly the kind of player, if this is the kind of play that can decide a championship game in this football code, then it will never dominate Australian sport.
May the sporting gods strike us down if it does.
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If you were a Brisbane Roar player (that’s the team in orange), you’d have to feel like the medal that’s now on your mantle is a little tarnished, wouldn’t you?
The video evidence is clear. Berisha did well to maintain posession in such heavy traffic but then he used the situation to milk a penalty. He took a dive. He acted. He cheated the fair-play spirit of the game, the spirit of all sport, and what makes it so much worse is that he did it in what was supposed to be the showcase game of the year – a grand final.
It’s not like the grainy film from Maradona’s hand-of-god goal back in 1986 (thanks Phil R!). This is clear. There is no contact. He cheated to gain advantage and his team won the championship as a direct result.
I hope the FFA is feeling a little embarrassed about this. I have never watched an A-League game and it’s not likely I ever will.
After months of deliberation and literal/metaphorical tyre-kicking, I’ve finally bought a new bicycle. Unusually for me, I resisted all manner of used bike deals and temptations (both online and off) and actually bought a new one. From a proper, bricks & mortar shop. Unheard-of for me, but there you go. Time reveals all sides to a coin. Ok, I did pick up a slighly used SRAM Force groupset on-line to switch out for the bike’s standard Rival one but essentially, I bought a complete new bike, fresh out of the box.
Why a Cervelo? Well, mostly just because I like them. I like their design, their engineering, their approach. I like lots of the guys who ride for their pro team. Hard to explain but I just like them. The model I chose is an S5 which is interesting fit between traditional road bike and a TimeTrial (TT) geometry. This means that the rear wheel is stuffed up under the seat post, allowing the seat tube to be a few degrees more upright than usual. It rides like a standard road bike – the Garmin Barracuda pro team use S5’s as their standard bike – but it can also do a nice turn as a time-trial bike if you want to change things up. The seat post has a reversing function which, when combined with some aerobars, can allow you to sit that bit further forward and cheat the wind a little bit more. Helpful, that.
Cheating the wind is a bit of an obsession with road cyclists and triathletes. Less of an issue for mountainbikers, of course (let’s discuss that another time…) but if you’re just pounding down the tarmac it inevitably occupies your thoughts. Never mind the countless online forums (hello, www.slowtwitch.com, www.bikeforums.net) where you can obsess about yaw rates and drag coeffcients all day long. Estimates are that once you’re riding above 30km/h, upwards of 80% of your effort is pushing the wind. Thus, cheat the wind and you’ll gain speed/distance for the same effort. For a Saab fan, it brings a smile to my face every time I hear people discuss this magic combination: aero. The S5 is aero. Along with Specialized’s Venge (co-development with Mclaren F1), the S5 is apparently the most aerodynamically efficient road bike around. Aero. Invisible, free and yet so hard to find.
Weight is of course, a whole other world that cyclists LOVE to to obsess about. Must be one of the few products in the world where the more you pay, the less you get. Carbon fibre, hmmmmm. Perhaps I’m a cynic and I can see it as a wonderfully marketable aspect of the love of cycling – it’s so simple and tangible to weigh things – but it’s fascinating, nonetheless. Mind you, the professionals don’t always seem to sing from the same hymn book and will often have bikes well above the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) minimum limit of 6.9kg. Aero bikes, interestingly, are often not the lightest bikes and so it’s a weigh-up between the two components.
For a hacker like me, who frankly could lose a lot of weight and become a lot more aero before I should reasonably expect the same of my bicycle, it’s mostly academic but nevertheless irresistible. It’s a lot of fun to have a nice bike, after all.
Anyway, after a long hiatus while I was without a road bike over the course of summer (I sold my LOOK unexpectedly in December) I’m back on the road and enjoying it more than ever. I’m no threat to Cadel Evans or Thor Hushovd but I’m having a blast.
Post Script:
Strange name, Cervelo; took me years to work out its meaning. Cer: cerebral or brain. Intellect. Velo: from the original French velocipede, for bicycle.
Thus: Cervelo – the intelligent bicycle. Now, that’s a pretty lofty claim which could possibly be staked by many, many bicycle manufacturers but it’s as original and catchy as much as it is meaningful. Whatever….seeing it on the roof of my 9-3 Sportcombi brought back some memories of watching pro bike races a few years ago in 2008 when Saab had a prominent role as the vehicles for the Mavic neutral service course guys.
