I wasted post number 200 on this?

Normally, I'd weigh in with my 2 cents about how the Australian Cricket Team is the least sporting bunch of arrogant idiots yet to grace the world stage, but it's all been said elsewhere, and a heck of a lot better than I could.

And after the last test match in Sydney, there have been so many issues thrown up by this one match - is it any wonder that I've just given up completely? I'm partially not surprised that India are hopping mad about this, but also partially staggered at the power that the Indian cricket authorities (BCCI) are able to wield.

Needless to say, there are kiddies growing up now who are being told by their coaches to play like these guys. Which is all well and good - the Australian cricket team are the most skilled team on the planet at the moment.

Unfortunately, as Plonka points out on his blog, cricket is not just about skill with a bat and ball. Cricket is also about playing within not only the letter of the Laws of Cricket, but also within the spirit of those laws.

Thus, when those kids say to their coach, "Even though the umpire gave me out, I didn't walk because he was wrong," we should be pointing out to them that this is not on.

But coaches and players these days use cricket at it's highest level as a barometer of what's acceptable and what is not. This is why Cricket Australia needs to show some authority by reading the riot act to its players.

So Harbhajan Singh called Andrew Symonds a "monkey". Up until a few years ago, I didn't even know that the term "monkey" was racist. Apparently, calling someone a monkey is not OK if that person is black. Symonds is supposedly a "black" man, notwithstanding the fact that his skin colour is whiter than most of the Indian cricket team.

Singh should know better after criticism of sections of the crowd at the recent matches between Australia and India in Valodara, Nagpur and Mumbai (who were calling Symonds a monkey, allegedly), although I am looking forward to the outcome of Singh's appeal, having been suspended for three matches originally.

The Australian cricket team has used sledging of opposition players to their advantage for some time. This is occasionally criticised, but the fact that it's the Aussies who are complaining is deemed in most parts of the cricketing world to be horribly hypocritical.

But the whole thing appears to be the final straw for a lot of Australian sports fans. "Enough!" they're saying.

For a good look at both sides of the debacle, please click here. The BBC has done a good job of compiling different comments.

As for me, I'm completely off cricket until I see evidence that the Australian level of sportsmanship has improved.

I see the BCCI's blackmail and threats - for that is exactly how they've behaved - to be entirely justifiable.

Happy blogiversary to me again!

Dear friendly blog readers,

At the start of the year, I celebrated one year since I rejoined the blogosphere.

I'm now going to celebrate an even bigger milestone, chronologically speaking, that is. This month marks ten years since Dikkii's Diatribe originally launched itself on to the net. Without repeating myself too much from my post in January, I began Dikkii's Diatribe out of my ground floor front bedroom in September 1997, not long after getting my first computer and internet access.

After a few days of feeling smug, I printed out a copy of this complaint and pasted it up in the bathroom of my house next to the toilet.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, this is my first post, which I have reproduced here at the new, Blogger facilitated Dikkii's Diatribe.

Lots of stuff has changed since I first started blogging, but in the meantime, a lot of stuff has stayed the same.

And it's somewhat topical that some of my favourite bloggers have started questioning why they started blogging in the first place. One of my favourite bloggers is Bob the Austin Atheist Anonymous who writes an excellent blog called Hot Dogs, Pretzels and Perplexing Questions. He's just retired from the blogosphere.

This immediately prompted his brother Bronze Dog who writes The Bronze Blog (another excellent blog, by the way) to review why it is that he blogs again.

So I thought I'd do a little review myself, and guess what? I'm going to put the broom through here a little bit.

For a long period - in fact, going right back to this blog's inception, this was the spiel that explained my blog:

"This page is an outlet for my own hate-filled vitriol and spiteful opinions. Uneducated as I am in the ways of the world, it's still necessary to vent my spleen at the media, the music industry, the AFL and anyone else who could have offended my sensibilities. I plan for this to be updated occasionally, depending on my state of mind. So you can either look forward to, or avoid my one-sided, uninformed and dangerously unbalanced opinions on the state of the world and everyone in it."

I'm dumping this. Not because it's inaccurate, but because I do other stuff on this blog, now.

So what is Dikkii's Diatribe about?

