Fradam

I’ve heard that it is the bride’s perogative really, but clearly, Tom Hanks was having none of it. I am impressed!

I’ve just spent a sunny weekend up the coast, and whilst there, learnt a few random things about the land to the north.

• The speed limit for Learners is 110 km/h (in Sydney, it’s 80 km/h). It is debatable whether it is safer having 16 year olds doing 110km/h on a motorway, or having them driving at  80 km/h in the left lane (particularly in merging situations) is safer… but needless to say, discovering this on my last day certainly explained why so many cars were happy to sit right on my tail on the motorways. Good thing Queenslanders are renowned for being relaxed on the roads and all.
• You can’t do a U Turn at a set of lights, unless you see a specific sign indicating it is permitted. I’m sure it’s the other way round down here..
• This isn’t specific to Queensland, but I love Wikipedia to a fault - but need to be reminded every now and then to not simply believe everything I read there: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/07/wikipedia_jarre_hoax/
• It is possible to purchase adult cinema tickets, at full price, and be paying less than $8 - it wasn’t even tight Tuesday! Unheard of in Sydney.
• The expansion of the Gold Coast airport, in order to allow it to field more international flights, is in a southward direction, i.e. further into NSW. On my return back home, I drove from QLD, to NSW (entrance to airport), walked back to QLD (where the gate was), then flew across the border into NSW (in a plane!). All in the space of an hour or two. I consider myself now a seasoned traveller.

Keep your eyes peeled for more trivialities in my soon-to-be-published “Guide Book to QLD”.

Okay, maybe not quite a hundred billion.

But two in two weeks? It seems highly coincidental.. both the stories drifted across my nose in the past week.

Bottle #1

From: ~160km east of the Mississippi river delta, USA, in the 1960s
To: Pirates Beach (yaar!), Galveston, Texas, USA, mid-January 2009
Distance travelled: ~1000kms across ~45 years
Why: Drift bottles; experiment to learn about ocean currents and surface circulation.
Random: A group of school kids analysed the reasons how the bottle got there and suggested that perhaps Hurricane Ike had something to do with it.. and that it probably “went through sharks, fish, squid, octopus, coral, seaweed, shrimp, crabs, boats, dolphins, whales, seals, eels, sea turtles, nets, surfing and other things close to the top of the ocean”.

Bottle #2

From: Cooks Beach, NZ, 1984
To: Cooks Beach, NZ, 2008
Distance travelled: 0km, 24 years
Why: No particular reason, “just wanted to do it”
Random: The bottle owner was tracked down via the Old Friends website.

I’m sort of curious, what is more unusual? A bottle that goes everywhere, or one that goes nowhere?

Sending out an SOS… Now I want to go write a message in a bottle. Makes me wonder though, what would I put in there? Something which across the ages, could track me down (perhaps a library card; librarians can always track you down when you’ve got something overdue), and hopefully meaningful.. hmm. What would you put in there?

Wow. So it is official: Michael Jackson tour, is ON. It’s difficult to focus right now as I contemplate possibly one of the greatest stars of our time, is going to be performing soon.  The scary part is that it’s a 10 concert tour, and it’s the last one for London. He’s given no indication about what is coming after that - I hope it’s a world tour. By my reasoning, if he goes outside of North America/Europe, he has to come to Sydney… right?

Tickets go on sale next Wednesday, March 13th. Fans can register for the chance to buy tickets on MichaelJacksonLive.com; the ticket sale will be similar to the Led Zeppelin reunion one, where registering results in a unique password that gives the user the chance to buy up to four tickets.

Well, I went into the draw for the Led one and didn’t go well.. but if I get the chance to buy these.. hmm…

Today, reports of Atlantis flitted across my table. With the launch of an Ocean in Google Earth, searching beneath the ocean has never been easier. How exciting to have this opportunity! The fact that oceans cover nearly three quarters of the entire globe, yet we know so little about what is actually down there is.. intriguing. A lot of it is well over 3km deep… there is a lot that can fit down there. Like the infamous colossal squid, which we still know… so little about. Except that it is not terribly small.

Generally, when comparing large objects, the usual denominators are simple: how does it compare to a London bus? How about a sperm whale? Well, here we go:

So the colossal squid dwarfs all else. Well, not all else, but everything in our sample space. Mind you, they apparently first proved the existence of colossal squids by discovering the tentacles of one, in the stomach of a sperm whale, so perhaps being so big isn’t so wonderful.

