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?

 

Her Majesty's Secret Cashcow

*SPOILERS, SUCKERS*

Today I watched the latest instalment in the Bond franchise juggernaut.  It's called Skyfall and it's the 230th movie in the James Bond series.  Or maybe it's the 23rd, who can keep up with it all.  Bloody good flick though; back to the traditional Bond style.  And in traditional action genre style, the storyline goes a little something like this - protagonist and antagonist spend 128 minutes trying to kill each other.

While Bond creator Ian Fleming passed on in the 1960's, and other writers have continued his legacy, I think it's safe to say that during his years working for the British Government, while his fellow civil servants pretended to be engaged in superspy subterfuge while they were really just filing boring, unclassified pieces of paper and writing dull emails in that old-fashioned pen, paper and envelope retro style, Fleming's imagination was going apeshit. 

I for one am glad that he was so bored and uninspired working in an office job in the public sector, Gov'ner.  Never mind the bollocks, eh wot!  Y'allreet?  Wass goin' on?  Sorry, got distracted by British slang that no Brit says ever unless they work for Eastenders.  Circling back to topic right now, innit.

A few things I noted in Skyfall:

Everyone knows that the best special super-effect for dark movies is real-life, non-CGI dark gloomy weather, ideally so dark that the audience need to don night vision goggles to know what the heck is going on.

The inherent risk of missing one Oscar encouragement award-worthy raised eyebrow or a half-smile is that you may lose track of the entire storyline.  Although with a Bond movie it's safe to assume that if there is gunfire or mortars, someone just died, and if there is no gunfire or mortars, someone is about to die.

So, weather-wise, I was a little surprised that much of the movie was filmed in a country renowned for its fun, sunny, balmy climate.  England.  It must have been boring for the film crew to have to wait around on set until it rained in London.  Shit weather is such a rare event in England that the director must have been tearing his hair out with the stress of it all.

In actual fact, the chance of it raining in London on any given day of the whole year is literally so excellent that one would put many quids, pounds, shillings or euros on it.  Probably not euros; nobody understands euros.  That's just how London rolls, innit. 

While London's weather may be complete bollocks at the best of times, the film crew were again just really lucky with the overcast gloominess and general malaise that greeted them when the film set relocated to the cheery Scottish moors.  Casting Scotland as 007's weather antagonist is certainly not going to win any friends at the Scottish Tourism Board, what with that country's fine track record of endless, sun-drenched summer days.

For me, the movie's best kept secret was the addition of Ralph Fiennes right at the end as the new M!  As much as I loved Dame Judi in that role, I approve of his casting because I heart Lord Voldermort. I suppose now the Harry Potter cashcow has dried up Fiennes had to find a new franchise teat to milk.  It makes sense for actors to sign up to multi-million dollar movie franchises. 

It's just like the good ol' golden days of Hollywood, when actors were signed to movie studios and were therefore unable to say no when the studio said you were going to be in a movie where you were required to wear an outfit made of panels of tin sheets for months and months and your co-stars, a dog actor called Terry (stage name Toto) and a pair of red sparkly shoes became far more famous than you'll ever be. 

But Fiennes is no fool.  He has worn a prosthetic non-nose in Harry Potter, a bandaged face in The English Patient, a Tom Cruise mask to play Maverick in Top Gun, and who can forget his body of work aboard a Qantas flight in 2007.  Through those roles, Fiennes avoided becoming typecast as anything more than the guy who likes wearing rubber.

Mud, Sweat and Tears

I am currently rereading Bear Grylls autobiography - Mud, Sweat and Tears, which is a personal account of the real-life GI Joe's life adventures thus far.  While Grylls honourably discharged himself from the British Special Forces in his early twenties due to injury, he delayed his autobiographical career until he had achieved quite a few more amazing feats.

Which is preferable to many of the celebrity autobiographies we are subjected to these days, written by some journalist who is trying to make a name for themselves in the publishing industry and thinks ghost writing the life story of a boring model / actor / tree humanitarian who starred in a kid’s game show that was axed after two shows and then got their big break on Neighbours is the best way to go.

As it turns out, Grylls had already penned eleven books, and has thrived in achieving numerous completely insane feats that defy human ability, so kudos to the big fella.

Mud, Sweat and Tears describes the gruelling training Grylls underwent to be chosen for the British SAS. He leaves no stone unturned, give or take some names, details, places and SAS operational procedures that cannot be released for security reasons.

I can't think of a better word to describe the selection process than gruelling, although this term doesn't even come close to a fair and appropriate account of the intensity of the program.

I love the positive messages that are ingrained in military training; camaraderie, skill, humility, endurance and character. Technically parents should be ingraining these messages into their kids, but what do I know.  I guess many parents didn't get the memo, or maybe it's just the places I frequent that are replete with bastard children causing all manner of chaos.

Special Forces are renown for their ruthless efficiency and professionalism, and anyone wanting to join them has to be mentally and physically unflappable and resilient, as the selection process ensures that only the soldiers with a lotta ticker make the cut.

