The Olympic Medal Count

I’m sure that I’ve probably made some comment on this about four years ago, but I can’t be bothered going back to check out whether I did or not. So here it is. The Australian media were basically a bunch of bastards until we started to win a couple more than that first relay gold medal.

There was a lot made about the fact that as a nation we’d had high expectations that weren’t being lived up to. In reality we only had that expectation because some athletes and certainly the media beat it all up ahead of the games. So we didn’t win all the gold medals that we expected. Personally I think even fourth or fifth in the world is a remarkable achievement. So I’d like to say well done to all our athletes that even made it as far as London.

Then there’s the medal count. I happen to check a number of media sources at different times and not all of them are based here in Oz. So I find it really interesting to see that different countries establish a nation’s rankings in different manners.

Here in Australia, it was all based on how many gold medals were won, with the silver and bronze used to split it when countries were tied. I find that an astonishing way for a small nation like us to put the tally together. Based on that, we were tenth.

In the US (who won both the most medals and the most gold, they put it together based on total medals won. That put Australia in 7th. Now if I was in the Aussie media, I’d be looking to spin our performance so that it looked as good as it possibly could.

Of course there’s a couple of other ways of putting the tables together as well. There’s medals per head of population, which usually puts Australia in a better spot than we see in other counts (though places like Jamaica smash us because of their sprinters. Then there’s medals per GDP which is another interesting measure. 

I’d be curious to see medals per dollar spent on training, but I sure don’t have the time, inclination or information sources to do that.

What I did do though was put together my own count based on a gold medal being worth 3 points, silver 2 and bronze 1. It says that a medal is important, but it still provides reward for placing better. In that way, Australia also placed 7th.

The other comments I’ll offer on the London event, which I thought went very well are:

1. That I would have to call this round of the olympics the year of the slow-mo montage. I got sick to death of artistic compilations of athletes I’d never heard of (non Aussies in particular) dragging out time and time again while somewhere, somewhere else in the big old thing they call the games, there was probably live sport happening that we could have been watching. I’d estimate that the amount of live sport versus bullshit was probably edging close to 50/50. 
2. That I was ecstatic when channel 9 had the coverage ahead of channel 7, because that meant that I wasn’t going to have to listen to Bruce McAvaney, who drives me nuts. I didn’t factor in how much it would shit me to have Mark Nicholls, a pom, presenting Australian performances. The emotion he brought was simply fake. It was bad enough when he popped up for the Ashes, but this was a step too far.
3. That I should have invested in Foxtel for the event to see events I wanted to see when I wanted to see them instead of being hustled away from a hockey game in which Australia were actually playing to sit through 20 mins of pre-race bullshit for the marathon.

I might have to remind myself of that four years from now in Rio. Or hope that the ABC get’s the rights.

Real or Fake?

Get your minds out of the gutter, it’s got nothing to do with boobs.

The other night I went to say goodnight to Emily and Thomas who had been shipped off on a mission to the land of nod. First I went to Emily’s room to find her curled on her side. It was the perfect angelic picture of a sleeping cherub. 

The thing is, I know Emily so I quietly crossed the room and gave her a kiss, telling her that I loved her. Then I quietly said to her, “Now stop faking and go to sleep properly.” This brought an immediate smile as her eyes popped open, knowing that she’d been busted. I gave her a stern talking to and moved on. 

I entered Thomas’ room wondering what I’d find. Talk about contrast. There he was, flat on his back, one arm thrown above his head, mouth wide open, blissfully sleeping away. There was simply no question as to whether he was faking it or not.

There’s possibly a lesson there for the youngsters that want to pretend to be asleep, but hey, I probably shouldn’t spell it out any more than that, should I?

The Right to Bear Arms

I, like many other people read with horror the news of the massacre in the theatre in Colorado. I don’t think there’s anything I can say that probably hasn’t already been said and I can’t begin to imagine just how bad it must be for those that were involved or even remotely close to the incident.

However, having said that there was something that I read a couple of days later that truly blew my mind.

Following the shooting, applications for guns went up by 41% in Colorado (including applications to be able to carry a concealed weapon).

I can only surmise that this is a fundamental and significant difference between the psyche of Australia and the US.