Usually, if you put squid and stomach in the same sentence, I think of something more like…

.. which got me thinking. Your average serving of salt and pepper calamari has about 125 grams of actual squid, which will generally take me about 12 minutes to consume.

The colossal squid that was snagged last year, weighed in at nearly 500 kg. So if my job was to eat the colossal squid; i.e. I ate for 8 hours a day, it would take me a 100 days to eat the entire thing. I just hope Burnsie is cooking it… with that amount of eating, I wouldn’t want to get bored.

All in all though, it is an amazing creature. Tentacles are laced with more than your average suckers; hooks of a varying nature also adorn the limbs. Scientists use that sort of information as evidence to support the idea that it is an aggressive creature, but really, there’s no way to know. The eye of the colossal squid is the largest eye we’ve ever encountered - my my what large eyes you have… So we’re still discovering new things about the world we live in…which I find incredible. God made it so rich and abundant of life and variety that the depths of our oceans sometimes feel as mysterious as the outer reaches of the universe. I hope one day I can be so fortunate to be making discoveries about one or the other. Maybe I’ll drill 20,000 leagues below the sea and find chocolate!

For now though, I’ll be content with the discovery (thanks to Kellie and Woody) of a new friend - Banjo. A beautiful fighting fish (betta), he enjoys fervent swimming at dinner time, docile snoozing in the afternoons, and making pouting faces at the Bart Simpson figurine on top of his tank. I wish my camera was able to take a photo of him that actually did him some creative justice as he is quite the poser. The fins, almost gossamer in nature, shimmer with a back light; he seems to have understood this and appeared to quite enjoy dancing in front of it. I am beginning to recognise a personality as well, which is an exciting thing to witness develop. Clearly, size does not matter when it comes to appreciating the wonderful things in the world around us. Banjo so far has not expressed displeasure at my singing either, so as far as friends go, he is definitely doing well

So, the next time you are over at my place, please do ask to say hello to Banjo, he definitely has enjoyed meeting new people, being the social butterfly fish and all.

… is the game of cricket. Or at least, that could be the future of it here in Australia.

Only those away from mass media would have missed what is one of the biggest rows in the history of the sport. Allusions have been made to the racial scandals of years gone by, or even to the controversial bodyline series. I’m not going to draw comparisons to events gone by; let’s not sully their relative purity by linking. Nor does the fate of the tour, or Singh’s ban really measure largely in the scale of the bigger picture.

Cricket, one of the true “gentleman’s game”, is now on the brink of disaster. When a man’s word on the field is questioned, when their integrity must be examined and analysed; that is when the innocence of the game has truly been lost. The 2nd test in Sydney, may well have witnessed that passing.

Symonds’ decision to simply stand his ground, with full knowledge that he was out, is a blatant slur against the code of honour in the game. If you know you’re out, you should walk. Sure, if there’s doubt or uncertainty, it is a good idea to wait for the finger to go up, but in this case, there was no thought of that. The nick was audible in the grandstands and in the commentary box - but just not to the umpire. The bad umpiring here was the difference between India winning, and a tie. Spilt milk it may be, the gall of the Australian team leadership to stand behind Symonds’ decision to stay at the crease was disappointing. Where is our oft-hailed sportsmanship, if not here? Is this not the moment where it is meant to shine? What kind of example do these cricketers set for the youth of today by their actions?

“That ain’t cricket”? - that ain’t the half of it! Young Sharma, the 19 year old Indian who went on to witness Symonds save the innings for a collapsed Australian lineup, went and shook Andrew Symonds’ hand. At the end of an innings which should never have been, he still had the right spirit about him and congratulated his opponent. How Roy could look him in the eye with any semblance of honesty was beyond me.

As for the final day… Dravid being dismissed as out; an example of the Australian team’s over-eagerness to appeal absolutely everything. Even when the bat is on the other side of the pad, quite clearly nowhere near the ball… the Aussies felt the right thing to do was pressure the umpire into making another bad decision. Full credit to the team once more, really great showmanship there. I’m left almost flabbergasted, considering Cricket Australia, the players, and the team are quite happy to sit there and say “we played in the right spirit”, when quite clearly, they were not.

