Forget Chris Gayle – let's talk about Meg Lanning
Like Chris Gayle, Meg Lanning is a cricket superstar who can win a game single-handedly. Like Gayle, she averages more than a run a ball in Twenty20 internationals, and regularly smashes bowlers all over the ground with the carefree panache of Shane Warne on Tinder.
Unlike Gayle, though, Lanning is not serially sleazy towards female journalists. And if her bedroom has a mirrored ceiling, she's not known for posting boastful photos of it on Instagram, a site upon which she has not chosen to nickname herself "UNIVERSE-BOSS".
Instead of focusing on herself for yet another selfie, she focuses on cricket. Last year, Lanning captained Australia to an Ashes victory, and was named the ICC's one-day cricketer of the year. This summer she's captaining the Melbourne Stars in the new Women's Big Bash League, and is one of the major reasons for its instant success, with four half-centuries in the six games so far.
Lanning produces runs as consistently as Tony Greig used to produce cricket memorabilia. She's an extraordinary leader, a world record holder and she's only 23. So if we were going to spend the week discussing a cricketer, wouldn't it have been an excellent idea to choose her instead of Chris Gayle?
Off-field behaviour isn't the only significant difference between Lanning and Gayle, though. No prizes for guessing which one of them gets paid to play full-time, and which one could afford to simply laugh off the $10,000 fine for his now-notorious conversation with Channel Ten's Mel McLaughlin.
It's not clear how much Gayle is earning for this stint down under, but in 2011 he turned down an offer of $250,000 from the Perth Scorchers. That's probably more than Meg Lanning has earned from cricket across her career to date.
Fortunately, things are changing. Lanning and the other brightest sparks among the Southern Stars received a significant salary increase last May, and the strong audience appeal of the WBBL, both on television and at the grounds, is likely to lead to significantly higher contracts still.
It should be no surprise that we're warming to the women's game given the stark contrast with men's cricket. I don't mean in terms of the play – sure, women's sixes might not be quite as massive, and the pace is less likely to cause severe injury, but the contest between bowlers' guile and batters' skill is no less engrossing.
No – the biggest contrast is the lack of behavioural issues. The WBBL promises equivalent excitement without the gauche egomania. What's not to like?
Not all women are paragons of sporting virtue, of course, as Marion Jones' steroid-fuelled athletics career amply demonstrated. But women's team sports still seem to be played primarily for love. That commodity often feels in precious little supply amongst sportsmen these days.
Professionalism was undeniably good for men's sport to begin with, opening it up across the class divide, but in many sports, the deluge of money from television deals has created a generation of obnoxious, entitled multimillionaires. We seem to be paying our male sports stars to disappoint us, and many of them are very happy to oblige, with a level of preening self-regard that Vladimir Putin would consider excessive.
Compared to the tedious cycle of disappointment, outrage, condemnation and limp apology that we see in men's professional sport, women's sport feels almost zen-like in its focus on the fundamentals of the game itself.
What's more, Australia is winning in women's team competitions, and we all enjoy that. The Hockeyroos are always in contention, the Diamonds won the netball world cup last year and the Matildas went further at the FIFA (soccer) World Cup than any senior national team ever has before.
But money is tight here, too – the Matildas followed up their success with a protracted pay dispute with the game's governing body, and their pay is still extremely modest compared to the men whose international accomplishments they have now surpassed.
Fortunately, this gulf in attention and compensation does not exist in all sports. When it comes to the Olympics, interest and coverage levels are broadly equivalent, and the same goes for tennis after many decades of campaigning from pioneering female players like Martina Navratilova.
Surely it's no coincidence that in tennis and the Olympics, the men and women compete simultaneously? This summer, scheduling WBBL matches as double headers with the men's games has been invaluable for its promotion, and the same approach should probably be adopted elsewhere.
At the last two FIFA World Cups, we got three chances to wake up early and cheers for the Socceroos, and it felt like we were out of things too early. Wouldn't it be great if we could also barrack for the Matildas during the world's largest sporting event? While their heroics last year received significant coverage, I've no doubt that running the two competitions simultaneously would lead to far more.
The gender pay gap is broad enough to make all of us blush, baby. Our excellent female athletes deserve parity, both because of their accomplishments on the field and their lack of nauseating misbehaviour off it. And it's a problem we can fix from our couches when we choose what to watch.
Of course there's a chance that a huge outpouring of money into women's cricket would create fresh egomaniacs – something along the lines of a Christina Gaylina. It's a risk worth taking.
We should look gift cards in the mouth
Dick Smith Electronics, that venerable merchant of gadgetry and geekery, entered receivership this week. It's terrible news for the staff and shareholders, but will presumably make no difference whatsoever to the private equity firm that made a motza out of flipping the business.
That's 21st century capitalism, folks!
The biggest impact for most Australians, though, will be for anyone who scored a DSE gift card for Christmas, or has put down some cash against a lay-by. Whether or not they'll be honoured is unclear -the administrator Ferrier Hodgson says not, but they may not have the last word on it, given various consumer-protection regimes. (Watch this space was the advice when I spoke to NSW Fair Trading about this on the radio this morning.)
Regardless of what happens with the Dick Smith situation, though, it's a reminder of something that's worth bearing in mind whenever Christmas or birthdays come around: gift cards are a terrible idea.
At the risk of seeming like a huge ingrate to anybody who's ever bought me one, the fact is that gift cards exist for one reason and one reason only: because some of us feel crass simply putting money in an envelope.
Gift cards offer a relatively elegantly packaged item that can be placed under the tree on Christmas morning, and handily, you generally don't even need to buy a separate card.
They do, though, prove that you cared enough about the person to go into a brick-and-mortar retailer and hand over your cash to an intermediary instead of handing the cash over directly.
They're convenient for us, and also for the recipients, who buy what they actually want instead of having to pretend we nailed it. They also allow a little control to be exercised - if you give somebody a bookshop gift card, they'll have a degree of difficulty blowing the money on lollies or booze.
Other than that, though, all the benefits would seem to lie with the retailer. They get the cash upfront for a guaranteed sale, as they're generally non-refundable. And often gift cards simply sit in our sock drawers unspent, which means the seller literally makes money for nothing.
Even when we do use them, there's just about always either a tiny remaining balance that we don't bother to spend, which ends up as pure profit to the retailer; otherwise, we can soak the remaining balance up by buying something that costs more, meaning they make extra money. It's a win-win.
What seems most outrageous about these notionally kind gifts, though, is the adoption of expiry dates. In effect, the shop gets to simply forget about its debt if we don't get around to collecting on it quickly enough. Just try that on any other category of debt and see how far that gets you. But no - for some reason, gift card sellers get to impose special, self-serving conditions which mean that at the end of the following year, they just get to keep the money. Merry Christmas, retailers!
This practice is indefensible. Thanks to inflation, a $50 gift card is almost always worth less by the time it's spent than it was when it was bought. And in the meantime, it's been earning interest for the retailer. Why on earth shouldn't they have to honour them for as long as humanly possible?
Given all this, I can certainly see why stores push gift cards so enthusiastically. But for consumers, they seem a dreadful option.
What can be done? At the very least, they should probably be renamed 'unsecured creditor cards', if the Dick Smith administrators' argument prevails. The terms and conditions should perhaps be made much more explicit, and consumer protection legislation may need to be beefed up.
One suggestion doing the rounds on Twitter today would see gift card payments kept in a trust fund so that they were protected from being counted as an asset for the retailer until they had been spent. That seems a reasonable approach, and is probably in line with what we expect when we give money for gift cards - that it'll be treated like cash by that retailer.
Some common conditions even specify that they'll be treated like cash in that they won't be replaced if lost, which surely means they should also be treated like cash in that the money can't magically disappear just because the person you got it from has financial difficulties.
But unless authorities step in and change the rules, or we stop buying gift cards in an effort to exert pressure on retailers, nothing will change.
The best solution may well be for us to stop kidding ourselves that gift cards are any more classy than putting cash in an envelope with a little note saying, "Thought you might want to buy yourself a video game."
Cash isn't the most thoughtful of gifts, I suppose, but any concerns about a perceived lack of effort can, I find, be quickly erased by the fact that you have a bunch of cash sitting in your hands.
Unlike Dick Smith, as we now know. So let the company's woes be a lesson to us all. There's a good chance that when you buy a gift card, it will end up being only a gift for the retailer.
This year of sequels does not bear repeating
The 2015 that Marty McFly visited in Back to the Future II was only partly like the year we've just lived through. We haven’t got flying cars or self-drying jackets, and let’s not say a word about hoverboards, especially to Russell Crowe.
That holographic shark that loomed at our hero to promote Jaws 19, however, was spot on. Because 2015 was truly the Year of the Sequel.
This year, it felt like most movie franchises with an admirable legacy jeopardised them with another instalment. The machine was as unrelenting as anything in Terminator Genisys, and also gave us a new Avengers, Fast and the Furious, Jurassic Park, Hunger Games, Mission Impossible, Bond and even Mad Max.
We reached Peak Sequel, though, with The Force Awakens. I’m unclear whether the title refers to George Lucas’ midichlorinated mumbo-jumbo or the slumbering merchandising colossus that recently produced Star Wars-branded fruit (not called ‘Bananakins’, sadly). But whichever it was, the Force is here to stay as we enter 2016.
Some of this year’s sequels were forgettable – I submit for the prosecution Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 – but having dutifully trudged along to most of the big sequels, I can affirm that the batting average would make at least the West Indies jealous.
In box office terms, though, this cavalcade of sequels has been spectacular. Jurassic World, Age of Ultron, Furious 7 and Minions already sit in the all-time top ten (without inflation adjustments), while The Force Awakens is on track to nab Avatar’s overall #1 spot.
The movie industry is in rude health, it seems, except creatively. Every one of these high-budget, low-risk blockbusters stopped more original, interesting films from gathering a wider audience. Multiplex screens and attention spans are finite, so anything below a household-name franchise gets choked out.
Even JJ Abrams isn't satisfied by sequels, it seems. He nearly turned down Lucasfilm because he feared being known only as “the sequel guy”, and has sworn off any more, unless perhaps Spaceballs II comes calling.
But you can’t entirely blame Hollywood for rehashing the same stories instead of taking a chance on new ones. When they do, they often get a disaster like the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending, a tuneless space opera which made The Phantom Menace look like Gungan With The Wind.
The fault is mostly ours, because we'd rather watch another Batman flick (Vs Superman is coming in 2016) than take a chance on a great local film like Predestination, which accumulated 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, and about $84 locally.
We'll even reward a terrible addition to a beloved series, which is why I watched Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.
This sequelmania is not limited to our screens. Once, deposed politicians would exit gracefully to boardrooms and embassies. Now they wait to be unleashed, wheezing ominously, upon the galaxy once more.
Kevin Rudd showed us that waiting for sweet revenge can bear fruit, at least temporarily. And hanging back until your rivals stumble is working as well for Malcolm Turnbull as it did for Steven Bradbury – and John Howard.
I presume Tony Abbott is sticking around because he's seen that, to use his evocative if confusing phrase, leaders have to be dead, buried and cremated before they're truly done.
In the US, Clinton II seems a forgone conclusion for the primaries and probably the Presidency, which seemed impossible when Hillary was shoved aside by a young senator from Illinois back in 2008.
On the Republican side, Bush III is in trouble, but Mr Trump Goes To Washington has proven a surprisingly successful sequel to The Apprentice. His appeal surely shows the enduring appeal of devils we know.
That country of 300 million people can't find fresh candidates who aren't billionaires or members of a political dynasty for the same reason as its movie studios keep pumping out sequels: risk aversion. The consumer satisfaction machines in Canberra and Hollywood are delivering what, through polls and ticket sales, we say we want.
Steve Jobs once said that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. The inflation-adjusted box office records have groundbreaking movies like Gone With The Wind, E.T. and the original Star Wars and Jaws up the top. There isn't a sequel until Return of the Jedi at 12.
