I might be missing for a week

At four o clock tomorrow I head off skiing for a week. If the lodge has wifi then I'll still be in business. Of course, if it doesnt, well I'll see you all in a week.

A sad, sad day in sport

If it is true that Caster Semenya has an inter sex condition and has male sex organs contributing to her massive testosterone level then clearly she cannot compete as a female anymore.

This is a tragic outcome for this young lady and a sad day for anyone interested in sport.

Unfortunately the totally irrational reaction out of South Africa cannot overrule the only possible answer, she cannot compete as a female ever again.

one of the great problems with dividing the world into simply male and female is that you miss the reality that gender is not always as neatly defined as we would like to think. The reality is that the amazingly complex transition of a (sort of) female fetus to male is not always a smooth one and between male and female there exists a wide variety of stages. In 'real' life there is no reason, or justification, to discriminate against intersex persons. However, in sport I fear we must. To allow people like Caster to compete as a woman makes a mockery of the contest.

Anyway, I think a few South Africans need to do some research before they go shooting their mouths off again, as always wikipedia is a great place to start.

Finally, Australia gets an ambassador from the US

Its been a little odd here in Oz lately, something has been missing but we couldnt quite quite put our finger on what it was, well now we've remembered, is a US Ambassador!

Ok, perhaps that's a little extreme and in reality only those of us who pay attention to these things noticed but still it has felt weird not having an ambassador from the US for quite some time. But the announcement is made and we are getting Jeff Bleich, described as Obama's Superman by The Australian.

If you want to read more about the guy go to The Australian article - its ok.

In short, it appears we have got another political appointtee rather than a career diplomat - and that's fine by me, why?

• First, governments face great embarrassment if a political appointtee screws up, therefore they are usually extra careful to send someone how might not have the exact experience but will be extraordinarily competent.

• Second, political appointees usually have direct access to high levels of government (also usually often based on mutual friendships with leaders) providing a unique opportunity to the country receiving the politicians mate. And finally,

• Third, political appointees fall into two camps, the comfortable retirement and the career advancement. Appointments to the Vatican and the Holy Sea are a reward for years of hard toil and a chance to see out your final years. The people sent there are usually in their late 60's and this will be there last job. Jeff Bleich is just 48 and in the middle of what appears a glittering career, he's a man going places. I cant see him swanning about the outback for a few years before retiring, I expect him to be looking to make his mark by doing something special. Given we aren't hiding any illegal nukes and turn up to all the right parties always wearing the right clothes I'm guessing that "something special" will be nice.

Welcome Jeff, glad to have you on board.

my unwhite moment 1 - I hate Apple

I'm generally pretty white using the measures thought up by Christian Lander. After all, I'm suppose to love Apple products.

But today I've crossed the line and gone from not being a fan of Apple to actively disliking them as a company. Whats driven this? Well lets start with why I've never been excited by them in the first place. iPods, and more specifically iTunes. To be honest iTunes sucks - it is possibly one of the worst pieces of software I have ever used. As a music fan and photographer I've used dozens of different cataloging systems for music and images (frankly the issues are pretty much the same, locate the files, name them, group and grade them etc). And iTunes is the worst I've even had despoil my computer.

Everything is just so hard. Finding your files on the computer is hard, moving them is hard, editing them is hard (no I dont mean mucking with the music, just changing metadata like genre), its all a huge pain in the arse.

Which brings me to iPods. To start with they look cool, no denying that, but as a music player they are pretty average. Their sound quality is so so, their screens are pretty average and they certainly arent cheap. The user interface is an interesting one, some users absolutely love it, others arent so sure. I swing back and forth on this issue. When the iPod is out of its cover I'm a fan, but once you're exercising and that fancy little pressure sensitive disk is behind its protective screen it really really sucks.

So between iTunes and the iPod I was disposed to be deeply ambivalent towards Apple. Add the immense hype around the company and its aura of coolness and to be honest, ambivalence was always just a small step from mild antipathy.

But hypocrisy really pisses me off. Not to mention market manipulation designed to steal my money.

This brings us to the MacBook. Now I quite like these products. The Operating System is pretty cool, they are easy to use, secure and these days have decent third party software support. When recently considering a switch across from PC to Apple I was really close to jumping.

But.

MacBooks are by any measure massively overpriced duds. Lets look at the basic model, the simple 13inch MacBook. Right now Apple will sell you one of these for near enough to $1600 Australian. Now, lets be fair and guess that the OS isnt free, but then again looking at the overall pack price of the desktops (which arent bad value btw) it isnt that pricey so lets assume that the OS "costs" - say - $200.

