Aussie rules football is a great game to watch. It's certainly the best code of football or rugby or soccer. Stop start, stop start American football with their Transformers-like armour coated uniforms is silly. Sure, American college football can still be fun to watch, but it's am ill conceived game and it needs to be improved through some wholesale changes. But Americans don't even realize their sport is only one minor code of football. To them, it is Football, and making changes especially for avoiding head injuries will be hard, but like gay marriage in America and equal rights for women and blacks, it has to happen. But, Nah, it's American football, which is similar to Canadian football, if you havent seen it.
AFL is a better team sport, and it is a lot less dangerous. One melancholy aspect of my annual trips is having to miss some of the footie season here. It's inevitable. This year I went early, in May, to catch the Great Migration in East Africa (of animals and their tourist paparazzi) so I missed Sydney coming back from a terrible start of the season, having lost on tv to the cross town expansion team, GWS. I like GWS' uniforms, and I hope the club takes root, but i am not sure how champion Sydney lost so badly to them in the first game back in May. I suspect the win was arranged to give GWS a boost, which by the Starbucks principle would also give a boost to Sydney. These things happen. Or it could have just been the games were off-kilter from that ugly but fortunately fleeting trend of Abe Lincoln beards that many of the footie players were sporting after the summer break.
Simple Asthma trick I invented: wrap scarf over mouth when walking fast in the cold. It works! I ran for the bus without the scarf and regretted it on the bus for twenty minutes of wheezing.
I was so engrosed in the whole family-fun footie environment, chatting to Matt (playing on this iphone) and watching the game and preparing snacks and voddy and pomegranites, I forgot to take action pics of the players. And we had great seats for perving on them. This pic is stolen, for completeness. Thanks, Rupert. Ps, this GWS guy needs to cut off that stupid mini hair braid. It bothered me the whole game.
Our understated clever coach John Longmire has no issue spending time, losing points, losing games, to figure out how to optimize his team. We've learned how to merge in super-talented Lance Franklin, who has miraculously converted from being a Melbourne bad boy to being a admirable, respectable person, which binds him tightly into the family-oriented club. (Superstar Barry Hall got shipped out post haste for repeated gratuitous bad boy violence.) Lance probably adopted his new persona from respectable award-winning Adam Goodes, an aboriginal brother. Adam and recent Swan player Michael O'Laughlin spend a lot of time and effort in the aboriginal community trying to get the kids on the right foot. I am sure they get counsel from Brett Kirk who retired last year. These guys used to use meditation to prep for games, and I am sure the players still do. So smart. The Swans play like Buddhists, calm and on it, regardless of what happens. Geelong always played that way, too. It's hard to beat. That is a lesson for everyone off the field, too.
Tonight I made fish fingers and woolies mushroom pizza with my special olive oil and scallion topping. Served in tupperware. For drinks we had soda water or my special hydrating drink Russian Standard vodka, pomegranite juice in a soda water bottle and soda water. The vodka sneaks up on you. For desert, a special brownie. I also served some crudite with a homemade yoghurt, moroccan spice and honey dip, though i used a bit too much honey. Matt was a great hungry date, not having eaten all day.
In the hour before the game, the fish and the pizza didnt cook in their recommended 15 minutes, and i like them crisp at the game, so i pushed the cooking time as long as possible. I realized during the game that I had left the oven on with a handful of fish fingers stil cooking on the tray. Ooop! So is the fire department at my house? Not much I could do, just enjoy the game and check the damage later. I suppose i could have called and seen if the phone had burned up.
Warm inside the stadium bathroom sending txts back to Matt and his iphone extension.
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