ReadWrite-grogsgamut

And so tomorrow night begins in my house the annual, we’re not going to get as much sleep as we planned fortnight, for Wimbledon is here again.

My memories of Wimbledon growing up are stronger than those of the Australian Open. I can remember being allowed at the age of 9 to stay up and watch Borg play McEnroe in the 1981 final. I wouldn’t be able to tell you who won the Australian Open that year without first having a squiz at Wikipedia (it was Johan Kreik).

This is due to the fact that even from a young age I had a deep sense of embarrassment about the Australian Open when it was held at Kooyong. I wrote about this a while ago so I won’t revisit again suffice to say that the 1981 men Wimbledon’s Final is an all time classic, and the Australian men’s final was between Johan Kreik and Steve Denton.

The thing about Wimbledon is that much like the US Masters Golf at Augusta National it somewhat irks my egalitarian sensibilities – the Royal box, the wearing of white, the bloody Kipling poem above the door (please John Newcombe, don’t read it out to us again, we get it – you’re inspired by it). But all that doesn’t matter – it’s Wimbledon. Sure it’s so full of snobbery that you fancy that if you spent too many days there you’d walk out of the ground with a new surname that ends with hyphen Smyth and a wife suddenly calling herself Lady Felicity, but somehow you don’t care – mostly because there is just something special about it – and maybe it is the snobbery.

There must be something about Wimbledon, because why else would European player like Becker, Lendl, Federer who would have grown up on clay and hard court have this insane devotion to the tournament? Poor Lendl drove himself to such distraction over the event that a guy with an amazing serve and forehand tried to volley in order to win it (note – he was born 20 years too early – Lendl would have won a heap of Wimbledons if he played in this era).

There must be something about Wimbledon to have people staying up past midnight watching each year. Thankfully this year the tournament is being telecast by Channel 7 who are making use of their digital channels to have coverage starting when play starts each day. No longer will we have to put up with Channel Nine treating viewers like scum and not showing the tennis until after some re-run of CSI Miami. 

Is the special thing about Wimbledon the lawn? For me it is. Growing up in the country I was fortunate enough to have a lawn tennis court in our backyard. I think I was a 30 per cent better player on lawn than I was on hard-court. I loved diving for volleys, loved how a backspin backhand could just skid through, loved the smell of the freshly cut lawn (which had been freshly cut by me – it was one of my chores). And now as a pretty avid watcher of tennis on Foxtel the love of grass remains. It is the visceral sense you get when you switch on the TV and instead of them running around on the blue hard courts or the red clay, you see that wonderful green surface. It feels like real tennis.

It even sounds like real tennis. There is no squeaking of shoes like on hard court. There’s no thwacking of racquets on the bottom of shoes to get rid of clay stuck in the soles. All there is is that pure sound of the tennis ball hitting the racquet (oh yeah, and the grunting…)

And even though it is only 3-4 weeks each year that grass rules, that has not caused Wimbledon to decline in anyway. It is not a tournament won by lucky players who only thrive on grass – here’s the list of those who have won the title this century:

Men:
Pete Sampras
Goran Ivanisevic
Lleyton Hewitt
Roger Federer (x6)
Rafael Nadal (x2)

Women:
Venus Williams (x5)
Serena Williams (x4)
Amelia Mauresmo
Maria Sharapova

No stragglers in either list. You win here, you can discount luck.

Even more so can luck be discounted now that the racquets and string technology is such that you don’t really need to be a grass court specialist to win here – though that helps (to whit Venus William’s 5 wins – I would hesitate to call Federer a grass court specialist given he’s won 5 US Opens and 4 Aussie Opens).

In the women’s game this is even more exacerbated where you don’t even need to be a great server (because well, holding your serve in women’s tennis seems to be an achievement in itself).

To pick the winner this year from the women’s draw is nigh on impossible. Serena and Venus Williams are back from long lay-offs with injuries (a year in the case of Serena). Had Serena been playing regularly you would have her as the favourite, but she is very rusty – she got knocked out in the second round of the Eastbourne tournament last week (admittedly by Vera Zonerava). The other issue is that Venus is now 31 and Serena is 30 in September, and well, time waits for no one. Sure 2-3 years ago they could swan around the tour each year and just get excited for the Grand Slams, but the days are tougher now.

