Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi' bickering brattle! I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry man's dominion, Has broken nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion, What makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An' fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! A daimen icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request; I'll get a blessin wi' the lave, An' never miss't!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin, Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, An' weary winter comin fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell - Till crash! the cruel coulter past Out thro' thy cell.
That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble, Has cost thee mony a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald, To thole the winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain; The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me; The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast my e'e, On prospects dreaer! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!
Tonight saw the last of my five games at the Canberra Stadium. Iraq versus Palestine. Now there is a contest I would never have imagined previously I'd be watching. But there we were, Spike and I plus somewhere in the region of 8,000 to 10,000 enthusiastic (not to say fanatical) supporters, mostly Iraqui nationals. The man with the big drum was but one of many drummers who were unceasing in their desire to make themselves heard. They succeeded. The game was enjoyable but the result was never in doubt. How could it have been? This is Palestine's first official tournament. Five members of the squad were prevented from travelling because of visa restrictions. The team gave their all but a victory was always going to be beyond their capabilities ... this time. Their supporters didn't seem to mind too much. They cheered on their team with the same passion as any bunch of avid fans but by half time it was pretty clear the night belonged to Iraq. Unpeturbed, the Palestine supporters - some expatriots plus a bunch of Aussie supporters politically of the emergent nation settled for a flag-waving, drum-beating procession around the stadium. Everyone in the ground seemed pleased they were there. Sometimes that's enough; a victory in its own right. The evening was marred a little by an argument I got into with an Iraqi supporter who refused to vacate the seat next to the wheelchair spot I was occupying. He and his mates had been standing up, crowding the space as their team took the field, which is when Spike and I arrived. Most of the guys moved so I could take the wheelchair spot. One guy sat down next to me. I asked him to move so Spike could join me. He declined, telling me he was recovering from a broken ankle. The ding dong commenced. He refused my request to prove the seat was his by showing me his ticket. He refused the same request from stewards and armed police officers. Our ding dong continued. In the end his mates persuaded him the fight was not worth the prize. They moved away but not too far away. They stood througout the match, jumping for joy when Iraq scored, as you would if you were an Iraqi. Broken ankle entirely healed it would seem.
I watched the movie This Is Where I Leave You today. Ho hum. It would be nice to be more enthusiastic about the film, not least because of its talented cast, but you can see the joins. It creaks a bit, I'm afraid; not sure if that's the fault of the screenplay or the direction. It's not awful but it probably had potential to be better. As the final, foreseeable scene closed the movie some not-entirely surprising tune (uplifting, hopeful but moderately open-ended nevertheless) kicked-in while the screen faded to black. I thought, this must have started out as someone's partially autobiographical novel. And so it proved to be.
A quick Google search told me it's the fifth novel (of six so far) of an American author I've not heard of before, Jonathan Tropperwho was born in 1970. Three of his novels have been optioned as movies, one linked to J J Abrams (coming after Star Wars, one assumes). My guess is the novels occupy much the same emotional territory as This Is Where I Leave You. I was, however, particularly struck by one comment on Jonthan Tropper's wiki entry (which, one assumes, he oversees). It read, "he spent eight years running a Manhattan-based company that manufactured
displays for jewelry companies. He wrote at night and on weekends,
ultimately publishing his first novel, Plan B, which attracted the attention of an agent, allowing him to leave his job and become a full-time writer."
He wrote at night and weekends ... The journey has to start somewhere, somehow. Where it leads depends on setting out. It's not rocket science, Douglas.
It was game five at the Canberra Stadium tonight (my fourth thanks to a puzzling attack last Tuesday of what doctors don't call 'the wobblies'). The traffic queued for a couple of kilometres ahead of the parking sites as we turned off the highway at Belconnen, confirming that tonight's game would be best attended of the group stage games in the nation's capital. I reckon it's likely to be the best attended game of Canberra's contribution to the Asian Cup. As we made our way to the entrance, where many hopeful ticket buyers were arrayed in lines before the box office, a voice announced - a little forlornly - that only 30 tickets remained. When, maybe a minute later, the same voice announced all tickets had been sold no one in the lines seemed inclined to believe her and move.
