Michael Clarke - Balanced Journalism Required

When Michael Clarke made his Test debut, Australia was in trouble in the match against India. I can't remember the score but Clarke made 151 and proved himself as a man. All the commentators said that it was a difficult situation to come out to bat and what a head he had on his shoulders to be able to handle the pressure.

In the second Test versus New Zealand, after being proclaimed as someone who would be a great, by virtue of his Test batting average being better than Sir Donald Bradman at the same stage of his career, he came to the batting crease with the score at 4/445. Situation was that New Zealand was on the ropes, bowling was crap, batsmen on top and Australia in a commanding position. Clarke made only seven runs.

The commentators, led by Greg Chappell, mentioned that it was a very difficult time to bat. Were we supposed to feel for this guy? He had proved himself when Australia was in trouble and then when the situation is set up for him he fails, and the only description is one that was used previously.

If Clarke had not been Australian I feel that the description of the situation wouldn't have been put so favourably. Mention of his fantastic debut innings would have been darkened by his very poor showing with the bat when the chips were certainly not down. A failure is how it would have been described, not to feel sorry for the poor young man put in a difficult situation.

Come on Chappelli, balance your journalistic skills.

Christmas Party - Sleepover

A few weeks back we invited one of Yu-Jin's friends, Jesse, to our home for a sleepover. He was a little scared about sleeping away from home and so declined.

Last Thursday, the day that Miky started work, we were invited to the staff Christmas Party, to be held on Saturday night at Gavino Restaurant, an Italian restaurant, in Subiaco. Their Website is very difficult to find. We had to look at the menu to pre-order as it was going to be a large function.

Yu-Jin had to stay at Jesse's house for the night. He wasn't bothered by this at all. We had a great night as I got to meet many of Miky's co-workers and they seem like a great bunch of people. Miky's boss, Denise, came over to chat for a while and she is very nice and mentioned that Daneechi is a family-friendly workplace.

We arrived home just before 1am. Just before 6am Miky woke me up and said, "Let's get my son." Mothers! Give me and the friends looking after Yu-Jin a rest. She seriously wanted to go straight to their house and pick him up! Her excuse was that she was worried about Jesse's parents, not Yu-Jin. We picked Yu-Jin up about 9:30.

It seems that the boys raised a bit of hell. They were running around until nearly 11 o'clock until Jesse's mum mentioned that a police car had gone past and if the neighbours complained about the noise the police would take them to jail. That shut them up and they went to bed. By 6:30 they were up again raising hell. As soon as we arrived there was an argument between the boys, probably caused by tiredness. We took him home, showered him, and made him go to bed. He snored for the next two hours!

Orgasm Lady At The Fashion Show

Miky's class of leavers from Clothing Production III from Swan TAFE Bentley had their graduation-style fashion show. Seated next to us was Stella, who has a Greek/Cypriot background, and is one of Miky's classmates. She invited about 30 (or was it 50?) of her friends and family to come for the show. As you can imagine, there was a great deal of Greek being spoken by people with big noses, but I digress.

Stella's range came before Miky's and the woman behind us, who belonged to Stella's group and had been reasonably quiet up until such time, burst out in rapturous prose.
"Oh, it's gorgeous Stella!"
"That is the best dress!"
"Oh, I love that dress Stella!"
"You've done a marvellous job."
"They're all so good!"

I thought we were sitting in the middle of a When-Harry-Met-Sally episode there. She was positively gushing.

Stella's gowns were nice. At least when Miky's range came out this woman still came forth with the praise. A couple of Miky's pieces looked very nice and there was a bit of interest shown in them afterwards.

True Praise

Kat Duncan had a nice main gown on display in the show. When the model walked onto the stage Yu-Jin let out a loud, "Wow!" Obviously he was impressed. When asked later which dresses he liked the best his reply was a very diplomatic "I like all of them."

After the show Yu-Jin wanted to look at the gowns and went right up to them. He was really interested and I'm glad that he behaved himself on the night.

Open Mouth To Change Feet

Our compere for the night was Nathan Morris, from Nova FM and Big Brother fame, and he made a bit of a balls-up. Amanda McKenna won a couple of awards. For the second award Nathan announced her as Amanda Keller (a presenter on TV) and then quickly realised his mistake.

