I saw movie: First Man - that time NASA opportuned the moon

I went to see a movie. It was this one. In First Man, Ryan Gosling answered the call to be the guy who accepted the mission to boldly go where no man had been unhinged enough to go before.

And like any blockbuster feature film featuring Gosling as a NASA astronaut who winds up being the first man on the bright lunar ball, this one was no different.

There’s something about a movie that, in the first few gripping, harrowing minutes, forces you to hold your breathe just long enough for the hero to get out of the messy scrappy culsterfuck the so-called rocket scientists at Houston Space Centre have gotten them into. 

Not out of anticipation; just mainly to see if you can hold your breathe for the time it takes NASA to build a proper rocket that’s not a diabolical lemon (4-10 years).

First Gosling on the moon

In First Man, it’s Gosling’s portrayal of moon pioneer Neil Armstrong causing the turbulent breathe-holding, as he spins out of control, in an out-of-control spin in his space rocket thingy, but handling it a stoic, 1960s I’ve fucking got this kind of way. 

People were tougher than titanium alloy back in the day. People were Neil Armstrong, but with just about all of them lacking his skill, talent, brains, confidence in ability, determination, perseverance and space rocket.

By the time the opening sequence is over, you’re a quivering mess in your comfy cinematic chair, mainly due to the photographic department's overuse of The Shaky Cam, the new cinematography effect favourite of the biopic action-drama-thriller. And I Like It Very Much.

In fact, my new thing, when filming myself on Snapchat with adorable filters featuring fluffy dog ears or panda bear eyes, will be to the use Shaky Cam, as used on Gosling’s good looks. He could have been dressed as a pirate for all I know, with a patch on his eye and a squawky parrot on his shoulder; I never got a good look at him in the first 10 minutes in his spacial rocket.

The cinematography in this flick is ace, and kicks you right in the prefrontal cortex. It was immediate, visceral, very personal and demands – DEMANDS! - your attention.

You were there on the lunary surface of the moon, sitting on your Hoyts deluxe recliner with a bag of popcorn, getting cranky that your shoes were soiled by white moon dirt and glaring occasionally at the moon martian morons in front of you who was loudly discussing everything they had just seen like they were in a cinema back on earth.

It’s okay folks, I got rid of them by shooting off a couple of powerful rays of moonbeam, which stirred up even more moon dust and aggravated my allergic rhinitis, which was annoying but necessary.

I did appreciate all the cinematic shots of the space rocket’s buttons and levers and magical devices and appliances, but it really wasn’t necessary. No-one in their right mind knows what any of those buttons do. Not even Ryan Gosling. Maybe 3% of the mass audience had a clue. It’s a language that’s almost as hard to fathom as basic English, folks.

While the fake moon landing loonytunes claim Armstrong's setting foot on the lunar surface was fake and set in a movie studio, let's just note that a fake landing would be almost impossible to cover up, given the Soviets were on USA's tale in the Space Race. 

I can in fact confirm, however, that claims Gosling shot the moon scenes in a movie studio are fake. It was actually shot on the moon. Life's confusing.

Final note - agoraphobes, agrophobes and moonaphobes need to beware this movie. It does all the bad things you don’t like. Constantly.

🚀🚀🚀🚀
4.5/5 spacey rockets.

Can Tiger change his stripes?

A few days ago Tiger Woods won a golf game by being the best at whacking hard little white balls into a hole. His first professional win in five years, as I understand it. It was a HUGE DEAL game in the big PGA Tour series, with the winner’s loot coming in at a staggering UDS $1.62 million; which is really just maintenance money on his USD$54 million private jet. 
 

If there was one thing Tiger probably wishes he could do with the enormous mountainous alps of golfing cash he’s earned over the years, it’s deleting his internet history. I don’t know much about The Golfing, but I do recall the sensationalised history of Tiger Woods, and The Internets is only too keen to remind me.

As we can recall from our previous experiences with Tiger, he is a tiger. Arguably the most recognised of the world's large animal species, he has widespread popular appeal. He spends his days stalking his prey and charming the tigresses. It's a jungle out there.