But it’s easier to make Jaws 19 than Jaws 1, just as it’s easier to elect someone predictable than somebody from outside the system.
Whether voting or picking a movie, it seems we'd rather risk mild disappointment from the familiar than try a moon shot. All we really aspire to, it seems, is to walk onto the flight deck of the Millennium Falcon and say 'Chewie, we’re home'.
If that's all we seek, there are plenty of competent, uninspired people out there who'll give us sequels. And then a few years later, give them to us all over again.
I was a teenage thespian
Pick the odd one out: Nicole Kidman, Rose Byrne, Geoffrey Rush, Baz Lurhmann, Toni Collette and me.
Geoffrey Rush, obviously. The rest of us all spent our formative years studying acting at the Australian Theatre for Young People. And many other luminaries of the Australian stage have passed through ATYP's doors.
I began attending classes in early high school, accompanying a friend who was a little older than me and more serious about becoming an actor. But I had 'trod the boards' a little as a child, with an acclaimed walk-on role as a mesmerised animal in The Magic Flute and a bit part in The Skin Of Our Teeth for which I adopted a terrible American accent.
Both of these breakthrough performances occurred in the student hall of residence where my family spent a few years in London. During that period I also played Prince Charming on the primary school stage, largely because nobody else was willing to do it.
Encouraged by a series of pats on the head from grown-ups which I now realise were motivated by kindness rather than any genuine potential, I eagerly agreed to accompany my friend. Every weekend for several years, we caught the train in to ATYP HQ at 200 Cumberland Street, right next to the Cahill Expressway in Sydney's The Rocks.
I vividly remember the crappy space where ATYP was headquartered in the early 1990s - a disused office building with crumbling walls that had shed a thick layer of dust over every surface. It was condemned, and rightly so, but the owner eked out a few extra bucks by renting a few floors to an impoverished acting school before the wrecking ball came.
My parents were eager to encourage me, probably because I'd shifted from a co-ed primary school to a boys-only high school and they didn't want me to entirely lose what few social skills I had around girls. And indeed, throughout my early years of high school, acting class provided me with a series of fresh crushes around whom I could practice remaining awkward and silent. It was the one performance I really mastered.
The classes were great, though. Each week, we were challenged to try something different, and become somebody else. We worked on scripts and we improvised using Theatresports games like Space Jump, where we had to join a scene and improv something new, and Expert Double Figures, where two people had to provide the arms for another pair's characters, which was hilarious, if a little sweaty.
I remember one classmate turned every single exercise into an intense coming out drama - I hope the conversation with his parents went well when he was finally able to have it for real.
When I wasn't coughing up an asthmatic storm because of the concrete dust everywhere, I loved it. I signed up for their school holiday programmes, and took extra classes wherever I could. One term, I signed up for a class called Corporeal Mime - I still don't know what that is.
Another year, I joined a street theatre troupe which performed a show at such prestigious Sydney pedestrian malls as Hornsby, Chatswood and Darling Harbour.
Our show was called Episode #66, in a nod to a pulp tradition I didn't really understand then. The heroine was Cockroach Woman, and I played her dastardly nemesis, Griller Carlos. The climax was a knife throwing scene where I tied a hapless victim to a board and threw machetes at her - which, due to ingenious stage machinery, duly popped out from the board beside her until Cockroach Woman's heroic intervention, to the tune of her theme, 'La Cucaracha'.
Getting cast as the villain was a recurring feature of my time at ATYP. In my final year there, in Year 10, I signed up for a series of group-devised productions which were performed at the Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf Two space. We may not have been serious actors ourselves, but we were performing in the very same building as people who knew what they were doing! I couldn't have been more excited.
We split into groups and wrote a series of four plays over a few months. My recollection of the plots is sketchy, but as one of the few men involved in the productions, my role was unambiguous. In our play, Dark Clouds & Chameleons, I played a child-molesting father. In another, The Perfect Woman, I played a leering minor character in the tale of a woman who had gaffer tape over her mouth symbolising male oppression until the last scene of the play when she dramatically tore it off, free at last.
In short, we teenagers were discovering feminism, which meant that I meekly agreed to play a series of sexist villains.
Those plays led to the most exciting party of my teenage years, a party I still can't believe my parents let me attend, and in hindsight, they definitely shouldn't have. It took place in a groovy terrace on South Dowling St in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills, which was much edgier back then, and didn't have a single pub with craft beer on tap.
I'm certain I was the only person there who not only abstained from the ubiquitous ciggies and widely available harder substances, but didn't even drink so much as one light beer, let alone indulge in some of the fumbling behind closed doors that I was blissfully oblivious to at the time, but later heard out about from the gossip network.
This formative experience led me to develop a theory that was entirely vindicated at uni - that almost everyone involved in amateur theatre is doing it for the after-parties.
Many of my classmates were talented. Some went on to international fame, while others are stalwarts of the Sydney theatre scene nowadays.
I, by contrast, was rubbish. Not that I didn't keep trying. After six months of acting classes, I auditioned for my school's Globe Players, and was given a walk-on role in Sheridan's The Rivals. My job was to walk into the on-stage inn, and up the staircase. On opening night, I tripped halfway up, after which my improvising skills abandoned me.
In Year 11, I played my finest role - General Haig in Theatre Workshop's remarkable Oh What A Lovely War. Again, I was the villain, and my role involved walking around in military uniform, shouting in a plummy English accent as I dispatched innocents to their death. The reviews were faintly positive. I was ecstatic.
Except for a brief uni experience in a production of Kafka's The Trial that was as horrifyingly impenetrable as Joseph K's experience of arbitrary arrest (I played a stern, shouty judge), I never acted again.
But studying at ATYP as a teenager has given me a lifelong love of great acting, and a keen appreciation of exactly how far it is from my own abilities. That said, I live in hope that someday, somebody will need a cartoonish, overacting villain, and I'll get the chance to tread those hallowed boards again.
Strong with the force this sequel is, or something like that
Star Wars fans, fear not. Firstly because fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering, etc. And more importantly because JJ Abrams and his team have succeeded in augmenting the original trilogy where even George Lucas could not.
The Force Awakens offers more of the same to a degree that I found surprising. It takes many of the familiar elements of the original trilogy and mashes them up into a new narrative. There are desert and forest worlds, dodgy spaceports and gleaming starships, scary tentacled aliens and tense lightsabre duels, all fuelled by the interpersonal drama that's always been at the heart of the series.
Best of all, there are no convoluted plots about trade negotiations, and nary a Gungan in sight.
The déjà vu is intense - just about every scene feels reminiscent of something that's appeared before, like a series of narrative Force Ghosts. But Abrams breathes an abundance of new life - new hope, even - into the franchise with some engaging young performers alongside the familiar favourites.
It's hard to discuss a movie without revealing a little bit of the plot. It's especially hard when Disney has done such an excellent job of concealing the details of the decade's most anticipated film. Despite watching every trailer, I never had a firm handle on what the story was about, and there are surprises galore in store. Do try and stay away from spoilers.
For the purposes of this review, I'm going to assume you've watched a few clips, at least, but I won't give any more details than appear there.
We rejoin the galaxy far, far away a few decades after the Battle of Endor. There's still a Rebellion, and they're still fighting against stormtroopers, TIE fighters and a black-clad, mask-wearing enforcer who terrifies even his own colleagues with his dark side powers.
One of those stormtroopers, Finn, abandons his fellow shiny goons and joins forces with a young scavenger, Rey, who lives on a desert planet rather like one we've seen before. Accompanied by a new droid, BB-8 (presumably the offspring of R2-D2 and a soccer ball) they meet Han, Chewie and Leia on their travels, among others, and end up getting drawn into the wider conflict.
The new characters are compelling, which is perhaps the greatest achievement of The Force Awakens, seeing as they have to carry the story despite the procession of series legends. Daisy Ridley's prickly smarts and John Boyega's charisma work excellently, especially when they're onscreen together, and despite my fears yesterday, let's just say that Adam Driver gives us something brand new and rather extraordinary as the hooded, masked Kylo Ren.
The whole thing has been done with enormous love and devotion, together with some outstanding special effects. Clearly, we are in the hands of superfan filmmakers.
If anything, they might have been too reverent. Bold new ideas are thinner on the ground than fans of The Phantom Menace. It's JJ Abrams' other star-based franchise that's dedicated to boldly going where nobody has gone before, after all.
At the end of the film, I'd enjoyed myself immensely - there's plenty of action and drama. But I was left with many questions about the characters, and how the galaxy's new order stacked up. Some of these questions are cliffhangers for the next instalment, clearly, but some felt like the results of undue haste in the storytelling.
The Force Awakens is so good that I'm extremely confident in the new creative team. But despite the two hours of Episode VII, it's fair to say that they're only just getting started.
In the end though, the important thing is that the film delivers what we love about Star Wars in spades. Nobody will be unhappy, especially if they see it in 3D. The wonderful dogfights and several scenes where the action looms out at the audience make it well worth the extra bucks for crappy glasses, especially because you get to feel like the mysterious new Maz Kanata.
In what's destined to be one of the film's most famous lines, Han Solo boards his ship and says, "Chewie, we're home". It's hard not to feel the same way. JJ Abrams has navigated his way through an asteroid field no less perilous than anything the Millennium Falcon has had to face, and done so spectacularly. I just hope that now it is awake, the Force is working on a few answers for us.
Five things I want to see in 'The Force Awakens' - and five things I don't
I can't wait to see The Force Awakens, but like any fan, I'm hoping they'll bring back the good stuff and leave out the bad. Here's my take on what that might look like...
Five things I want to see
Amazing sets
The prequels are far worse than the original trilogy in just about every respect - but the settings are an exception. Whereas the first three instalments had to opt for generic sand, ice, swamp and forest environments found on Earth, the prequels gave us the computer-generated gorgeousness of Naboo and the awesome Manhattan-on-crack intensity of Coruscant. CGI has come a long way since the days when Natalie Portman was strangling her vowel sounds as Queen Amidala, and I can't wait to see what the designers have come up with for The Force Awakens.
Yoda
I know he didn't make it out of the original trilogy alive, but I don't care - besides Darth Vader, the little green grand master is the best character in the series. Even if we can't bring him back, surely another wise yet adorable cousin who puts verbs at the end of sentences Yoda has? Do or do not, JJ Abrams. As Star Trek: Into Darkness proves, there is no try.
Female Jedis
There are a few in the Clone Wars cartoon series, apparently. But come on, Lucasfilm - lady Jedis are long overdue in the live action series. The shots of Rey wielding a lightsabre in recent trailers are promising, but if the Jedi Order is being reconstructed, it's high time some gender balance came into the Force. And speaking of which, I hope the series doesn't get too fancy with its weapons - there is nothing like a lightsabre battle - or perhaps a light-sword battle, Kylo Ren?
Dark, or darkish, Luke
We don't yet know what's happened to Luke - he isn't in any of the posters. Has the ageing process done what even the Emperor's lightning bolts couldn't, and turned our boy to the dark side? Probably not, let's face it - I suspect he's taking a soggy leaf out of Yoda's swamp and becoming the new reclusive trainer.
But a bit of character complexity wouldn't go astray for a character who has always been not only kind of short for a stormtrooper, but kind of dorky for the main hero of the greatest sci-fi trilogy ever. I'm not entirely sure that Mark Hamill has the acting chops to pull off a more sophisticated version of Luke, but I hope we get to find out.
Scary villains
Darth Vader's is a tough helmet to fit into - especially now that it's all melted, as seen in the trailer - but in the Emperor, the original series unleashed an even scarier villain. The prequels struggled to match these baddies - Palpatine was just getting started on his nefarious schemes, while Darth Maul was a squib despite his awesome face paint and double lightsabre. And Count Dooku ... was called Count Dooku, c'mon. Even if he was played by the ever-reliable Christopher Lee.
