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August 16, 2004
Olympics
The Athens 2004 Olympics are finally here, so what does that mean? You guessed it, actually watching some TV, spending a decent amount of time each day camped out in my dorm's TV lounge doing some homework, while watching the Aussies rack up the medals. The time difference only really comes into play if you wanna catch any of the finals of the premier events live. For instance, tonight I'm planning on staying up late so that I can catch the "race of the century," the 200m men's freestyle. Some of swimming's biggest names are all gonna be in the same race, including Australia's Ian Thorpe ("Thorpedo" or "Thorpie") & Grant Hackett, Klete Keller & Michael Phelps of the USA, and Pieter van den Hoogenband ("Hoogy") of The Netherlands. The race is on at 2:45am Melbourne time, or 11:45am back home, but I really wanna see this race live. Seeing snippets of replays of it after you already know the result just won't do it justice.
The Aussies are really proud of their dominance in the pool. I saw a funny commercial yesterday while watching the Olympics, and I think it may have been advertising the Olympics 2004 game for PS2 (but I'm not totally sure), but one guy had a line that went somethin like, "any real Aussie will teach his kids to swim before he teaches them to walk," hehe.
Another thing that's different about Australia is that they like to give nicknames to their sports teams that compete internationally in various sports. Here are a few examples:
men's field hockey: Kookaburras
women's field hockey: Hockeyroos
men's soccer: Olyroos
women's soccer: Matildas
men's basketball: Boomers
women's basketball: Opals
men's rugby: Wallabies
There are probably at least a couple of other ones that I'm forgetting, but that's at least a good sample. How come the United States doesn't give cool nicknames to our international teams?
Yesterday my res hall had another game of footy, this time against Farrer Hall. Farrer's entire team was made up of guys who are on the Monash club footy team, so they were really good, whereas our team had several international players like myself who are still learning the game. They shut us out in the first quarter 32-0, and went on to cruise to a 90-18 victory (somewhere around there anyway, we kinda stopped keeping score after the first quarter). Oh well, it was still fun. And the ground was still muddy, although much better than last week, as it was actually sunny yesterday.
Josh has just three days left in the US! Make sure you wish him well before he takes off for a semester of study abroad in Japan. No fugu for you!
Considering that both the United States and Australia are well into political campaign season, with all the candidates promising big things, we probably all need a quick refresher course in Economics 101 from the incomparable Walter E. Williams. And does the Koran actually condemn the beheadings and other such acts that the Islamofascist terrorists have been committing recently, like some Islamic scholars have been trying to claim? Not hardly, according to a columnist at NRO. And only in Hong Kong would you have a cricket gambling ring. Who knew that insects could warrant such devotion?
Posted by Jared at August 16, 2004 11:57 PM