 

It's hard to believe that it's been nearly nine years since the world discovered that the golf world’s golden boy  - the human Tiger - had an off-duty hobby that took up nearly as much time as his golfing commitments. 

That being his wild infidelity scandal involving a gazillion affairs, and the fallout in 2009, when the media drooled as one mistress after another crawled out of seedy Las Vegas and New York City stripclubs to tell their sordid Tiger tale.

 

Back in the day, he really took his most bankable sponsor’s logo to heart – Just Do It.  While the media tore him apart, much of the public merely marveled at Tiger's clearly superior time management juggling so many tigresses.  He really put wedding planners to shame with his organisational skills.

Amid all the scandal and the global media's insatiable appetite for celebrity sleaze, one thing confused the hell out of me. Apparently Tiger first met his wife Elin when she was the on-tour babysitter for Swedish golfer, Jesper Parnevik, and his wife.  At what point would Parnevik's wife have agreed to having a gorgeous, Swedish ex-model come along to look after their children on tour with her husband? 

For the past few years, apart from a few trips in and out of court houses, Tiger has done a great job - or at least his management company have - at staying off the radar to refocus and concentrate on the sport that enabled him to score with so many trashy tigresses young women in the first place. 

While Woods was once widely acknowledged as the best adulterer golfer in the world, he is currently ranked 13^th, up from the 55^th a few years ago, which is roughly the same number of women he had going in 2009 before he was caught with his hand in the skanky jar. 

Which begs the question; should we expect a return of strippers / cocktail waitresses / nightclub door tigresses now Tiger’s clawed his way back out of the jungle?

 

Coles mini shop obsessive-compulsive disorder

A few months ago, Australians were busy shopping for groceries wherever we damn well pleased. It was a great time to be alive. Coles, Woolies, Aldi, the markets, you name it, we were there, purchasing things, for no reason other than we needed things. 

And then the Coles marketing team came and ruined everything that is good about grocery shopping forever.

They stormed into our lives uninvited and, since July, they have been hunting us like prey. They threw out a silky web, made up of gross spider glands and other gross things, and also millions of those Coles Mini Shop Collectibles that have made us lose our collective shits with the excitement of all of it. (Don’t pretend you are collecting them for your kids.)

Me gently cradling my beloved Coles Mini
Shop Collectible Nescafé Gold.

We should have all kept our poker faces and shown only a vague, passing interest in the useless miniatures but, no, we’ve showed our hand and actually LOST. OUR. MINDS. over pointless pieces of plastic handwash. 

Bloody iconic products too, because Coles are not amateurs at this. This is not  their first time at the rodeo. Who turns down a mini Timtams or Weetbix? 

I haven’t read up on the Constitution recently, but it’s presumably in there as an Act of the Australian Parliament – if someone gives you free iconic Aussie shit, you take it, and you collect it, until you have all of it and, ironically, can no longer afford to buy groceries because you went and spent all your money buying minis on eBay. She’ll be right, mate.


Since the promotion came, saw and conquered I have become conditioned, like Pavlov’s dogs, to spend $30 or more in store when I just pop in to pick up some milk. But I think, eventually, I will be okay and come out of this fog. 

I’m popping in this afternoon to get bread, which, because I don’t buy the gluten free type, will come in under $30. I’ve got this.

But you just know there’s more to come. The marketing and advertising teams of the big companies now know how to catch their prey. Which, in my opinion, isn’t an accident.  

As if it couldn’t get anymore dire, the chatter on the street (in Coles aisles – I don’t go to streets anymore, unless there is a Coles), is that they are going to bring out a second range called Coles Normal Size Shop. 

Which is just grocery shopping, Coles. And we won’t play your game. We won’t no matter what (we will).

The Making of Cadbury

Once upon a time, many aero bars ago in like 1801, a man was walking through the forest near his village in rural England when he decided that he didn't like people actually at all really, so he devised a top secret plan to make them all very, very fat. I guess he didn't have access to the internet so had to troll his frenemies in person.