After the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania there was almost universal agreement throughout the nation for better gun control and tighter gun laws. Sure there was protest within the gun community and objection to it, but all in all, the cry was there and the government acted upon it.

Yes in the US, even after such a significant and tragic incident, we have not a cry for greater control or to get guns off the street, but a deference to that much loved (?) line of the constitution about the right to bear arms.

I am astounded that the reaction to the event is to carry a gun. Would it truly have been better if more people in that theatre had been carrying concealed weapons? Would they have fired back at the intruder? Would they have been good enough to stop him before he inflicted tragedy? Would they perhaps have created even greater mayhem and potentially injury or death with the cross-fire they would potentially create.

It reminds me of a story told to me by a South African friend who said that he knew it was time to try and get out when he was almost accepting of the fact that there had been a shoot out in their street/compound. He joked that he thought that most of the firing had possibly been the two groups of security guards at each end who had probably ended up shooting at each other as the would-be burglars ran off somewhere else. That’s not an environment in which I’d like to live.

People say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but I still maintain that if there isn’t a gun about, or if it’s locked away, you take away that capacity to grab it in the heat of the moment and potentially change someone’s life forever.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that tighter gun laws will completely remove them from the streets, there will always be someone willing to go outside the law in an order to get ahead, but surely if the number of guns available even legally is reduced then the opportunity for those outside the law reduces as well. We’ve come to far from a world without guns but if every one of them was destroyed, no one could be shot.

I just don’t know that I’d feel safer in a cinema in Colorado today than I would have before the shooting.

The Claw

One of the attractions of coming up to Queensland to visit Nick, Ramona and the boys was of course the theme parks on the Gold Coast. After much research by Caroline it was decided that Dreamworld would be the park of choice and with the weather not particularly conducive to much else we’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past week.

One of the good things about the park this time around is that all the kids are now tall enough to go on any ride that they choose. Of course, being tall enough to ride the Tower of Terror and the like doesn’t of course mean that the little pink thing will be enamored of the idea which means that there’s still an element of family splitting involved to try and keep everyone happy. Michael doesn’t really want to be caught dead on the Madagascar ride and Emily sure as hell wasn’t going near some of the scarier rides.

Back in 2007 we went to Disneyland and one of the rides that I had been really looking forward to was Space Mountain. It’s a roller coaster in the dark and Emily was just tall enough to go on and so we dragged her on. I spent that entire ride with Emily screaming and crying in my ear as I tried to reassure her that she was going to be ok and that the world wasn’t ending. I didn’t get a chance to experience that ride properly until 3 years later at Disney World. What it did do however was to put a significant dent in Emily’s willingness to go on anything that she thought might be scary.

So fast forward back to the present day and during our first visit to Dreamworld for the trip, we come up to the ride known as the claw. Emily agreed to go on the ride with Michael, Sam, Thomas and I, but as we drew nearer and nearer to the front of the line, Emily’s willingness was evaporating fast. Being the good father that I am, I talked her into going anyway.

Lets just say that that didn’t pan out particularly well and I was immediately reminded of the Space Mountain experience, thinking that we’d never get her on anything else for the rest of the trip. It was certainly the case for the rest of day 1.

The next day was a juggling act but on our third day, somewhere and somehow, Caroling convinced Emily that the Buzzsaw wasn’t such a bad ride despite it rising some 43m in the air, suspending you upside down and going backwards (which Emily had declared the worst part of any ride). I had seen the past coming back to haunt the future.

I was to be surprised. Emily didn’t pull out at the last moment and didn’t refuse to never go on another ride ever again. In fact a day later, she also decided to go on the Tower of Terror II despite the previous declaration that she wouldn’t ever do it because she hated going backwards and was scared of heights. She even decided that it was the best ride ever and insisted on doing it again immediately after getting off!

Seems that we might just have another little thrill seeker on our hands.

Camping with the Griswalds Tembys

We recently had a lovely time camping in the flinders rangers with the Rowlands and the Haines. All seemed to be going somewhat loosely according to plan. After failing on the ‘pack Saturday night after our sport’ plan, we managed to get everything loaded and stored on Sunday morning and were off before lunch. The drive went well and we arrived at Rawnsley Park Station in time to set up for dinner.