I'm sceptical about just how terrifying Adam Driver's Kylo Ren will be - he seems like the kind of guy whose wrath would extend to sending you to only the second-best craft beer bar in Williamsburg - but we can hope there's some genuinely spine-chilling scenes in store.
And five things I don't want to see
Ethnic stereotypes
For some reason, George Lucas packed The Phantom Menace with enough racial stereotypes for a Bill Leak cartoon. Jar Jar Binks invoked all kinds of jaded, horrible African-American caricatures, while the mendacious merchants of the Trade Federation were a throwback to perceptions of Asians that felt more reminiscent of the Opium Wars than Star Wars. The greedy junk shop owner Watto has also been perceived as anti-Semitic.
While George Lucas denies that these characters have any racial connotations, and it's hard to imagine that it was done intentionally, it doesn't matter - these uncomfortable associations would have gone a long way towards ruining Episode I if the terrible dialogue and cringe-inducing acting hadn't done so already.
This would also mean no Jar Jar, obviously. Good.
Midichlorians
The Star Wars universe was already laden with Force mumbo-jumbo, but that was kind of OK when it meant Jedis could play mind tricks, do athletic leaps and wield those awesome lightsabres.
For some reason, though, the notion of Anakin's elevated midichlorian count really broke the tauntaun's back. What's more, it led to the deeply silly notion of Anakin's immaculate conception. From which we can gather, since Ani's mum Shmi Skywalker is a brunette, that the physical embodiment of the Force is whiny, has blonde hair and is partial to bowl cuts.
Fat-shaming
I know Jabba's not a good guy. Not only is he a crime lord whose foul tentacles extend far beyond Tatooine, he wanted Han Solo encased in carbonite even though Han was well on the way to assembling the credit needed to repay his debt. But please - did he have to be morbidly obese? Why couldn't it have been a coincidence that the Hutt shares his species with an all-you-can-eat pizza place?
Podracing
One of the many reasons Episode I is so terrible is because a great deal of screen time is given to those dumb races where Anakin wins the freedom we all know he was destined to win from the dastardly Watto (see above). We all know he succeeds, so there's no suspense, just crappy special effects as the pods zoom around that boring canyon.
I can only assume that the podracing was included to sell toys and videogames, but since it's an axiom that all Star Wars videogames stink like Chewie after a dip in a trash compactor, I do wish they hadn't bothered.
Another Death Star
The Death Star is a brilliant and truly sinister concept, but come on - they shouldn't have gone back to the same idea for the climax of Return of the Jedi. And while it was foolish of the initial designers to render the first one vulnerable to Luke's proton torpedoes, surely you'd get rid of any such vulnerabilities for #2? If I was Emperor Palpatine's insurer, I would have refused to pay out on the loss of the first Death Star until they came up with a design that was fully Rebel air raid-proof.
When the major difference between the endings of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi is a bunch of ewoks, it's clear they were out of ideas. So they really had better not resort to a third Death Star in any of the new sequels, or I swear I'll breed my very own Sarlaac and feed it JJ Abrams.
Lateral ways to convince punters to quit smoking
Forty bucks for a pack of ciggies? That will happen by 2020 if Bill Shorten gets his way and Labor's proposed increase to cigarette taxes is introduced.
Not everyone agrees with tobacco excise, with NSW's Senator David Leyonhjelm a prominent recent dissenter, but at both state and federal levels, governments of both persuasions have made cigarettes more expensive, covered the packets with horrifying images, and restricted the places where they could be smoked.
Nowadays, smokers huddle outdoors, away from doors and outdoor eating areas, and the long Aussie tradition of bumming cigarettes has become tantamount to asking for a gold coin donation.
But is this the only way of convincing punters to give up their precious ciggies? I've come up with a few more lateral options.
Built-in speakers
We've all seen those cards that you open and they play a little song. What about mandatory cigarette packets that, when opened, let out a loud, hacking cough?
Zinger ciggies
If Bill Shorten is determined to reduce smoking, he might also like to put his famous sense of humour into action. If every cigarette had a Shorten one-liner printed on it, smokers would feel nauseous every time they lit up. On second thought, though, this might require careful testing because if cigarettes had things like "Once upon a time, I thought denial was a river in Egypt" printed on them, some might be tempted to set them on fire immediately.
Scented cigarettes
Back when you used to be able to smoke in pubs, I'd regularly come home reeking of ciggies, even though I've never smoked. It seemed particularly unfair that smokers lose the ability to smell the scent that infests their own clothing.
But there is one aroma powerful enough for the impotent nostrils of smokers could detect - the scent of an ashtray at the end of the night. If all cigarettes were rolled in paper dipped in eau de ashtray, we would surely see a drop in smoking rates immediately.
Ciggie roulette
What if in every box of cigarettes, there was one unmarked filter that delivered a huge hit of wasabi? We all know that smoking has many risks - now there's a new one. Chili and ultrasour filters could also be available.
Point-of-sale boredom
We know that making cigarettes expensive works, but this disproportionately strikes the least wealthy among us. So why not waste the time of everyone wanting to buy cigarettes?
Whether it's watching a mandatory public health video, signing a lengthy contract and initialling every clause, or completing a multiple-choice health impact quiz like the one you have to do to get a learner driver's license, this would hugely reduce the desire to buy a fresh pack.
Freshly shocking packaging
Australia's world-leading plain packaging laws have been credited with reducing smoking rates via a series of disgusting images printed on cigarette boxes. But after a few years of this, I wonder whether they're losing their impact.
Instead of rotting teeth and diseased lungs, we might need a fresh disincentive. Surely nobody would want to buy cigarette packages with images of politicians on them?
Leave penalty
If you think about it, two five-minute smokos per day across the roughly 220 days we all work per year means 2,200 minutes per year which is 36 hours which is approximately one working week. So, what if non-smokers got an extra week of leave? Then again, this logic could also penalise people wasting time on Facebook or watching YouTube cat videos, in which case the modern economy would collapse completely.
Evil product placement
Watch any old movie, and you'll see that the cool dude and the exciting broad generally have cigarettes between their fingers. This kind of thing has been stamped out in subsequent years, but what if we went a step further, and insisted that the movie and TV industries follow in the footsteps of the X-Files, whose mysterious baddie was known only as the Smoking Man?
In the new season of Game of Thrones, the terrifying White Walkers could be depicted holding equally white cigarettes, while the Star Wars movies could be re-edited once again so that the Emperor's maniacal laugh was punctuated by hacking smoker's cough.
Smoking lounges
What if those horrible, depressing little rooms in some airports were everywhere, and became the onlyplace you were allowed to smoke?
Giant fans could extract the thick fug of smoke from the ceiling and then pump it afresh into the room so everyone could benefit from the secondary smoke into the bargain. These rooms could also be designated as the only places where cigarettes could be purchased - from machines, of course, because anyone made to work there would earn millions in the inevitable lawsuit.
Market cigarettes as healthy
I've no idea how you'd accomplish this, but surely the best way to encourage many Australians to give up ciggies would be to somehow convince chronic smokers that cigarettes are healthy. We know that regular exercise and a sensible diet prolongs life - we also know that the vast majority of us totally ignores this message. Fortunately, the tobacco industry has some old marketing material that would be just perfect.
'Spectre' review: A realistic Bond in a ridiculous world
Should you see Spectre? If you've enjoyed any of the Daniel Craig Bond films, then yes you should. It’s much better than Quantum of Solace, for one thing. But if you saw it, found it not entirely satisfying and are wondering why, then read on as I try to figure it out.
I never thought I’d think this thought, let alone dare to express it publicly, but here goes.
The problem with Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as James Bond is there simply isn’t enough of the spirit of Roger Moore.
Yes, Roger Moore. Yes, the guy who skipped blithely across a lake of crocodiles in Live And Let Die.
He does have one thing in common with Moore, mind you. Both Bonds share a commitment to impeccable tailoring even in the most implausible of circumstances. Near the climax of the remarkable opening Mexico City sequence, Craig somehow sprints down a crowded avenida without even unbuttoning his suit jacket. Later in the film he manages to pull off a range of rapid costume changes in a range of remote locations without so much as a suitcase, let alone a travel iron.
But Roger Moore knew that Bond was a little silly, and that his films were supposed to be fun. And I'm not sure Daniel Craig knows how to have fun, other than by belittling inane journalists.
If Casino Royale was an attempt to strip Bond back to Fleming's basics, to purge the series of invisible cars, Spectre wants to unite the new style with the old, more outlandish conventions.
On paper, it's a brilliant theory for how to top Skyfall, the most commercially successful entry in the series' long history. Since Craig's films are more or less a reboot – except keeping Judi Dench as M, however that makes sense – there's no reason they can't bring back Bond's most legendary adversaries.
To cap it off – and this is no spoiler, since it's clear in the trailer – they not only hired the brilliantly sinister Christoph Waltz as the baddie, but used him to unify the three entries in the series thus far.
You can imagine the studio executives giving the pitch a standing ovation. All the Craig realism we've come to love, combined with the classic elements of the genre – a ski chase, an Aston Martin full of gadgets, and an outlandish, remote lair in which Bond is strapped to a chair while ominous machinery draws ever closer to his manly British frame. (Plus a few more genre box-ticking elements that I won't mention to avoid spoiling the non-surprise. I particularly liked what they did with the martini order).
And yet, somehow Spectre is less than the sum of these parts. In a world where even Austin Powers’ pisstake of 007 is old hat, there are surely only two approaches to Bond. You can either shrink down the scale, as they did so successfully with Casino Royale, where nailbiting drama was generated in only one exotic location via a simple game of poker. Or you can go for the full-blown, Dr Evil-style supervillain-plots-to-destroy-the-world-with-his-moon-laser approach, and have some fun with it.
The producers of Furious 7 understood the joy of outlandish action scenarios when they dropped vehicles out of aeroplanes and drove a sports car through the upper levels of multiple skyscrapers. When The Rock shatters that plaster cast with a simple flex of his basketball-sized bicep, he’s no longer an even slightly plausible police officer. But it doesn't matter, because it's fun.
Moore’s Bond operated in this same cartoon world. Daniel Craig, though, is not wired for this kind of fun. He does intense, he does serious, and he does it brilliantly. But he's not the guy you send to the evil lair where the bad guy recites his entire plan before somehow failing to kill him. It's too ridiculous a scenario for an actor who brings enormous credibility but very little charisma or swagger.
Craig's Bond originally felt like a real agent, in our familiar world. But Spectre takes him somewhere else entirely. The film sits in the implausible quadrant in the action genre, with a dastardly evil army that has somehow remained hidden for decades, like Hydra in the Avengers movies. In this film, Q can hack into anything using just a laptop in the back of a moving car, like Simon Pegg in the Mission Impossible movies, and there's ‘smart blood’ that somehow magically transforms the body in a manner reminiscent of The Phantom Menace’s midichlorians.
What’s more, the plot feels derivative. The film's central premise, yet again, revolves around whether there's a place in this world for double-0 agents. And yet again, Bond proves that there is, as he must, because otherwise why are we watching him?
But in Preposterous Action Land, such questions should be redundant. Of course there has to be One Super Goodie, just as there's One Super Baddie. There's no need for the filmmakers to feel self-conscious about this, as they evidently do – they just need to have fun with it, because it's no longer our world that Bond's operating in.
I would have been perfectly happy watching Bond trying to stop a plausible conspiracy that's not too far removed from what we've seen happen in our world. The terrorist attack he thwarts in the first, incredible scene (the highlight of the entire film) could have been enough of a premise for a whole film.
But if you want to pit Bond against the SPECTRE we all remember, you need to do what Q is ordered to do in this film, and give the tricked-out Aston Martin to a different agent.
