Thursday, September 27, 2012

A visit from the grey nomads

The grey nomads – retirees who travel the country in caravans like elderly, motorised gypsies – in this instance are, of course, my parents; my mother and stepfather to be precise. But when they aren't driving around dragging a tin box on wheels around behind them, they live near Childers in Queensland, so – given that I live in Adelaide – I don't get to see them very often otherwise. But the very idea of doing what they're doing is so utterly horrifying to me – I literally cringe at the very thought of hooking a caravan up to a car and driving long distances.

And it's prompted me to think about why that is, which I've realised comes down to three things.

Monday, September 17, 2012

2012 ATG Curtain Call Awards

Sunday, the morning after: I'm in a good mood. I may be hungover and tired from having had slightly less than four hours' sleep, but that does not diminish how happy I am about how last night's ATG Curtain Call Awards dinner went.

This wasn't necessarily a given – but not because of the night itself, but instead because of my occasionally problematic social anxiety issues; last year these turned what should have been a good night into an unpleasant one that I've all-but blocked out any memory of - I didn't even write about it afterward.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The week that was #29

This week's post covers a tv show about cricket, a musical comedy gig, a recent Stephen King novel about time travel, and one of the best films of the year.

Howzat! Kerry Packer's War

[For the non-Australians/Australians who don't know the story, this was a tv mini-series about a man named Kerry Packer, who was an Australian businessman whose primary interest was in broadcasting and publishing; in the late seventies he wanted the television rights for cricket and was refused. He found out many of the players were dissatisfied with the poor wages they were paid (relative to the money the organisations were making) and together they attempted to stage their own cricket competition. As you can imagine, it was not well-received by the very traditional cricket boards around the world, and it went to the courts.]

I started watching cricket in the early 80s, by which time all the events covered in the mini-series had taken place, so most of what I knew about the formation of World Series Cricket came from some televised interviews with Ian Chappell – mostly that the players were extremely poorly treated by the cricket boards, who were making large amounts of money but refusing to play the players what they were worth.