My health is slowly deteriorating. I can feel it. I’ve been able to feel it for a while now. Things took a turn for the better when I was in Sweden as I was enjoying my work and had a flat landscape which made it easier for my lazy arse to get some exercise. Here in hilly Hobart, that’s a much less attractive proposition, no matter how bad I’m feeling.
Of course, the big health hazard in my life continues to be smoking. I’ve never been a truly heavy smoker – less than a pack a day and I smoke the lightest cigarettes you can buy here (yes, I know they’re still bad, only have tiny holes in the filters, etc. I’ve heard it all, thanks). Nevertheless, I’m still a consistent, habitual smoker and I can feel it affecting my throat and my breathing. My physical fitness left me a long time ago thanks to the cigarettes, a predominantly poor diet and this blogging habit that took over from playing basketball around 7 years ago.
I’m facing an elephantine task and how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, of course.
Hence my wondering if anyone out there has tried and/or had any successful outcome with e-cigarettes. These are the ones I’m thinking of. I’ve tried patches and a medication called Zyban and both came with some initial success. Part of my problem, however, is that I enjoy the ritual that comes with smoking – getting outside for 5 minutes and having a chance to think about stuff, having a chat with a colleague or a friend.
From what I’ve heard/read about these e-cigarettes, the ritual can remain but they serve up a cigarette-like experience without all the really nasty chemicals that go into traditional cigarettes. No tar, no carbon monoxide, no ash, etc. You still get nicotine as per a normal cigarette so the base chemical dependency is taken care of.
Many users seem to report feeling the benefits of not taking in all the really bad stuff and of course, a large number of people use them as an aid to quit smoking, which is my intention, too.
The idea of inhaling something delivered to you via power from a battery is rather odd. Ironically, it worries me because it doesn’t sound healthy. E-cigarettes are not able to be sold legally within Australia right now as they haven’t been approved by health authorities. You can source them from overseas, however.
I’m willing to give them a go based on my own limited reading. The way I’m feeling right now, they can’t be any worse than what I’m on right now.
Has anyone used them? And if so, what did you think?
Or…..A 20+ year journey with a guy who looks and sounds like a poof*.
1987 has a lot to answer for. Well, maybe it’s just the 1987 version of me that has a lot to answer for. I was 17 years old and militant in my attitude towards anything I didn’t like and if it wasn’t loud, hard and metallic, there was a very good chance that 1987-me wasn’t into it.
In 1987 I was a long-haired wannabe guitar player who had a hard time accepting that anything not involving a hammer-on guitar solo was real music. Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen were gods and as soon as I got a car in early 1988, it became a rolling church, blaring their hymns at maximum volume wherever I went. I used to have a 25km commute to work and I can remember winding down all four windows in my LJ Torana and having the music up so loud that I couldn’t hear the traffic around me. Yes, I was that guy.
It was around 1987 that I first met a certain guy who just happened to be a Prince fan. It was three years after Purple Rain, but he still wore the T-Shirt from the film at every opportunity and of course, I gave him heaps for it. Let’s just say that with all the frilly shirts, the heels and the high-pitched singing, Prince wasn’t regarded as much of a man’s man in suburban Melbourne. The recipient of my mostly good-natured derision was much nicer about it than I would have been, taking my constant ribbing in his stride and turning out to be a very decent guy in response to my constant asshattery.
A potential conflict of interest arose in 1989. My favourite superhero of all time, Batman, was the subject of a new feature film. I didn’t know it when I arrived at the movie theatre, but the soundtrack to the movie was written and performed by Prince – and I loved it. Thus began what was for me a minor personal cultural revolution, one that would later see me accepting all sorts of things that 1987-me would have considered rather ‘poncy’ – like European cars, for instance.
It was a guitar solo that got the ball rolling. Skip ahead to 2:20….
Who knew that Prince could play the guitar like that? Well, aside from all the people who weren’t boof-headed, loudmouth idiots like me. If I’d actually seen Purple Rain back in 1984, I would have known that Prince had significant guitar chops. But I didn’t. I preferred to base my opinion on how the guy dressed.
Apple is now valued at $600 BILLION. If I’ve got my zeroes figured correctly, that’s US$600,000,000,000 – though whichever way you say it, that’s a lotta clams.
