Grand Final Fevers

I find myself with something of a dilemma. Where shall my allegiance lie for the 2006 Grand Final?

My usual gut decision making practice has failed me and I have been forced to think rationally about it. So I decided to draw up a list of pros and cons…


West Coast Cons

They will gloat FOREVER.
The players are mutants.
They knocked the wonderful deserving doggies out of the finals race.
They have the dumbest player in the universe – Ben Cousins.
The more feral section of my family barrack for them.


Sydney Cons

They play cold and calculating footy – completely unlovable.
Last year’s sympathy support and the South Melbourne 72 year premiership drought love-in are over. This premiership is all about Sydney.
They already won the brownlow.
They won the thing just last year, give someone else a turn.

It turns out neither team had any pros.

And I still can’t decide. If anyone can give me a single good reason to pick one side over the other please let me know. Otherwise I may have to remain an impartial observer.
How boring.

Stupid computers

I just opened a pdf file to recieve an error message which suggested the document had, and i quote, 'too few operands'.

I had to look it up.

Wah?

Did anyone have as much fun as Travis Johnstone at the Brownlow?

What Travis Johnstone did while on camera:

1. Wear a white tie, despite the AFL black tie policy
2. Kiss Ben Holland (his date)
3. Scull beer
4. Embarrassing himself on national television.

Check out this photo for proof.

Brownlow

There is a very funny article in today's Age By Richard Hind on the wonderful absurdity that is Brownlow Night. I would link it, but for some reason my sad old home computer is never quite up to the task. So you'll have to go find it yourself.

Brownlow night is one of the few nights of the year when football fulfils my needs as a sports fan and a woman. And, like most, I have developed a ritual to prepare myself for the event (thankfully in my case it involves absolutely no waxing or tanning.)

First, over the course of Monday I start to get irrationally excited and feel the need to read all of the terrible half-baked journalism available on the who, what, where and wear of those in a attendance.

By 8pm when the red carpet special (gods gift to women to who don’t like blonds eg. me) begins, I can barely contain the anticipation. I love to hate the frocks. Being critical of other people’s fashion choices is one of my greatest joys in life and the Brownlow is a guilt free opportunity to indulge. They get free booze and all night parties, I get to sit at home in my grease stained trackies and criticise their fashion choices. Everyone wins!

Then they actually start to count votes. The Brownlow night is like the whole football season in fast forward, and those great little highlights packages let me relive all the exciting bits without having to watch teams flood or time-waste for half the game. For the rest of the Browlnlow these brief moments of interest will be interspersed with long tedious hours of name after name after name.

Still, once they settle into the counting its time to spot the boozehounds. Checking out each of the tables, place bets on who’s photo will be front and centre of the Herald-Sun the next day (and not because they won the thing). Safe money is usually on Billy Brownless.

By round 16 I will have fallen asleep on the couch. All that monotony is so soothing, it is some of the best sleep I get all year, well at least until the cricket starts! But by round 19 I’ll be awake again as the murmurings of the room instensify when the front-runners get a vote. The end is nigh and the winner is almost decided.

The evening will then come to an end (way past my bedtime) with platitudes about the winner’s coach, team, wife/girlfriend and mum. The winner then goes off to drink too much and then do breakfast radio interviews, while I trundle off to bed to dream of doing it all again next year.

I say, BRING IT!

Top Fun

I have a confession to make. I LOVE TOP GEAR!

I heard Debbie Enker and Jon Faine talking about it a couple of weeks ago and so I know I’m definitely not alone in my love, but still, I feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. The program is, as they say, grouse.

I don’t drive a car. In fact, I don’t even have a licence. And I get to work by the slowest and most inconvenient form of transport possible (hello Yarra Trams if you’re watching) but I absolutely love to watch those boys making a mess out of cars and bikes and field and roads and tanks and whatever else they can think of.

I love Jeremy Clarkson and his old codger wit, but what I love most of all is The Stig. The reason? Well, this is his web page bio,

‘Some say he urinates 98 RON petrol, and that he can smell corners. No one knows when the Stig was born, or how. But we do know why he was placed upon the Earth. To drive quickly. He has a penchant for prog rock, and rumour has it, likes his eggs sunny side up.’