Ben Wishaw's 'Q', like Ralph Fiennes' 'M' and Naomie Harris' Moneypenny, is so terrific that I wish the supporting players had more to do in a less overblown situation, while Andrew Scott's hyperbureaucratic 'C' could have sufficed as a fine villain in a more realistic movie. But Waltz, while good, is better when Tarantino scripts his dialogue.
Next time, the producers need to go one of two ways. Either they should give Craig a more plausible, dramatic scenario, and let him play the flawed, vulnerable hero, as he does so well. Or they should bid him a grateful goodbye and hand his license to kill over to someone like Idris Elba with the charisma to play Bond as a superhero fit to take on a supervillain.
How arguing about next to nothing teaches student politicians everything
The world of student politics is usually trivial and frequently hilarious. And yet, unlike the petty deliberations of most tiny bodies composed largely of unjustifiably self-important people who seem addicted to grandstanding, what goes on is ultimately of great importance. Because student politics is, more often than not, what selects and shapes our future leaders.
Anybody who tuned into the shenanigans of the first meeting of the new Student Representative Council at the University of Sydney last Thursday night, or followed #repselect on Twitter, or read one of the media reports the following day, will have had the chance to see both the triviality and the hilarity up close.
As far as I can understand things from the media reports and from talking to some of the editors of the student newspaper Honi Soit, here's what happened. A number of Labor factions, which are generally aligned in name only, joined forces with the Liberal and other right-wing students to craft a deal that would exclude the previously powerful far-left students from positions of power on the council.
But then (cue sinister dun-dun-dunnnn sound) at the eleventh hour, the Labor Left faction reneged on the deal and joined forces with the "Grassroots" far left group/collective/junta/etc to instead exclude the Labor Right (ironically named Unity) and those further to the right of it. In other words, Labor Left left.
Consequently, some of the "victims" may have/allegedly/reportedly tried to stop the meeting that would vote in the office-holders for the year. They did it by trying to render the meeting without a quorum by walking out, which is known as pulling quorum.
Then someone unknown took the "pulling things" idea even further, and pulled out the fuses so there was no light.
Both campus security and the NSW Police Force were called in, for reasons they were unable to understand - but in short, one group was trying to stop the meeting from electing officeholders, and the other wanted to protect it so that it could.
I found the whole thing highly amusing, given the utter desperation of the tactics and the sheer unimportance of most of the positions being decided. I know this very well because I was once a student politician, and an especially ridiculous one at that.
I was elected to the same council in 1999 as the 37th of 37 representatives. I achieved this by running under the same ticket name as my friends and I were using to run to Honi Soit newspaper editors, on the basis that it would help us elude the strict spending caps applied to each category of candidates - a practice that endured many years afterwards.
At this same "reps-elect" meeting, I was elected Intercampus Liaison Officer, a role in which not only did I achieve zero in terms of furthering relationships between the unis many locations, but I couldn't even manage to organise any liaisons with anyone from another campus.
So it was with no little nostalgia that I sat late last Thursday night and watched the meeting on Periscope. Many of the speeches contained the usual dogma and charming lack of self-awareness, and they took forever. Just as they had in my day.
To be fair, many of my fellow student politicians were extremely dedicated, and devoted countless hours to working on policy and helping other students who had found themselves in trouble. The presidents of the Union and SRC that I knew worked really hard, and generally achieved much.
More broadly, of the campaigns that were run touched on matters of genuine importance, and made me extremely proud of our representatives.
And yet these were the minority of officeholders. Most of them, it seemed to me, were motivated purely by padding their CVs, or getting the numbers to build up credit within their own movements, or simply by the sheer joy of beating their ideological opponents. They won, and then did very little with the role they'd campaigned so hard to achieve.
Just like I did.
Student politics wasn't a game for the faint-hearted. The year before we won, I grouped together with some friends to try to run for the newspaper, and got utterly destroyed because we didn't have anyone political on our ticket, so we got very few endorsements. The job we'd do as editors seemed almost irrelevant - what mattered was being part of the machine.
And it's those machine skills that get honed in student politics. The ones who went furthest worked hardest, spending their nights chalking or postering or photocopying leaflets. They stayed up late making plans and cutting deals, and the ones who were best at it got jobs as staffers before they'd even graduated. Some even ran for office in grown-up elections, flying the party's banner in unwinnable seats to impress the elders.
When they graduated, many of these people became full-time staffers, or union reps, or think tank members, and before long got elected themselves. Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey were all student leaders in their days at Sydney Uni. So were Michael Kirby, Geoffrey Robertson, Richard Walsh and Belinda Neal, to name but a few.
The people who join the student politics machines in their uni days, though, are not necessarily the best and brightest. They generally aren't the most charismatic, or the most likely to be seen on stage at the academic awards nights. They're the ones who'll work their butts off, and do what they're told. And they're the ones who'll pull out the fuses if it means they'll get what they want.
Most abominably, some of them are the ones who'll distribute so-called "shit sheets", unauthorised, anonymous leaflets full of untraceable, unfair innuendo so close to polling day that they can't effectively be refuted. When this kind of thing happened in the seat of Lindsay in 2007, the outgoing member Jackie Kelly called it a "Chaser-style prank". It wasn't a prank, and the style was undergraduate politics, not humour.
The attributes that so many have criticised in our politics - the willingness to compromise principles to win, the lack of non-political work and life experience and the tendency to get personal to win at all costs - all begin in student politics. In many, if not most seats at general elections, the only serious contenders on either side are these kinds of people.
So while we can all snigger at the pathetic infighting over incredibly slim pickings that occurred last Thursday night, that kind of behaviour constitutes the first few clips in a training montage that ends in the triumph of elected office.
We may enjoy paying out student politicians, and I certainly did myself back then. But we end up paying them to govern us.
Dom Knight is the only person ever to write an 80,000 word novel about an election for the Sydney Uni SRC.
Why Australians aren't going to cut down on bacon
Stop the presses, folks. And in particular, stop devouring that bacon and egg roll.
No less a body than the World Health Organisation has come out to warn us that sausages, bacon, ham, salami and other processed meats aren't good for us. The very idea that we should be cutting down on this stuff! My jaw would have hit the floor if my belly hadn't helpfully gotten in the way.
Admittedly, the idea that these meats are definitively linked to bowel cancer is something of a revelation, while the prospect that red meat may not be doing us any favours either is a significant shock to a country that has long been told that a lamb roast was worth giving up dinner with Tom Cruise - a proposition that seems more convincing the more Alex Gibney documentaries I watch.
But fear not. Australian election day, in which we swap the minor inconvenience of voting for the chance to devour a sausage lovingly wrapped in supermarket-brand white bread by an apron-wearing dad at the local school, is safe.
Because while the boffins may have proven that processed meats increase our risk of bowel cancer, it remains likely that anybody who regularly consumes bacon and sausages will succumb to heart disease long before a tumour has the chance to form in their colon.
It was no surprise to see Barnaby Joyce rushing out of the gate to condemn the WHO's advice as condemning Australians to living in caves.
"I don't think that we should get too excited that if you have a sausage you're going to die of bowel cancer because you're not," he said, which was highly reassuring unless you're the kind of person who tends to listen to the considered opinion of medical experts.
The only thing that might have prompted a more instantaneous response from the Agriculture Minister is if a Hollywood star tried to bring unauthorised dogs into the country. Apparently spoiled canines represent a clear and present danger to our biosecurity, whereas foodstuffs that have been proven to cause cancer are an inviolable part of our way of life.
I'm not sure, though, how the Minister would react to a Hollywood star who wanted to import dogmeat sausages.
What's more, if the World Health Organisation feels that a return to cave-dwelling would make for a healthier lifestyle, I'd be eager to hear about it, and presumably so would the residents of Coober Pedy.
Minister Joyce's reaction, though, will probably mirror that of most Australians. We know we aren't really meant to eat that stuff on a regular basis. The health-conscious among us will probably move from eating processed meats sometimes to eating them occasionally. I can't imagine Christmas lunch without ham, but sure - when I go to a sandwich counter, I'll probably go for chicken instead, or smoked salmon, or even - shock horror, a vegetarian option.
But our smallgoods tycoons can sleep comfortably in their beds before getting up for another hard day of whatever they do to make sausages, which, I am very clear, I absolutely do not want to know.
We Australians do not tend to choose healthy options, even when we know perfectly well what they are. We are most likely to be killed by preventable conditions, to the perpetual despair of public health authorities. Last year, the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners had this to say:
Many of the leading causes of death in Australians could have been impacted by implementing simple lifestyle changes, such as quitting smoking, reducing alcohol intake and maintaining a healthy weight.
Bet you didn't get through it without yawning, am I right?!
Compared to losing weight, cutting down on booze and generally not eating unhealthy crap, the impact of cured meats is likely to be fairly minimal. As Cancer Research UK have pointed out in an infographic that has been doing the rounds today (along with a detailed summary of the results), everyone giving up smoking would have a far greater public health impact than everyone giving up cured meat and processed meats, simply because bowel cancer is far less prevalent than lung cancer.
In other words, these meats increase the risk of something that isn't hugely risky to begin with, making up (in the UK, at least) 3 per cent of all cancers, whereas smoking-related lung cancer is 19 per cent.
The kind of people who pay attention to public health messages probably don't eat much processed meat already, with the possible exception of lean ham, or red meat for that matter. These people will probably cut down on what little they consume.
The rest of us will go on, in blissful oblivion, until some preventable lifestyle disease knocks us over. Because whether consciously or otherwise, most of us have decided that we'd rather have a shorter life without worrying about staying healthy. Our approach seems to be Life, Be In It, But For A Relatively Brief Period Of Time.
No doubt processed and red meats will remain part of this picture for most of us, no matter what those exasperated public health experts tell us. Because if we wanted to listen, there are far more impactful lifestyle changes we could be making than cutting down on the odd rasher of bacon at breakfast time.
How to survive the HSC
Today is the first day of the HSC, those three letters calculated to terrify Year 11 and 12 students and which I still can't hear without experiencing flashbacks.
So, to all HSC and other Year 12 students, please allow me to offer you my sincerest condolenceswish you the very best of luck!
Talk to anyone who's slogged through and obtained the NSW qualification, or the VCE or WACE or anything like it, and they'll tell you that end-of-school exams are a uniquely cruel prank to play on 17-year-olds, especially when uni is never anything like as harrowing as the hoops you have to jump through to get there.
On the bright side, today is the first day of a few weeks of inconvenience you have to endure before getting on with the rest of your life, whatever that may entail. Which is hugely exciting.
Here are a few things that might help you transition from the ranks of those dreading their end-of-school exams to those delighted that they'll never have to do them again.
Sleep
You'll be tempted to stay up all night cramming, but that really isn't a smart idea. You've been studying all year. You've done the trials. You almost certainly know everything you need to know already, and the honest truth is that exhaustion will probably hurt your performance more than stuffing your brain full of last-minute facts will benefit it. Worst of all, you might end up confusing yourself in your exhaustion.
Get a good pen
Boringly practical, I know - but if you've got a crappy biro, you'll write less and your hand will cramp. Get one of those nifty rollerball pens where the ink flows freely without needing any pressure from your hand. I got ridiculous and bought a fountain pen because I thought it would let me write the most, but there's no need to get that stupid unless you get a kick out of the idea. Oh, and get some spares, too.
Plan your essay answers
As a humanities guy, my HSC experience was full of 40 minute essays. Despite the temptation to start writing immediately, things always went better when I took a minute or two to work out some kind of logical structure.
Unfortunately HSC markers still don't recognise listicles like this one, so you will need to construct some kind of an argument. Being 'right' or 'wrong' isn't really a possibility - it's all about trying to write convincingly.
Find a way to take your mind off it
In Year 12, I convinced myself that what I should do right before any exam was play Tetris on my monochrome Nintendo Game Boy, because it's impossible to freak out about how maybe you've forgotten certain key characteristics of flowering plants when there are different-shaped blocks to stack to the sound of a mesmeric Russian folksong.