To top that, Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 Billion, which as this article from Australia points out, makes this 17 month-old photo-sharing start-up with just over a dozen employees worth more than the New York Times.
Are these values the tip of an iceberg that is about to pop a gigantic tech bubble right in our nerdy faces? Whilst conditions are somewhat different these days and a burst seems less likely, valuations like these are nothing short of extraordinary.
Interestingly, Microsoft topped $600Bil once in its history and for just a few weeks – right before the tech bubble burst back around the turn of the century.
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The performance of the Koenigsegg Agera is absolutely extraordinary. Whilst I don’t want to take anything away from the astonishing Pagani Zonda, I found it amusing that this film begins by talking about the Zonda as an appreciating classic.
I’m not sure the last 1:20 of the video does anything to help with that assertion, to be honest. It does plenty to pump up the Koenigsegg’s value, though.
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Saab’s photo studio is in a wonderful building in Vanersborg and is apparently valued at a mere SEK800,000 – a sum that I find extraordinarily low.
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I’m in two minds as to whether I should post this, but as tough as it is to watch, it is definitely extraordinary. Parkinson’s Disease is such a cruel affliction and I don’t mean to trivialise it in any way by posting this. I know a family with an elderly who is afflicted with Parkinson’s in my neighborhood. I hear they have a reliable in-home care provider from an institution similar to Care For Family (careforfamily.com.au), which is in a way better than family members trying their best. Professionals understand how to manage and care for their patients.
We all know someone famous with the same neurological disease. The degeneration of Muhammad Ali is extraordinary to see. He is, and always will be, The Champ.
Ironically, there’s been a documentary on TV tonight about the Thrilla in Manila, Ali’s final fight against the late Joe Frazier.
It scared me a little when I saw this documentary scheduled on the TV guide. The last Ali documentary I saw on TV was When We Were Kings, back in 2001. The program featured a news ticker to tell viewers that a plane had accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center. Around 10 minutes later, the program finished prematurely and the next 48 hours were consumed with blanket news feeds from the United States. I still have the videotape.
Thanks to Ted for the right info – it’s Parkinsons, not Alzheimers.
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The men of the Carlton Football Club were extraordinary last Thursday night. I beg you – watch this video and take particular notice of highlight #3.
Catching the ball in the air from a kick (called a “mark”) can be one of the most spectacular things you’ll ever see on a sports field, and something like this happens nearly every week in our game. It’s poetry.
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I hope you all had a wonderful Easter long weekend.
After a looooooong cricket season, southern Australia can breathe a collective sigh of relief – footy’s back.
Tonight, my beloved Carlton Football Club will take on Richmond in the traditional season opener at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I’ll be at home, on the edge of my seat, willing the Blues on to another Round 1 rout of the Tigers.
Two of the guys to watch tonight will be Tasmanian, Mitch Robinson (#12) and Carlton’s captain Chris Judd (#5).
Robbo’s playing his 50th game tonight and will hopefully attack the contest with his usual vigour (see the video, below). For those non-Aussies watching, all these things are good….. 🙂
Whatever the AFL forked out for AC/DC’s anthem It’s A Long Way To The Top, it’s presumably more than the pair of dark Navy Blue guernseys it cost the then Carlton General Manager Keith “Caper” McKenzie to stitch up Swedish supergroup ABBA way back in ’77.
With the League landing Australia’s unofficial national anthem for use through 2012, thoughts turn to ABBA, specifically its old music clip “Chiquitita”, in which Agnetha Fältskog can be seen belting out the hit sporting the famous CFC across her front.
McKenzie, who turns 90 in April, vividly recalled the chain of events which led to Anna and her fellow ABBA songstress Frida Lyngstad getting decked out in dark Navy Blue 35 years ago this month.
“When we knew they were about to land at Tullamarine I told our marketing bloke Michael Whitewood, ‘Grab a couple of guernseys, get up to the airport and take them out to ABBA’,” said McKenzie of one of the all-time great club marketing triumphs.
“The band later headed out to Western Australia to play for shows wearing the jumpers. I don’t know what guernsey numbers they got, but it was a real coup.”
I liked these the moment I saw them. Like miniature Marshall stacks for your ears. Such an obvious product for Marshall to make but surprisingly one that took them a long time to get around to. I guess Dr Jim is such a busy guy keeping the rock gods of the world amplified that a sideline into headphones was always just pushed to the back of the desk. Well, whatever finally allowed him to get to it, I’m glad he did.