I think any of the top 10 seeds can win it. I am not a huge watcher of Women’s tennis, so my tip is much more speculative, but given her strong performance at the French Open, I’m going to tip Maria Sharapova here. This is not good for Sam Stosur who is scheduled to meet her in the 4th round. Stosur, with her great serve, should love Wimbledon. The only problem is when it really gets down to the nitty gritty, her serve is not always so great.

The men’s event? Forget anyone not in the top 4. It is Nadal, Djokovic, Federer or Murray. The rest are playing to hopefully get to a semi final, but in all likelihood to make up the number in the quarter finals.

Of the Top 4, Nadal is due to meet Thomas Berdych in the quarters. Berdych lost to Nadal in last year’s final in straight sets. I would expect the same here. Djokovic looks likely to meet Soderling. That is a tough ask, and in any other year I would give Soderling a big chance. But this year Djokovic is at another level, and it is not a level Soderling can reach. Federer is set to meet Djokovic in the semi, but before then he will probably meet David Ferrer of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tsonga looks like a guy who should play grass well but he has only made the Quarter Finals once. And the last of the top four, Andy Murray is due to meet Andy Roddick or Gail Monfils in the Quarter Finals. Based on how he dealt with Roddick at Queens last week, he should get though to meet Nadal in the semi.

But this year’s tournament has an added aspect. Since 2 February 2004 either Federer or Nadal have been Number 1 – that’s 387 weeks. How long is that? The next longest streak by two players Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg who from 29 July 1974 to 2 March 1980 held the number one spot for 292 weeks – or 95 weeks shorter than the Fed-Nadal streak.

How long have these two players been at the top? Here’s the Top 10 prior to Federer taking over in February 2004:

Yep the tennis world has changed a bit since then.

But this tournament is a big chance to see a change, and Novak Djokovic could become the 25th Number One male tennis player of the Open era.

Given the way the tennis rankings work where points last for 12 months, currently Nadal is on 12,070 points to Djokovic’s 12,005. But as they lose the points they won at last year’s Wimbledon once this event finishes, the more accurate way to see where things are at is to take away the points they won last year. 

Last year Nadal won and so he loses the 2,000 points he won for that taking him back to 10,070 points. Djokovic on the other hand only reached the semi-final and so he only loses 720 points, meaning he is sitting on 11,285.

That means he starts the tournament effectively 1,215 points ahead of Nadal. Given that the runner-up only gets 1,200 points, Nadal must win the tournament to retain number one. Even if Djokovic loses in the first round, Nadal must win the tournament to stay number one.

If Djokovic gets to the final he will be number one even if Nadal beats him.

Below is the breakdown of points for the top 4 players – with the score they will be on if they reach certain rounds.

As you can see Federer is small chance to move up to Number 2 and no chance to fall to Number 4. Even if he loses in the first round and Murray wins the whole thing, Murray will still be 735 points behind Federer. If Federer wins the thing, he would need Nadal to lose in the Semi (or worse) for him to go above Nadal (ie Federer would be the new number 2 and Nadal number 3).

So if you are a Djokovic or Federer fan you’ll be cheering for Murray to take out Nadal in the semis.

If you are just a tennis/sports fan, it won’t matter too much, because if these four get to the semi-finals, you know you’re going to see three amazing games of tennis (the two semis and the final). And also by that stage, you’ll be sleep deprived.

But hey, it’s Wimbledon. It’s worth it.

Today the news filtered through that there was more to Andrew Bolt’s “all about me” tip and prediction at the end of yesterday’s Insiders. It was reported by Amanda Meade in The Oz that he was in talks with Channel 10 for his very own show!

Well done Andrew, finally you get a chance to come about from under the bushel where you’ve been hiding all these years, as Les Kendall would say, “You’ve got a light in you boy. Let it shine!”

Very quickly after the news came through , Possum on Twitter, fresh off his success last week starting up the #TonyTonight Twitter meme, came up with #boltsnewshow – which allowed the obviously biased evil leftist Twitter to go slightly mad with suggestions for what Bolt’s new show would be called, and it quickly became the top trending topic on Twitter in Australia.

Given I’m a bit light on things to write about today, I’m taking the standard MSM line of just grabbing stuff from Twitter. So in that vein, some of the best were:

@B_Natural: Australia's Got Malice
@matthewbevan: Border Insecurity
@AusDude71: Against the Wind Farm
@upulie: Talkin' 'bout my Not Stolen Generation
@KathyReid: Incite
@Bor_Seyah: Top Fear
@madcatjo2point0: Steve Price Is Right
@alexmillier: Who wants to be a dill on air?
@crazyjane13: So You Think You Can Rant
@jonaholmesMW: Emission possible

Apologies to those missed – there were over 4000 of them, and there were a few repeats, (Top Fear got a few mentions), so apologies as well if you think I’ve given a line to someone else.

