The World Game Lame

I watched (on TV) Australia’s Socceroos qualify for their first World Cup appearance in 32 years. It was spectacular stuff… the event was huge and there was certainly drama and action aplenty… but what is it with this acting? how can they get away with that?

I was impressed that the Spanish referee seemed on several occasions completely ignore the agonised writhings of one particular Uruguayan player – who was then left with no choice than to make a Lazarus like recovery and rejoin the game, but that didn’t seem to stop his team mates or, I’m sorry to say, a few of the Australians from diving and writhing whenever an opportunity presented itself.

Those watchers of ‘contact’ sports, such as AFL and the various Rugby codes around the world will be quite familiar with the body language that accompanies pain inflicted on a football field, and it’s nothing like the ridiculous squirming that soccer players seem to learn from some bad acting school. We know when something hurts – we don’t need interpretive break dancing to tell us.

I don’t know if it’s possible to eliminate this, but each time it happens, the game loses a bit of credibility. The referee certainly helped by ignoring several instances, but as is the case with Cricket, cameras are everywhere and they concentrate on the mistakes the referees/umpires make, so it’s a problem that is not going away. There definitely needs to be consideration of a sanction for overacting… maybe three instances make a yellow card, I don’t know.

I’m not a huge soccer fan, so I’d like to say I don’t care, but lately this sort of thing has been seen in Aussie Rules games. There’s nowhere near the scope for it in ‘our’ game – the pace is so much faster; ‘incidents’ so much more intense, and it is a ‘contact’ sport – but I certainly hope umpires don’t let it get to the ridiculous levels it has in the ‘world’ game.

Better get used to it I suppose… there’s going to be a whole lot more in the next 9 months!

wipe off that drool!…

As of last Tuesday’s Epicure liftout in The Age, everyone is discovering food blogs.

I’m a food lover – a bit of a cook – mostly an eater, who has long enjoyed the vicarious pleasure of food blogs. The epicure article was pretty good, highlighting a bunch of great blogs – some I’ve already seen, many I haven’t.

There are a couple I reckon they missed though, Continue reading “wipe off that drool!…”

go and poo somewhere else…

The building I work in is beautiful. Very old, very grand, sorta gothic sandstone. My office has real windows we can open and there are lawns outside the window. Alas, old buildings are expensive to maintain, the sandstone parapets are broken in places and the facade is cracked and flaking – mortar and finishing are deteriorating all over.

cracking sandstone facade

So, I was pleased to see this morning that some workmen had blocked off my usual entry to the building and had erected some scaffold. Was this the start of renovations? The answer was appalling… Continue reading “go and poo somewhere else…”

flock to this…

Sorry, inexcusable pun – I would never make a sub-editor! On the other hand, if you like new toys, you should take a look at flock, a new mozilla based browser, with active hooks for posting to blogs (I’m writing this entry from within the browser) and sharing bookmarks. It integrates with delicious for bookmark management.

It’s very exciting to see the browser integrating seamlessly with a personal online presence – it’s all coming together nicely.

the ring road

the italian ring roadWe have a ring road here in Melbourne, but it’s not much of a ring – more a half finished peanut shape, but it gets the job done I s’pose. Not like this one near Taranto in Italy, now this is what I call a ring road… it’s massive!

Actually, this whole area seems to be obsessed with circles and ellipses. There are circular lakes here, here, and a whole bunch of elliptical ones over here.

The circular road is some kind of a vehicle testing ground the Nardò, Proving Ground, (their site has a map explaining what each part of the facility does), but what’s the excuse for all the round lakes?

very old noodles

very old noodlesBeing a big fan of Chinese Food (inserts plug for our favourite local restaurant), and living in a very ‘Italian’ area of Melbourne, I have followed with some interest the debate about who invented the noodle. The Italians insist that Marco Polo introduced it to China, the Chinese argue the reverse. Even the Arab countries in between get into the act, saying he picked it up on the way through. Well, wonder no more; according to this article from the BBC, some noodles have been uncovered in an archeological dig in China that are returning radio carbon dates of around 4,000 years ago.

I always suspected the Chinese had the edge 😉

a naughty little cat

viv a the parkThis is viv, our cat, with his tail up in defiance despite being well out of his comfort zone. You see, we’d just gone down the park for a quick kick of the football and he followed us all the way. I tried to catch him to take him back to the house, but he’s quite good at staying out of reach.

Anyway, he ran around alternately looking fierce and terrrified – way too much excitement for a little boy. We headed back up the hill making sure he could see us and hoping therefore that he would follow.

At first, he stayed down among the trees, but in a stroke of good fortune a Crow decided he was either a bit of a threat or possibly an entree, and it swooped him with a loud caw. They were out of view just over the brow of the hill, but I think they actually engaged for a moment, before another crow came and Viv rocketed out of the trees and up the street toward us, straight under a parked car for shelter. He meekly followed us the rest of the way home – panting from either stress or tiredness. Naughty little boy!

WE05

I suppose I’d better give into it… everyone else has blogged about , so I’d better do my bit. Not that it’s a chore at all – quite the opposite – this was the most informative and inspirational conference I have been to in years. No, the problems are: 1. where to start, and 2. what to leave out.

Informative: Eric Meyer and his approach to prototyping css design, Tantek Çelik and his insight into the deep end of sematic XHTML, and Derek Featherstone taking forms accessibility to new levels.

Inspirational: Molly Holzschlag – is there anything she isn’t into?, Jeff Veen, simply inspirational!

There were others, of course, but I’ve gotta stop dribbling! Over the next week or so I’m going to be going through my notes and listening to the podcasts to try and pass on as much of this wisdom as possible to my work colleagues.

fore!

golfballs on Point Cook beachWhy, why, why? What is it with golfballs and beaches? This photo of Point Cook beach takes in a group of eight golf balls. The nearest course is Sanctuary Lakes, some five kilometers away.

I often find golfballs when snorkelling off Williamstown, but at least there you’ve got some nice grass and a large population, so it’s conceivable that someone has just had a bit of fun belting the odd ball out to sea. Here though, there is some cut grass roughly 80m away behind a huge stand of trees, nearer grass is very heavy ‘rough’, it would take a pro to group the balls like this with no other obvious strays.

Ok, so it’s not one of the world’s great mysteries, but it has me flummoxed… why are they there?

first class

airplane as a homeHow many of us have dreamed that one day we’d have a real, full size jet aircraft of our own to live in?… OK, not that many! Still, given the relatively high concentration of wierdos per square inch in the US, you would have guessed it would happen there. This is a Boeing 727 in someone’s front yard in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Bruce Campbell has built a website to document his obsession, called airplanehome.com, but from the photos on the site, it looks very little like a home and very much like a cross between a film set and my father’s garage. Still, whatever rips your cord!