No silver lining

It cost the city of Pontiac, Michigan eight years and $55.7 million of your American dollars to build the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium, later the Pontiac Silverdome. Yesterday, 34 years after the Silverdome first opened, it cost a bunch of Canadian business types $583K to buy it off the city, now too broke to afford the $1.5 million annual upkeep on the massive indoor dome. In its time, the Silverdome hosted the Lions in the NFL and the Pistons in the NBA, the 1982 Superbowl, a bunch of 1994 World Cup games, a Papal mass and a Pink Floyd tour. So not all beer and fuckin' skittles then. Unfortunately Pink Floyd can't be blamed for sending the City of Pontiac broke - the Global Financial Clusterfuck and serial incompetence on behalf of Motor City can probably put their hands up there - and it was the Lions moving to bigger digs across town which was the first stage in the Silverdome's abandonment.


The Canadians have plans for a Major League Soccer franchise in the stadium, which is about the only bit of good news here. Not that another MLS team is necessary, or even newsworthy. Just that old stadiums deserve to have people in them. There's something about old, abandoned sporting arenas - like old, abandoned theme parks - that makes them among the saddest places in the world. The World Expo site in Brisbane was the same for the late 80s and early 90s, at least until it was reborn as South Bank.

The theme park analogy isn't chosen lightly. There is nothing left of Australia's Wonderland in Sydney's west. Not a thing. The entire place was levelled. I had no great affection for Wonderland. Had some good times, like on a school trip there in '93 when our man Dawso rode every dodgy, stomach-churning ride he could find with belligerent glee, then contrived to throw up on the bus home. But nothing that could predict the sense of desolation that came along with aerial images of the site after the demo crews had moved in.


Next door to what was once Wonderland is Eastern Creek Raceway, which was built for two reasons: one, to steal the MotoGP off Phillip Island, and two, to replace Amaroo Park, a wonderful little racetrack once described by Nelson Piquet (Senior, the old man of the crashing-F1s-on-purpose muppet) as a mini-Nurburgring but which was put to the sword in the late 90s by the need to build more obnoxious fucking McMansions on prime bushland. So it goes. Oran Park, further west, is about to fall to the same fate. I never got to see racing at Amaroo, but about ten years ago the King of Seed and I caught the V8 Supercars at Oran Park. It was a damn fine place to watch a motor race. It will be missed. Particularly because Eastern Creek is by no means a damn fine place to watch a motor race. Then again, I suspect the Olympic precinct at Homebush might yet turn out to be, even if the sight of a full grid bellowing up Bitupave Hill at Amaroo and teetering into the right-hander over the crest is long lost.


Old racetracks are a personal favourite (of sorts) - quietly happy they've reopened Lakeside, even just as a club venue, which has more charm and history in its entry gates that the benighted bogan hell of Willowbank in Ipswich has in its entire complex - but the same stories could be told for old, abandoned AFL grounds or NRL venues. It's a combination of the sense of history, and the poignancy of failed human endeavour - failed because by definition these places are no longer. A graveyard for human memories, emotions, hopes and dreams. The housing estate that now befouls Amaroo Park, the deserted and cavernous Silverdome, the peeling advertising hoardings of Belmore Oval where Canterbury used to go round. Race circuits have this even more so because often they are graveyards in more than just a metaphorical sense.

I tripped over a bit of racing history last time I was up in the Blue Mountains. In the council's dog-off-lead area, a bit of slightly cleared bushland in a gully behind the town centre, lies Catalina Park. An impossibly narrow, winding rollercoaster of a track (check the photos in this link, seriously) lined by wooden fences still with the paint-shadow outlines of ancient advertising hoardings for Craven A and Dunlop, it hadn't held national touring car championship races since the '60s, when the Mustangs of Pete Geoghegan and Bob Jane were duelling for the title, long before Monaros, Toranas and Falcon GTs fought for supremacy. Even then it was considered too dicey, and was infamous for actually making some drivers carsick mid-race.


Later, after the capabilities of '70s touring cars had outgrown the place, it was used as a rallycross circuit where Peter Brock and Colin Bond used to scare people witless in a V8 powered Holden Dealer Team XU1 Torana nicknamed 'The Beast'. Then or in its previous guises it would have been an amazing place to watch racing. Walking around the circuit, overgrown and seemingly retreating into the grey gums and the Katoomba mist, you could smell the history, damp and poignant, in the air around Catalina.


Or perhaps that was just the fences rotting.

The Doctor is OUT.