The sheer irony of the Australian team to be the one complaining of copping abuse on the field is almost too much. The long tradition of sledging, very often using words and ideas deemed to be offfensive to the given competitor, is part of the mantra when one joins the slip cordon. If there’s something that bothers me more than sheer outright dishonesty, it is hypocrisy. Being a hypocrite, especially on the public stage, is just asking for trouble. Look to see Australia get bitten back hard for this.

The question is now, what to do to fix things? 31000 SMH readers (60% of all respondents) felt Ricky Pointing should be given the boot. Brendan Nelson thinks we should get off his back. I’m not sure where change need to start from, but I feel a united front from the top going down, recognising that whilst umpiring can be poor, it was not helped by the approach the team took to the game.

Perhaps starting with that, both teams will be in a position where they can sit and discuss what honour means to them.

Recently, Kellie and I visited the latest venue to be graced by Guy Sebastian’s musical talents, one of the places where all performers can be humbled: the Sydney Opera House. It was very much a case of ‘returning to the scene of the crime’, as this was where it all started, where Guy was crowned the first Australian Idol. Being at the Opera House demanded a bit of fancyness, and upon arrival, it was clear that the audience at this concert was far older than the usual Guy fanfare, almost on par with the Elton crowd!

The seats we had were awesome (hats off to Kellie! ). Dead set centre and one level up; it afforded a view of the entire stage, and the choir behind. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. To top it off, it was quite a way through the concert that people even sat in front of us, so the view was mostly uninterrupted. Looking around, there really wasn’t a position in the entire hall that I’d have preferred… except maybe right on stage

The first half of the concert was Guy’s music, ‘remixed orchestral style’… I mean, the tunes were largely untouched, but hearing these tunes created by about 15 violins was pretty amazing! Song selection basically consisted of most of his singles, and a few of his personal favourites that were suited towards his backing. Hearing “Climb Every Mountain” was always going to be a powerful one to experience, this time with a full orchestra behind him… whilst he’s never been able to hit that final note the way he did in Idol, it was still intense and elicited a standing ovation.

What really impressed me during this entire section was the control of the conductor. I’ve honestly never seen much orchestral music, save for school bands, but keeping a tight rein on 30 or so people spread across that area can never be easy. Keeping in mind that Guy’s usual band is a group of like-minded individuals who are very flexible and can work around his constant adlibbing of lyrics and trills, and therein lies the potential for chaos; or at least, a restriction on how much leeway Guy really had. Or so I thought. It didn’t stop Guy from being his usual self with his music, and the power the conductor wielded as he kept the entire orchestra in time with Guy with his song changes was amazing! It was almost like improv classical as all the music paused with an instant’s notice, and then quickly rejoining the fray as Guy returned back to song. Just amazing.

Following the intermission, Guy took up a few of the Beatles’ classics - throwing the gauntlet across time and space at Shannon, he performed a wonderful rendition of Hey Jude that garnered much praise from the audience. He moved onto Elvis and whilst I don’t know Elvis’ music that well, he definitely had some good choices there that suited both his voice and the orchestra behind him. Guy then made a tribute to his dad, and belted out some genuine classics - old blue eyes with ‘The way you look tonight’ (possibly my favourite Sinatra song ever!), and Nat King Cole too!

In a strong move, he also chose to perform a few gospel songs — all quite strong ones, and even a few that I knew! :p So quickly however, it seemed to come to an end, an exhilirating ride that brought an amazing evening to a close. All in all, an awesome concert To witness such talent, in such an inspiring locale… well, you kinda wonder if you can ever get there too!

I discovered that the experience had renewed the vigor for my Australian Idol campaign (remember, vote 1 Fradam!)… somewhat sadly, it appears I’m not the only one.

Idol 2007 has already seen 30,000 singers try out for the show, the same as last year, and thousands tried their luck at Sydney’s Australian Technology Park over the weekend.

Australian Idol began in 2003 and sifted through 20,000 hopefuls in capital cities to find its first winner, Guy Sebastian.

Doh… not as much chance, but we can always hope!

Across the last few days, there has been a sick story developing, and becoming more localised with more detail each day — the incident taking place in our very own Warringah Mall. It was somewhat disconcerting considering that such a perverse act was taking place in a shopping mall that I’ve known for so long; that there were people like that in my area. Honestly, it shocks me that there are guys out there that are believing that its okay to do things like this; I pray that more news about people being caught stops those who still practice it.

