Betting and "Anti-betting"

Just a brief blog post today, again TV related. Aussies call the TV set "telly." It is quite common to see TV ads for sports betting. This happens mostly during the Australian Open and Melbourne Cup on the main TV channels. Occasionally, these ads appear also during the footy (Australian rules football) season. In the meantime, since gambling is allowed in many places in Australia, many people's lives are destroyed by addiction to gambling. So there are the ads for organizations helping those with a gambling problem... To make a silly parallel, since I perceive betting on sports as a sort of gambling, too, imagine watching one of the reality shows like "The biggest loser," yet, all the ads shown during the program focus on marketing junk food... Changing subject again, today's picture is that of an emu, our local ostrich. It's not agressive, but often inquisitive.

Hollywood Gossip

Oh, yes, they love it here! For a country of about twenty two millions, the number of celebrities in Oz is too low to afford enough gossip. I'm being sarcastic, but the reality is that every half hour of morning show on TV has a tiny bit of weather forecast, a few minutes of very limited news, some stock exchange news, price of gold and oil, and finally a good chunk of Hollywood gossip. Like it or not, you hear it all, just not at the extent presented on TMZ... Each TV channel has a reporter in the US, Hollywood or New York, from where they transmit infamous news about even more infamous celebrities. I must be the only one who doesn't care about it, especially at 6AM. I wish they cut the gossip in half, but were able to tell me if it will rain today in the North areas of Melbourne (sigh and see yesterday's blog entry). And here is my kind of celebrity, the goanna! This is NOT an iguana, my friends!

Weather Forecast

Today's blog entry is still related to TV, and I'll talk about weather again. This time, the forecast. I get up early in the morning and prepare for work. Like most people, I turn on the TV and I am confronted with 3 choices of local stations that present a forecast, and they only do so every 30 minutes. This frequency matches the "laid back" air of the Aussies... Although Australia is huge, and Melbourne is the second biggest city, there is no local forecast, just country wide. The minute of national forecast starts with Brisbane in the North East, quickly goes through Sydney and Canberra, after which I get my most frequent and anticipated "Melbourne, showers" news and a temperature. Sometimes the forecast refers to other smaller cities, too. The weather information is so thin, I know it's wise to turn off the TV, dress in layers, and pack sunglasses and umbrella in my purse! One TV channel has a nice weather report at 7AM, where currents of air and pressure are shown on the screen and a few more details are added to the forecast of the day. Another channel has a unique forecast. It's brief and useless, unless one has no other means to get weather information, and presented by a guy who is always traveling in Australia or in the world. I love it when he's in a sunny place, but all he can warn me is "Melbourne, showers and a maximum of 10 degrees"...

Aussie TV Ads

Imagine this: you're having dinner, cozy, after a long day of work or school and extra curricular activities. You are enjoying a homemade meal and chat about that day's "stuff". The TV is on and with your meal you are swallowing some bits of news, or most likely a fattening cooking show, or an unreal reality show. But quite often the programs are broken by ads. Nothing odd, right? Well, more often than I expect, the Aussie television programs are interrupted by ads endorsed by the government in which a man is spitting blood at a barbecue party because he is a smoker with lung cancer (he spits blood in a tissue and shows it to us), a mother attached to a chemo line is telling us she's sad not to see her children grow up because she also has lung cancer (I normally turn my head, but I think she's also a smoker), a young girl opening the door to a policeman who came to their house to announce the death of her father in a work accident, and also a young boy whose father comes home extremely late, after him and his mother believe him dead in a work accident. In better days, when our dinners are "lighter," we enjoy funeral home ads or bloody re-enactments of car or motorcycle accidents that could be avoided if people drove slower. Well, yes, at this point we feel like drinking a glass of wine after such gloomy ads... Or more glasses, especially since none of these ads ever raise awareness about drinking and its effect on health and driving. More about this soon! Rinse your eyes with another beautiful Aboriginal drawing now. I think it is from Uluru and it represents emu footprints.

Aussie TV (1)

Most people in Australia do not have cable TV. That is because unlike in the US, one can see most Australian channels with a regular antenna, old fashioned, sitting atop the house. However, the number of channels and programs are limited. For example, we love watching the tennis Grand Slam tournaments, but on "regular" TV one can see only the Australian Open. IF any Aussie player makes it to a final in another Grand Slam, then maybe, maybe, maybe, we are lucky and one of the main channels shows the match. Do not feel bad for me though, because I can still watch the David Letterman Show some days of the week, really late... Until a couple of months ago, however, cable companies used to ask for a fat installation fee and were operating only with contracts. Contracts that were at least one or two year long. This tie and the high monthly price made it so unappealing, we never subscribed. But this changed recently, so we got cable without a binding contract and paid no installation fee. I wonder if there is a catch somewhere that we haven't discovered yet. Once we pay the first bill, I'll let you know! Aboriginal drawing from Uluru in today's picture.

Childhood Memories

Driving just outside Melbourne in late summer or autumn, you see these well packed and wrapped rolls of hay. There are no wheat or corn fields, but paddocks are very common. The hay brings back memories from my childhood, those of car trips through the mountains of Romania, where people piled the hay in large hill-like stacks by the side of the road. They were messy, man-made stacks, unlike the ones here that I captured in the picture, and were covered roughly with sheets of weathered, old plastic. We used to go to the mountains during the summer vacations only, when the heat in the plains chased us away. Once arrived in the mountains, we rode with the car window down, letting the freshly cut hay perfume our faces. Poppies and daisies sometimes smiled at us from the endlessly green landscape.

Roos

I guess a blog about Australia should have already talked about kangaroos. Yet, some pleasures are better tasted when left last. Kangaroos are what most Americans see when they think about Australia. And Roos were among the top animals we wanted to see when we first visited Oz. Grey and red kangaroos, and all kinds of wallabies. So we saw them very often, in zoos, parks, and in the wild. The most unusual and striking image is that of a wide, grassy landscape from which suddenly start to hop these large but fit animals, grey with big black eyes and ears perked up. Sometimes, they stare at you while standing up, and if they are alarmed or feel threatened, they turn around and hop away. Fast. One time on Raymond Island, we got off the car and tried to follow an echidna in the bush. I suddenly raised my eyes from the ground and just ten meters away was a mob of roos, with a large mom in front. She stood up, transfixed, staring at me as surprised as I was. From her pouch another pair of long and curly eyelashes was trying to figure me out, her joey... I will never forget how fragile, yet powerful they seemed, standing there and trying to understand my next step. I backed up, went into the car and was happy to not have disturbed them too much.