Things i’ve grown to dislike…

Brian Goorjian is the Boomers coach (Aussie basketball team) and the Sydney Kings coach. After Sydney last night playing in front of only 3500 fans despite the fixture being a sudden-death quarter final, Goorjian has come out to say that Sydney doesn’t care about the Kings.

I’d like to point out that in general, most people only take a passing interest in Basketball, including myself. Admittedly I got caught up in the basketball boom of the 80s and I quite enjoy shooting hoops myself. HOWEVER I turned on the Wildcats match on foxtel by accident as I didnt even realise they were on. I watched it for about 2 minutes before changing the channel. Yeah I realised it was a final but I wasn’t going to sit through 2 hours of coverage just to get to the interesting bit of the game which is usually the last quarter.

I don’t even watch NBA, so it’s not a question of quality, it’s the nature of the game. AFL fans should pay attention to this, constant scoring ISN’T good for a game. Seeing someone hit a three pointer only for the other team to instantly go down the court and score a three renders what was once a difficult task quite simple and devalues making a basket.

In Football, you don’t know when a team is going to score so you stay watching. In AFL whilst they score alot more, a 3 or 4 goal lead is sometimes impossible to overcom HOWEVER at least there is a huge requirement for build up play leading to a goal. In basketball, one guy can dribble down the court and shoot a three and score.

The once popular wildcats now only fill out a 2000-3000 seat stadium and a sad indictment on the popularity of Basketball is that the only time I wanted to go to a game this season was when there was a legends game as a curtain raiser to a wildcats game.

Alot of the media seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon of writing off our World Cup chances. This, only a month or so after we were lauded for smashing England in the Ashes.

Whats changed since then? We’ve lost Martyn, Warne and McGrath has announced his retirement. But that was no change to our one day attack, apart from that, Symonds has been injured and Lee limped out of training with an Injury. We’ve lost to England in the finals of our one day series after dominating the qualifiers, dropped the number 1 one day cricket position to South Africa who have pantsed Pakistan and we’ve lost the Hadlee-Lillee series to New Zealand.

Should it really be a case of red alert or is everyone just over reacting.

Personally I think that there is nothing we can really do other than ride this out. I don’t think we are any less talented a side than when we beat England in the Ashes. Martyn and Warne don’t play in the one day side, McGrath is still playing and Lee was always expensive. Our best bowler in our previous one day series in South Africa was Stuart Clark and we didn’t have Mcgrath then either. Sure there has been a change over of bowlers recently as we try and find a new lineup but still.

Firstly I think our ashes campaign took alot out of the team. It was always going to be hard to follow up a full summer of trying to smash the poms and qualify for the finals. I don’t think we’ve ever had such a demanding line up of events before. We relaxed after qualifying and thats the most dangerous thing when you’ve kept up the intensity for such a long time. I coach football and I know that once you step down in intensity after long periods it’s hard to pick it back up and sometimes you have to work harder and other times its impossible without burning out. Regardless of our skill I think we will have to wait and hope that they can pick it up their play, they need a rest but aren’t going to get it so hopefully someone can pull out something special.

Secondly we’ve seen Australia play on many a batting wicket in recent weeks. The Australian grounds have been rubbish for bowling this season, they’ve over compensated for many matches that have finished prematurely due to our dominating performances and decided to at least give other teams a chance with batting wickets. Our problem is that whilst our bowlers are good at getting wickets on a bowling wicket, we’ve always been poor on batting wickets. Very few of our bowlers know how to bowl to contain a team (McGrath and Clark aside), in fact I would suggset that we have never been of the attitude that we should contain. We’ve always been of the atitude that we should destroy other teams, which is fair enough but we don’t usually play on flat batting wickets. Having said that, I think the wickets in the West Indies will suit us more than most other teams.

Finally to say our bowlers let the side down in this last loss to NZ as some articles suggest, is ridiculous. We took more wickets than New Zealand did, we just didn’t contain them enough.

I’m gonna call the DVD Format war early!

I pronounce Blu-Ray as the winner. Reports are already coming out that it is outselling HD DVD.