Inside the ground, packed with thousands of the most polite football spectators I've ever encountered, the game was seven minutes old and China one goal ahead by the time we reached our spots. We were surrounded by Chinese Australians most of whom were wearing what looked like the same one-size-fits-all red T-shirt bearing the legend - in English and hanji characters - GO CHINA. Looking around the stadium it was clear someone was doing good business that night. There were thousands of people wearing t-shirts.
The game ended in a victory for China, which pleased the vast majority of the 20,000 spectators. North Korea gave the opposition a run for its money in the second half and only the woodwork denied the Koreans the draw they probably deserved. I have one more game to go here in Canberra, which is Iraq v Palestine next Tuesday then it's up to Sydney on Friday for the first of the knock-out games that lead to the final.
Go Socceroos, although after the loss to South Korea I hae ma doots ... as we say in the old country, where we know everything there is to know about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
It has been a while since I was anywhere near Spike's veggie plot so I was hugely impressed when Spike and the cat gave me a guided tour today. We - which is the Royal We - have corn, beans, chillies, capsicum, shallots and rhubarb growing strong in the small space at the back of the garden Spike cleared earlier in the year. We shall eat well by the time summer draws to a close.
Had we moved to Geelong this harvest would not now be in the making. All sorts of signals confirm the rightness of that decision.
I watched Clint Eastwood's American Sniper last night. Woke up this morning to read it has been nominated in the Best Picture category of this year's Oscars. How fond of Clint the members of the Academy must be to go that far off track.
I read Peter Bradshaw's two-star review of the film in today's Guardian. I didn't agree with all of the Guardian critic's analysis although I do think his two-star rating is much nearer the mark than an Oscar nomination. As often happens I felt compelled to comment on the views of someone writing in my favourite newspaper.
Should I be worried that I'm one of those people who leave below the line comments in response to newspaper articles? Probably. But at least I don't rant. Here's my attempt at a measured and reasoned response to Mr Bradshaw's original review.
I may be in a minority on this one but
here goes. There are huge problems with the movie but not, I think,
those Peter Bradshaw describes.
I didn't think it was dull (at least when it's in Iraq) but it
certainly is derivative. We have a SEAL training camp straight out of An
Officer And A Gentleman, a wedding dance from The Deer Hunter, a touch
of Hurt Locker here, a bit of Zero Dark Thirty there. I think too that
Bradley Cooper does well with the raw material he was given and I quite
took to Sienna Miller's return to centre stage. Overall it struck me as a
technically competent but pretty average American war movie of a very
old and completely illusory type.
The super-size failures, however, are the script and directorial
choices that led to the creation of this sanitised, delusional fantasy.
Mr Eastwood's team has given us Chris Kyle's ghost written autobiography
as some kind of cinema verite. I've no doubt that Kyle was a brave - if
self-declared "redneck" - soldier of the type Republicans cherish. But
there's not a hint anywhere in the movie of the more complex reality we
can find behind the words of any unreliable, first-person narrator including Chris Kyle. That means, for instance, verifiable facts such as
spending nights locked up in jail or trouble with booze or the legal
dispute with Jesse Ventura don't feature anywhere in the movie to spoil
the director's picture of a righteous warrior; not to mention Mr
Eastwood's re-imaginings of events in Iraq e.g. the first kill in the
movie has a boy added that doesn't even feature in Kyle's own
autobiography presumably to give the film character's arc the contrast
the movie needs via the incident with another boy and a rocket launcher
later on.
And the truly fascinating, genuinely interesting and more complex
reality of Mr Kyle's life and death - on American soil and not at the
hands of the Iraqi "savages" he disliked so much but murdered by a
fellow American at a gun range - gets reduced to one line of white text
as the screen fades to black at the end of more than two hours of
historical revisionism.