Personally though, I think such shows are aiming too low. Indeed I hope Channel 10 seizes this opportunity to give Bolt a chance to branch out and show off his thespian chops. I see Bolt playing a detective – sort of Bolt P.I. – where each week he has new and exciting sexy adventures where the culprit is invariably a Somali warlord living the high life on the dole in a two bedroom flat in Footscray.

If detective work ain’t his caper, perhaps Bolt MD, would be more his style. Instead of the tired old “lupus” being the standard cause of illness, the team of highly trained physicians at Robert Menzies Memorial Hospital would be stumped each week until the patient casually announces, “Hey you know, I really only started feeling ill when this family of asylum seekers moved in next door”.

And if all else fails, The Andrew Bolt Variety Hour would be sure to get the ratings soaring. Where Don Lane had Uri Gellar, Bolt could get in his very own climate scientists who could show us how if you hold a graph a certain way the curve magically starts to bend down. His slightly flirty repartee with guests Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen each week would be sure to be the topic of giddy conversation at the water coolers the next morning. And with Andrew ending each night singing one of his favourite tunes – “A Whiter Shade of Pale” perhaps – well heck, I doubt you could get better entertainment anywhere this side of a Blankety Blanks repeat (the Daryl Somers version).

***

So seriously (really – you want to be serious about this?), will his show be a success? Well who the hell knows – for a start we don’t even know what it is to be. If his MTR ratings though are anything to go by, Channel 10 is taking a big risk. Bolt on TV seems to be best suited when he is the second banana – the guy who is there to say something outrageous and have a go at someone else – sort of the political equivalent of Sam Newman on The Footy Show. Now there may be lots of people who watch The Footy Show who say Sam is the best thing about it (and equally many who say he is the worst), but I doubt The Sam Newman Show would rate – and you have to figure if such a show would rate Channel 9 would have given it a shot by now.

I’ve watched Bolt on Insiders these many years – and I have no doubt he gets more of a reaction than other panellists – but I have only watched him on Insiders because he was on Insiders – ditto Piers Ackerman and others. I don’t watch the 7pm Project, (ABC News is on), and so when I see announced on Twitter that he is on that show I don’t feel any need switch over to be outraged. Ditto his appearances on The Today Show. If he started appearing on ABC Breakfast I’d probably make a comment, but I don’t ever switch over to Channel 9 to see what zany hijinks he is going to be up to today with Karl Stefanovik.

So if is to be a success I think he is going to need a bloody good support act – Bolt leading the discussion is pretty dull, because as you can see when he has been on Insiders, Bolt leading the discussion means “enough about you, here’s what I think”. No doubt a few (and probably me – if it doesn’t clash with something I usually watch) will tune in to the first episode for curiosity value, however it is amazing how a big reputation and audience in one medium does not transfer to TV – think Alan Jones Live, which lasted a whole 13 weeks.

But hey let’s not pre-judge a show before it has even been officially announced!

Good luck Andrew – here’s hoping you can be our very own Glenn Beck.

***

In a bit of house keeping – there won’t be a blog post tomorrow, I’m meeting up with a mate who has spent the last 4 months touring round the middle east. Apparently some interesting things have happened in that area of late…

A few week’s back when Andrew Bolt was on “Insiders” I let fly a few tweets about him. He didn’t like that, so he had a pretty laughable go at me on his blog.

He was back today. Thankfully for the sake of my day, I didn’t bother to watch most of it – I only tuned in just in time for Mike Bowers and Talking Pictures. The Twitter commentary was actually more antagonistic towards Bolt than even usual, and so it was with great trepidation I watched the replay on iView.

I think Bolt’s opinions are pretty much based on purposeful ignorance and bias. But that’s fine, he’d probably say the same about mine. However, today’s show highlighted what has become more prevalent in his recent appearances – his contempt for the other panellists and even of Barrie Cassidy the host – and the belief that the panellists are there to answer his questions.

I know it is a shock to think that a guy who has a blog on the Herald Sun website, a column in every news.ltd paper, and who appears regularly on the Today Show, and also on the 7pm Project, as well has a daily gig on MTR that he plugs each day on his blog is not self-effacing, but there you go.