So that means Apple wants me to pay $1400 Australian for a 13 inch laptop with a 2.13 GHz processor, 2 Gb ram, a tiny 160 Gb hard drive and an Nivedia 9400 M graphics card.

What a rip off.

But worse, this plucky little battler of company, out to help the little guy, the friendly company not like those bastards at Microsoft then take legal action to make sure I cant avoid being ripped off.

Where is the Mac clone. If I can buy a 13 inch HP with better processors, more memory, better graphics, bigger drive etc for less than half the price of the Mac that will run Vista or 7 why cant I buy one to run Snow Leopard.

Because Apple sucks and Steve Jobs is an arsehole - thats why.

Sandilands - idiot or truly an arsehole? Either way, the first FAWN.

Kyle Sandlilands is back in the news again, this time for making a crack about Magda Szubanski not really being that thin and how going to a concentration camp would slim her down (I reckon she's done great - read about it here). This is wrong for so, so many reasons.

One, if you are going to make a crack about concentration camps you really want to have some greater social comment that a celebrity weight loss idea.

Two, Szubanski's Polish heritage makes this a particularly sensitive issue (I suppose we should at last be thankful she's not Jewish - she isnt is she?).

Three, it wasnt that funny. It might not be right, but the truth is we'll forgive offensive remarks if they actually make us laugh but Kyle hasnt been able to do that for years - if ever.

But for me the questions are:

a) is this guy really really dumb who just doesnt get it or just an arsehole who really does get it and goes ahead with this crap anyway?

b) how idiotic are we? After all we made this guy a star!

I dont know the answer to either of these questions but I've decided I'm creating a new class of celebrities, the FAWN, Fucking Arseholes I Wont Name. I'll not mention this cretin by name again. Instead on my blog he will forever just be known as FAWN1.

(I suspect I might get ot a pretty big number of FAWNs one day)

PS - I understand how hard Magda has fought this one - I need to achieve pretty much the same thing.

Losing weight got harder - I'm injured.

Ok, the latest installment of my fight with fat - to see where it started go here. Well losing weight just got a little harder. One of the problems with being fat and over 40 is that you are also prone to more injuries.

This one was embarrassingly ordinary. I went out for a gentle kick around with a soccer ball with mates at work, overstretched a touch and strained a groin muscle - how dumb. Well now I'm hobbling around like a really old man and have to be careful about staying still too long or it gets used to being in one place and it kills to move.

Still, I've got on the ride and refuse to get off - I can still swim. So I started swimming yesterday.

All in all swimming is a crap exercise for losing weight, at least when you first start. Why? Because to lose weight you need to lift your heart rate and keep it high for some time. When you first start swimming this is virtually impossible as your arms and shoulders will simply run out of power well before your heart is working hard enough. That's whats happening to me. Yesterday I squeezed out 400 meters, and I could only do that as 8x50 meter swims. Today I stretched that to 500 meters, a 100m plus another 8x50 meter swims.

This is killing me emotionally, you see I used to swim competitively as a kid and I wasn't bad. At my best I was swimming around the mid 23 seconds for a 50 freestyle. Today the fastest I could manage was 1 minute 10 seconds. That's nearly 17 seconds slower than I used to do a 100m!

Well, its just another thing that's going to have to change. If you are interested in my progress, have tips or questions feel free to comment.

My news sources.

There are two quality 'broadsheet' newspapers in Australia, The Australian (run by news limited) and The Age (with a sister the Sydney Morning Herald - run by Fairfax).

Now as a soft leftie, I should be loving the The Age, it is, after all renowned for being a bit of a soft leftie newspaper. I should also be hating the Australian, if its not enough that its a pretty right wing publication, one also has to deal with its being published by the son of Satan himself, Rupert Murdoch.

And yet I tend to read the Australian - why?

Basically its because its columnists are better. Yes there are some execrable ones like Janet Albrechtsen, Australias Anne Coulter (perhaps the most horrid journalist on the planet - and at Fox thats saying something) wannabe. But there are so many other really, really good ones. That doesnt mean I agree, I often dont. I tend to think Greg Sheridan, for example, tends to look for the Liberal Party advantage a little to often and also falls prey to the Great Man theory of history. But still, I like to read his, and other people I disagree with because, frankly, its well written and engaging.

Over at The Age there are a couple of really good writers like Michelle Grattan and Tim Colebatch but far, far too much dross. In fact, I sometimes think that I'd read the The Age more if there was less I agreed with and more that challenged me.