These days you probably have far more sophisticated games on your phone, but the point is the same - we benefit from taking our minds out of a stressful situation. Whether it's having a bath, lying in the sun or going for a swim, having some brain downtime will help.
Know that courses with higher entry requirements aren't necessarily better
At school, I had my heart set on a certain course because it was supposed to be prestigious, and I thought that if I got into it, everyone would think I was smart. I'd never even thought of that particular career before my ego and my insecurity combined to tell me that I should do it.
I got into the course, and got my qualification, but I've never been sure that it was a good decision - I've never really used it, and all it ended up giving me were a few more years at uni. In other words, I made a dumb decision because I wanted people to think I was smart. Better to be honest about what you'd really enjoy doing, and be good at.
Treat yourself
I'm not saying go out and rampage through every outlet at your nearest food court, but this is not the time to be imposing a rigorous new diet. I wouldn't have made it through the HSC without regular splurges on chocolate and ice cream, but your rewards program can work in other ways, too - two hours of study might buy one more episode of an entertaining TV show, or whatever works.
Don't worry - there are lots of pathways to where you want to go
These days, there are lots of way to get into just about any field. Most programs are available at graduate level, for instance, and Melbourne Uni is pioneering a model where everybody does generalist degrees when they first leave school. What this means is that while a mark that exceeds your target will let you get into a certain course, not getting in this time around won't permanently exclude you. It's tempting to feel that school exams are an all-or-nothing scenario, but they really aren't.
Or you might not know what you want to do, which seems scary but is really quite liberating - it's OK to take a few years to find out.
Drink cups of tea
Coffee before an exam, perhaps, but I've always tended to drink a lake's worth of herbal tea when I had to do a lot of studying or writing. Somehow, it's very soothing. I particularly recommend peppermint or rooibos.
Find out about your heroes, and how they did at school
It's hard to avoid the impression that your Year 12 mark matters immensely. Looking at the biography of just about anybody who you admire will show you that in fact, school results are a very minor thing in the context of most people's lives. In terms of my heroes, very few hilarious comedians, great writers or excellent musicians did brilliantly at school, and even if they did, their marks didn't particularly help them to become who they ended up being.
Get ready never to talk about your mark again
After the second week of uni, it becomes socially unacceptable to mention any high school accomplishment, and especially your mark - unless you do really well and the newspaper rings up 20 years later, I guess. You might put it on your first graduate job application, but you probably won't ever again after that. A few decades on, even you will struggle to remember the number that right now means everything.
Good luck, and I hope you get the mark you want - but if it doesn't work out that way, you'll almost certainly still be absolutely fine. You may even be considerably better off if you avoid a course you don't really want to do.
Regardless, in a few week's time, you'll never have to wear a school uniform again, and that fact alone makes it well worth saying - congratulations!
Ten things that happened at my wedding in India
Last month, I got married.
Regular readers might wonder how on earth I went from every second column whinging about my dire personal life to blissful matrimony - the answer is 2.5 excellent years with a woman named Divya, whose family hails from Chennai, formerly known as Madras, which is the capital of Tamil Nadu state and the sixth-largest city in India.
One day late last year, we decided to get married. And given the choice between a three-day traditional ceremony in India and a relatively brief event with a celebrant here, the choice was obvious.
(Actually, we chose both, the latter being necessary to make it legal.)
This meant I had a lot to learn, seeing as both sides of my family were predominantly raised Anglican. Here are some of the things that happened when I got to - well, not walk down the aisle - walk around a sacred fire, in fact.
1) It goes for three days
I've heard that some varieties of Hindu weddings have events stretching across a whole month, but our wedding lasted for three days. It began with a mehndi, or henna ceremony - a party at the hotel where many of us were staying, at which the female guests got their hands painted with henna.
Then, the following evening, there was an engagement ceremony or nichayathartham, at which I promised to return for a marriage ceremony the following morning. Then, at 7am - yes, 7am - the following morning, we began the ceremony in earnest. The various ceremonies took until lunchtime and were then followed by a formal reception dinner back at the hotel.
2) It was vegetarian - and dry
It was much longer than a typical Australian wedding, of course, but there were two other major differences that our overseas guests had to adjust to. Firstly, all the food was vegetarian, as are my wife's family, and secondly, there was no alcohol.
And, despite being advised that it was going to require three days of not drinking, quite a few brave Australians volunteered to attend.
One of the major lessons for me was that there's incredible variety within the Hindu religion, which has no overarching hierarchical structure - there are no archbishops, let alone Popes. For instance, I was told that in the neighbouring state, Kerala, traditional Hindu weddings can often take a matter of just a few minutes.
3) Hands and feet were painted with henna
The mehndi is traditionally a North Indian ceremony, but it seems to have been adopted elsewhere, probably because it's really fun. Divya's family had already had a ceremony at their home the evening before, meaning not only that she looked spectacular with ornate decorations up to her elbows and knees (within which somewhere the letters of my name were concealed!), but that she was free to welcome our guests at the first event.
Two canopies were set up inside a function room and there were two women at each station, meaning that their 'customers' could get their hands painted simultaneously. Everyone's designs were different, and yet somehow the artists managed to make the patterns match on each hand.
As this was going on, a DJ played Bollywood tunes (and a bit of Daft Punk as the party progressed), and everybody ended up on the dancefloor. At 4pm. Sober.
It was a great lesson for all of us, especially a certain self-conscious groom who was meant to lead the group in Bollywood dancing. And yes, me doing that made for some wonderfully awkward photos.
4) We wore incredibly colourful outfits
Saris must be among the most beautiful garments ever conceived, and of course my bride looked gorgeous in each of her eight or so wardrobe changes throughout the event. I honestly don't think it's possible to look anything but elegant in a sari, and they looked terrific on our guests from a wide variety of backgrounds.
As for me, not only did I get to wear some excellent outfits, including some rather fetching Nehru jackets atop kurthas (traditional shirts), but our guests embraced the Indian wardrobe with unexpected gusto. The local retailers of Indian formalwear must have thought that all their Diwalis had come at once.
During the wedding ceremony itself, I managed to negotiate wearing a simple white shirt rather than exposing my pasty skin to direct sun for four hours, which I really feel was in everyone's best interests, but my lower half was wrapped in an extraordinary length of cloth called a veshti which had been dyed an auspicious shade of yellow in turmeric overnight by both our mothers (thanks mums). It took two brave men to get me into it, and after trying it, I fully expect Aussie blokes to embrace the veshti someday with the same vigour that visitors to Bali have embraced the sarong.
5) I travelled by bullock cart
At a typical Western wedding, the bride gets to make a grand entrance - but at our wedding, the arrival was all about me! The tradition is that the groom's family travels to the bride's home, so it makes sense for him to get the big entry at the engagement ceremony.
The one question everyone asked me before I left for India was whether I'd arrive on a horse or an elephant. Apparently the latter is still an option, although an increasingly unpopular one given welfare concerns, but the idea of a traditional bullock cart seemed wonderful, especially since my family could accompany me on it.
The procession was led not by horses, but by traditional poikkal kuthirai dancers dressed as horses, and accompanied by loud piping on an instrument called the nadaswaram which made everything highly festive.
It was a brilliant way to arrive at the wedding hall, so much so that I'm still waiting for the Uber app to offer a bullock cart option.
6) We had a very short engagement
We've all heard of lengthy engagements - Audrey Tautou made a movie about one once - but ours only lasted for about nine hours. On the evening of the second day, we gathered at the wedding hall (mandapam) for the wedding to be formally announced, which involved reading out the names of our ancestors for three generations back. Rings were exchanged, along with jewellery, more clothes, food items and even toiletries just to prove that we were going to be well looked after, and I formally promised to return for the wedding.
Traditionally, the bride and groom's families stay at the wedding hall until the end of the wedding - mine went back to the hotel overnight, while Divya's stayed at the beautiful traditional Kerala-style seaside home that was our venue.
And that meant we had to be up at 5am and onto a bus at 6 to get there by 7 for the start of proceedings. Everyone made it, impressively - which was great, because after all, I had promised I'd be there.
7) I called the whole thing off... and then called it back on again immediately
The wedding itself involved a great many ceremonies, largely conducted in Sanskrit, with a few directions in Tamil. As I understand neither language, some of Divya's relatives helpfully translated for me. We had to build a holy fire and distribute various offerings into certain sacred receptacles, and the sound of the Sanskrit chants was mesmerising.
The one thing I got to do in English, though, was the kasi yatra, a ceremony where I announced I was going off on a pilgrimage to pursue further religious studies and renounce worldly pursuits. Armed with a copy of said scriptures, a parasol to shield my hairless pate from the hot sun, and the most uncomfortable sandals I've ever worn (because I was renouncing the comforts of this world), I set off for the gate, announcing that I'd changed my mind, and that the scriptures were my priority henceforth.
At the gate, though, my prospective father-in-law stopped me, and suggested that marriage was a superior state, and that I'd have his daughter as a partner through the travails of life. Of course I agreed, and back we went.
8) There was a swing!
A common feature in South Indian homes, the swing is called an oonjal, and it's a wooden plank big enough for two. We gently rocked backwards and forwards to symbolise the ups and downs of life. I was very much feeling the ups at that point, especially as I'd just taken off those sandals.
9) We sealed the deal with a thread and seven steps together
The actual moment of marriage - the equivalent of "I now declare you man and wife" occurred at the "auspicious time", when I performed the mangalya dharanam, and tied a yellow thread around my wife's neck. I only tied the first knot though - the second and third are tied by the groom's sister to symbolise that she is joining the family. As I don't have a sister, my sister-in-law officiated.
I promised three times to take care of my wife, and after this we took seven steps together, each one representing a promise not unlike the western marriage vows. I then placed her toe on a grindstone, and we promised to be as solid and firm as that slab of rock so we can always depend on one another.
10) We joined our families
One of the biggest differences from the wedding traditions I've previously been familiar with is that there's much more of a role for the whole family. The bride and groom's parents are involved at various points throughout proceedings and sit on a dias to symbolise their blessing for their children. (Unfortunately my father was unwell and could not attend, so my aunt and uncle joined my mother on the dias, while my dad watched from Sydney via FaceTime - a truly modern situation!)
My brother and nephew accompanied me on my "pilgrimage", and we received the blessings of five married women from each family. Divya's cousin was also very much involved in the wedding ceremony itself, in particular during a part where we threw puffed rice into the sacred fire to represent prosperity in our new lives together. I honestly felt that I was joining a family.
So, after all that, I feel well and truly married… and in a few weeks we'll say a few more vows, this time in English, to make it legal. (If we lived in India, we could register the marriage there, but having something here seemed a nice option.)
It was undoubtedly the most extraordinary wedding I've ever attended. I'm very grateful to Divya's family for organising such a spectacular occasion, and to everyone who travelled a long way to be part of it.
As a result of all this, I can promise no more mopey columns about being single. From now on, I'm going to be one of those infuriating smug marrieds.
How did the world's most boring car company manage such epic fraud?
Of all the companies to get busted perpetrating massive environmental fraud, I would have thought Volkswagen the least likely. Even those skinny jeans-wearing eco-hipsters at Tesla might have seemed more willing to capitulate to the huge pressure to produce innovative green vehicles than Volkswagen, the world's most boringly consistent car company.
How on earth has a company dull enough to name its two most popular models after the world's two most bourgeois sports managed to concoct a scheme so dodgy that even cigarette company executives must be doffing their tar-encrusted hats?
The more I learn about the scheme, the more astonished I am. Their diesel system was clever enough to know when it was being tested by the likes of the US EPA; during these tests harmful emissions of nitrous oxides would be prevented, whereas under normal circumstances the cars spewed forth between 10 and 40 times the permitted amount.