As a long time “Insiders” watcher, I have seen Bolt change how he treats his appearances. For example, in 2007 as the Howard Govt headed for defeat, he would give his view, do his usual thing of repeating things he had already written in his blog that week (his statements are always pretty predictable) but basically engage in good robust discussion.

I disagreed back then with 99% of what he said and thought him a fool, but at least the discussion was mostly interesting, and it wasn’t all about Andrew.

Now he just sees “Insiders” as yet another opportunity for him to run his agenda.

It is boring, it is pointless, and it is killing a show which oddly Bolt decided to make reference to its 10 year run at the end of today’s show – oddly because it seemed again to be more about his appearing on the show for 10 years than the actual show’s length.

It is all very sad because I used to absolutely love the show – even when Bolt was on. Back then I would never miss an episode. Now as a rule I record the show, sleep in and watch it later – if at all. Last week’s I totally skipped. Rather than affection, now I mostly view it with sad pity.

Barrie Cassidy does not like Twitter, and probably never reads the feeds, but someone need to tell him that Bolt is now laughing at him. And worse, that Bolt is now killing his show. Today, Mark Kenny and Lenore Taylor were treated with sanctimonious contempt by Bolt whenever the topic got on to the Greens or climate change, and if that is now the point of Insiders, then it really is time for it to be put out to pasture. 

Last year Annabel Crabb on Twitter replied to people complaining about Bolt being on Insiders again that “there’s no show without Punch”. And it was true - in the past his different view was borderline entertaining, because at least he would keep to arguing the policy or the politics (mostly that – policy, ain’t a big thing on Insiders). And such a show should have differing opinions.

But now it is just him challenging the others to answer his questions, and sneer at them if they don’t give him a yes or no answer in 10 seconds.

The lack of respect he showed Taylor, Kenny and Cassidy today was enough for me to stop watching. I knew there was nothing new I would learn, and I have better things than watch a guy be rude to other people and then laugh while doing it.

Lenore’s Taylor’s exasperated look to Cassidy after yet another of Bolt’s interruptions and contemptuous remarks, spoke for many of us.

The Australian recently has been running a rather funny little campaign to make it seem like its Sunday morning show on Sky, “Australian Agenda” is shaping the week’s agenda. It isn’t yet, but “Insiders” used to be the show. It was not watched by many, but those who mattered did watch it because not only would the interviews battle with Laurie Oakes’s Sunday interviews for importance, but the discussion by journalists on the show would give insight into how the media was viewing the political battle – and thus what the political parties were doing right or wrong in getting their message across (there’s more to be said about this point, but I’ll leave that for another day) .

Now it is hardly worth watching – rarely is anything new revealed; never is anything learned.

And when Bolt is on, it is not at all worth watching, because Bolt thinks it is all about him. Someone needs to tell Barrie that Insiders is not all about Bolt, but he is a big part of its decline (there’s more to the decline, but I’ll leave that for another day).

I know this won’t make a lick of difference, and I’m guessing the ABC don’t care about the impact Bolt has on the show. In reality having Bolt on is a nice cover for Mark Scott when he fronts up at Senate estimates and needs to counter claims by Eric Abetz that the ABC is biased to the left.

I am obviously from the left, but with regards to “Insiders”, I’ve left as well. To be honest, I’m not even that sad about it – sleeping in on Sunday is pretty good really!

***

Over in America things are getting fun with the Presidential election. A plethora of Republican Party non-candidates are circling around trying to decide whether or not they will officially enter the race. Most of them seem to be more interested in appealing to the right wing of the Republican Party than the centre. That may be great for winning the nomination, but it’s pretty terrible in term so winning the election.

The most bizarre of these non-candidates is Donald Trump. Trump, who it is pretty obvious will not run for election at all – as if this guy is ever going to do anything that won’t make him money – has decided to boost his credentials by bringing up the “birther” argument – namely that Obama was not born in the US and thus cannot be President. It would be funny if it were not so sad. But even in the sadness there is the laughs – and there are plenty in this interview with right wing talk show host Laura Ingraham.

Apparently Trump thinks it is odd that someone puts a birth notice in the paper announcing the birth of their son!

By the way – here’s Obama’s birth certificate:

Trump may have ok polling in media polls, but Real Clear Politics isn’t even including him yet in its summary of polling of potential candidates. My guess – he’s a joke candidate who is just trying to beef up his profile in order to make some more money, because well, that’s what he’s done for the last 30 years. 