Sony Pictures, Columbia, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Disney and Lions gate are signed up to Blu-Ray

only Universal and Weinstein are with HD DVD

and

Paramount and Warner support both.

The X-Box 360 only comes with the player as an add-on, no one buys add-ons.

THe Playstation 3 comes with it standard.

There are no HD DVD players available in Australia except in Toshiba laptops (Toshiba developed the HD DVD).

Georgie Parker is to star in another Aussie Drama set in the Blue Mountains.

ENOUGH ALREADY, Aussie dramas are bad enough as it is, but ones set in the country just shit me off. Are we city folk somehow supposed to be in awe of the country are relate to country people as being the epitome of all that is aussie.

Remember that movie Danny Deckchair, if you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. It had a big budget for an Aussie movie, famous actors in Miranda Otto (Lord of the Rings) and Rhys Ifans (Twin Town, Notting Hill, The Replacements) and yet they had a stupid plot that ended up with him being out in the country for the whole movie. It sucked!

Make more inner city movies and tv shows.

Some Qantas flight attendant was sacked for allegedly having sex with Ralph Feinnes (which she denies) in a plane toilet during a flight and now she is going to sell her story for $400,000.

WHAT STORY IS THERE TO TELL?

The sad thing is that people are going to tune into the news to listen to this! And what for? To hear her deny it? What sort of story is that, it’s a waste of half an hour of your life. Even if she did, who cares, good on her! He’s ONLY a celebrity, that doesn’t make him any better a person than anyone else.

Somehow an industry has grown up around celebrities and celebrity gossip. I suspect that people who have nothing better to do with their lives want to live their lives vicariously through famous people and also want to see those famous people they don’t like, fail. Which is amusing to say the least because their judgements on who they like and don’t like is based on what they read in the papers and see on tv. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that these people are no different to you and me, except they have alot more money probably.

I feel sorry for the people of Zimbabwe, they have an economic moron as the leader of their country.

I’m not going to comment about Mugabe’s human rights violations and whether they did or did not happen.

But from a simple leadership point of view, when you lead a country there are a few simple rules that i’m going to break down to the most basic level I can.

- You need to make stuff. The more stuff your country makes, the more you can sell and the more money the employees, land owners and the government can make. Take Australia for example, we grow heaps of stuff, and we dig heaps of stuff under the ground THEN we sell it to people. We are a bit silly in some respects in that we let overseas companies dig metals out of the ground, refine it and sell it back to us at a higher price BUT it’s better than nothing.

- Fighting for the rights of your people is cool but not when it grinds the country to a stop. It’s true the black people got a shitty deal with the white people came to Zimbabwe and ended up owning all the farms BUT you’ve now kicked off all the white famers and there is no one to run your farms. So now you can’t make stuff.

- Now when your not making stuff and you have bills to pay, the last thing you want to do is print more money. It’s been done before and it doesnt work. So in your case, printing 21 million Zimbabwe dollars to pay the International MOnetary Fund is a BAD idea because it then becomes worth nothing.

And hence Zimbabwe now has a record 1594% inflation

I’m a huge supporter of schemes that hope to save the environment or at least make a difference to the environment.

I’m also skeptical about schemes that I think are a waste of time because they are either aimed at making somoene a whole lot of money on the back of an environmentally friendly product or because society’s reality is that it just won’t happen mainly because it is not commercially viable.

I always point to Enjo, the environmentally friendly cleaning glove/cloth thingo. It was questionable at best, what advantages that brought to the environment, sure, they say they only sell environmentally friendly products but in reality how many people regularly buy their products and is it enough to save the world… definitely not.

Now there is this article on the Sydney Morning Herald about the IT industry having to start looking at stopping such high consumption of power which we all know is created by burning coal which is bad.

MY issue with this article is that it is misguided and tries to simplify a complex situation into a black and white one. And it also throws in a plug for VMWare’s virtualisation software.

It’s a given that most offices have many computers, usually one per person and that these consume alot of power. However unless you are a big organisation, most companies buy what ever system they can afford without regard for low power processors. Many don’t even know much about computers and buy what is sold to them. And that is the reality of the situation, it’s driven by money, suppliers want you to pay more and you want to pay less, in the end it’s unlikely that small to medium companies are going to end up with an environmentally friendly system.

Furthermore to expect them to is ridiculous. Many still use computers and servers that they have been using for many years. Ones that are no doubt very inefficient in their power use or require alot of cooling and hence adding to the environmental problem.

Sure you can maybe push larger organisations to do so but in the end is it going to make that much difference. Each company may reduce energy consumption per person but with ever expanding companies and ever increasing numbers of companies IS THIS REALLY GOING TO HAVE AN EFFECT.

In reality, like most environmental solutions, their needs to be a government led push either by law or by a reward system. Make people do it or make them want to do it. I’ve always thought that this is where the government is very slow to react, the general public are lazy when it comes to being environmentally friendly, not enough people care if something is made from recycled goods or if its biodegradable. I don’t think the onus should be on the public (because you cannot force nor can you regulate so many people), the onus should be on the manufacturers and the government should be enforcing it because stopping climate change is in the peoples interest.

And virtualisation is not a solution to cutting power consumption. You still need a computer to connect to the server that host the virtual machine and the cooling for the server room and then you have to pay for the virtual machine software which the report conveniently pointed out, can be purchased from VMware.

THe movie Goal was released a couple of years ago and the sequel Goal 2 is to be released soon with the trailer available online right now [view the trailer].

It’s the story of a young illegal mexican immigrant in the US who is a gifted footballer but his dad doesn’t want him to play professionally when a scout tries to take him to Newcastle United for a trial. Obviously he does well and makes it in the end.

It’s a underdog story in the vein of many other underdog movies, Mighty Ducks, Bad News Bears (the original movies). Though in this case as it’s focused on the one player it’s more apt to compare it to Rocky or, if you’ve seen it “When Saturday Comes” which stars Sean Bean as a footballer who makes it to the big stage and it’s infinitely more in depth than the glamourous marketing brand driven, Goal.

Non content on stopping at 1 movie, he has of course made it to the Premier League which is regarded as the most watched and entertaining league if not the most skillful league in the world, the producers are to make 2 more, the first one of which is titled “Goal 2″… HOW INSPIRING. Could they not have come up with something better than that?

Goal - A new hope
Goal - Santiago Strikes Back
Goal Evolution
Goal Goal Goal
Goal - The Empire Stikes from long distance and scores?

Just a suggestion.

Nonetheless, he now leaves Newcastle to play for Real Madrid. Completely understandable in this story line, though apparently the producers are huge Liverpool fans and when they offered the part of Santiago’s first team to Liverpool FC they turned it down because they didn’t want to be seen as a club whose players leave for another team. Newcastle obviously have no shame in that respect.

The question through all of this is very simple, the movie should have stopped after half an hour. He is a mexican illegal immigrant into the US. He has never played for either Mexico or the US. In the football leagues in Europe a player has to get a work permit (especially in England) to play football if you or your parents were not born in Europe.

To get a work permit is quite hard as you have to prove you have played 75% of your countries international games. Hence alot of players don’t get to play in England.

How then did Santiago manage to walk into the Newcastle first team?

There are other questions of course. He grew up in America not Mexico and no doubt learnt his football in America. I doubt very much that his skills would be good enough to play Premier League and even if they were, he was playing casual kick around at a park in LA. It would take months or years of training to get him up to Premier League pace.

I only head about new rave this weekend. Apparently its a fusion of rock and electronic (hasn’t this been around for years, Prodigy, Regurgitator) etc.

Apparently the Presets are New Rave as are a band called the Klaxons.

Interviewed on JJJ recently, they said they wanted to make an album full of silly pop songs.

They did a cover of one of my favourite house tunes Perfecto feat. Grace - “Not Over Yet”. It SUCKS!!

I hate new rave!

This article touches on the concept of fining people for using an iPod or phone whilst crossing the road.

This is a stupid proposition.

Warnings on ipods, fuck that, if you’re too stupid to concentrate on the road instead of your ipod, then you deserve to get hit. Survival of the fittest.