Not very PC

The words you are reading, along with all the others written by Your Correspondent since years came with a '2' in front, were typed on a Mac. A MacBook 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB SD RAM, running OSX Leopard, to be precise. All I've owned for the last ten years have been a series of Mac laptops. My honours and PhD theses, various research papers, job applications, wedding invite lists, all the bits of In The Worst Possible Taste which I've read and you haven't, all were written on a Mac. Add to that a series of iPods, and a minor but persistent case of tech-widget-droolage whenever Steve Jobs and his experimental bionic liver unveil the latest and greatest out of Apple HQ in Cupertino, and you could safely presume that as the ad campaign runs, I'm a Mac.

Except I'm not.

Because I didn't choose to be a Mac. And more to the point, I didn't actually pay for any of those Macs. This one was bought off the grant which employs me. Its predecessor, a G4 iBook was a handover from DMDY, procured under similar circumstances. Before that it was a G3 MacBook inherited from my PhD supervisor - it was higher-specced than the base model he was offering to sort for me, and had a swag of not-entirely-paid-for software licences for useful apps like the full version of Photoshop, not that *cough* that would be of any use to someone preparing scientific data for research paper figures.

In fact, the last time I spent any of my own money on a 'puter, to wit the proceeds of selling my first car en route to uni, it was a PC. Pentium 166 MMX. Big fuck-off graphics card. Old-school. 1997 in the house, y'all. And of course there were a couple of workplace interludes on PCs.

So yeah, Apple FanBoi Numero Uno I ain't, or at least ain't got the credentials for. Still, if there's a Mac-PC stoush in the offing, I'm keen to assist. Not because I love Macs... just because I hate PCs. Just because I genuinely do not believe any appliance supposedly designed to make our lives easier could have had more of a history of doing exactly the opposite than the Wintel PC. Think back through the endless, endless catalogue of clusterfucks, of bug-filled beta releases.

And because I was on the losing side on the last big war of the OSs. I'm not a Mac, nor am I a PC. I was an Amiga. Fucking brilliant platform. Fucking boneheaded company. When Amigas were taking it to the PCs - not in terms of market share, though Macs are similarly 'selective in their appeal' (thanks v. much Spinal Tap) to this day - Macs were an afterthought, found only in primary school classrooms, design studios and sheltered workshops. Most of the Mac-PC dynamic echoes the Amiga-PC battlefronts. PCs were computers for all, particularly the stupid. Amigas were for gamers, graphic artists, discerning creatives. They had better graphics, better sound, better processors for gaming applications. But they had thumbless muppets running the company and went tits up. Consoles and dedicated PC gaming systems claimed the Amiga's gaming market, while the reborn Macs - starting with the first of the 'lollipop' designer iMacs in the late '90s, on which my honours thesis was extruded - claimed the creative market. Or the smug wanker market, if you prefer.

AJ, my former fellow soldier from the Amiga-PC wars, is claiming Win7 is all gold and Snow Leopard is a confection of arse. I've pointed out his obvious conflict of interest, given his modelling appearance in the ad campaign above, which is why he's not talking to me at the moment, but to be honest, I don't rate either system. As Leopard has developed from Tiger, so has OSX morphed more into Microsophistry, with second-guessing checkboxes and annoyingly-querying dialogue boxes getting in the way of what used to be the Mac's strongest point: shit just WORKS. Straight off. Out of the box. Without needing to download drivers, consult online help and call tech support in Mumbai. That said, Vista was and is fucking appalling, like drag-racing a road grader with the handbrake on. The most pleasant, workable, flexible and intuitive system I've used in the past six months was a CentOS Linux install on a bioinformatics workstation. Then again it was running dual quad-core processors, had more memory than God and needed a Rolls-Royce Trent XWB jet engine as an cooling fan, so it did have a bit of toe to cut down spinning-pizza-of-death related downtime. But there's that certain whiff to Linuxites, that whiff of... I don't know what you'd call it. Anorak. Parents' basement. Lynx Africa. Really, they're just as dull and punishing as the PCistas, just with that alluring dash of proto-anarchic 'I'm bringing down the system from within, really quietly, so like totally up yours Uncle Bill' which pulls all the chicks. For sufficiently low levels of all.

So, in short, (a) I'll use whatever I'm paid to, (b) Mac users are smug and PC users are dull, bollocks to the lot of 'em; and (c) no matter which platform you use, Microsoft Office will still perform to its key performance aim: to shit you to fucking tears.

The Doctor is OUT.

One shot for glory

Tonight the New Zealand All Whites play Bahrain in a one-shot, winner-take-all playoff to decide which team is going to the 2010 FIFA World Cup Finals in South Africa, and which is a bunch of choking dogs who will be spurned by their nations and forced to seek asylum on a leaky boat off the coast of Indonesia. It's all ON. The Cake Tin in Wellington is completely sold out, the team anthem (fairly catchy as football songs go* despite the awful vid clip featuring fat clownsmiming badly in downtown Auckland) is all over TV and radio, and confidence in the nation's footballing talent (I use that term advisedly) is at an all time high - probably even more so than in 1981 when the All Whites won their first and only trip to the World Cup.

*Though this is damning with very bloody faint praise given the history of same is uniformly appalling, particularly England anthems as outlined here and here


It's traditional, if not a requirement of holding a passport, for Aussies to death-ride any and all Kiwi achievements in sport, largely because they do it so well in return (being ever so balanced a nation, enormous chip on both shoulders) but I'm backing the Whites in this one, even though supporting NZ in any sport feels vaguely sick and wrong. I'm backing the Whites not just because Bahrain are there on cash instead of talent, using their oil money to coach a bunch of ordinary hackers into a well-oiled (sorry) international squad, with the requisite number of 'naturalized' imports to up the skill level. Not just because the NZ squad is full of decent, likeable players from the A-League and good, honest bastards like Ryan Nelsen from Blackburn. Not just because any win for NZ football is a loss for NZ rugby, and that's something everyone can enjoy.

No, I'm backing the Whites because we Aussies know what last-chance, sudden-death World Cup qualifiers are like. They're horrendous. They're miserable and desperate and they fucking kill you to watch them. They suck. And we kinda miss them.


Australia moving into the Asian confederation did both sides of the ditch a huge favour. It meant Australia's world cup qualifying, instead of being hell-for-leather home-and-away playoffs against Uruguay or Argentina or whoever else finished 5th in South American qualifying, was a series of sensible, manageable round-robin fixtures against beatable mid-ranking sides like Oman or China. And it meant NZ not only avoided running into Australia early in qualifying, but ended up with that playoff against the fifth-placed nation, but in Asia, not South America. UR Gay or Maradona's Argies would have been an ugly prospect for the Socceroos, let alone the All Whites, given they smaaaashed our World Cup dreams in 1993 and 2001. Bahrain? That's winnable. Even for the All Whites, who looked handy in a scoreless draw in the away leg in Manama (do dooo do-do-do) Manama (do do-do-do) etc.

Then again, we've been here before, just in gold shirts rather than white ones. The fateful France '98 qualification campaign, where Australia took a precious away goal from a 1-1 draw in Tehran into the home leg of our last-chance-qualifier again Iran, at a heaving, sold-out MCG. And took a two-nil lead, 3-1 on aggregate, into the last twenty minutes of the second half. And lost on 3-3 away goals. I can still see Johnny Warren breaking down on live TV, Les Murray beside him, in the dumbstruck, deafening silence afterwards. We were in France, except we weren't, and wouldn't be. Getting towelled up 3-0 by the Uruguayans in Montevideo in the away leg in 2001 (after Kevin Bloody Muscat's penalty in the home leg put us up 1-0) was just as painful, but somehow, because it happened in the middle of the night on the other side of the world, less immediate. It was only the 2005 penalty shootout win over the same (well, slightly older) UR Gay side which finally exorcised the demons of 30-odd years of misery and got us to a world cup, where we moved our misery and frustration to a new level after our underperforming and scrappy side arsed late goals to squeak past higher-ranked Japan and Croatia in the group stage, then got gypped by a furiously dodgy penalty late in the second round against the eventual winners Italy.


By comparison, qualifying for the Big Show this time round has been a piece of piss. From the last team into Germany 2006, Straya almost became the first to qualify for Sarth Efricor 2010, just edged out by our old mates Japan. It's been great... yet strangely unsatisfying. The drama, and horror, and potential disaster and misery of a LCQ sudden death playoff, just hasn't been there for Australia.

But it will be for New Zealand. Tonight, 7.30pm NZST.
One shot for glory.



The Doctor is OUT.

Position A, Sandy

There's weird doings afoot on my televisual screen, and it's not just the glass of Cooper's Sparky I'm viewing it through. It's that there golfing tournament, the Strayan Masters, in which it is oft said, usually by nasal one-armed golfing drunk Jack Newton, 'The Tradition Continues'. Except, in this year's Masters, the tradition does not continue. It fails to continue. It is, indeed, discontinuous. And there's nothing more profoundly objectionable than discontinuities in one's tradition.

It's not the fault of Tigger, or the decision to get him in for the tourney. Paying three mill to get the golfing world's favourite mobile media circus (and reasonably handy hacker) down under looks like chickenfeed when set against the saturation media coverage, ratings increase, box-office benefits and sponsorship exposure thus produced. It's not even the shift from Huntingdale - the, erm, traditional home of the Masters - to Kingston Heath, the tight and twisty Monaco street circuit of the Melbourne sandbelt.

No, it's the fucking coverage.