They’re not fancy but that’s part of the appeal. A simple, folding design for easy and damage-free transport. A decent, soft-touch lead with a spring-coil section to prevent sudden jerks to ones cranium. A proper, metal plug with a spring protector for the lead. That wonderfully minimalist Marshall logo in cursive script, just like their amplifiers. Quality sound with depth, clarity and power.
Possibly not the absolute ultimate headphones for the fanatical audiophile and there are no claims of noise reduction either. Nevertheless, I’m not arguing. After all, plug in and you’re listening to your music through Marshalls. Other companies can make all the claims they like but when all is said and done, they’re not Marshalls. Sometimes, I think its ok to be a bit cool.
Footnote: This is not a review. It’s purely a personal opinion and offered without any connection to, or provision from Marshall. I bought these headphones with my own cash and have been using them happily since December 2011.
Every four years a group of combatants, many of whom have trained their whole lives just for this moment, go toe-to-toe in a winner-take-all contest that bestows glory, if not necessarily honour, on the winner.
It’s not the Olympics. It’s much more ruthless than that. I’m talking about the 2012 US Presidential elections.
If you’re like me, you’ll be interested in what happens in the US. Even in the midst of an economic crisis, they’re still a world superpower and decisions taken there tend to have an impact around the world. It’s nice to know who’s in charge and therefore, what you might expect.
If you’re like me, you’re probably not fond of all the usual talking heads, whose coverage of the elections as is much about their media mogul status as it is about the facts.
I’m not an American, so I don’t need to know the minutiae of who-said-what at which town hall meeting. I just want to know what’s going on, have a laugh as I learn about it and generally speaking, cut through the crap.
SYWBANP is published by a couple of Dutch guys. Though left leaning, there’s no intense skin-in-the-game agenda evident in their coverage. Their mission is to take a look at what’s going on and generally see the lighter side of America’s political olympics. Right now, all the activity is with the Republicans, so that where the coverage is focused (and where the laughs are coming from). The stranger the candidate, the better – and there are certainly some characters in this year’s race.
They not only cover the main players, they also introduce us to a few potential fringe dwellers, too. Perhaps a glimpse into America’s future. Today, for example, I learned about Governor Chris Christie from New Jersey, a potential Republican candidate in 2016 and a man who if his actual work is as accomplished as his oral skills, will make for an even more compelling Republican primary season in four years from now.
SYWBANP is also run by one of my former colleagues from Saab, which is how I found out about it.
Planet America has ABC News Radio’s John Barron playing straight man with The Chaser’s Chad Licciardello doing all the reality-based jokes. It’s on every Friday night and makes for some very informative viewing, often with some insightful special guests from both the US and Australia.
So, for the non-Americans who want to keep an eye on what’s going on there, check ’em out.
There’s nothing worse than an old fat bastard giving you the “I told you so” treatment, but here I go…..
When you live on an island, it’s a good idea to learn how to swim. That’s why all kids in an Australian school are encouraged to take swimming lessons from a very young age. In fact, most kids are old hands at swimming by the time school lessons come around.
There are swimming classes at local pools for toddlers and plenty of parents chuck their kids in at the deep end while they’re still in nappies. People who can afford it get hold of a local pool contractor and build one in their backyard to have their kids be deft swimmers. One such expert swimmer was Ian Thorpe.
Thorpe is/was one of our country’s greatest ever swimmers. His ascension to the top of the swimming heap began when he was just a schoolboy, selected for the Australian swimming team at just 14 years of age. That year, he won 10 gold medals in the Australian underage championships, but more remarkably, set six Australian records in the process.
His international debut in the Pan Pacific Championships (age 15) was marred by an appendix operation but just a year later he took his first two World Championship gold medals. Later that year he won four gold medals at the Commonwealth Games.
His first Olympics were in Sydney, in 2000. He took three gold, including the famous 4×100 relay win where the Australians smashed the Americans like guitars (a response to some US trash talk in the lead up to the event, see below). He also won two silver medals at the Sydney Olympics.
At the 2001 World Championships, he won six more gold. Another six at the 2002 Commonwealth Games and another five gold at the 2002 Pan Pacs.
Thorpe shone again in 2004 at Athens, taking home another four medals, half of them gold.
We shouldn’t forget the world records, either. 13 of them. Thorpe held world records in the 200, 400 and 800 meter freestyle events. They’ve all been broken since, but it was a wonderful achievement.