There's an interesting movie to be made about that Hellish American
tragedy but American Sniper isn't that movie. It's Green Berets for the
21st Century - more subtle in its assertion of American exceptionalism,
more nuanced in its story telling, more aware of the forces reigned
against such simplistic readings of events but just as deeply delusional.
Fortunately, no one will watch American Sniper in two years time and
five years from now no one but the cast and crew will remember it was
made.
I attended game 13 of the Asian Cup tonight accompanied by Colin Tulley, an associate of Spike's father and dedicated supporter of Glasgow Celtic FC. When I first saw Colin approaching my car from the other side of the Glassworks car park in Canberra I knew it would be him. Who else that evening would be wearing the green and white hoops of a Celtic strip? Oddly enough, when we were seated in the Canberra Stadium waiting for the match between United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to kick off, Colin introduced me to a few of his football-loving friends who were also present. I was suddenly surrouded by a sea of Glasgow accents, friendly men of my age and their adolescent or twentysomething children. All diehard Celtic fans. Any one of them could have been dressed like Colin. Naturally, in the spirit of footbll bantering males, each was advised I am a supporter of Partick Thistle. None laughed openly but there was an expression on their faces somewhere between jocular pity and sympathy for the terminal illness from which I was suffering. There was no rain tonight. It was a perfect evening for playing and watching football: blue sky, warm sunshine, decent crowd reported to us as 7,992 people.
The UAE took all of 14 seconds to score the first of their 2 match winning goals. Blink and you'd have missed it. Lots of fun. Looking forward to my next match. China v North Korea. Never done that pairing before.
I read Peter Bradshaw's two-star review of the film in today's Guardian. I didn't agree with all of the Guardian critic's analysis although I do think his two-star rating is much nearer the mark than an Oscar nomination. As often happens I felt compelled to comment on the views of someone writing in my favourite newspaper.
Should I be worried that I'm one of those people who leave below the line comments in response to newspaper articles? Probably. But at least I don't rant. Here's my attempt at a measured and reasoned response to Mr Bradshaw's original review.
I may be in a minority on this one but here goes. There are huge problems with the movie but not, I think, those Peter Bradshaw describes.
I didn't think it was dull (at least when it's in Iraq) but it certainly is derivative. We have a SEAL training camp straight out of An Officer And A Gentleman, a wedding dance from The Deer Hunter, a touch of Hurt Locker here, a bit of Zero Dark Thirty there. I think too that Bradley Cooper does well with the raw material he was given and I quite took to Sienna Miller's return to centre stage. Overall it struck me as a technically competent but pretty average American war movie of a very old and completely illusory type.
The super-size failures, however, are the script and directorial choices that led to the creation of this sanitised, delusional fantasy. Mr Eastwood's team has given us Chris Kyle's ghost written autobiography as some kind of cinema verite. I've no doubt that Kyle was a brave - if self-declared "redneck" - soldier of the type Republicans cherish. But there's not a hint anywhere in the movie of the more complex reality we can find behind the words of any unreliable, first-person narrator including Chris Kyle. That means, for instance, verifiable facts such as spending nights locked up in jail or trouble with booze or the legal dispute with Jesse Ventura don't feature anywhere in the movie to spoil the director's picture of a righteous warrior; not to mention Mr Eastwood's re-imaginings of events in Iraq e.g. the first kill in the movie has a boy added that doesn't even feature in Kyle's own autobiography presumably to give the film character's arc the contrast the movie needs via the incident with another boy and a rocket launcher later on.
And the truly fascinating, genuinely interesting and more complex reality of Mr Kyle's life and death - on American soil and not at the hands of the Iraqi "savages" he disliked so much but murdered by a fellow American at a gun range - gets reduced to one line of white text as the screen fades to black at the end of more than two hours of historical revisionism.
There's an interesting movie to be made about that Hellish American tragedy but American Sniper isn't that movie. It's Green Berets for the 21st Century - more subtle in its assertion of American exceptionalism, more nuanced in its story telling, more aware of the forces reigned against such simplistic readings of events but just as deeply delusional.
Fortunately, no one will watch American Sniper in two years time and five years from now no one but the cast and crew will remember it was made.