I guess it was way past his bedtime as he starts his radio program at 6am and it was about 9:40 by this time. He can be forgiven.

Serious Commentary

I met up with one of my friends, Joe, from uni at the show. He was one of the last people I would expect to see but it was great to catch up. After the show he gave me some of his thoughts for the night. He didn't like the dress that accentuated the bottom of the lady wearing it. In my opinion it looked like a button mushroom, and Yu-Jin thought that it looked like a hot air balloon, but Joe thought that women would not be happy with that sensitive part of their body made to look larger.

Another comment from Joe was regarding a very frilly and layered down complete with top hot and vest. "Serious gender issues" was how he summed it up. If only we could have sat together for the whole show.

Rainbow Poo

Yu-Jin saw some white bird poo today and remembered that human poo is brown. He then mentioned that if we ate food with lots of colours then we would have rainbow poo. I like his thinking, wishful though it is.

Dumb Question

Another subject with input from Yu-Jin. We received some chocolates last night at the show and Miky said, "chocolate's nice."
"Why is chocolate nice?" Yu-Jin asked.
I thought that that was a stupid question but then it struck me, why the hell did they make carob chocolate? It is chocolate but tastes terrible.

Letter To Santa

I wonder how long it takes to get a letter to Santa at the North Pole. He lives just outside a city in Finland called Rovaniemi, which itself is situated on page 140 N2 of The Tmes Concise Atlas of the World, Eighth Edition. Not that it really stands out on the page. Bloody cold place, as I have visited there. Didn't get to Santa's village though.

Anyway, back to the story. How long does the letter take to reach Santa? A damn sight less time than a letter being sent to South Australia from Perth is my guess!! Pick up your game Australia Post.

Last Wicket Stand Of Gillespie And McGrath Reminds Me Of The Time...

We played table tennis at physical education class in high school. My friend, Friendy, and I were the most hopeless in the class. We tried to hit the ball too hard and had the shortest rallies of anyone. Then they announced a competition to see which pair could do the most hits in a rally.

Guess what? The no-hopers chalked up over 400 hits and beat everyone else by a country mile. Kind of like Gillespie and McGrath knocking hell out of the Kiwis.

Noongyar Patrol

There is a Noongyar Patrol in Northbridge as the local Aborigines cause a bit of trouble and need to be kept in line. Interestingly on Saturday night it was only a bunch of Asians causing strife and the Noongyars behaved themselves. Wasn't much call for the patrol. In fact, they were all sitting outside a restaurant/cafe and stuffing their faces.

Hearing Test

We've been worried about Yu-Jin's hearing for some time now and Miky finally found the time to take him to a hearing centre and get his hearing tested. It was all above normal although the pattern in either ear was quite different. One ear had a nice convex curve and the other was almost a flat line - not ideal as it turns out. The doctor wishes to test him again in February and has told us that swimming lessons are out. Yu-Jin has taken it rather well as he was really looking forward to going to swimming lessons.

Frugal Bastard Cooking Show

I've had an idea to do my own cooking show. And keeping with the theme I am guessing that it wouldn't cost too much to produce. Let's see - there would probably only be one show as I don't know how to do a lot of cooking in the first place. I could prepare all of the ingredients firstly but I would be putting all of them in the cooking vessel as I hate wastage. Can't stand these people on TV that go to the trouble of cutting something up and only getting three quarters of it into their saucepan because it sticks to the bowl that they had it in. Don't cut so much up if you aren't going to use it!

There would only be a few simple recipes - meat and veg, spaghetti bolognese, microwave pasta and banana cake is a pretty exhaustive list of my cooking talent. Then there are the cooking utensils and vessels - probably limited to a saucepan, knife, cutting board, frypan and egg flip (spatula).

There you have it. A cheap show that would be cheap to produce and would showcase all of my talents in the kitchen. I guess I could show everyone how to wash dishes as well.

Lyrics Update

My mistake. The lyrics for "Do they know it's Christmas?" song are actually "Feed the world" and not "Food for all" as previously reported.

Highlight Of My Test Match Career

Well, my test match watching career. We did our shopping yesterday and Miky wanted to get her hair cut in the city. I'd had enough and wanted to go home and watch the cricket, the first test match between Australia and New Zealand in Brisbane. It was an absolute highlight to see Glenn McGrath, Australia's no. 11 batsman, I use that term loosely, scored his first test 50. As I type this he has just gotten out for 61.