Jon Stewart of course has been having lots of fun with it all – referring to the place the right wing republicans are trying to appeal to as “Baseistan”. At least here’s one show that’s certainly not in decline

Just a quick one tonight, because once a gain life interrupts.

I know this makes it a few Fridays in a row (so much for my advice of being regular) without a post, but I swear I will be back next Friday (now if you could just come up with an idea for me to write on, that’d be great).

In place of a real post, let me take the lazy way out and show some videos.

Like many Gen Xers in the early 1990s, for me life on Saturday nights meant sitting in front of the TV and watching The Late Show before heading out to the pub (where invariably a few mates and I would retell the skits from that night’s The Late Show – yeah I was pretty boring). The Working Dog guys back when they were the D-Generation – and permanently “undergraduate” – were must see TV.

I have the Champagne Comedy DVD set and at least once a year I’ll get it out and go through it. Usually however this ends we me thinking, “How could that be nearly 20 years ago? Where has my life gone?”.

My favourite segments were the interviews with (usually) Rob Sitch doing some absurd impression. The interviews have held up incredibly well, my favourite of all time however was the one with John Hewson:

A close runner up was the immortal Imran “like a tiger” Khan:

I also liked it when in the last series they set aside a bit more time to do a short-film like pieces. My favourite of these (perhaps because I now work in the film policy area of the public service) was Warren Perso: The Last Aussie Auteur. I’ll still every now and then let out a “Listen to me Barry! Listen to me!”. People of course then look at me oddly, so I do try to keep it to a minimum.

Geez, I wish we had a show like it now.

And lastly (and not The Late Show related – but still in the Gen-X wheelhouse) Tom Cowie from Crikey linked to this today on Twitter – it is a brilliant little melody by Fredde Gredde of some songs from The Simpsons. And as with anything good about The Simpsons they all come comes from the first half dozen seasons (yeah there’ll be a post on that topic one day…). If you like it check out his medley of TV themes:

Have a great weekend.

I am not by nature a hoarder. Sure I have never thrown out a novel, but that is more due to my book addiction than anything else. I’m not one for keeping too many things “just in case”. If I haven’t thrown out something old and long since unused, it is more likely due to my laziness at walking the approximately 23 steps to the wheelie bin outside than to any hoarding tendencies.

Pretty much the only collections I have are of books, DVDs CDs and magazines.

Now the magazine collection I have however is pretty limited. I don’t keep every magazine I buy. A Who magazine will find its way to the trash pile just as quickly as will yesterday’s newspaper. But I do find it hard to throw out movie or music magazines. I keep them because I find them fascinating sources of popular history. The New Weekly types of magazines are for the most part instantly trashable (and to be honest they rarely find their way inside our house in the first place), but magazines like Rolling Stone, Mojo, Empire and the dearly departed except for on the web, Premiere, offer wonderful snapshots of culture through my lifetime. I keep them not only because I will occasionally flick through them (though this is rare) but more so because I figure my daughters may one day like to read them. I know I would have loved to read old magazines of my parents about The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, or the latest release film from the 1963.

I don’t know if they even had such magazines, but if they did I would have liked them to keep them. And so even when I was in my early 20s and in no way thinking about having children I kept these magazines. It was actually a precipitous decision because when in my early 30s I did a PhD on Hollywood satires, I actually cited some articles from my old collection of Empire and Premiere magazines.

I don’t buy the Empire magazines anymore – I did buy about the first 20 of the Australian edition, but found it was a bit lightweight, and too much a fan boy mag. There’s only so often you can talk about how great is Star Wars… And Rolling Stone? I can’t remember the last time I bought it – 2003 maybe?

The other magazine of my teenage and early 20s was Time. Before the internet, this was my best source of international news, and when I lived in Japan for a year in 1989, each week I used to catch a  train to the next town over which had a large bookshop that sold English magazines, and got my copy. I didn’t keep that many, which is a shame because 1989 was a year in a 100.

Do you know where you were when you heard the Berlin Wall came down? I remember exactly.

It was at the Isehara train station in Japan. I was there waiting to meet a Canadian mate who was fellow exchange student. We were off to Tokyo for the night (Shinjuku to be precise). When he got off the train he had a copy of The Japan Times (the best English newspaper, in my opinion). I asked him if there was any news. He said not really; talked a bit about the hockey scores, mentioned some info about the lasted Sumo tournament, and then, “Oh yeah, the Berlin Wall came down”.