1. Woo.

I have a particular fascination with anything that falls under the umbrella title of "woo", be it the paranormal, pseudoscience, quackery, religion, or anything else that can be so labelled. I tend to also place things like postmodernist/deconstructionist/post structuralist mumbo-jumbo, management doublespeak, legal flummery and quack economics/finance under this umbrella title too.

Why?

The ultimate aim of these is to obfuscate and deceive, and it's no different to the mischief of woo merchants such as your John Edwards, Sylvia Brownes and Allison DuBoises.

Fighting these is the least that the world's one and only militant agnostic can do.

2. Politics.

I regard myself as politically, the most average bloke out there. I strive for political mediocrity and normality. I consider myself the yardstick by which everyone else is measured, the social median, if you like.

My economics may be slightly on the right, but my social justice meter counter-balances this by being slightly on the left.

Consequently, I think that there is no better person than myself for pointing out the foibles of the politically conservative or politically progressive.

3. Economics.

I love economics and I have worked in finance for pretty much all my working life.

One of my key complaints about people these days is that they don't see the need to be fiscally literate. This leads people to be exploited financially, so it is my aim to see the balance redressed by providing the odd piece of commentary on economics and finance.

Hopefully in a simple and straightforward fashion.

4. Science.

Science is an area that I wish I knew more about. People appear to only know slightly more about science than what they do about economics, so I'm schooling myself to know more as well.

And along the way, a bit of scientific knowledge helps stave off all sorts of charlatans peddling woo.

5. Law.

The law is an ass.

6. Music.

I love music but hate the music industry. I might just quote TISM here from "Jesus pots the white ball" off their Beasts of Suburban compilation:

"Why play rock and roll? It's a question fundamental
Take Jimbo from The Doors, you'll find which ones incidental
Take the music from the industry, you're left with grasping bankers
Take the industry out of music, you're left with childish wankers"

It says it all.

7. Sport.

I am a spectator. I was routinely bad at sport, but I love to watch it. I also love to watch the sheer amateurism of sporting administrators in professional sport.

I also like to get in any chance I possibly can to poke fun at the Collingwood Football Club and their president, Eddie McGuire. If they win a flag this year, we should all reflect on what we all could have done to prevent this from happening.

---

So there you go. Over the next few weeks, I'll progressively change the look of my blog to reflect where I'm going with this.

But I'll leave you in the meantime with my blog's new motto, from Public Image Ltd's "Rise":

"Anger is an energy."

Hugs and kisses to all, Dikkii.

Why I don't buy the "sportspeople are role models" argument

The "sportspeople as role models" argument is one that has long grated with me.

And it's not just because the sporting prowess of wet cement together with a lack of motivation and interest led to me putting my sporting career on hold until the next life. Sure, I would have loved to have had a career at centre half-forward for the Swans, but for my innate uncoordination and getting into things like music and finance instead.

The worst part of the argument for me is that the whole discussion about this appears to have been engineered for the benefit of entities other than concerned parents, sportspeople themselves, sporting administrators and politicians.

Step forward sporting goods companies.

The inherent phoniness of the argument is made manifest when one considers that there are kids out there who do not have their favourite sportsman or woman on the wall. Apart from a brief period in the mid-eighties when I read surfing magazines, I was one of those kids.

I don't actually remember the surfers who graced my walls. Barton Lynch might have been one. I would be surprised if the the great Mark "Occy" Occhilupo and Tom Carroll weren't others.

I might have had the odd poster of the Australian Cricket Team up on my wall when I was even younger.

But my fling with professional sportsmen on my wall was a brief one.

After this, I stopped with the sportsmen outright, and started putting rock and rollers on my wall. I would have been about 12 or 13 years old.

Favourites that I recall were INXS and U2 in the early days, Hunters & Collectors and Midnight Oil a little later on, and then finally outfits like The Stems, the Hoodoo Gurus, the Violent Femmes and The Stone Roses through my final years of high school.

I always wanted an Iron Maiden poster - their album cover artwork was considered a holy grail throughout my dorm at school. I particularly loved the cover of their Powerslave album, but I digress.

If we're to accept that sporting heroes are role models, the best place to start appears to be what or who kids put on their walls. Around the dorm where I lived in my final years of high school, there were quite a few footballers - maybe on a third of the walls. I remember one guy had a prized poster of Robert DiPierdomenico and another of Leigh Matthews.