These soldiers are deployed to locations and situations that the rest of us don't even want to imagine. And they somehow endure it, because they have evidently been exposed to awful, worst case scenarios in the selection process and training procedures, which makes the stories in Australia's military history of inexperienced kids heading off to war all the more heart-breaking.  My dad went to war when he was too young. They were all far too young backin the day. But it is what it is.

A few years ago through my family history I found out about 21-year-old Alfred Ernest Tarrant, who was sent to Gallipoli.  He wasn't a soldier, he was a school teacher.  None of them were soldiers; they were just young men.

Tarrant's 12th Battalion was part of a landing party that arrived at Anzac Cove at 04:30 on 25 April 1915.  He survived. His Battalion fought in the bloody Battle of Lone Pine in August and Tarrant was killed in action at Shrapnel Gulley on 11 November 1915, just weeks before the Anzacs were evacuated. He is buried in the Shell Green Cemetery in Gallipoli, Turkey. 

I write of this because it’s ANZAC Day, and it’s important to be thinking about and commerating and never forgetting all those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for us.  We all try to understand what those kids who went to war experienced, and what all the men and women who go to war endure; but we’ll never understand. What we can do is never forget it.

Walking with a Narcissistic T-Rex

Being rich means having a lot of dosh, or something yum with a fairly significant amount of butter or cream. I guess they both can kill you in the end in different ways.  Even though the title is as helpful as ever, I'll give you a hint of what this post is about; it's not about me making a batch of scones.

Brian loving himself sick.

The BRW Entertainers List has recently been released, and the biggest surprise to me is that we have entertainers in Australia that don't have to supplement their income through waitressing jobs or working as adult entertainment to keep a mansion over their heads.  Despite the fact that man holds dominion over all animals, at the number one spot, raking in $60 million big ones in 2010-11, are a bunch of dinosaurs.

Global Creatures, the production company who brought us Walking with Dinosaurs - The Arena Spectacular,  have one of the those pretentious websites that is completely confusing and incomprehensible. It is designed like that because they are important artists, you know. If everybody could understand and navigate their website, and have an insight into the intricacies of their complex artisitic brains, they wouldn't be talented artists any more, they'd just be nerdy kids into animatronics who got lucky.

Felipe is the company's Inflatables Expert, which can't get him many dates. Or maybe it gets him a lot of dates; who knows the ways of artists.  Inflatable dinosaurs, you say? Yeah, okay, that totally doesn't need any further explanation.  How big can the kinky market for inflatable dinosaurs really be?  Poor Felipe probably has to constantly explain himself at arty tete-e-tetes to cretins who can't get their minds out of the gutter.

I imagine Felipe's job is a bit like a paleontologist; only really necessary when a movie director needs someone to explain dinosaurs.

We Aussies like to blow our own trumpet on the world stage when it comes to, well, pretty much everything.  Like when an actress wins an academy award and the dress designer's sister works in the factory where they made the fabric and knows someone there who is Australian - AUSTRALIAN! - and all the major networks in the country run with it as breaking news.  It's all just a little embarassing.

The actresses of the world, like our Naomi Watts (Number 3) and Nicole Kidman (4) must be pretty pissed about being trumped by a bunch of extinct prehistoric creatures for the honour of being the most entertaining.  Youth is king in the world of celebrity, and dinosaurs have to be only thirty years old, if not younger.  So by this logic, Naomi and Nic are older than dinosaurs.  They must be full of resentful bile at the moment.

I wonder if the Walking with Dinosaurs dinosaurs are as excessively preoccuped with themselves as their fellow actors, and spend their off duty hours falling in love with their own reflection.  I guess if anyone has caught them dry humping a mirror we'd know we had ourselves a narcissistic T-Rex.

Dinosaurs don't have to worry about keeping themselves beautiful for the papparazzi either.  Their days of botox shots and endless pampering went out the window a few billions years ago.  Maybe they can get a skincare commercial, like Kate Moss; because they're worth it.  Who would notice the difference?

The naming of natural disasters

Apart from a pressing need for an amendment to its ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next’ self-styled motto, Queensland needs to go buy itself a state-wide lotto ticket, because it has, for the most part, narrowly avoided being completely scuttled by TC Yasi.  Yasi, or the Banana Crop Murderer as I like to call her, is one of the manliest sounding cyclone names we have come across in a long time. Which isn’t difficult when you are comparing it to Larry or Tracy.

I know the people who name natural disasters are just trying their best, and are probably more concerned with the meteorological side of weather things that blow up a fierce gale, but who the heck thought Larry, Katrina, Bianca and Anthony were appropriate names for these monsters created out of mother nature's fury?

I suppose the really important point to remember is that celebrities don’t get the opportunity to name them. Or else we would have ‘Hurricane Pomegranate’ by Gwyneth Paltrow, 'Tornado Bluebelle Sweet Nectarin' by Bob Geldof, and ‘Tropical Cyclone Princess Plush Pillow’ by Michael Jackson.