The most amazing thing, apart from no. 9 and no. 11 putting on a 114 run partnership for the last wicket, was the world record for the no.11 test batsman was 68 runs and Glenn McGrath, almost the no.1 bunny in the world and playing his 102nd test match, with an average of 6.65 (I think it was), almost became the world's best no.11 batsman in one innings. He raised his average to 7.27 following that innings.

Onya Glenn. An absolute highlight.

Celebratory Tea

We went to Northbridge last night to have a celebratory meal. First stop was Mama Maria's - it had closed down. Not a great start to the evening. We had a look at a few more menus. Outside Sorrento an old Italian woman tried to coax us inside. She looked at Miky and asked "Japanese?".
"No, Korean."
Then she continued to prattle on and ask us if we knew this woman that she had a picture of. The woman was Japanese - why would we care? Just drop it. Needless to say, we didn't have our meal there.

Found a reasonable Italian restaurant, nearly all restaurants in Northbridge were Italian or Chinese, and enjoyed our meal. At one stage, the Northbridge parking guys broke into a car across the road that was parked in a no parking zone, but they couldn't move the car because it was parked too tightly. It was the Italian woman who had complained about the car and she let the police know about it as they drove past too.

Following our pizza, which Yu-Jin wanted, and linghine (their spelling), we moved next door to have cake at Dome Coffee. That's when the interesting stuff began. There was a big fight across the road

Glenn McGrath has taken a wicket in his first over

where many plates were broken, the table and umbrella overturned, and lots of blood on the shirt of one of the combattants. He was advised to leave the premises (Biaggio) which he did in his big Holden Commodore.

Ten minutes later he was back and another fight ensued. The table was overturned again but no more plates were broken. The lad was asked to leave once again and that was the end of the fireworks.

Not a bad night out.

Did I Mention The Weather?

I said yesterday that it was seven degrees in the morning. At the time that I was up, it was only five degrees. And that was the coldest temperature in Perth for a November morning on record. Interestingly, the weather records are now recorded at the inland suburb of Mt Lawley, where it would be considerably warmer than the previous record site, of Jandakot which has much more wide open expanses. How cold was it really yesterday morning?

No need to answer - I've found it. The temperature in Jandakot yesterday morning was 0.8 degrees. Here's the proof.

Ladies And Gentlemen - We Have A New Taxpayer

Miky has landed a job!! And a pretty good one by all accounts. She will be a pattern maker at Daneechi. They have something like 25 employees and so there will be a great variety of work.

In actual fact, every company that Miky has had work experience with have offered her a job. In this case, Miky applied for a job that one of her lecturer's mentioned was going, and was given a trial period. Up against another girl she had the goods.

She's taking me out to tea! To a nice restaurant. Does anyone know of a nice restaurant in Perth? Being the frugal bastard that I am I don't know of any nice restaurants. Apart from a good friend's restaurant in Sorrento, Fratelli. Sorry, they don't have a Website.

A Balanced Family Relationship

The Korean women in my life try to create a balance.

Mother-in-Law - shiksa, shiksa. Meaning "eat, eat".
Wife - stop eating, that's enough, you've eaten enough, you're fat, it's time you started doing some exercise, you should eat less....

Glad My Boss Pays For My Parking

I had to drop some equipment off to one of our customers in the city yesterday and managed to find a parking meter nearby that offered me 10 mins parking. I put 20 cents, of the company's money, into it and it registered two minutes. I thought "Bloody rip-off meter. Make you pay for someone else's 10 minutes first and then you start on your time." I threw another 20 cents in and to my horror it only registered four minutes.

This parking meter was charging $6.00 an hour!! Glad that I wasn't paying for it. When I got back to the meter it was at -1 min. Not too bad I suppose.

Dinner Party

I found out recently that one of my good friends from uni was heading back to Singapore and not taking PR (permanent residency) as I had expected. I invited her to a dinner party with one of Miky's friends, who also studied at Curtin Uni, and it was a good night. Lots of gossip to catch up on and it was tinged with some sadness that she is leaving our shores. The half an hour, late at night, that I spent cleaning the dishes afterwards was worth the lovely meal that Miky cooked. We have to invite people around more often. Miky outdoes herself with the food.