Learning that the man was from Harbord hit even closer to home, having spent a better part of my teenage years in neighbouring Manly High School. However, the latest update (thanks Will), names and shames the perpetrator as a Mr Robert Drummond, a teacher at Cromer High. Those who attended Manly High and read this no doubt were met with immediate shock, as many of us went to school with a science teacher by the name of Mr Drummond! Could this be true… could the originator of this sick crime be someone we had known for 6 years…?

After the initial shock settled passed, the question of “Is that our Drummond?!” began to rise more fervently. After all, how many guys with a surname like ‘Drummond’, would be living in Harbord and teaching?

An investigation to determine this was launched… and resulted in a few reasons to suggest that it was in fact a different Drummond who just happened to live in the area and be a teacher:
- being 41 now, would mean he was 31-37 during the time we knew him at school, and between his balding scalp, and the remaining whispers of hair being reasonably grey, there was a strong claim for him being far older than these news articles would imply
- the teacher referenced in the article taught English, whereas our Drummond was a Science teacher and seemed quite content with staying within that discipline
- Cromer High students have confirmed the presence of a Mr Drummond teaching English there during the same time as a Mr Drummond was teaching Science at Manly High school.

Yep, that about seals it. Different Drummond…

During the investigation however, certain other interesting facts surfaced:
- there was more than one member of the Cromer High staff whom could share some resemblance to Manly Drummond
- there is no Drummond listed in the Manly staff anymore, but there is still one at Cromer.
- Manly Drummond was a teacher who chose not to undertake any other co-curricular activities within the school
- the name Robert Drummond as the teacher of a NSW school has risen before - a different age, a different school and different scandal.

It’s interesting in a way; news and current affairs often seem a little detached; everything happens everywhere else, and even when its local, e.g. the Manly Daily, there is still a certain sense of disenchantment. However, upon seeing a name that was immediately recognisable, and fitting together with so many other local details, it suddenly brought the news right close to home, and for a brief moment, everything seems to be in your own world.

This doesn’t in any way lessen the fact that someone still committed this crime; but it is of some relief to me at least that it was not a teacher that I went to school with, and who taught classes that I sat in. Hopefully whatever punishment is doled out scares off other people who behave like that.

You have to wonder what the world is coming to when it seems anyone or anything, can get its paws on a credit card.

I wonder what the credit rating would be like on one of those giant trees…

After much poking, prodding, bugging and otherwise incessant badgering from numerous people to go see Casino Royale, I finally did it, and saw it without thinking about all the things the media have been saying about it for ages.

Overall, I have to say I am impressed.

I am one of the many who was getting a little tired of the over-slicked and over-gadgetised Bond of recent years, which had become an exercise in sheer technological indulgence for the people behind it. We’ve seen everything from disappearing cars and X-ray glass to the most unrealistic of them all, a jetpack! It was honestly getting a bit much. I don’t think Bond was ever meant to get suave — a trend which I guess began with Roger Moore. The classics with Sean Connery were smooth at times, but also a bit brutish in some respects.

Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Bond is indeed a throwback to those times, with his character being placed in his novitiate as far as ‘00′ status is concerned, and thus, is fully qualified with being ‘rough around the edges’:

James Bond: Vodka-martini.
Bartender: Shaken or stirred?
James Bond: Does it look like I give a damn?

Watching this younger, brash Bond, was reminiscent of watching Sean Connery on old Friday night Channel 10 Bond reruns. A British gentleman who knew what he wanted and how to get it.

I found most of the commentary on Craig to be quite interesting — reviewers “were forced to eat their words over doubts about Daniel Craig’s ability to play agent 007“. Many fans however, yelled loudly against him — and why? He is blonde and blue eyes… yes, I am dead serious. Of course, that didn’t stop him somehow being voted World’s Sexiest Man, which I heartily disagree with.. it definitely should have Johnny on top!

The part of the film I find the most curious surrounds the concept of time. This is apparently the first Bond film (in terms of his career), since it deals with his promotion to ‘00′ status, yet, they are quite happy to note that it is indeed the year 2006, and things like SMS are freely available. If we consider there to be no timeline of Bond outside of a start and then a middle, then this makes sense — except that M is still a woman (no longer grey though), as she is in the last few movies, but not in any prior. A bit of a muddled mess!

All in all though, it has done well at the box office, becoming the highest ever earning Bond film of all time, and I would recommend those unsure about the movie to go ahead and check it out!