(Which is incredibly dastardly, of course, but also yet another impressive piece of German engineering.)
The impact of these unauthorised extra emissions could be severe. It's estimated that diesel-powered Volkswagens in the UK may be responsible for as many harmful emissions of NOx as all the country's power stations put together. And the emission of nitrous oxides has been shown to cost thousands of lives annually.
The company's reputations for safety in crash tests and innovations in collision-avoidance systems seem fairly moot if what's coming out of its exhaust pipes is deadly.
And we're talking about Volkswagen, for goodness' sake! The company whose Beetle was the official car of flower power, and whose Kombi was so popular with hippies that it's mandatory for drivers to exchange peace signs when they pass one another on the highway. (Seriously, this is a thing, based on my travels in my friends' khaki model when I was a kid).
In recent decades, its cars have been predominantly associated with inner-city architect types who appreciate their Teutonic minimalism. I used to drive a dark grey Golf when I briefly lived in Surry Hills, and it was often hard to distinguish mine from the half-dozen other identical ones parked on the same street.
Sure, OK, the company has its roots in Nazi Germany, but that was a long time ago. Today's Europe is environmentally conscious almost to a fault. In fact, the switch to diesel to reduce CO2 emissions seems literally to have been a fault, given the subsequent impact on health from all those extra emissions.
Volkswagen drivers are, above all, boring. After five years with a capricious Peugeot, I got one because I wanted a car that would keep me safe in a collision, never break down, and fit into inner-city parking spaces. In other words, for reasons so practical that I'm embarrassed to report them.
VW is known as a reliable, predictable, safe brand. And that's perhaps what's most surprising about the Volkswagen controversy - it seems so profoundly risky. Given the multitude of car tests performed around the world, surely somebody might have experimented with emissions outside a lab?
Surely questions like these were always inevitable. Scientists had already noted that improved diesel standards weren't leading to the forecast reduction in deaths. And I discovered, after only a brief search, a 2014 study claiming that real-world diesel car emissions were much higher than reported.
And yet Volkswagen committed to a strategy that, if revealed, was always going to be devastating for both their bottom line and their reputation. They programmed their cars to evade detection. It wasn't an oversight or an accident, it was a deliberate deception when their whole brand proposition is based on safety and environmental consciousness.
Volkswagen's Australian website says:
Think Blue embodies Volkswagen's goal of creating environmentally friendly products and solutions, communicating and encouraging better environmental behaviour and getting involved in initiatives that contribute to a sustainable future.
Last week that might have seemed plausible, now it seems like so much corporate guff.
The reason for this crisis was that Volkswagen was expected to deliver more fuel-efficient diesel cars, with sufficient power, at a reasonable price. Something had to give in this equation, and clearly, it was emissions. Their "clean diesel" cars were based on a falsehood.
But the same market and regulatory pressures apply across the industry, especially in Europe. Will Volkswagen be only the first manufacturer to get caught out?
There's a German industry website called "Clearly Better Diesel", which trumpets the kinds of breakthrough that got Volkswagen into trouble:
Clean Diesel technology has changed everything. From the pump to the engine, it's remarkably improved the driving experience. Say goodbye to loud trips with dirtier exhaust. And hello to great MPG, powered with exhilarating performance.
Well, Volkswagen will now be forced to say goodbye to dirtier exhaust, to the tune of billions of dollars. What about all the other diesel manufacturers? Is current diesel technology itself incapable of producing low emissions?
If a company like Volkswagen can deceive supposedly tough regulators around the world so successfully for so long, it's clear that the green bona fides of large companies like it cannot be taken for granted. In particular, as the Climate Change Authority has noted, the idea of self-regulation seems risible given what we've learned about Volkswagen this week.
Clearly, the price of environmental safety is eternal and independent vigilance - along with improved emissions tests in real-world conditions. Then Volkswagen drivers might once again be able to flash one another peace signs without feeling like they're choking the planet.
I want a nightclub for old people
Once upon a time, I used to go to nightclubs. By which I mean establishments with a 'disc jockey', as I believe they're known, who mixes different musical items together in a seamless progression of beats, soaring vocals and, because a lot of this happened in the 1990s, incredibly crappy synths.
Once upon a time, I could wear a t-shirt, cargo pants with an abundance of convenient pockets, and suede sneakers, and be considered adequately dressed to enter a licensed premises. And once upon a time, despite the licensed nature of said premises, it was clear that the vast majority of other patrons were instead choosing to obtain their intoxicants from helpful private contractors.
Nowadays, largely empty weekends spread out before me, and I wonder whether I might be able to go out somewhere to listen to a bit of music and have what used to be called a 'boogie'. Sure, in my case, that means my body jerking spasmodically at intervals which bear only the faintest resemblance to the beat. Still, I'm having fun, even if my flailing limbs pose an injury risk to others.
The problem is, I've no idea where to go. I made a rare visit to a proper young-people nightclub a few years ago, but I didn't really know or relate to any of the music, with the dubstep beats or whatever they're called.
Yes, I know that sentence makes me sound middle-aged – which was another problem. Being 20 years older than most patrons made me feel both ancient and creepy, and that was far from relaxing. Plus, the whole thing started well after my bedtime.
What we need is a nightclub suitable for people a few years either side of 40, where we can all gyrate badly together, pretend that 'Sing It Back' by Moloko is still the height of dancefloor cool, and expressly forbid the music of Flo Rida.
This nightclub for the aged should be absolutely pumping by 9pm, and wind up by about 12.30 or 1 so people can get home and relieve their babysitters. It should have fancy cocktails made with huge sticks because we still think that's the coolest thing imaginable, as well as a range of overpriced bottles of water for nostalgia purposes.
What's more, there should be absolutely no drugs besides our prescription pain medication. Because honestly, we're too old, and it's undignified. We'll be drooling of our own accord before long, I promise you.
The lighting should be extremely dim and flattering to increasingly wizened faces, and there should be a range of soundproof seating areas where people can have a decent conversation without any interruptions from that doof-doof-doof stuff we were dancing to at the beginning of the night, when we had energy. Plus we'll need a fully-equipped First Aid station with a defibrillator, as well as a few physios for when we sprain a muscle on the dancefloor.
Back in the day, one would never dream of arriving at a nightclub before midnight. Nobody was there, and it suggested you didn't have a long list of earlier engagements. Whereas nowadays, let's not kid ourselves – it's a minor miracle if people of my age are out past one. While many have protested against the impact of Sydney's lockout laws which kick in at 1.30, the embarrassing truth is that I've never been in a situation where I wanted to get into a venue after the lockout began.
In fact, rather than reliving our brief 1990s heyday, people of my generation might be better served by returning to the original days of the nightclub, back in the 1920s. The kind of establishment where there are little round tables with candles on them, and people dress up properly.
I'm not afraid to say that donning a sharpish suit and heading downtown for a night of hot jazz and proper, Arthur Murray-style dance steps sounds magnificent. I'd be more than happy to foxtrot or cha cha if the band plays slowly enough and I can copy somebody's steps. Plus, there would be martinis, and that's never a bad thing.
It's entirely possible that I'm ignorant of lots of exciting, underground jazz clubs out there, but I can't think of a single place anywhere in Australia where you can go and dance to live music like this. I don't mean wobbling to the tired strains of a covers band murdering Madonna's 'Holiday'; I mean old-fashioned dancing to a jazz band, whether a traditional combo or, better still, a full-on Duke Ellington-style big band. You can go and hear recitals of jazz, sure, in a fancy concert hall, but a lot of that music was originally meant to be danced to, late at night.
Maybe in Paris or New York City there are still places like that. Definitely Havana still has nightclubs where you can go and listen to salsa bands playing into the night – I went there once upon a time, and it was a lot of fun, even though I was easily the worst dancer in the place and everyone else was either a tourist or sufficiently high up in the government to have fistfuls of dollars to blow on overpriced mojitos. No doubt in Vegas there are still a few establishments offering late night jazz as a way of luring people into the casinos. But if there ever were venues like this in Australia, I fear they're long gone.
There's another problem, of course – who to go out with. Most of my friends have long since made it clear that having kids means no, nearly all of the time, often with an incredulous look as they realise that I live in a vastly different, childless universe of social possibilities. I think to myself oh, surely your partner can take the brunt of sleepless kids for an hour or two occasionally, but then realise that the real issue is that kids have left them in a state of perma-exhaustion, and that going out late means even fewer hours of sleep before they're dragged from their beds to entertain toddlers. Fair enough.
So I'm too old to frequent the DJ-powered nightclubs of today, and old-style jazz-filled nightclubs don't exist outside Mad Men. But least we still have pubs. The live music may be some miserable bloke whose dreams of a spectacular performing career have diminished to a life spent blasting out yet another version of 'Khe Sanh' to people who are too busy talking to listen, and the only dancing on offer may be involuntary wobbling as you stagger from your table to the bathroom, but at least pubs are full of people going out and having a good time, even as we grow older. In our pubs, the glass can be half full, and that's not a bad thing. And when I get home, I have the option of listening to a little bit of jazz before I go to sleep at a somewhat sensible hour.
But if anyone starts a nightclub for old people, I'll be there as soon as you can say 'age-appropriate footwear'. At least until I have kids of my own.
8 things we learned from @RealMarkLatham
1) If there's an internet mystery, who ya gonna call?
Mark Di Stefano from Buzzfeed is the answer. The former ABC journo is fast becoming the nation's leading internet detective, whether he's trying to ascertain the veracity of an abusive Twitter account or identify the genius who drew those legendary DJ headphones on John Howard (caution - this link features language that is NSFW, but that is very amusing when not at work).
Connecting @RealMarkLatham's tweets to material appearing in subsequent AFR columns was revealing, but finding a link between the account and Latham's public email address was a masterstroke of internet-era sleuthing.
His work has been called a "social media campaign" by The Australian's Sharri Markson, but it could be more accurately described as investigative journalism.
2) As Taylor said, haters gonna hate
Sorry, Paul Keating - Mark Latham is Australia's most prodigious hater. His column, and the @RealMarkLatham account that's allegedly his (though this is denied), have repeatedly pummelled a wide range of targets - working mums, transgender military officers, people with depression, and not one but two Australians of the Year.
Among his list of targets, you won't find many of his fellow white, heterosexual men, with Peter FitzSimons a notable exception - but I'm sure he'd say that's because decent Aussie blokes aren't among the privileged beneficiaries of political correctness.
I'm always perplexed when people look at contemporary Australia and perceive white straight blokes like Latham (and me) as the underdogs, but presumably we media types are too busy swigging lattes to understand real Australia.
3) Even someone who was nearly prime minister can rail against 'elites'
There are plenty of people in privileged positions who rail constantly against the straw men and women they perceive to wield the real power in Australian public life. Some prominent commentators simultaneously rail against these 'elites' in their columns, on top-rating radio stations, and on television.
But the enormous chip on Mark Latham's shoulder is perhaps unique in Australian public life. Others may see him as a white, male, straight University of Sydney graduate who rose to the top of the nation's oldest political party and consequently enjoys a generous parliamentary pension and, until recently, a columnist's income to boot. Whereas Latham views himself as a Real Australian from the Western Suburbs who tells it like it is, unadorned by the silly political correctness of inner-city types who don't have access to the rich seam of Genuine Australianness that flows right through his dinkum Aussie backyard.
In his mind, he's the voice of suburban Australia:
The most telling initial sign, I thought, that @RealMarkLatham was the actual guy was the first word in the account's Twitter bio - "Outsider". It's a fairly extraordinary self-perception for someone who nearly ran the country and until recently wrote for a newspaper that costs $780 per year to read, but identity contradictions like these have always defined Latham.
You can say one thing of his mentor and predecessor as Member for Werriwa, Gough Whitlam - nobody could accuse him of claiming to be an ordinary Aussie.