One guy had his own shrine to Stephen Silvagni with a few of Stephen Kernahan as well.

How then did my posters of rock and rollers fit in? Well, I don't for one second accept that I thought of them as role models and a quick search of the news at Google doesn't even mention musicians at all.

But the thought has crossed my mind about half a dozen times that posters for sportspeople are suspiciously plugged as appropriate for kids all too frequently, and a quick look at the ones in the stores that stock posters seems to have the answer:

Much like the posters of surfers that I put up in my early high school years, it appears to be impossible to get a poster of a sportsperson that doesn't contain a prominent logo of a sporting goods company in the corner.

Nike is the worst offender. In the early nineties, the promoted the bejesus out of Michael Jordan to the point that many Australian kids wore Nike sporting apparel with his image on them. But if you asked any Australian kids about Jordan specifically, or basketball generally, you would draw a blank. Basketball is simply a fringe game outside of North America, and Jordan happened to be photogenic.

It wasn't long before Nike discovered that the best way to sell to the rest of the world was to go for local sporting celebrities.

The face of Nike in Australia was Shane Warne - quite possibly the greatest spin bowler that world cricket has ever seen, or at least until Muttiah Muralitharan came along. Nike didn't stop there.

They hit serious paydirt when they sponsored Ronaldo and the rest of the Brazilian national football (soccer) team in a year when Brazil were unstoppable in winning a fourth world cup and they then managed to re-create this in 2002 when Brazil did it again.

And the posters of surfers always had their sponsors figuring promptly as well. Show me a poster of a surfer without a Billabong or Rip Curl logo in the corner and I'll show you a magazine logo instead.

But the whole argument that sportspeople are role models appears to be somewhat contrived, particularly when no one takes the notion seriously that musicians gracing other kids walls might also be.

I put it to you that sporting goods manufacturers drive the debate around this. If not then why don't musicians ever get a look in?

For the record, my role model, if I had one when I was growing up, was my dad. I don't think I ever had a poster of him on the wall. And I don't think that I'm different to many others.

My Night out at the Commonwealth Games

I went to see the gymnastics on Saturday night at the Commonwealth Games. They're currently being held in Melbourne.

Now, for those of you who don't know, that is, for those of you outside the remains of what used to be the British Empire, these are kinda like the Olympics, but only for countries in the Commonwealth of Nations.

Which naturally means that countries like Australia, South Africa and Canada dominate the medal count, rather than the USA and China.

Kinda like big fish in a small pond, though, cause the only other countries there are little tiddlers like Jamaica, Mozambique and St Helena.

Points if you can tell me where St Helena is without looking it up in an atlas.

Anyway, I went to see the women's gymnastics. I use the word "women" advisedly - most of these girls were scraping to see over the age of 12.

In fact, I think that I could count up those of teenage or older on 1 hand. Why did I bother typing "...or older"?

All that was missing was the pushy parents.

Gymnastics requires routines on different "apparatuses". These routines are then given a score by a panel of judges.

Routines are marked on degree of difficulty, a checklist of required moves and "artistry".

This is quite a bit different to what can best be described as "objective" sports in the games schedule.

In an objective sport, there is no ambiguity. Results are based on heaviest lift, highest jump, first past the post, furthest thrown, most targets hit, most goals, most points etc.

In subjective "sports", of which gymnastics is one, one certainly wins by gaining the most points. But the points themselves are based on the outcome of whatever is in the collective head of a panel of judges, all of whom are going to have different opinions vis-a-vis the artistic component.

Methinks that there is a bit too much scope for judges to display some artistry of their own when preparing their assessments.

Anyway, by the end of the night, Chloe Sims became Australia's youngest gold medallist of the Games by a long, long way. We got to noisily sing the national anthem and go home.

Funnily enough, I think that the crowd has had enough of this gold medal blizzard that Australia gets whenever this carnival is on. I only heard one half-hearted "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, Oi, Oi!" all night.

Back to little Chloe. Sims scored the same number of points as the Canadian silver medallist, Elyse Hopfner-Hibbs, but she won on a countback as per FIG (Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique) rules.