So there you go Fairfax, my stab at why you are struggling. In order to shore up your base, you are actually just boring us and forcing us away. Surprise us, challenge us and we will come back - because God knows we want to escape Rupert.

Australia takes one step closer to being what it should be

Today in Australia the government finally took away the punitive measure of actually charging asylum seekers for the pleasure of being detained in mandatory detention as covered here in The Age, in abolishing asylum seeker debt.

This measure was never about recouping the cost of detention, it was about making sure that people that tried to escape horrible places that were sent home would never be able return. You see, having a debt to the Commonwealth makes it impossible to apply for a visa. So imagine your kids got accepted as legitimate refugees but you got knocked back, then you got sent home with a quarter of a million dollar debt and could never return to see them.

That wasn't an accident - that was the entire aim of the plan.

It was evil and we are a better country with it gone.

Blogging 101 - avoid drop offs

Just checked my stats on Google analytics and one lesson is absolutely clear. In the absence of a huge, committed following its absolutely essential a 'young' blog just get stuff out there pretty much every day.

A couple of days away and suddenly three days in a row with 0 views. Lets face it, I doubt anyone starts one of these things actually hoping no one pays attention so that's not good.

So thing to note for young players (of which I am one) - always post.

My fight with fat - a personal thread

A slightly different, and pretty personal, thread to start today.

A week or so ago I just felt bad, nothing specific, just kind of off. Anyway, I went to bed, still feeling off and just couldnt sleep. A couple of times through the night I found myself feeling sick, like my stomach was being squeezed and its contents forced back up my throat.

Well I know what was causing it now. I'm fat.

You know, its kind of creeps up on us. I know my clothe's dont fit properly and I know I avoid beaches and things but ultimately I can hide from all that by buying bigger clothes and telling myself I dont really like the beach anyway but this, this I cant escape. When lying down and trying to sleep leaves me feeling ill, well thats pretty hard to avoid.

So what counts as fat then? Well the morning after this night I weighed in at 126.5 Kgs, since I'm 193cm tall, this gives me a BMI of 34. Considering that, as a guide, 25 is healthy, and 30 is obese I'm in trouble.

Since then I've done some things, I've joined Weight Watchers - just the online site and I've tried to start exercising more.

This morning (Monday is my weigh in day) I was 123.5 KGs. So I've lost 3 kilos and I've got to admit I feel a little better for it. That gives ma a BMI of 33.2 so I'm on my way.

So whats the final target?

I'm shooting for a weight of 95kg, thats a BMI of 25.5. I'll take that.

Its often said that dieting is a struggle and I've always found it so. Also, Weight Watchers et al have all suggested that giving yourself 'little' goals and (non food) rewards is a great idea. So whats are my goals?

I'm thinking they are:

119 kg (yay - under the 120 mark) - small goal/reward

111 kg (BMI under 30 - not morbidly obese anymore) - big goal/reward

105 kg (nothing really special here - just half way to the next big goal) - small goal/reward

100 kg (obvious really, a nice round number and weight I first passed when I was 19 years old) - big goal/reward

95 kg (final goal) - small goal/reward (why?????)

95 kg - three months on. Huge goal/reward. The sign I've made it.

So thats it - I figure that if I share this with the world and tie it to a blog I'm committed to keeping and god forbid, get some comments and support, I can keep this going.

I'll keep the blog updated with what I'm doing to lose the weight semi regularly but tune in again each Monday for the latest weight data.

Wish me luck.

Eddie Vedder, Into the Wild - great driving music

Been listening to Eddie Vedder's - Into the Wild cd every morning driving to work this week. Really bad mistake. A long line of discordant, stirring, stirring and ultimately haunting songs questioning the role of greed, the importance of stuff, the glory of the simple and finally the peace of acceptance. A truly horrible soundtrack to have going through your head as you drive through the gates and strap in for another day of working for the man.

But I cant stop listening. I think part of the reason is the timing.

As I drive to work along the banks of the Hunter River in Newcastle, over the Stockton Bridge, and then north through the countryside leading out of Newcastle the sun is just rising in that glorious golden hour. This creates wonderful lines and shadows, imbues ordinarily ugly devices like coal loaders with a magical halo and when all combined with the simple guitars and soulful vocals of Into the Wild I feel transported. I feel like I'm making a journey, I feel that its going to change and be better.

So when I hit the gates of work, yeah I'm brought down a little, but from a point where I was so high it doesnt matter. Soon I'll tire of the album, or the sun will be rising earlier and I'll miss golden hour but either way. I have this time now and I'm loving it.