4) Dubious tweets are worse than dubious columns
Latham resigned, the story goes - but before that happened, he and the AFR withstood months of sustained criticism (and at least one lawsuit) before he was linked to these tweets. What's peculiar about this is that his column was far more prominent than a Twitter account that only ever had a smattering of followers, and contained some of the same material.
Or could it be that Latham's falling out with the Financial Review was the realisation that he might have been giving away for free on Twitter the same zingers about Tara Moss' Facebook page that he was serving up in his premium-priced, paywalled-to-the-hilt columns?
5) High-profile women can complain all they like, but you don't want to offend the sponsors
Is it a coincidence that Latham's departure follows Westpac, which sponsors the 100 Women of Influence Awards with the AFR, expressing concern about him? Buzzfeed had an exclusive here, too, publishing an email from Westpac, sent last Thursday, that agreed Latham's language was "derogatory and offensive".
The Fin acknowledged the issue in its announcement as follows: "Some feminist websites and activists have campaigned against Mr Latham's columns, including by complaining to Westpac, which presents the successful Women of Influence awards with the Financial Review."
It doesn't mention the bank's response.
6) Yet again, aggression has overwhelmed Latham's gifts
Once upon a time Mark Latham was seen as Labor's leading Third Way intellectual, able to fuse scholarly economic insight with the social values of the middle Australia from whence he came. But then there were incidents like that notorious, allegedly election-losing handshake which cemented a public perception of bullying hardly helped by the colourful stories of cabbies and broken arms.
The party trusted him to lead them forward, and Latham was ahead in the polls for a long period before the 2004 election. Ultimately, he led them to a rout that gave the Coalition control of the Senate.
The Latham Diaries similarly veered between powerfully frank insider (cf "Outsider") insights into the political process and extraordinary fits of bile, but the attacks in his AFR columns and on Twitter have been jaw-dropping. It's one thing to go in hard on fellow politicians, but the attacks on Rosie Batty, whose story broke the nation's heart, were simply extraordinary.
Latham has at times offered telling insights into the problems with the Labor Party in particular, but it generally isn't long before things get heated.
7) Mark Latham apparently has a friend
What's more, according to the reputable source @RealMarkLatham, this friend, Mitch Carter, actually ran the @RealMarkLatham account:
What a top bloke!
As Di Stefano pointed out, he must have been a particularly top bloke to supply "Lathos" with so many choice quotes that later made it into his column. And his generosity in running the account despite it being linked to Latham's personal email address is also impressive.
No doubt as you read this, Mitch is shouting "Lathos" heaps of beers this week while he complains about how "Buzzfed wankers" (sic) and "bourgeois left feminist" women robbed him of his column.
8) For the umpteenth time, social media can be career-ending
Whether thanks to resignations, "resignations" or sackings, the annals of Twitter and Facebook are full of examples of people who have lost their jobs for things they shared in a moment of poor judgement. Carrying a smartphone means you can make or break your career in an instant, and sometimes at moments where you shouldn't be communicating with the public.
The Latham case is yet another reminder that what you do on the internet stays around forever, and it's very hard to keep a genie in the bottle, especially when that genie is regularly given to fits of rage, and even more especially when those fits of rage use the same material that has featured on an obscure Twitter account with your name on it.
The phones themselves may be smart, but often the people using them do very dumb things indeed.
Nine brilliant new ideas for cooking shows (if I say so myself)
No doubt about it, we love cooking shows. MasterChef is still a juggernaut, netting more than two million viewers for its finale earlier this week, and then there's My Kitchen/Restaurant/Cafe/Sandwich Maker Rules. They've been followed immediately by a whole new bunch of food shows, because as any TV programmer will tell you, the best way to make programmes is to simply ape what's been done before.
That said, Seven and Nine's new entries - Restaurant Revolution and The Hotplate - have been criticised by some as derivative of MasterChef and MKR, which means we need a few cooking-based reality shows with some slightly more original ideas. I humbly present the following for consideration.
My Reheat Rules
This environmentally-conscious show will use the mountain of leftovers from all the other cooking shows on television. The contestants will be challenged to perform one of the trickiest tasks in modern cooking - reheating frozen leftovers. They get one chance to pick the heat and time settings for the microwave so that the food's cooked through and not too cold or hot. Points will be deducted for any spillage left on the rotating glass plate. Successfully defrosting a snow egg without melting it will win you immunity from that round's evictions.
InstaChef
In this very 2015 cooking show, there will be no judging process whatsoever. Instead, the show's contestants will post photos of all meals on Instagram, using the filter of their choice. Whoever gets the most regrams and likes wins. The food will never be tasted by anybody.
Send It Back!
In this programme, the judges sit at a table, order entirely random and arbitrary dishes and sending them back on the flimsiest of pretexts. The winner is the chef who can accede to their absurd demands without spitting on the plate.
MasochistChef
Young, up-and-coming chefs have to prepare complex, creative food with Gordon Ramsay constantly shouting obscenities right in their face. In the more advanced rounds, he will use a megaphone. Finalists will have their families called in so that Ramsay can belittle them in front of the people they treasure most. If they can thrive on the abuse, they'll be set for a lifetime in the restaurant industry.
Restaurant Refinance
Contestants are challenged to save the restaurants that previous cooking show winners opened when their victories made them overconfident. Prudent financial and ego management will be needed to help these ex-celebrities (who no longer make it to social pages) stave off financial ruin. Competitors are prohibited from using social media to resurrect the public's dwindling interest.
Cha Cha Challenge
Budding chefs must devise delicious new items that can be served on yum cha trolleys and don't taste terrible after circulating around a huge room for an hour. As is standard at yum cha, all items must include pork and/or prawns in some way, even when the person pushing the trolley says they don't. For the final challenge, contestants have to attempt to make chicken's feet palatable to diners without Chinese heritage.
The Meal High Club
Sure, these trainee chefs can whip up a delicious three-course meal in any cuisine you like, but can they make it not taste terrible when served in economy class? Definitely not, if every airline I've ever flown on is any guide. Still, perhaps they'll be able to come up with something more innovative than bland chicken with anonymous sauce on a bed of bedraggled rice.
Cecil's Revenge
A food show which involves no actual cooking, this programme gives African lions the chance to showcase their expertise in obtaining, preparing and devouring al fresco meals. In the grand finale, the most ferocious lions will be given a chance to demonstrate their skills on certain American dentists, who won't have their bow and arrow to protect them this time.
TofuChef
Is there anything you can't do with tofu, the wonder product that can substitute for any meat you like? Well, yes, actually. But in this show, chefs will be challenged to make tofurkey, tork, tofeef, tossages, and other lame soybean puns in a doomed attempt to seamlessly mimic a carnivorous diet. Any contestant expressing a sentiment like "But why would a vego want to eat fake meat anyway?" will be immediately evicted.
A farewell to ABC Shops
It used to be all about the bananas. The ones in pyjamas, of course - B1, B2 and their other pals from Cuddles Avenue. An endearing song from Play School spun off into its own series with all the merchandise imaginable.
In their prime, the Bananas in Pyjamas had a network of embassies across the country, with ABC Shops in most major malls and city centres that sold their replica toys, books, DVDs. The perfect gift for Christmas, if you like anthropomorphic, sleepwear-clad fruit.
There were the Wiggles too, of course, bringing skivvies back into the mainstream where they have always belonged, and let's not forget Doctor Who. Even before the series returned, it was one of the most highly-trafficked areas in ABC Shops, and the reboot has unleashed a huge range of DVDs, novels, toy Daleks and TARDISes, and even funky Doctor Who cushions.
Sometimes past incarnations of the Doctor would even materialise for an in-store signing, leading to enormous queues and keeping the cash registers beeping more rapidly than the console on a Gallifreyan time machine.
Nowadays, Peppa Pig is queen of the ABC Shop. On a recent visit to the Queen Victoria Building branch, my five-year-old nephew and I counted no less than seven incarnations of her, each one larger than him, although a range of sizes is of course available. Books, games, clothes, backpacks, water bottles, books, and even a Peppa playhouse are on sale - no less than 272 products in all.
My nephew and I had a ball looking at all the different ABC products, but what excited him most was when we discovered the little table in the corner with a range of iPads tethered to it, each one running iView. We lingered while he watched his favourite programs for free as he navigated around an app that he could operate before he could talk in complete sentences.
And therein lies the ABC Shop's problem, and the reason the national broadcaster announced today that its national network of 50 retail outlets will close in the coming months. Today, there's an ABC Shop in just about every major mall across Australia, 50 outposts where you can feel the comfy embrace of the national broadcaster as soon as you walk in the door. By 2017, there will in all likelihood be none.
It's hard to dispute that the internet offers a better way to distribute video and audio content than DVDs, CDs, and even those USB sticks of Richard Fidler's Conversations that have apparently done brisk trade in recent years. In these cases, the end viewer and listener experiences are more or less identical, but the delivery platform is instantaneous.
I will argue loud and long with anyone who thinks print books have no future, but even here the internet can provide mail-orders from a larger range than any retailer can offer.
I've long shopped at the ABC Shop for Christmas and birthday presents, especially for little kids who love nothing more than a stuffed toy, but no retailer could survive just on those kinds of items, especially when they're also stocked by those ubiquitous discount department stores.
This change has taken place across the retail sector. When I was growing up, music and video stores were everywhere, and I would constantly drop in to listen to the latest releases on a CD listening post. Nowadays, when a new album is released, I just go straight to a streaming service.
I haven't bought a DVD or CD for personal consumption in many years, so I'm one whose purchasing practices have driven yet another nail into the coffin of these kinds of retailers. Many, like Brashs, are long gone, while other operators like JB Hi-Fi who once sold mainly media items have shifted to sell devices instead, but that's not an option for the ABC. In some respects, it's remarkable those Shops have survived this long.
And yet the closure of the ABC Shops will mean more than just a reduction in our Peppa-purchasing opportunities. I've visited more than my fair share over the years, thanks to the Chaser's brief heyday in the mid-2000s, when we used to make pilgrimages around the country signing books and DVDs, and I'll miss them.
To regular customers, ABC Shops are the ABC, and the staff will tell you that they're constantly fielding enquiries, comments and occasionally brickbats about programming, transmission and all other aspects of what the national broadcaster does.
When the doors close, it will no doubt feel to some as though the ABC has in some tangible sense departed from those communities. On-air personalities won't drop in regularly to the places where most of us do our weekly shop, and the regular outside broadcasts in those stores, often timed to coincide with Christmas shopping, will cease.
But that said, the ABC's connection with the community is moving online too. If you want to contact the national broadcaster, you don't need to go and chat to a teenager working a retail job while they study. Nowadays you can directly tweet Leigh Sales, Costa Georgiadis and even the managing director himself.
Still, I'll miss the chance to walk through the doors of an ABC Shop - there's one in the foyer at Ultimo, and I pop in regularly. They're calm, friendly, reassuring places, with thoughtful staff who love a chat and are always handy with a recommendation. When I stream the latest triple j Hottest 100 collection as opposed to buying it on a CD, I don't get to chat to somebody and wander around a space where I feel a connection with the ABC family of programs that I grew up with, and that's a pity.
The whole thing's a pity, of course, especially for those who will be losing their jobs. But sadly, they're our ABC Shops, and we've already voted with our wallets.
An end to Watto Lotto?
Shane Watson, out leg before wicket. It's a refrain that has been heard 29 times in his 59 Tests, frequently after a slight break to allow the decision review system to confirm the obvious.
Watto is out. We've said it so many times over the years, often as he failed yet again to convert a half-century into a big score. He's accumulated 24 half-centuries and a mere four tons. Sadly for Watson, four Test centuries is too few for Cricinfo even to bother counting the accomplishment in its league table of Australian century-makers. It's less than 10 per cent of Ricky Ponting's record 41.