And all of that had happened before he turned 23 years old.
Every athlete (except maybe some pro basketballers) will tell you that the pinnacle of athletic achievement is the Olympic Games. In 2006, at age 24 and with the Beijing Olympics just two years away, Thorpe decided he’d had enough. He was feeling burned out and just didn’t have the desire to swim anymore. At just 24.
Thorpe has told a packed news conference in Sydney that he is moving on to a “next phase” in his life.
The Sydney and Athens gold medallist has said he decided on Sunday to leave the sport that had “catapulted” him into the limelight 10 years ago.
“I know there is a lot of people out there that want me to keep swimming. I only hoped that I wanted to swim half as much as other people want me to,” he has said.
“It would be dishonest to myself and to others (to continue) as I would be fulfilling other people’s dreams.”
He has decided to pursue other interests after realising competitive swimming was no longer his top priority in life.
“It’s like swimming lap after lap staring at a black line – then all of a sudden you look up” at the world around you, he has said.
“I started looking at myself, not just physically, but also as a person. I haven’t balanced out my life as well as what I should have.”
I remember thinking at the time, like quite a few other people, that this was a flawed decision. I believed 200% that he’d regret not using the full compliment of his talent while he had age and ability on his side.
His movements outside of swimming included some daft forays into television in programs that went absolutely nowhere. Things about travel, and fashion, IIRC. I’m sure there were other business ventures as well, but bottom line, Ian Thorpe is an average person in every respect aside from his ability to propel himself through the water at amazing speed.
The theory that he’d miss swimming was confirmed 18 months or so ago, when the Thorpedo announced that he was making a comeback, with a view to competing in the London Olympics this year, 2012. Everyone wished him well and I think we all wanted to see Thorpe back to his best. I know I did.
It’s a long way to the Olympic podium, however, even if you know the route.
In that semi-final, Thorpe showed that the slow-down earlier in the day might have actually been fatigue rather than race craft. Thorpe came out well but started losing pace from the 100m mark, eventually finishing sixth and not even making it to the final. He ranked 12th out of the 16 swimmers who contested the semi-finals.
His own words told the story:
(It’s) the fairytale that just turned into a nightmare.
Ian Thorpe was the best swimmer in the world at his peak. I’m sure that Michael Phelps would have forced him into the background had Thorpe swum in Athens anyway, but if Thorpe’s legacy was injured by his decision to retire back in 2006, that injury revealed its full depth last night.
Thorpe abandoned a field in which he was the world’s best and at an age where he could have continued to inspire and achieve. I don’t know if he wanted “find himself” or if he was just ignoring the consequences of a big decision as if they didn’t matter (like many Gen-Y’ers before and since). At the end of it all, he “found himself” last night, trying – and failing – to take hold of the Olympic dream that he treated with such flippancy back in 2006.
We’ve all got decisions in our lives that we regret, things we’d like to take back years later, but we can’t. That much was clear from the look on Thorpe’s face and the stunned silence from the crowd last night.
The moral of the story – if you’re good at something, do it for as long as you are able to do it because you’re going to miss it like hell when it’s gone.
And a message to anyone with an extraordinary talent:
Those of us who are mere mortals, the people who cheer you on and can only dream of achieving the things you achieve, doing the things you can do – we don’t welcome you to the land of the mundane. We want you to stay remarkable. And once you become ‘normal’ like the rest of us, you’ll know why.
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Please don’t think I’m saying that Ian Thorpe is/was a wasted talent. He was extraordinary. I just think he wasted a few prime years in his athletic career, a career that we all enjoyed watching. I wish him good luck in whatever it is he chooses to do now. I just wish we could have cheered him on in Beijing instead of watching Phelps go unchallenged though the whole meet.
If it’s any consolation, I won’t remember Ian Thorpe for last night’s failure. This is my best Thorpe memory – that “guitar” episode from 2000.
The Americans had never lost this relay event since it’s inclusion in the games program in 1964. They knew we were coming, though, and US swimmer Gary Hall Jr thought he’d up the ante by saying they’d “smash us like guitars” in the lead-up to the event. Make sure you watch to around the 3:40 mark or just before, for the Aussie response to that particular taunt.
This is how I’ll remember Ian Thorpe’s stellar career. I just hope we can all learn lessons from the way it ended, both in 2006 and 2012.