Golf should be covered the same way cricket is. By the same people, on the same network, for the rest of time, or until all the presenters wither and die of old age. Any attempt to remove Richie, Bill, Tony and Ian from the Nine cricket commentary team will result in me coming around to your house and setting fire to something important, like your cat, or your pubic hair. I don't care that they're old and shit. They ARE cricket commentary. Conservative, old-fashioned, long-form sports need conservative, old-fashioned, long-form commentary. And so it is with golf. I don't even like golf. I don't play it - not in a form that is recognisable AS golf, anyway - and I don't watch it. Except for the Australian majors, on lazy summer afternoons, with a beer in my hand and an absence of thoughts in my head, listening to the gentle discussion between Seven's commentators. While waiting for the ad break in the cricket to finish so I can flick back to something more watchable, of course.

So what happened when I turn my TV on this afternoon to check out the end of the first round at Kingston Heath?

Fucking Warren Smith. That's what happened.

Warren Smith is a rugby league commentator for Fox. He's OK at that - shouty, random, annoying, but it goes with the territory. He tried being a motorsport commentator, briefly, before someone at Fox actually listened to the playback of him and Kevin Magee dribbling and fumbling through the call of world superbike races and changed the locks on the motorsport studio door.

It doesn't end there, either. Not only do we have a B-grade football commentator, but we have Mark fucking Nicholas and his pink shirts, filling in time before the cricket season. And to top it off, there's the promise of the most egregious man on Australian television, more ubiquitous than chlamydia and equally as entertaining, Eddie McGuire on hosting duties.

There are rules to summer sports coverage. Nine does the cricket and Seven does the golf and the tennis. That is the fucking END of it. Nine doesn't do the golf, because they will only fuck it up. And have, by sticking Collingwood apologists and cricket presenters on screen in place of Sandy Roberts, Pat Welsh and Bwuce McAvaney. Headhunting a couple of colour guys from Seven and ringing-in the Dark Shark from the Golf Channel in the US just ain't gonna cut it.

This is bollocks, and will fail. As sure as Jack Newton swims in circles.

The Doctor is OUT.

Whatareya?

You're a yob
Or you're a wanker
Take your fuckin' choice
So who is your favourite genius
James Hird or James Joyce?
You ever seen a 'live performance' -
Join the wanker club
You thought I meant tabletop dancing -
Well, you're a yobbo bub....
- TISM, 1998



A fair question, well-posed. And as the man says, 'Yob or wanker, wanker or yob, pass me the brush to tar ya; make your choice then live your life, c'mon pal whatareya??'

I made my choice and I live my life. I like beer. I like V8s and footy and bacon and chicks with big boobies. I swear like it's an Olympic sport and I'm in repechage qualifiers for national selection. Farts are funny. I have mates called Moff and Dawso. My ears are still fucked from AC/DC at the Sydney Ent Cent in January 2001, and no, I don't want them back. I have an advanced certificate in RSL carpark circlework. I'm so fucken rural I feel ripped off when TV ad breaks don't contain at least one commercial for cattle dip. Fairly content in D-Town then, as it happens. Basically, there's a sign on the wall and it says Yobbo. You might want to be sure, 'cos you know sometimes words have two meanings, but I can confirm, I am a Yobbo.

But.

See, there's a problem. Cos I drive an Audi. It's an old, crappy one, but it's an Audi - and worse still I BOUGHT it because it was an Audi, and not a Toyota. And I have one of them PhD things, and spend all my time with highly verbose and edjumacated people. And I refuse to drink instant coffee, and think I can cook, and go on about being half-Italian like it's a point of difference between me and the proletariat. And I use big words like proletariat. I'm currently drinking an expensive beer which I suspect to be actually a very cheap beer in an expensive bottle, and I don't really give a shit that I've been gouged hideously by a blatant megabrewery exercise in style over substance. I don't buy cheap supermarket sausages, I buy the expensive ones that appear to have recognisable animal content. I own several Macs, but have never bought a Big Mac. And the last time I was out west (well, more westerly than the 'Switch) I almost got run out of town - or at least lynched on Rosewood station platform - for mildly inferring that most of our fellow Ipswich 500 V8 punters were snaggle-toothed bogans called Cletus who could play 'Duelling Banjos' with their toes as a result of generations of inveterate inbreeding. For which I blame Moff. (The insults, not the inbreeding. He even married someone who wasn't from Queensland. Jesus.)

So maybe TISM were wrong. I know this is blasphemy of the highest order, but it's possible. Maybe the Yob and the Wanker are the true Yin and Yang of the Australian male, and we are all part of the Yobwanker spectrum. As Ween might have put it, There's many colours in the Yobwanker Rainbow. Don't be afraid to let your colour shine.

The Doctor is OUT.