Look at them yo yos, that’s the way you do it

Walking through the downtown of Sydney, I would have expected to see more street entertainers than you end up seeing. There is the usual cast of characters with very little variation. The lineup includes: an American tap dancer who works the corner outside the main grocery store, a Chinese teenager who plays saxophone on top of recorded music, kitty corner to the tap dancer. Down the road in a pedestrian shopping centre is where the competition is the fiercest. One guy wears a tuxedo as he plays the violin with backing tracks. There has been the odd Aboriginal group with didgeridoo players, a few guitarists here and there, but by far my favourite has been the other tap dancing guy. He wears an outfit that looks like he got it from James Brown, tight maroon velour pants with a built in corset, terminating just below the xiphoid process. I struggle to describe the pants, but I think everyone will know exactly what I am talking about. He also has billowy satin sleeves on his shirt. He looks just like the godfather of soul but without the conk. He sort of shuffles around and then asks people to pay him. I enjoyed him more for his commitment to costuming than for his skills. Speaking of mad skills, there was a guy who was playing his guitar the other day, just sitting on a stoop outside the movie theatre. His gimmick wasn’t really great guitar playing; rather while he played he balanced a guitar on his forehead. So he was sitting playing something particularly buskworthy and his second guitar was resting on his head from the headstock, big round end straight up in the air. I watched for a while to see if he would keep it up, and yes, as long as the song continued, he kept balancing his guitar. An unexpected skill to be sure, though judging by his outstretched hat not particularly lucrative. I guess like Bryan, he should have practiced until his fingers bled, not just his forehead.

I see London, I see France

Any newcomer to Australia can report that trying to pick up a new sport to watch can be very confusing. Watching on television with no one to explain the intricacies of the rules can be tricky at best. This in mind, I wanted to see some rugby in person, so I went to watch the footy this weekend. Here in New South Wales when you say footy you mean Australian Rugby League as opposed to Australian Rugby Union and Australian Rules Football. The rules are different for all of these games and in the case of ARL, the pitch is vastly different. Australian Rules Football is by far the wierdest of these sports from a North American standpoint. They say that watching on television doesn't do it justice because there's something like forty guys on the field all playing game of 500. You score by kicking the ball through some uprights, but in order to get close enough so that your punt will be close, they pass the ball by hitting it with a fist, then sometimes they run, sometimes they dribble it and sometimes they pass by kicking and catching. There seems to be no consistent rules as to when you're allowed to do what, so it is hard to appreciate the nuances. Of course any time a ball gets close, it becomes a big jump off for the ball, complete with a whole lot of mid-air violence. Just a few weeks back one of the biggest stars of the game was suspended because out of the blue he swung at an opponent with his fist and knocked him out. Apparently this is outside of the rules, but there wasn' t exactly a huge public outcry, so maybe maneuvres like that are merely out of style. But I digress, back to the footy. So this year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Rugby League. To honour this they have been having celebrations all winter and had a big match on the weekend. It was Australia versus New Zealand, so presumably the best players in the sport from each nation. The Centenary Test Match as it was called was held at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Friday night. I saw a news report earlier in the week that was bemoaning the state of the game due to poor ticket sales. Apparently a similar game had taken in 80,000 fans in Victoria a few years back, but there were only 10,000 tickets sold at the writing of the article. I have watched a few games and can now recognize some of the players. The game is sort of an abbreviated version of the game that the world plays as rugby, and it sort of plays like a flowing game of American football, without the equipment or the forward passing or the stopping to set up new plays and the like. I assumed that I would be able to get in without advance notice, so I walked there to arrive just on time. I ended up having to wait in line for about twenty minutes when I got there, but I got my ticket and managed to get the whole game. I have to admit this was one of the most boring games I have ever seen live. There is no doubt that these are very athletic men and it is a tough sport, but the game was really boring. It didn't help that Australia was up 22-0 at the half, but it was even boring in the first half. The first play of the game was an exciting try, but the rest was pretty utilitarian footy. I was sitting with a guy who watches a lot of footy, and he admitted that the sport in general wasn't very exciting for spectators. He was a German who really enjoyed soccer, and sort of admitted that he watched Rugby League just cause it was there. I have seen games in the NFL and the CFL that are boring too I suppose, but it was really disappointing for this to be so lame. The crowd was only there in the second half because they paid so much for their ticket that they didn't want to leave early. Luckily there was a little excitement near the end of the game. With a minute left a guy went streaking through the arena. He ran from end to end, evading the security personnel until he slipped on the grass (should have worn the birthday suit cleats) and they piled on and beat him down. Immediately the big screen flashed a notification that anybody going onto the field of play would be fined $5500, but that didn't discourage the crowd who had waited for a long time for any excitement. The fans got really into it; they were cheering him on and when he raised his head to salute the crowd they gave him a standing ovation. The security staff were walking him towards the exit and one guy was trying to keep up and hold a towel around his crotch. Our hero figured this out and successfully thrusted his pelvis until he was free, free, free at last. He proceeded to gyrate as well as anyone could while surrounded by burly men and in handcuffs. The crowd let out a roar, but the security guys were embarrassed so they beat him some more. They then got a full body towel and duct tape to cover him up. One of the guards jobs seemed to be holding a hat on the guys head, presumably to reduce the likelihood of becoming a populist hero. Before leaving the field, our young champion bucked the hat off his head and saluted the crowd with a cocked eyebrow. The crowd ate it up and cheered until he was well out of sight. It was nice to see an engaged crowd in the end and the post game deconstruction was given some new material. Gave some fresh meaning to a naked bootleg.