One of the issues that we had was that in planning to sell the caravan, we’d started to strip things out which meant that the stuff that we normally just assumed was already packed had to be considered, found and stored in the van again. Apparently at the end of our last camping trip I failed to pack the tap connection for the hose. We had one part, but not all the parts … so no running water.

It was getting rather cold with night time temperatures expecting to hit -2C though we weren’t overly concerned as we had the heater in the caravan (though Michael, Sam and Thomas were all outside in tents/annexes and the like and were going to have to deal with sleeping bags, blanket and good old body warmth.

All was good until about midnight when the heating seemed to cut out in the caravan. That meant that someone had to get out of bed and face the cold to work out what was going on. There was only ever going to be one person doing that. Caroline noticed (from bed) that the microwave was off and that led me to believe that we’d likely tripped the circuit breaker (especially given the fact that we’d had the a/c and a fan heater running at the same time. I went out side, checked the box that we were plugged into … no good. I explored the van, pulling fuses, all good. I pulled cords and reinserted them changed points at the box … still nothing).

Finally, lost for any other potential cause, I pulled the connection between the cord and the van. I’m not quite sure what made me do it, but I gave it a sniff. Something smelt burnt. Clearly not a good sign and given it was now about 1am and bloody cold, I simply dropped the cord in the dirt and went back to bed thinking about how this was suddenly starting to look like it was going to be one of those trips.

We decided that in the morning we’d drive the 30kms or so back to Hawker, the nearest town to pick up a new cord and a connection for the tap. We drove all over town (took about 5 mins) and found the one store that was likely to have what we needed. Despite having a reasonable amount of camping equipment, they didn’t have the electrical part that we needed for me to fix the cord. We tried the garage down the road that had an auto electrician on hand but they didn’t have it either.

In a fit of desperation, we walked across to the service station and huzzah! Where I least expected it they had a nice new caravan extension cord of the right amps. We were saved. So we trekked back, set everything up and didn’t face any further dramas with our set up! Griswalds evaded

The rest of the trip was great fun. We climbed Rawnsley’s Bluff (even with Thomas sick as a dog) and drove up to Blinman and back through Parachilna and Brachina gorges. A great trip indeed that left us with a desire to go back and further explore the Flinders when we next manage to find the opportunity.

Don't forget your towel

So yesterday I turned 42. A milestone for those that are fans of Douglas Adams. There will be a party this year, we just ran out of time to do it near my birthday. It’s likely this year’s Spit and Swallow will acquire a theme. I won’t reveal too much now, but the number and the author are significant.

If happen to be a facebook friend, you’ll already likely be aware of the little gift that I got from soccer on the weekend.

We played a cup round in soccer a week ago and it was a tough day at the office. Not only did we go down 6 zip, but I walked off feeling my age. Now I often walk off tired and a bit sore, but last week, for some reason, it just seemed to bloody hurt. I’ve been through worse though and so soldiered on, took the bike up to Eagle on the Hill on the holiday Monday and then ran out soccer training.

It’s probably the first time that I’ve really showed up to a game seeming still sore (in a general muscle soreness kind of way) from the activity of the week before the game. It was something of an ordinary game, giving up a goal too early, playing down to the opposition’s level and losing a man to a red card (undeserved) with a good 30 minutes to go in the second half.

It meant for a lot of hard work and I knew that it was going to hurt at the end of the game, but I really wasn’t expecting to take out someone’s elbow with my face. It certainly left me with more of a memory of the game for my birthday than what I was expecting!

If I thought I was feeling my age last week, I was really feeling it yesterday!

Old as Dirt ... or Seventy

Dad turns 70 today. We’re headed out for dinner to celebrate with him and last week Mum sprung on me invited me, during a conversation to propose a toast. This of course led to some thinking about exactly what it is that I would say.

I considered keeping it short and simple, “Here’s to you, you old bastard,” but that probably doesn’t quite cut it. Not to mention the fact that you’re probably thinking that referring to my dad as a bastard is a bit harsh. However, I do try to work with the facts. IT has been stated and not by me, that upon the death of my grandmother, certain records were found that suggest that the date her wedding to my Grandfather might not quite have been as removed from the birth date of my father as one would expect. The fact that this likely had something to do with my Grandfather heading North to war, well that’s speculation and we can only work with facts.

So what else should I say about my Dad? For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been helping out. It seems to be in his DNA. When I was in school and took up soccer (much to his horror as an avid AFL footballer) which Dad knew about as much as ‘the ball is the wrong shape and you’re not allowed to mark* it,’ we didn’t have a coach. So Dad stepped in as team manager. He was on the Primary School Sports Committee, he was at working bees and as I got older he seemed to always be involved somewhere. Even now he’s wound up as president of the tennis club and helps out at the Church.

Dad has always seemed to be one of those blokes who’d have a go. Clearly the money wasn’t there to pay for other people to do things for him, so it was painting the house or servicing a car or erecting a garage or just maybe making picket gates fly down the drive way, but it was always something. Rare are the times that I can think of that Dad would spend his time sitting down and watching the telly.

I have great memories of going to the football with Dad to watch the beloved Tigers, year in year out, almost making the grade, but not quite coming through with the goods in the final. I especially remember the two special years when we actually went to see them actually win Grand Finals. Those were good times. Dad has always been passionate about his sport, possibly to a fault at times. After all, who really manages to get a net ball game stopped until they have been removed from the spectating area? I mean, netball, really? And who get’s so involved in their son’s football that they find themselves barracking from 10 yards inside the boundary line? Not me, but I could give you a clue.

Dad has made choices throughout his life that have put family first. They’re not always apparent when you’re a kid, but over the years bits and pieces filter through and come up in conversation – decisions not to move to Sydney, not taking up an opportunity to move to PNG later in his career (and during some critical school years for us kids).

All in all, we’ve been bloody well looked after as a family. That’s not to say Dad’s perfect. No one is, but he’s made a bloody good fist of the hand that he’s been dealt and I for one am eminently proud to call him Dad. So it will be a pleasure to toast him tonight and here and now I’d just like to say thanks and Happy Birthday Dad.

*that would be catch it for you overseas people unfamiliar with the game

Fifteen

No, it’s not a Taylor Swift song, well it is, but that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that the eldest lad has hit that milestone. Quite scary really to think that so much time has passed since the fateful day when he arrived in the world.

There’s certainly been some changes in the last 12 months. Michael at 15 seems to have his head screwed on the right way and there hasn’t been quite as many of those moments where irrational hormone driven obstinacy becomes the response. He’s generally accepting of his siblings and remains thick as thieves with Sam in particular.

The voice dropped since he was 14. Fortunately for him he didn’t suffer wild swings of tone during the process, it was more like he had a cold and sounded a little gravelly, but never quite recovered from it. It’s weird to now try and remember what he sounded like pre-voice change. I really don’t think I can recall.

Year 10 seems to be going well for him at school and recently he undertook one of those future career based assessments where they try and look at your personality and what you might be suited to in the future (whilst taking into account what the kid might actually be interested in). of course with all the communications skills of a teenager, the first I knew about it was when I received an email from the school asking that we make an appointment to see the people that had run the session. This lead to some questioning of the lad, but he wasn’t able to shed any light on the matter, not even really being able to remember what questions he’d been asked.

So we rolled up suspecting what it was about and fortunately were pretty much on the money. There weren’t really any surprises in the assessment other than to suggest that he has a whole lot of potential to live up to and that he seems to be headed toward an engineering career. There was way too much of me in that assessment even before getting to the engineering part of it.

Michael’s best friend seems to be his computer because that’s where you’ll find him most of the time. That’s probably not that unusual for a modern kid, but there are times when you feel like dragging him outside and staking him in the sun just so that he remembers what it looks like. At least he’s playing soccer again this winter and hopefully his team can manage to be competitive to keep the interest level up (I’ve not seen them yet as they’ve only had the one game).

All in all, I can only be proud of Michael and hope that he continues on the path that he’s set for himself so far.

Oh and it appears he might just have started to notice girls ;)

Camel Redistribution Theory

So as documented previously, Caroline has gone back to university. Overall, despite the additional stress, I think that she’s enjoying it. There was one assignment so far that I personally am well over.

It’s all about a camel. It could have been about any business, but for some reason, the lecturer decided to make it about a camel. The assignment caused great consternation as Caroline puzzled her way through it. It was made worse by the fact that in discussions with class mates, they thought that she wasn’t doing it right and she thought that they were doing it wrong.

The lecturer was also not very helpful according to the reports that I received. What it meant was that I heard an awful lot about the bloody camel.

The assignment was completed, handed in and results received. They weren’t what Caroline was expecting, so she quizzed the lecturer about the assignment and the process used as she worked out that she hadn’t actually got it all wrong, though she’d made a silly mistake early in the process. She got a re-mark and it improved significantly and also proved that the lecturer wasn’t possibly quite on the ball.

The long and challenging process meant that for several weeks, I heard more about the camel than I thought was reasonable.

So when we were at Floss’ the other night and the camel story started, I suggested that the best approach to the whole business would have been to shoot the camel at the outset to avoid all the complications that came later. Floss suggested that would have been a good way of redistributing the camel.

Camel redistribution theory was born.

Tri hard

About 13 years ago some work colleagues of mine thought that it would be a good thing to do a triathlon together. They proposed that we enter the BRW Corporate Cup event with each of us completing one of the legs. They’d volunteered for the run and the bike legs and suggested that perhaps I’d like to do the swim for them. Foolishly I agreed. I say foolishly because I hadn’t really done any swimming and apparently I didn’t really start doing any prior to the event because ‘it’s only 400m’.
As the day of the event drew closer, it came out in conversation that they’d not entered us in the team sprint event, but had in fact entered us in the main event where each person completes the entire race.
Now at this point, panicking and doing a bit of training probably would have been better than the approach which I took, which was to say ‘oh shit’ and yet do nothing.
On the day of the event, my two team mates did admirably and then passed over to myself. I managed to complete about half the swim before resorting to less effective than freestyle strokes (yes, I did side-stroke some of the swim) partially because I’d swum so far of course that I probably added another 50m to it. I staggered out of the water to the bike transition where I was abused by my team mates because I was taking the time to put socks on.
On the back leg of the bike ride I was seriously forced to consider what the protocol was for vomiting whilst riding a bike. Was it lean left and pedal or get off and hurl? Fortunately I never found out. Whilst abusing my team mates at the half point of the ride I nearly ran over a marshall and when it came to the run, well there was a little bit of walking involved.
Overall we completed the event in under 3 hours but I was informed that just because we did that didn’t mean that we’d each completed it in under an hour. It was quite a point of note.
Although I’d survived the triathlon, I swore never to do another one as long as I lived.
Anyway, having been conned into the Corporate Cup run and City to Bay last year, this year the same group from my client suggested that we tackle, you guessed it, the BRW Corporate Cup Triathlon. Stupid said yes.
This time, I trained. I even went through a couple of practice triathlons with friends to make sure that I’d be ready. I bought elastic laces, I practised transitions and I was determined not to be the one that was being abused in the transition area for putting socks on. The same cannot be said for my comrades. This time around, I was determined to post a time that I’d be happy with where as they were both of the ‘finishing is the goal’ mindset. I tried not to give them too much shit for it.
I opted to go second, to avoid the thrash and bash in the water at the start and so I had a clear run into the water to start (especially since by the time our first competitor came through (he’d breast stroked the swim and then completed the ride on a Big W mountain bike) there weren’t too many teams hanging around the team transition area. I managed to over take a couple of people in the swim, had good transitions and had a good solid ride on the bike. In fact, of the people that completed the triathlon on the same leg as I did, I had the 23rd fastest swim and 26th fastest ride of the 147 or so people competing. If the event had stopped there, I would have been ecstatic about my place. As it happens, there’s the run leg on the back end that has to be added to it. I didn’t quite manage to fare so well in that part. I overtook plenty of people as I ran, but also had a couple overtake me as well. I needed some better motivation I think to kick my run harder earlier in that phase.
In the end I completed my section in 44:33 which I was more than happy with given I’d set myself a target of about 50 mins. The distances weren’t quite what was advertised in the ride and run which helped, but it meant that I’d been about on target and so walked away happy.
Far from my reaction of never again the first time, this time around I’m actually a little disappointed that I don’t get to do it again in say 2 weeks to try and improve on that time! Maybe next year.