But now Watto is out of the team, many years after Australians stopped wondering whether he was somehow sacrosanct, and assumed he had footage of the selectors doing nuddy runs around the MCG.
Traditionally, a long-serving Test all-rounder is worth two players, but when it comes to Watson, it always seemed that the selectors were satisfied that being a half-decent batsman and a half-decent bowler was enough to make him a complete cricketer.
But now Watto is out of the team entirely, and at the age of 34, it might be for good, both in the sense of being permanent and for the good of the team, which in the first day of the Second Test has not exactly felt his absence.
Watching this compilation of some of the eight times - eight! - that Watson has been out LBW in Ashes Tests, I came to recognise the expression of wincing incredulity that crosses his face whenever the ball has yet again crashed into his legs instead of the bat. Why hasn't the universe been kinder, Watto is wondering. Why haven't more of my dreams come to pass? How can I be out like that, again?
Sport, and life, are like that. Some of us just always seem to get there, while others just always seem to miss out. Why was Kevin Rudd and not Kim Beazley the one who finally led Labor to victory? Or, as Simon Crean would ask (but only Simon Crean), why not him?
Some people are just unlucky. Others are not good enough, of course - but when it comes to Shane Watson, we'll undoubtedly never know which he was.
Watto has long been a figure of derision in a country that's used to winning, and winning big, and if that means winning ugly, then that's okay. But there are other cricketing nations who might have treasured Shane Watson as a prodigy. Okay, so I'm probably not talking about nations with full Test status, but nevertheless, it's conceivable.
And even for Australia, there are other times, during the period of West Indian domination, for instance, when he might have seemed a stalwart.
Shane Watson's experience in the Australian Test team is not unlike my own recollection of playing the sport. There were days as a batsman when it seemed I could do no wrong, when the ball just flew to the boundary, as it often did from my most reliable scoring shot, the accidental edge. They were precious, joyful days, and their rarity made them all the more special.
Sure, my all-time high score was 16, while his is 176, but we are similar in that there weren't many days that good. Looking at his career batting graph, that score in the drawn fifth Test in 2013 towers above the rest of his performances like the gulf between his potential and the reality of his career.
And at least he got to play, and play for many years. He was much more fortunate than poor old Scott Muller, who played a mere two Tests in which he dismissed seven recognised batsmen, but is now remembered only for the "can't bowl, can't throw" scandal.
Darren Lehmann says Watson's career is not yet over. But in Lehmann's words, one can detect the faint praise that has so often accompanied his career. "He's been an experienced player for us," Lehmann said. He certainly has - but arguably not a great one, sadly.
"Form is going to dictate what Shane does," Lehmann went on to say. Which is something of a first, in recent years, admittedly. But while there's the prospect of injury to better players, there's surely hope.
Steve Waugh is more sceptical, saying there's probably no way back now, given Watto's age. If he's right, we'll never see Shane Watson's legs before a Test wicket again.
But if we know Watto, and we do, we can be certain of one thing. Somewhere over there in England, he's asking for this decision to be reviewed.
Texting while driving, and other smart tech to help morons
Do you text while driving? One in three do, apparently. Which means that even though it’s a leading cause of accidents, a lot of us are such utter idiots that it’s a miracle any car gets to its destination intact.
Our capacity to act against our obvious self-interest has inspired inventor Scott Tibbetts to create a device to solve a problem that really shouldn’t be one. It’s a little box that stores the text messages up, only delivering them to our phone when we’ve arrived at our destination. The theory is that we’re all so thoroughly programmed to be distracted by a “little bing”, as he puts it, that we need to ensure that these messages don’t arrive in the first place.
It seems a brilliant solution to a moronic problem. The equation whereby answering a text message is more important than keeping your eyes on the heavy machines hurtling towards you makes absolutely no sense. The extent of this problem must mean that somehow our phones have bypassed our instinct for self-preservation, and induced some kind of Pavlovian response whereby we simply cannot concentrate on anything else once we hear a message arrive.
Getting into a crash because of a text message is bad enough, but there are even more irrelevant distractions than SMS on our phones these days. Writing off your car because someone tagged you in a Facebook photo is an even more ridiculous possibility, but we can more or less guarantee that somewhere, sometime, it’s happened.
Have our intense yet indulgent lifestyles have completely destroyed our capacity for self-control? It seems that way when you consider that lifestyle diseases are the world’s biggest killers. It’s dumb to overeat, or smoke, or reply to a text while you’re navigating a busy highway, and yet we can’t say no. Just like it’s dumb to build up a huge credit card debt, or go BASE jumping, or go and see an Ashton Kutcher movie, yet still many of us do, time and time again.
It may seem ironic that the solution to a problem caused by technology is more technology, but appealing to our self-preservation instincts clearly doesn’t work. That’s why the government insists we buckle our seatbelts and wear bike helmets, even though not doing these things is as self-evidently bad an idea as an island full of genetically-engineered dinosaurs.
So if self-control is genuinely no longer an option for us as a species, here are some machines that inventors like Tibbetts might want to work on.
A car distance lock
While we’re adding features to our cars, what about a feature that disables the engine if the distance you’re proposing to drive is within walking distance? It would also somehow have to be able to prevent us from hailing cabs.
A flame preventer
The technology that can stop us getting text messages while driving may also be able to prevent us sending those angry messages that spiral into a pointless, time-wasting exchange of bile. It would be especially useful on websites that feature anonymous comments from the public. (Hint, hint.)
A stomach controller
Gastric bands reduce the size of the stomach on a permanent basis, but I’d love to see a machine that can induce a feeling of intense fullness whenever I walk past a bakery, but give me a ravenous hunger when all there is on the table in front of me is lettuce.
A pokie controller
Playing the pokies is fundamentally illogical, as Tom Cummings once explained on The Drum. Even if you win, that will encourage you to keep playing, and in the end you’ll almost certainly lose, because they’re programmed to give a return to player of something like 85%. We need a machine that sits on our ear and constantly says “DON’T PLAY, YOU WILL DEFINITELY LOSE”, and then, when that doesn’t work and we try to play, disables our fingers.
A humblebrag nausea-inducer
Remember how in A Clockwork Orange, Alex has a treatment that makes him queasy whenever he thinks of violence? I’d like to see people getting that fitted so that whenever they say something like “Don’t you hate it when the paper prints a terrible photo of you in the social pages?” or “Seems like they were really desperate for Order of Australia recipients this year, you guys!” they immediately feel as ill as everybody around them does.
A selfie deleter
Simple – if you take a photo of yourself, not only is it immediately shredded before your eyes, but you receive a mild electric shock. The more selfies you take, the more intense the shock gets. This may be fatal in the case of certain celebrities, which means that it’s all upside, really.
What I learned hanging out with a 5-year-old boy
This week, I spent a day escorting a five-year-old boy around Sydney. Courtesy of school holidays and a last-minute change in plans, I was called up from the childcare reserve bench. My challenge: to ensure not only that my nephew was kept safe and sound (basic childcare), but that he had a reasonably good time (advanced childcare).
Safe and sound wasn’t too hard – it meant that we had to hold hands crossing the road and on the escalators, and he promised not to run off in exchange for my promise to follow wherever he wanted to go in return. A solid negotiation, I thought.
But the challenge of killing most of a day in the city was a daunting one, especially since rain was forecast.
Imagine my delight, then, upon realising that there was a vast Lego exhibition on in the Sydney Town Hall, especially for the holidays. It turned out that all my nephew’s friends were going, apparently, and so of course we had to, as well. After all, I wanted to be one of those fun uncles.
I loved Lego growing up. We had an avalanche of the stuff, and I spent thousands upon thousands of hours constructing my latest acquisition, characteristically discarding the instructions early on in the piece to freestyle additions that no Lego structural engineer would have signed off on. Stepping on one of those two-button-bricks was probably my most frequent childhood injury.
Back then, Denmark’s greatest cultural export to the world only came in regular, now known as City, and Space Lego. Nowadays, just about every successful movie franchise except Magic Mike has its own Lego spin-off. So I was keen to get up to speed on what on earth ‘Lego Chyna’ was, besides misspelled.
So it was hard to say who was more excited upon arriving at the Town Hall for the Lego exhibition, the five-year-old or the 38-year-old.
Unfortunately, both the 10.30 and 12.30 slots were sold out, forcing us to return at 2.30 – in four hours’ time.
For me, an unexpected few hours in the city is easily solved via a café, multiple hot drinks, and reading. I’m very comfortable being one of those terrible people who hog a table for hours and then, right when the wait staff are on the verge of making a pointed comment, ordering a cup of peppermint tea so I’m technically still paying rent on my space.
That plan, I quickly realised, would not wash with a five-year-old whose known tolerance to sitting still generally cuts out two-thirds through the first flat white.
What, I wondered, would be fun for my nephew – but also, since I’m not the world’s most selfless person and there was a lot of time to kill, fun for me as well?
Fortunately, he had a strong opening gambit. Before going and looking at several millions bricks’ worth of Lego in the exhibition, he suggested, why couldn’t we go and look at some Lego?
It was hard to fault his logic, and there was a specialist store nearby, so off we headed to whet our appetites. As he patiently explained the subtle distinctions between Ninjago, Ultra Agents and Super Heroes, I took careful note of all the items my nephew wanted for his next birthday, as he requested, even though it’s not for nine months.
After individually considering every single one of the Lego items on sale (and most of the Duplo too, as he has a younger sister), we went off to the ABC Shop. Amidst the endless Peppa Pig merch, they had a number of tablets set up to allow kids to view iView programmes, which offered fifteen minutes of blissful respite for me, albeit perched on a tiny stool.
Next he wanted to visit a bookshop, which was a surprise, but a welcome one. There are still some excellent, enormous ones in the city which are surviving in the face of Amazon. He sat and patiently read at least a dozen books – well, flicked through the pictures, at least, which is about all you can ask of a five-year-old. What’s more, only two-thirds of them were about Lego, Star Wars or Lego Star Wars.
Next, we went to a department store which was having a toy sale, ie more Lego, and, just to mix things up, we dropped in on a hotel which had installed an enormous Lego rocket in its foyer.
By now it was lunchtime, and my commitment to being a fun uncle extended to a cheeseburger and fries, although I insisted on water instead of lemonade as a token concession to nutritional balance. The burger came with a Minion toy, which provided the standard three minutes of fun before being relegated to my pocket.
There was still an hour until our 2.30 Lego exhibition, and I was totally out of ideas. But then I somehow remembered that my nephew was quite the fan of Timezone. Plastic crocodiles were whacked with a hammer, balls were lobbed into plastic cups and a descending claw game proved its usual unsatisfying self. Before we knew it, it was 2.30 – time to go and look at even more Lego.
Despite spending most of the day beforehand looking at and talking about Scandinavian plastic bricks, I thought the exhibition was excellent. Australia’s pre-eminent Lego artiste Ryan “The Brickman” McNaught had assembled a greatest hits collection of planes, trains and automobiles, along with the Sydney Opera House, the Colosseum and many other delights. They were great to inspect, when we could see them through the crowds of primary-aged kids.
What’s more, the challenge of counting the little green spacemen hidden in each exhibit was equally difficult for both of us. I had the advantage of height, but he was able to peer under the models to spy their little green heads. I like to think we made a formidable space search-and-rescue team.
When I was heading home, I realised that I’d really enjoyed doing stuff my five-year-old nephew loved. Sure, my tolerance for Lego is significantly lower, but I really enjoyed the exhibition. What’s more, there’s absolutely no way I could have visited without a child in tow. And I’m not above visiting arcades the way I used to as a teenager, but let me tell you, you definitely feels less pathetic when you’re also supervising a child.
After his safe return, I was roundly praised for giving up a day to entertain my nephew. Little did they realise that I enjoyed the whole thing nearly as much as he did.
So, next holidays, I’m volunteering to babysit. Especially if there’s a Lego exhibition on.