This was beaten up by Melbourne's newspaper for the truly illiterate, the Herald-Sun (Monday 20 March) into a scandal. In an article that was clearly not even considered good enough to go online, idiot journalist Mark Stevens (with ghostwriter Selina Steele) went fishing for quotes in order to drum up some sour grapes, and the best that he could do was these:

Asked if hometown judging was alive and well, Canadian coach Carol-Angela Orchard said: " I think there's always an advantage to be at home."

Questioned further if Australia was enjoying a good run from the judges, Orchard smiled and replied: "Yeah."

Fourth-placed English competitor Imogen Cairns was clearly gutted after being pipped [for the bronze medal by Australian, Hollie] Dykes.

When asked if she was gutted (my emphasis - Stevens & Steele must have been in a hurry) to miss out on bronze, Cairns said, "Well, we're in Australia."

From all of this, Stevens/Steele came up with an opening paragraph of:

Tensions are mounting in the usually genteel sport of gymnastics, with both England and Canada inferring they have been victims of hometown judging decisions.

Sorry, Mark, Selina or whoever wrote this pice of crap. You cannot infer squat from the quotes that you have provided.

The best that you could do after needling these poor souls for God only knows how long was Cairns' quote. Given that Cairns is, most likely, a pre-nubile, I personally wouldn't trust that her opinions accurately reflected the English gymnastics hierarchy. If she has actually reached pubescence, I would put even less stock in anything that she has to say. Adolescents can be a hysterical bunch.

Now the Herald-Sun is never actually going to win awards for "Fair and Balanced" journalism (for Chrissakes, Rupert, grow some brains, morals and something vaguely approaching honesty) but I do have to say their sport coverage is usually pretty darn good. That is, of course, when Scot Palmer isn't writing.

This article was stellar rubbish of the highest order, but it does beg the question: would this piece of mind-numbing schlock have been written if gymnastics was an objective sport?

I think not.

What surprises me most about this whole affair is that I have been able to write an article on gymnastics without once mentioning how uninterested I am in it. I've done well.

Stevens' article on the other hand - I give it a 5 for the degree of difficulty (he is a footy writer, after all) and a perfect zero for the artistic component.

A-League. Flash in the Pan, or Paradigm Shift?

On the weekend, the A League Grand Final was played out between Sydney FC and the Central Coast Mariners.

It played to a sold-out crowd of approx. 42,000.

So the question has to be asked, is this the kick-along that Australian soccer, sorry, football so badly needs to survive?

I for one hope so. This correspondent has hitched his post to the Melbourne Victory horse for 2006/2007, and would like to see the A-League succeed.

But I have to say that I have my doubts.

Firstly, the Grand Final on the weekend was between the biggest and third-biggest cities in New South Wales.

This hardly makes for a great deal of interest around the rest of the country.

Now, you can put this down to the provincial mentality we have in this country, but I can't see Dave from Karratha putting down his evening meal for a spot of soccer.

The problem that soccer faces is that it is on at the wrong time of year.

This means that we will always have a hard time getting big name players over from Europe or wherever to play for Australian clubs.

This is a real shame, because what the A-League is going to need going forward is some serious firepower from overseas.

Take Dwight Yorke, for instance. This is probably the biggest name ever to play soccer in this country. In fact, he's probably the biggest name to play any code of football here at all.

Now if we had 8 Yorkes, playing for each of the clubs, this would be fantastic.

All the clubs would be able to get the most out of this leverage, and we could ensure that loyalty is provided to all clubs through a genuine supporter base.

Instead, what we have are the top two clubs being supported by the ficklest of Australian sporting fans, or at least, Sydney FC, anyway. I can't speak for the Coast, but, lets face it, the Central Coast is just the far northern suburbs of Sydney, anyway. Hence the reason for my doubts about Coastal fans.

The A-League needs to capitalise on this something major.

We have a genuine shot at getting Futbol out there and into the Australian sporting imagination.

Sadly, this probably means that basketball in Australia is dead, and cricket will get encroached upon, but I give it 4 seasons if it's successful until it shifts to the winter to take AFL and the rugby codes (union and league) on.

If it's not, then it will remain of curiosity value only to the Australian public.

Carn the Victory in 2007!