As two fairly politically aware teenagers who took life and world affairs oh so very seriously we then proceeded to shout and scream and jump up and down celebrating right there on the platform of the train station, with Japanese staring at us and edging ever so slightly away from where we were.

We then spent the rest of the evening drinking Kirin Beer and talking about what it all meant. (Is there anything better than to be young and oh so very serious?)

That week I bought this copy of Time, and knew I was never going to throw it out. Growing up I couldn’t conceive of the Wall coming down, and given what had happened in China only a couple months earlier that year, it still seemed inconceivable. This cover still bring out the giddy, politically serious youth in me. It is an odd feeling as well, because I had always wanted to get to Berlin and see the Wall, and at this point I knew that dream was never going to happen.  What is stunning now is that the Wall had been up for 28 years, and it has now been down for 21. That means there are people at university who were not alive when there was a thing called the Cold War. Amazing.

It also reminds me of another thing I thought back then – those Berlin youth take their fashion very seriously. These guys on the Wall could have been getting ready to pose for a Benetton advert. The citizens of Cairo this week will never have a hope of being so well dressed!

I bought the People magazine on the right from Camp Zama Army Base. I was there as guests of a couple Americans who had got us passes to watch an American Football game played between the base team and a local team (the score was not close). I bought it at the PX – which might as well have been a 7-Eleven in America – not one bit of Japanese merchandise was for sale.

At the time I thought the 80s were the greatest decade ever. The 60s? Pah, get in your box, baby boomers. Looking back I now prefer the 90s (because of course you need to rank these things) – but that is more because my life was more interesting in the 90s (oh and the music was better).

I kept this mag and re-read it quite often, and could never bring myself to throw it out if only because it had lots of trivia about the 80s – such as the fact that in 1980 only 37,000 Walkmans had been sold, but by 1988 there had been 25 million sold. I mean honestly, how can you throw out something like that?

It is now an historical relic, and thus I keep it tattered cover and all. And how scary is it that of the people featured on the cover, Donald Trump is the one who has arguably had the best last 10 years?

Ah Madonna.

Now I have to say growing up I was huge a Madonna fan. And in 1991 she turned it up a notch an outraged the censors (well sort of).

The Hot issue of Rolling Stone that year featured her in a photo series taken by Steven Meisal that saw her doing all sorts of outrageous things – dressing as a man and dancing with a woman! How decadent and boundary pushing!!!

What is most sad though is I probably bought this magazine as much for the article on Ratcat as I did for the Madonna interview with Carrie Fisher.

Oh Ratcat, you just never really kicked on did you?

Pity.

Looking at he charts at the back of this issue I see the top 5 albums that month were Ratcat “Blind Love”, James Reyne “Electric Digger Dandy”, Jimmy Barnes “Two Fires”, REM “Out of Time” and Daryl Braithwaite “Rise”. Ahem.

It was August 1991, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” would be released in September, and the music world would be changed.

This issue is thus like a last gasp of the 1980s. But it also gave us an insight into the future with an article on Philips latest new thing – the Digital Compact Cassette: “DCC is a thoroughly researched project with high consumer appeal and a pile of potential in the marketplace” . Yep. Good luck with that.

My God the world changes in 16 years.

Back then, there’s fresh, all jokey Mel Gibson bringing on the laughs behind the set of Maverick. How’s that image going Mel?

I started reading Premiere in 1993, but I can’t find the first copy I bought which featured a cover story on the movie Hero starring Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia.

I loved the issues that came out featuring the summer movie preview. They used to try and work out which films would be hits, and which would bomb. Rather bravely they would rank 20 films according to their predicted box office.

This year in 1994, they believed that True Lies would be Number 1 (it came 3rd), The Lion King to come second (it did), and Maverick to come 3rd (it finished the year 12th). Worse still it had the stinkers, I Love Trouble, Renaissance Man and City Slickers 2 to come 4th, 5th and 6th. They ended up 44th, 57th and 32nd).

The Number 1 film that year, Forrest Gump, they had coming 11th, with the suggestion it could be “the summer sleeper”.

One of the main reasons I kept the issue, and re-read it often, was the excellent article by Peter Biskand on the making of Chinatown. The article would later be reproduced pretty much word for word in his book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It was brilliant journalism, and the lack of that type of writing is why I don’t bother with film magazines anymore.

As the character in the dreadful Generation X film, Reality Bites, played by Winona Ryder says with great understatement, “Melrose Place is a really good show”.