"I could bury some of those people!", he exclaimed to his cat, and thus Couldbury, or Cadbury, was born.

Unfortunately, for this plan to work, he would need access to sugar and a sugary food making machine. "Oh fudge!", he said to his cat. Fortunately, he then remembered he had in fact bought a sugary food making machine in the village trash and treasure last week, so that was a very convenient and somehow not pointless purchase indeed.

He spent weeks but mainly just a few hours reading up about the history of chocolate, modern techniques of whipping up a batch, cultivating, processing, marketing, production, the chemistry of flavours, tempering, dipping, decorating and molding, ganache making and fondue excavating. That last one isn't even a thing, but - guess what - I'm telling the story.

And thus Cadbury was born. And just like all demented fairytales where the storyline is terrifying and the antagonist is fucking crazy, this one was too.

*names, places, truth have been irrevocably altered to ensure a more captivating storyline.

I went to rugby. I blogged.

The other night I dusted the spikey icicles off my season pass and dragged my seasoned arse to Canberra's numero uno football stadium. I was wildly anticipating an evening of watching my Super Rugby team, the ACT Brumbies, get their (foot)balls handed to them by the Wellington Hurricanes; a team that is, generally speaking, considerably better than my team. 

It was never going to be about Having Fun or Enjoying Oneself; one just has to support one's team through thick and thin, rain or shine, snow or hurricane, Chief or Crusader, self-annihilation or crushing smackdown. You have to be there and just go with it when we are playing a New Zealand team.

ACT Brumbies versus Wellington Hurricanes. Let's take a look at the matchup on e-paper. A free-roaming feral horse, an animal known for its random roaming usually through alpine countryside for no particular reason, versus a hostile weather system known for its wanton random destruction of stuff in its path.

Well it seems to me that everyone involved just needed to sit down for a planning morning and focus on developing some type of strategic plan for getting through the game with maybe some scones and jam for morning tea if you don't mind. None of this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants entertainment; that's not want the people want.

As it turns out, the wild horse gave the hurricane from UnZud quite a run for its money. Alas, as they say in the classic sports broadcasts, "Are you not entertained?! Are you not entertained?! Is this not why you are here?" Or maybe that was a quote from the movie Gladiator. It's hard to say.   

At kickoff, the opposition started as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds, causing heavy rains that were expected to continue for several hours. Linesmen were down, sponsors were airborne, and there was all kinds of carnage going on at that place that sells cold hot chips, which was potentially not hurricane related though.

Wild horse fan, Jimbo, saw all the action, saying “Everyone was warned to expect catastrophic flooding, and I think we got 6-8 metres of storm surge. Now my cold hot chip are wet”.  I think Jimbo may well have had a few.

But before you could say “that’s a ferocious battering, squire”, the strong gusts stopped, the eye of the storm passed, and the cell was fairly quickly downgraded to a tropical storm. And then it turned into a little rain shower as it continued to make landfall. My team won, which made my head spin on its axis and explode in astonishment.

As the game went on, I turned my attention to all the similarities of professional rugby union and my work as a public servant. Playing for a professional public servant team is a dream for thousands of people. But behind the glamour is grinding hours of hard work:

Desk work
Look, I did see a slew pf people with clipboards parading along the sidelines at the footy. It's hard to say what they were doing, but they looked like they were of great significance; they had pens and they were ticking things on paper. And if ticking things on paper for no good reason whatsoever doesn't constitute a desk job then I don't know what does.

Applause
Every morning, as I jog out of the elevator with meaningful purpose on my face, there is a throng of people who cheer my sudden presence and clamour for a glimpse of me as I head to my position on the floor, and then spend the day marvelling at my skillset - what a skillset! - when I use the printer, and cheer loudly - what a great delivery of that email!

Near the end of the day, they yell loudly - hurrah! - urging me on, to keep doing the impressive things I do. I didn't want this. This life, this dream life, was thrust upon me. I can’t make it stop. They idolise me. Occasionally, after work, I hang around to sign autographs.

Blood bin
Like rugby players, as soon as we have a piece of trash that needs tending to, we can leave the field of play to place it in the blood red bin. But only if it can't be recycled.

Offside
This occurs when you eat your packed lunch before lunchtime. It's not really in the spirit of the game, but some people do it deliberately - and get away with it - when the ref isn't looking. What's that? That doesn't even make sense? Well, look, the cyber universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Nutrition
Every public servant player knows the secret to maximise on-field performance: 'tis cake. 'tis always cake.

Scrum meetings
A key part of the day. Unlike an actual scrum, which rugby players use as a method to restart play to gain possession of the ball, public servant players pack down closely together just for the hell of it. 

The average acceleration at which a public servant player moves forward, out of a scrum meeting, is 29.2.54m/s2. What's that - that doesn't make sense either? That's not really relevant? Much like the minutes wasted in rugby scrums, many scrum meetings are also an officially sanctioned waste of time.

Rugby union for puppies

I've recently added value to my life by getting a puppy. Ellie is easily excitable, often overstimulated, bubbly, bouncy, unrelenting when I’ve relented; a textbook case of puppy.

Every morning – before, throughout and after I’m getting organised for work – we play chase the ball, which mainly involves her making forward passes, consistently knocking the ball on, deliberately obstructing me when I don’t have the ball, making a late tackle after I’ve already kicked the ball away, or some other type of illegal tackle like a head-high tackle around my neck or jaw violently at high speed, which is often my fault because my head is on the floor.

But her tackles are potentially very dangerous and are not sanctioned by the rules of the game, so at this point I blow my whistle to give her a yellow card, but she just bites me. It’s like she doesn’t know or care about the rules of rugby union.

Sometimes she plays fairly, but more often than not she plays the man and not the ball. Like any puppy heading towards the teething development milestone, she loves her chew toys - among her favourite ones being my hands - which often sends me to the blood bin to stop the flow before I can return to the pitch to continue playing.

I kick off from the 22m line, just off the try line, but I’m not going to make any ground because she charges it down when I try to clear the ball. I get it back and box kick over the top of her clear into undefended territory and then try to play the advantage but she ankle taps me with her milk teeth and it really hurts.

I won’t accept it so I call a free kick for myself and stand with my back to her as per the ‘How to stop your puppy from biting you” Youtube videos, but she barks at me for holding up the game, so instead I call a line-out, and she barks at me for holding up the game.

She’s lucky I don’t pull her up on all her impatient puppy barks, let alone all the infringements and technical offences. I’ve got no-one to throw it to in the line-out, but I throw it right down the middle, which is completely missed by Ellie because her hand-eye coordination is not a thing yet.

She prances off to get the ball and does a grubber kick, her favourite, which makes the ball tumble and roll along the ground, making it bounce all over the place. It’s literally the only bit of this game she’s good at. She runs down the blind side straight past me, dummy passes the ball, and goes on to score a try in the corner of the lounge room. Well, there go the blinds.

Instead of taking a kick to convert the try for extra points she runs up the field of play with her bed, shaking it furiously in some weird post-try celebration, which is not in the rule book so I’m not entirely sure what the infraction is.

I decide to have a scrum, because that’s always a great idea with a puppy. We crouch, bind, set and then she tries to scalp me because she sees my hair dangling in her face.

I call a red card on her and she sits and looks at me with puppy dog eyes, which are the only eyes she has admittedly, but still doesn’t get her out of the penalty.

And then just for funsies we have another scrum, because I hadn’t learnt my lesson, which collapses, but then we have a rolling maul, because if the ACT Brumbies can do it, so can we.

I grab her by the head in an illegal spear tackle, and she rolls around on her back trying to be cute as we both scrap for the ball. She wins obviously because teeth but I award myself a penalty try because I believe she illegally prevented me from probably getting over the try line. So many professional fouls.

We’ve been playing 30 minutes – not even half time – and it looks like she’s going to take a kick from the centre line but then she lies down and goes to sleep.