Performance-Enhancing Art

So in the wake of Barry Bonds' indictment for lying about taking steroids, it leads to an interesting thought. I was watching a great movie from the 60s last night, Monterey Pop, and it made me wonder: if not for performance-enhancing drugs, would the Beatles have ever made Sgt. Peppers or any of the San Francisco groups existed? I mean, LSD should be considered the steroids of music, right? I would never defend Barry Bonds and not doing so here, but we need to put this whole thing in perspective. Every entertainer and athlete has used one form or another to boost their performance or creativity, legal or otherwise.

Some say there are not rules or standards in music or art. Ok, fine, good argument. That's what makes rock n roll so cool.

Visa....It's Everywhere You Want to Be

After a day more than two months of being Down Under, my work visa was finally approved today. So now I have to train myself to wake up at 7 again, eat three full meals (instead of breakfast at 11, lunch of a snack and dinner at 8) and shave again. Well, now that it's Movember, gotta keep the lame 'stache, but at the least, will have to wear those pesky shirts with buttons and shoes. But the upside is a paycheck, which will be oh so welcome.

Bring on the TPS reports and conference calls....I'll be an official Aussie employee!

Just Like a Rolling Stone

So upon an invite from friends, I partook (that a word?) in the game of lawn bowling on Saturday. Upon first look, it's a game played by people who are of advanced ages living out their AARP years and maybe richies sipping on champagne. Well, on second look, it is alot of older dudes in white suits, looking like cricket players. But it looks like the lawn bowling folks are trying to get the whipper snappers out to the grounds, and why not? It's a game that has similarities to a number of other games that young people if not love, tend to play on occasion. And plus, there's always a bar attached to the grounds, so that always makes any game more interesting.
Basically, the goal is to roll your ball thingy as close to the little white ball as possible on a short grass surface, similar to a golf putting green. Now, all this ball talk brought back (or moreso reinvigorated) a 12-year-old mentality of finding anything to do with balls as funny. Any sexual innuendo was possible, actually, as we felt for the heavy side of the balls, admired an old man wiping off his balls and instructing us newbies to be gentle with the balls when it was our turn.
The juvenile humor aside, why are there so many games where you have to get one object as close as possible to one "nucleus" object? Was this the basis for the first game ever? In horshoes it's a horeshoe with a stick, shuffle board is a round thingy with some other thingy, bar shuffleboard is round thingys on a long wooden board, curling is the things with a handle near the circles, helped with those agic brooms. Am I missing another? I now know basketball has it's relative in netball, a form of the former without a net or backboard. American football has rugby. Baseball has cricket. But the most simple of games, and in my guesstimation, the first games invented, involved sending an object one direction in hopes of stopping as close as possible to another.
It would only be natural to now think of a full-fledged drinking game in this mold: shuffling shot glasses towards the tequila bottle? Pushing quarters towards the full pint glass? Or maybe best bet is to go for the balls.

A Bug's Life

One thing they don't tell you about Sydney is that at times it can be infiltrated, or even invaded by a number of bugs. First the moths came in October, but they're relatively easy to deal with. Large and mostly confined to sitting on the wall, the bullseye on those guys is pretty big. One slap of the newspaper and they're gone. The flies, however, are a different story.

Unlike North American flies that are just a pest but tend to scoot when asked, these flies are the beagle of the fly family. They're too dumb to realize that when swiped or shooed at, that means go the hell away. Not only do they stick around, but they pretty much make themselves home on your face, neck, sunglasses for as long as they see fit. And this is a constant little game us humans play with the bugs all day long. Most Sydneysiders tend to shoo them away as a minor convenience, but my inclination is to squash every flying bug that comes into my space. If this continues, I might just go a little gnat crazy.

Am I the only one that threatens to A-bomb each and every fly to kingdom come? Maybe with the other creatures Australians have to deal with, the flies are no big whoop. Or maybe I just need to invest in a little bug repellant and I'll be ok.

I've been told that the flies go away in December, which seems odd, since I thought bugs, birds and the like all arrive during summer. If that's the case, cool.....now all I have to deal with are the huge spiders that tend to get in our house.