Of course it was. No, I’ll go further: it was THE great show of the early to mid 1990s. Before Friends and Seinfeld took over the zeitgeist, you needed to watch this show. A spin off from Beverly Hills 90210, it was such a guilty pleasure that it even crossed over into Seinfeld, with the great episode where Jerry takes a lie detector test to try and prove he has never watched it (tip from George – “It’s not a lie if you believe it”).

Many a Monday night (OK I’m guessing there, I am pretty sure it was Monday night) was spent with friends watching it and bagging the show the whole time. It was a show that demanded to be watched with a group of friends. Oh Alison, you useless pushover! Give up, girl, Billy is never going to want you. Oh Michael, you’re so bad. Jo? C’mon, Jake is not for you. And Oh. My. God. Did you just see the scar on Kimberly’s head??!!!

My sister during the early-mid 90s lived in London, and in my letters to her I used to give her updates on MP – in fact I think they were the only reason she wanted me to write. In the years before the web and sites like Television Without Pity, my relating the adventure of “I-need-a-man-Amanda” (played by Special Guest Star, Heather Lockear) and the others living at the apartment complex were the only way she could keep tabs on her favourite show. It truly is a different world now.

That issue also listed the Hot Actor and Actress of the 1994 as 19yo Leonardo di Caprio (hard at work on The Basketball Diaries) and Gwyneth Paltrow. The Hot Band was Green Day. I guess you can say they were on the money there.

Looking at my collection of magazines, I see it pretty much runs out around 2004, the time when I had my first child. I guess my kids can use the internet to find things from the past, but for me, these have been with me now for so long, that even if all of the articles within can be found online, they’ll be staying on my shelves. Tattered and dog-eared memories, yes; but precious all the same. 

By the way, for those interested, Time does have all its old copies online – all the covers can be found here.

Have a good weekend.

This was meant to be the last sitting day of the Parliament.  It won’t be, due to debate about procedure and debate – or as Lyndal Curtis nicely put it on Twitter:

Both Chambers of Fed Parliament now talking about what they'll talk about. #thisyearwillneverend

Annabel Crabb also described the process beautifully:

This is all a bit how's your father. Senate doing a suspension of standing orders to debate a motion that has not actually been disclosed

Here’s what was going on in the Senate this morning:

Motion to suspend standing orders to enable Senator Ludwig to move a motion to give precedence to a motion to vary the hours of meeting and routine of business for today.

Commenced 9:31 AM
Agreed to Senate divided: Ayes 34; Noes 32

Motion - that the motion to vary the hours of meeting and routine of business may be moved immediately and have precedence over all other business today until determined

Senator Ludwig moved that the question be put - agreed to (Senate divided: Ayes 34; Noes 32)
Commenced 10:14 AM
Agreed to Senate divided: Ayes 34; Noes 32

Motion to vary the hours of meeting and routine of business

Points of order were raised and the President responded
Commenced 10:27 AM

Motion to suspend standing orders to enable Senator Brandis to take note of the President's response

Senator Ludwig moved that the question be put - agreed to (Senate divided: Ayes 34; Noes 32)
Commenced 10:35 AM
Negatived Senate divided: Ayes 32; Noes 34

Motion to vary the hours of meeting and routine of business

Senator Ludwig moved that the question be put - agreed to (Senate divided: Ayes 34; Noes 32)
Commenced 10:54 AM
Agreed to Senate divided: Ayes 37; Noes 35

Motion to suspend standing orders to allow Senator Brandis to move a motion to amend the variation to the hours of meeting and routine of business

Senator Ludwig moved that the question be put - agreed to (Senate divided: Ayes 37; Noes 35)
Commenced 11:27 AM
Negatived Senate divided: Ayes 35; Noes 37

Motion to suspend standing orders to enable Senator Macdonald to move a motion to amend the variation to the hours of meeting and routine of business was ruled by the President as out of order
Commenced 11:48 AM

Senator Macdonald moved to suspend standing orders to take note of the ruling
Senator Evans moved that the question be put - agreed to (Senate divided: Ayes 36; Noes 34)
Commenced 11:50 AM
Negatived Senate divided: Ayes 34; Noes 36

S0 it was 12:14 before the Senate actually got round to discussing any actual business

All this is because the Opposition does not want to vote on the “No. 1–Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2010”. This is the Bill to split Telstra – something that the Liberal Party is actually in favour of. The Liberal Party are hoping to filibuster long enough to delay the vote on the Bill till next year – thus allowing them to say the Government doesn't deliver on promises.