Apart from the obvious similarities in personality traits and disposition, natural disasters resemble children in other ways too; that is, someone has to name them and someone has to pay for the damage they inflict on society and the environment.  Hmm, who has to pay for natural disasters in Australia? Oh wait, that’s us taxpayers.  Which we are more than happy to do.  But just when you thought those bucks would be covered through your annual taxes...

Our fearless and rather stupid Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has whipped up a whole tornado of bullshit by deciding that Australians need to fork out for a ‘flood levy’, to pay for the wet and wild ride that devastated Queensland a few weeks ago. 

Our Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, in opposing the PM, decided to fight the levy, and called for donations to set this in motion. Yes, the former is in charge of running the country and the latter is supposed to be holding the other to account, but that's no fun when there is a cyclone to exploit and much natural disaster politicking to oversee.  As usual, I had the lowest of expectations and I'm still disappointed.

Maybe there is another solution.  I have noticed that big whopper companies love to show their philanthropic streak when times are tough for Aussies. So what if we allow these companies to sponsor natural disasters (eg. Tropical Cyclone McDonald's Angus Burger), and the trade off is that they pick up the dry-cleaning bill?

Then we wouldn’t have to pay the stupid levy. It’s a two-pronged effect – they raise awareness of their company whilst looking like they care about the public and the environment. In my defence, I haven’t thought this idea through at all.  But that excuse seems good enough for our PM and Peter Garrett and the other hillbillies who are supposedly governing the country, so it's good enough for me.

Also in my defence, I haven’t been elected by the people to stop the country running into bankruptcy, and it’s also not my responsibility to prevent a situation where the electorate are needing to take on second jobs to pay for natural disasters, which we rather ignorantly assume are covered by our normal taxes.

Young gun no more, Mr Sheen

What does the average 45-year-old male do on a Thursday night? Watch a bit of telly? Play a bit of sport? Pop down to the gym? Hell no. Real men go on a 36-hour drug and alcohol bender with a plethora of skanky porn star strippers and end up in a hospital emergency department. Just another day in the life of an average joe, aka Charlie Sheen.  Mr Sheen has headed off to rebab again, to try and clean, wax and polish up his act.

Charlie Sheen is the star of CBS’ hit comedy Two and a Half Men, which premiered in 2003, and has been in the Top 10 of U.S. television programs ever since. Despite the fact that it is a cheesy American sitcom, I very much like Men, with its misogynistic comedy and double entendres. Charlie plays Charlie Harper, a self-gratifying jingle writer, who lives in a Malibu beach house with his freeloading brother Alan, and Alan’s son, Jake. Charlie’s character is exactly like Charlie in real life, except Charlie in real life is just a bit pathetic.

I bet you didn’t know that Mr Sheen, the actor, has quite a bit in common with Mr Sheen the cleaning product. It’s true. They both sweep clean surfaces containing white puffy stuff, and they both spend time trying to clean up their act, only having to go redo the whole process when they mess up their house/life again. Clean and polish surfaces as you snort with Mr. Sheen, indeed.  But the cleaning brand, Mr. Sheen, wants to distance itself from its namesake, as it notes on its Wikipedia entry:

“Mr Sheen is a brand of cleaning materials (chiefly floor and furniture polish) to be used after visits from Charlie Sheen.”

While cleaning brands are well-known for their disinfectious humour, I don’t know if that entry was entirely necessary.  But I can certainly understand if they want to differentiate their product from the cheaper, trashier brand; in the event we got the two confused.

Charlie Sheen has been a little loopy for years. I’m not an actual psychologist, but then neither is Dr Phil. But I do possess the psychologist’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders, and I know how to use it, so let’s do a little diagnosing. I’ve never met Mr Sheen, and I haven’t done a differential diagnosis, but I’m gonna go with drug-induced psychosis, based loosely on the fact that he has a nasty little habit of snorting alot of cocaine on a pretty regular basis. You don’t need to be a psychologist to know this idiotic behaviour does not bode well for your psychological health (See: Britney Spears and the hair-shaving brouhaha).

To be diagnosed with a ‘Substance-Induced Psychotic Disorder’ you must meet certain criteria, one of which is prominent hallucinations and delusions. Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like our Charlie. Let’s look at the evidence. How about this gem from Charlie Sheen commenting on the September 11 attacks:

"There was a feeling, it just didn't look any commercial jetliner I've flown on any time in my life.….but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition'?"

Yes Charlie. It probably looked a little unorthodox to you because commercial jetliners flown by pilots who are not terrorists do not tend to fly intentionally into scyscrapers.  I have no doubt that Charlie is well-regarded at AA meetings for his Homeland Security credentials and construction industry expertise, but this sort of analysis doesn't really wash on Planet Sane.  And this from the same interview:

"It seems to me like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 percent of their targets: that feels like a conspiracy theory."

Even Osama bin Laden would think Sheen's conspiracy theory was whacked. Disregarding the fact that al-Qaeda couldn’t wait to tell us that they were responsible for the attacks, a flushing toilet is going to look like a conspiracy theory to someone who has been snorting cocaine for most of their life.