Need I say more?

If you don’t know what I am talking about then I have two things to say to you,
a) Where have you been?
b) SBS 7:30pm Monday.

Also, if you know if some way I can get my hands on one of those Stig t-shirts I will marry you. (If you want me to. I’m a pretty good cook, but I do get a bit grumpy in the mornings.)

Sports Mania

The guilt I feel for neglecting to post a single thing lately is tempered by the fact that as far as I know, I’m the only one who reads this blog. But I do have an excuse for my tardiness. I have immersed myself in sport.

First there is the finals. Poor doggies, poor dees, but what were they going to do, both were playing Western Australian mutants. What exactly do they feed them over there to make their coats so shiny?

Then there was the Moto GP. Motor sport is my secret indulgence. Well, not so secret any more. Those boys are so strange, they are meant to be these super duper motor heads but instead they are like little jockeys with even sillier clothes. Valentino’s run of greatness continues down at Phillip Island.

And last night I tried to go see Melbourne Victory play. Not that I could get in, the place was sold out and as we walked despondently away from the stadium, hordes of people continued to stream towards it. Victory now has the very happy problem of not having a stadium big enough for its crowd. In the long term they need to find a new home or they will find themselves missing out on some lovely revenue. Telstra Dome is looking pretty empty right about now. In the short term though, they could get rid of the $45 premium tickets. I’m sorry you are a mug if you pay that much money to see 90 minutes of regular season football.

And the festival of sporting goodness continues. Still to come is more footy finals, Bathurst, and hopefully one day, a seat a Melbourne Victory game. Ooh, and then there is cricket soon…

Places of Pain and Shame

I spent yesterday in a very long but equally interesting seminar on the heritage of ‘places of pain and shame’. There is book of case studies to be published next year and the seminar was a chance for the authors to test their ideas out on each other and anyone else interested in listening.

It is one of the most challenging areas of heritage practice and heritage theory. What do we do with sites of pain and shame? and how do we do it? How do we we satisfy the needs of both global and local audiences and respect the memory of those who have dies at these sites?

Two examples are Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and Toul Sleng in Cambodia, these are sites of death, mass murder and torture, and they are also two of the biggest tourist attractions in their respective countries.

These sites are retained for people to see them. To remember. But reconciling that with the busload of tourists who stream through the gates is difficult. The prisoner reception building at Auschwitz is now the visitor reception centre complete with ticket book, kiosk and toilets centre. Is that respecting the memories of the people whose lives were decided in that place? Or doesn’t it matter as long as the people who visit Auchwitz-Birkenau leave with a better understanding of what happened there?

And what of the people who live on the boundary of Auschwitz? The local community who have to live out their daily lives under the scrutiny of the international community, ready to judge new development as disrespectful, no matter how necessary to the town’s survival. Or the squatters on the grounds of Toul Sleng, who have no money, no land, no place to live and no way out of a devastating poverty cycle and now find themselves living on the grounds where many, many people were imprisoned and killed.

I don’t know what the answers to these questions are, but I do know that in spite of the challenges of presenting these sites to the masses, of the desire to forget or move on, retaining these sites is essential for reminding all people how easily violence on this scale can take place and how easily the world can turn a blind eye to it.

Good News

While doing some research into successful projects encouraging Indigenous students into education I encountered this outrageously popular program over in WA.

The Clontarf Foundation began as a football academy at Clontarf Aboriginal School set up Gerard Neesham to give boys the motivation and self belief to go to, and stay at, school. The academy was so successful at Clontarf it has now been expanded to 6 other locations and will probably grow to 11 by 2008. It began with just 25 kids in 2000 and now the academies have a combined enrolment of 400.

The success of this program absolutely astounds me. All I hear from the media is the bad and the hopeless, but here is an example of a project that works with an idea so simple it can continue to expand and develop in the future.

I’d like to see more of the successful programs like this one being reported and supported by the media, and I’d like to hope this kind of success can be replicated in other non-football programs as well.

...and so it begins/ends

My darling football team, which perhaps did not finish the season on the strongest possible note will now face off against my friend Helen’s football team on Friday night.

I fear we will have to tiptoe around each other for the next week (and probably the week after depending on who wins).

I hate/love finals. It is so very stressful.