As I write the bill is in committee going through a raft or amendments. They’ll be back tomorrow and the House will be back on Monday to (hopefully) vote on the Bill.

It is the type of bullshit that makes people look at the Parliament and think, why do we elect these arse hats?

Unfortunately due to a variety of  reasons (mostly to do with being a Dad!) I haven’t been able to catch much of Question Time today. It doesn’t matter because today some policy actually got announced (once again by Senator Conroy). This was to do with the anti-siphoning list for sport on TV.

Rather amazingly he has come up with a list that the Free TV broadcasters, Pay TV operators and the AFL and NRL are pretty much happy with.

Free TV are happy because they are allowed to now show sport like AFL games and Australian Open tennis on their multi-channels. Pay TV are happy because it looks like they’ll get 4 AFL games and possibly 5 NRL games a week. The AFL and NRL are happy because they don’t need to just sell to the Free-to-Air stations, and thus can get a nice big broadcasting deal.

The new list is actually two lists – Tier A which is all the culturally vital events – Melbourne Cup, Test Matches in Australia, AFL and NRL Grand Finals (but not the NRL State of Origin). One Day Matches are still on this list which marks it as a tad out of date, but no matter, Twenty-20 matches are, but only those involving Australia in Australia, so if a decent Twenty-20 champions league takes off in Australia that won’t be on this list.

These events are “required be shown first on a free-to-air broadcaster’s main channel (with concessions to allow coverage of overlapping events, or where an event overlaps with the news).”

The events on this list must also be shown live: “they will mandate live coverage of all marquee listed events and permit only minimal delays in coverage of regionally significant events”.

The second list – Tier B has events like the Olympics, Wimbledon, normal AFL and NRL games etc. These events are those which “free-to-air broadcasters may premier on a free-to-air multi-channel”.

The events on this list must be shown within 4 hours – so yes, non-Rugby League states might still get the State of Origin at Midnight.

This policy doesn’t mean we will now see all the tennis from the Australian Open, nor does it mean the end of coverage being cut to go to the news. Yes they might show them on their multi-channel, but they’ll only do that if what they would have been showing on their multi-channel (Go! GEM, 7TWO etc) would not rate as well as (for eg) the tennis. All stations care about is ratings. The rest is just background noise. So I don’t trust that this will suddenly lead to us seeing a lot more sport live. After all Channel 7 during the Beijing Olympics got Matt White to lie to viewers about the fact that they were not showing Steve Hooker winning the Gold Medal in the Pole Vault live – and that had nothing to do with the anti-siphoning list – it was just because they are crap broadcasters who treat viewers of sport with contempt (as they did again this year for the Bathurst 1000).

But let’s be a little bit optimistic. At least Conroy has come up with a list that makes some degree of sense – unlike the old one that had events like the French Open tennis on it.

I leave the Parliament year with some long viewing (about 30 minutes) but it is well worth it. It is Lindsay Tanner interviewing George Megalogenis on the impact of polls and the 24 hours media cycle on politics. It is great viewing.

Watching so much tennis this summer has made me realise a couple things.

Firstly, Courtney Cox needs to be surrounded by 5 other friends, for me to really want to watch any TV show she is in. Sure I'll give Cougar Town a go, but I have a suspicion it'll go in the pile with Dirty Sexy Money and Cashmire Mafia of shows plugged without remorse during the Australian Open that turn out to be only so so.

Secondly, I haven't watched Lost in ages.

I think I stopped part way through the third season, when "the Others" came along in great prominence. The show went a different direction to the way I wanted it to go, so I dropped it. I did much the same with Heroes. Both shows had great first seasons - as good a first seasons as any shows in the history of TV. Some shows start off ok, but take a while to find their feet - Seinfeld, The West Wing, The Simpsons are a couple that really only became truly amazing in their second and third seasons. But Lost and Heroes? Their premises were so unique and interesting that each episode in their first seasons was absolutely unmissable.

And then... well they kept going... and I went.

In Lost's case things just got too damn convoluted; too damn stupid. It went from being a show where you wanted to find out the answers to a couple of things, to a show where every episode threw up a new question. Given this season is to be the last season, apparently these questions will be answered. I won't be around to find out, and the "Fine Brothers" have come up with an excellent song which pretty much explains why I won't be: