This week the award goes to one of the best bands of all time, The Monkees, and whilst they have a large array of fantastic upbeat songs, I can’t go past one of their slower, and arguably their most moving song, Shades Of Gray. I have decided to not amend the lyrics to Australian English as the title of the song is widely accepted as being spelled with the American spelling of “Grey” as “Gray”.
When the world and I were young,
Just yesterday.
Live was such a simple game,
A child could play.
It was easy then to tell right from wrong.
Easy then to tell weak from strong.
When a man should stand and fight,
Or just go along.
But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark or light.
Today there is no black or white,
Only shades of gray.
I remember when the answers seemed so clear
We had never lived with doubt or tasted fear.
It was easy then to tell truth from lies
Selling out from compromise
Who to love and who to hate,
The foolish from the wise.
But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark or light.
Today there is no black or white,
Only shades of gray.
[instumental interlude]
It was easy then to know what was fair
When to keep and when to share.
How much to protect your heart
And how much to care.
But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark or light.
Today there is no black or white,
Only shades of gray.
Only shades of gray.
It’s a glorious day today, for the Brumbies are not in the Super 14 Rugby finals. Despite having lived in Canberra all my life, I do not support the local side, in fact I can’t stand them. I’m a Canterbury Crusaders fan (that’s a short but interesting story that I’ll get to in a minute), and despite not following the Super 14 all that closely, I can honestly say that I am very pleased with the way the premiership season has ended.
The Brumbies needed a few things to go their way to get in to the finals. They needed to defeat the Highlanders, which they did 29 points to 10, but they also needed a rather large victory by last placed Queensland Reds over the Bulls. The match got under way at around 3am Canberra time, and before long it was obvious that the Bulls were going to easily win the match and rub the Brumbies out of the finals. The Bulls did so in style, convincingly thrashing the Reds 92 points to three. A perfect way to end the Brumbies’ season from distant Pretoria, South Africa in my opinion.
Also interesting (and good for the team involved) is the news that the Sharks are the first ever South African team to finish on top of the ladder in the Super 14. Admittedly the Super 14 hasn’t been going for all that long, but it’s an important record which will be carried with pride by the Sharks.
The finals consist of the Sharks, Bulls, Crusaders and Blues, which means that no Australian team is in the finals.
Now, the story about why I follow the Crusaders…it dates back to when my age could still be expressed in single digits, I was about three or four at the time when Dad asked me who I wanted to follow in the AFL, after listening to a list of teams I picked out the Bulldogs (then Footscray, now Western), and subsequently chose the same team mascot in the Rugby League, effectively choosing the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs. Moving on to when I was about seven or eight years old, it was a Sunday night and National Nine News was on the television, and they were reporting on the Rugby Union results, they said that Canterbury had won, I latched on to the name thinking that it was the same area as the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, and despite it not being the same area, and instead being across the Tasman Sea, the name stuck and I have followed them ever since.
This could be why I despise the Brumbies so much…they are the local team and the local media treat them with some bias, and it is something peculiar about Canberra that we have so few local teams that they all get treated with some favourable bias, but I think the Brumbies are a special case. In the NRL the Raiders get some favourable bias, but the media tend to accept that a lot of Canberrans don’t give two hoots about the Raiders and support other teams, however the Brumbies, being one of only two teams within hundreds of kilometres, get treated like they are the entire competition (RiotACT provide roughly the same amount of Brumbies bias as the rest of the local media, see the linked article for an example), they are an annoying waste of excess media time in this town, and I for one just can’t stand them. The news that a thrashing of another team many thousands of kilometres away has directly affected and destroyed their hopes of a finals berth has made my day, and possibly my week!
One thing that has intrigued me for a while is how much sleep people need. I know that my sleep pattern varies wildly, and I tend to require more sleep if I sleep at night than I do if I sleep during the day. So, this week’s question is as follows:
What I noticed during the week was that the support for Labor’s policy had a large lead for most of the week, but near the end after the “fairness test” changes announced by the federal government, the support for Work Choices rebounded. As people who have already voted can’t vote again, it is quite possible that people who voted earlier in the week may have changed their mind since, but have been unable to change their vote.
As I said last week, I’m quite happy with Work Choices, but then again I’m not employed by someone who has taken unfair advantage of the laws. It’s a good thing in my view that the federal government has sought to fix up the holes in the laws, and for those who think it’s just a petty grab for votes, this isn’t the first time that laws have been changed to fix problems with them…both major parties have a good track record of doing that.