Revenge of the Sandwich Artist

Last night I had to stay downtown for supper and I was really hungry so I decided to eat at a fast food place. For some reason, Burger King has had some significant problems with their trademarking, so here in Australia it is known as Hungry Jacks. The meal offerings are the same as in North America, the logo is the same, but the title is different. As in other big cities in the world, the service sector is dominated by recent arrivals to the country. Service personnel generally have a rather tenuous grasp on English, so that compounded with my funny accent results in pretty bad service. At Subway, the staff seem to be entirely Chinese while the Hungry Jacks seem to have mostly Persians, I don’t know why. At Subway, when the sandwich artist offers you salad, she is referring to lettuce. It took me a while to learn that I was the problem in the curious incident of the green pepper: I was trying to explain that I wanted green pepper on my sandwich and got a blank stare. Using my pantomiming skills I was able to simulate the planting, growth and harvest of the green pepper, including a particularly clever visual representation of photosynthesis, and I got my green pepper. I later looked at the menu documentation stuck to the wall and learned that they are called capsicums here, and not green pepper. I looked the rube then. Anyway, back to Hungry Jacks, I wanted a Whopper meal. The till person repeated, “a double Whopper meal?” I said, “no, I want just a single Whopper meal”. This quickly became a continuous loop with no feedback, only a time constraint. Eventually she ordered my hamburger; I was sure we had it right, but when I got it, sure enough it was a double Whopper. It may offend the beef farming contingent, but that was too much meat. I didn’t want to get back into a discussion over the distinction between double and single, so I ate quietly, silently considering the latest scandal in the Indian Cricket Premiership.

Bob’s Boomerang Boutique

As I was walking the other night, I happened upon a storefront that offered boomerangs. Nothing else. Not even novelty nerf or other foamy boomerangs, just hand carved and painted wooden boomerangs. I was surprised that somebody could earn enough to justify having a store serving only the boomerang market. Most souvenir shops pack a pile of junk into them, like cheap T-shirts that say “G’Day Mate”, or sunhats with hundreds of little corks hanging off them, or snow globes with a model of the Sydney Opera House, or a collector’s plate depicting the America’s Cup win of 1983, those sorts of things. At the very least I would expect a store selling boomerangs would also try to hit the dijeridoo crowd, capitalizing on the aboriginal artifact motif, but this one only sold boomerangs. I was looking to see if there were any boomerangs of the sharpened steel kind like in the Road Warrior when the guy’s fingers were chopped off trying to catch it, but no, only blunt wooden death sticks. Perhaps the proprietor tried some other product but he never got the return he was looking for.

Naval gazing and heroes amazing

So I went for a long walk in the city this weekend. I was checking out the new neighbourhood. Apparently it is a rarity in that it houses really rich people, very average people and some high falutin’ types. Apparently I am only a few blocks from Russell Crowe’s house, but one block from rent controlled low income folk. There’s also a bunch of areas where homeless people sleep at night. It is neat to see homeless walking step in step down the street with their well heeled neighbours, everyone ignoring each other cordially. So I had a pleasant walk around the wharf, and saw a huge naval frigate docked. Up in the cabins there were people partying, complete with loud screaming and music. On the main deck there was a poor schlub sailor who evidently wasn’t invited to the party. He looked a little glum, and of course had to spend his night watch listening to the sound of revelry from up in the officer’s areas. As I walked, this racing motorcycle came around a tight corner and lost his line, ended up sliding past me on his side. I don’t know what it’s called when your tire slips out from under you, but I know when you’re skiing and you lose your edge, it is pretty unpleasant Anyway, I looked on with horror and got ready to help the guy if his torso had turned into hamburger (actually here, it would be called minced beef), but he just got up and surveyed the damage, brushed himself off and tore away. He didn’t even look up to acknowledge my concern. I kept walking along these swanky looking pubs. I noticed that while the clientele all were wearing tight jeans with pointy white shoes, the bouncers had a little more concern for the functionality of their footwear. They were wearing pretty sensible looking boots and shoes, presumably the better for fighting. I know I have often considered the pickle I would be in if I were to find myself in a compromised situation having to fight my way out of a jam wearing flip flops. I walked past the Romanian consulate and then sat down on a bench intent on considering the bats flying overhead. Bats are so cool, and because they’re black, they are really hard to see well. Any bats that I’ve seen before Sydney have been small and frantic, kind of like sparrows, but the bats here are big and graceful, like hawks. They soar overhead silently and are just generally neat. The shadowy nature of the bat had me thinking about superheroes, and how the creators of Batman really hit the nail on the head having this guy clothed in mystery, able to hide in the shadows and soar through the sky (and when they pass the moon, their silhouette makes that cool shape). Although, I never quite understood how they managed to get the bat signal to show up on the sky as it was being projected onto a screen. It strikes me that without anything to terminate the light beam it would just beam into space and you would never really be able to make it out, and of course it could be stopped by hitting a cloud, but then it would only light up that cloud. And come to think of it, I would guess that diffraction effects would serve to blur the edges of the signal.
Anyway, I think bats are really neat to watch, especially because you can never really get a good image of them, sort of like knowing a person: you may watch them and think you see them; you may see glimpses of beauty and glimpses of ugliness but you’ll never see the whole picture. But I digress. Thinking about superheroes reminds me of when my friend Dave went to Manhattan and said it became clear to him how the creators of Spiderman could conceive of a guy making time by swinging on the skyscrapers overhead. If you don’t have a vast expanse of skyscrapers, it doesn’t make sense, but here of course it does. I don’t really see any easily observable crime though, so Spidey might have to resort to Head and Shoulders to get that tingling feeling.