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With 2008 being so dominated for us by holidays–four months of it were consumed by our trip of a lifetime around South America, not to mention a two week suprise trip over to Oz in February–it was inevitable that we would have to pay for it eventually. And so 2009 has been as defined by the lack of time off as 2008 was by living it up on steak and Malbec.

Much as I might once have considered Aus to be a holiday destination, the daily grind of delayed trains and desk-based work is much the same as anywhere else in the world. Somehow we had reached September with just weekend breaks in Sydney and Adelaide under our belts (and I’m not particularly proud of the second one). It’s fair to say that we were hanging out for our two and a bit weeks in Thai paradise.

Unbelievably it has somehow been nine years since I was last here. Much has changed, of course, but then so have I. Gone are the days when it’s possible to get by on a couple of hundred baht a day, staying in guesthouses for 50 baht a night. But then I’m not sure I’d want to now even if I could.

It’s fair to say that we haven’t skimped on our accommodation options this time.

The first of our hotels, the lovely Twin Palms resort in Surin beach, turned out to be our favourite. And one of the benefits of travelling in the low season is that when we arrived there at 9am exhausted from our overnight flight from Melbourne and sweating profusely from the humid 30 degree day that was waiting for us, there was a room ready for us to check straight into. We were in the pool by 10.

And what a pool: the resort’s best feature is the massive central swimming pool area. Our room was one of the “lagoon” rooms that open directly onto a smaller section of it that loops around the edge of some of the rooms. This means that you can step down from your balcony and straight into the pool, then swim around to the main pool. Aside from the occasional other guest swimming past your window it’s like having your own private pool outside your door. All hotels should be like this.

Another aspect of travelling here in the low season that brought unexpected benefits is that although the weather gave us its fair share of the rain you would expect this time of year, it was still humid and hot enough to swim, just without all the people. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s raining when you’re in the pool-the bottom part of you is already wet, so a bit more from above–even a torrential downpour–doesn’t make much difference.

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At breakfast on the second morning of our stay we were briefly entertained by listening to the middle aged man with the strangely ugly face and terrible dress sense loudly lecturing his prettier, younger, and more pregnant wife about how this wasn’t “the real Thailand”. She listened intently as if this was some kind of profound insight, as if he was the first to notice that your average Thai doesn’t spend his days lounging around in 5 star luxury with twice daily maid service, a minibar and room service on call. Perhaps we’d have been more convinced of his commitment to finding the real Thailand if he was actually out looking for it instead of sitting at the buffet breakfast in his garish tourist T-shirt and brown deck shoes lecturing the room about it…

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Another place where you won’t find the real Thailand is Patong, the garish beach and bar district a few kms away from Surin that is filled with neon, gogo girls and drunken western tourists. It’s the kind of place that males you think that Al Queida might have a point.

We went down there for a few drinks to see for ourselves. Who knew there were so many fat sweaty old men in the world on the hunt for young Thai girls… It really is quite unpleasant, and by the time we’d overheard the two middle aged Germans behind us negotiating a sex transaction with the woman in the bar and seen our fifteenth guy who could barely walk being led down the street on the arm of a Thai girl young enough to be his granddaughter, we decided it was time to finish our drinks and catch the next tuk tuk out of there…

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After three days in Surin, we moved on, first to Phuket Town where we stocked up on dodgy DVDs and T-shirts at the night market, and then across the Andaman Sea to Koh Phi Phi, where our bungalow on the beachfront was waiting for us. On the way over, we passed Koh Phi Phi Leh, the smaller of the two islands and the location 10 years ago for the filming of The Beach, a story on one level about the traveller’s ideal of trying to find that isolated untouched idyll.

Ao Maya, the beach where most of the filming took place was swarming with speedboats, longtails and packed with more people than we have so far seen on a single beach on the trip so far. And this is the low season…

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But we loved our quiet little resort over on a private beach on the eastern side of the island. Especially as a modicum of internet research beforehand had warned us that as you are so isolated the resort will overcharge you for everything, and that the average food at their restaurants isn’t worth it. However, you can sneak out of the back of the resort through the staff exit where a small village with some excellent cheap Thai restaurants awaits. We found this on the second attempt, after eating lunch on our first day in the staff canteen by mistake (although at 35 THB each for lunch it was some of the cheapest and best food we’ve had so far, and it meant we found the staff supermarket, which was the cheapest place to buy beers on our bit of the island). Thank you Tripadvisor…

We took said beers back to our bungalow, where we would sit each evening as the sun went down enjoying the view with a glass of Singha. On our penultimate night we even had a wedding to watch as it was taking place on the small grassy area between us and the sea. I’m not sure if the brochure advertising the wedding package would have specified that you might end up with two drunken holidaymakers sitting on their deck watching your special day with beer and snacks, but we enjoyed it anyway…

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The final part of the first half of our holiday–before we head East tomorrow to Koh Samui to join the rest of the gang for the real wedding we have come all this way to see–has brought us back to Phuket to Kata beach, where our suite is up on the hillside looking down onto the bay, and where the pool I’m sitting beside tapping this away on my iphone is calling me to go for a dip…

It’s been an interesting experience so far following the fortunes of the England cricket team from deep in enemy territory.

On the one hand, I will get to see far more of this Ashes series than I would have done had I been in the UK, as the time difference turns something that would otherwise have happened while I was at work into prime evening viewing–the 11AM start for the first test translates to 8PM over here. Much to Sal’s chagrin I can watch the first two sessions right up to the tea break and I only need to stay up until half past midnight, which isn’t difficult at all given that I’ve done far worse since we’ve been here in my attempts to keep up with the Everton.

Even better, the TV coverage is the same as I’d be watching back home, as neither SBS nor Fox Sports, the Free to Air and Pay TV broadcasters with the rights to show the games, have bothered to send over any commentators. Thanks presumably to the Global Financial Crisis (TM) we only have to put up with about 5 minutes of pre-match Stuart MacGill awkwardly stumbling over his words while chatting to a couple of ex-Aussie players in a studio that I assume is in Sydney before the action cuts across to David Lloyd, Ian Botham, Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain and the rest over in their commentary box. I’m surprised that the Australian Cricket loving public are happy to put up with this state of affairs, but it certainly works for me.

On the other hand, I do have to put up with lashings of (generally good natured) abuse from the locals…

At least this time, when my boss brought up the subject on Monday morning, I was able to turn around and say: “hey, I thought we were supposed to be the whingers?” as the post-match newspaper reports over here have predictably concentrated not on the game itself but on the allegations of time wasting. Funny how there’s always some kind of excuse whenever the aussies fail in some way: no matter that they had plenty of time–40 minutes–to get that vital final wicket, or that they had the whole day to bowl us out and failed to do so, the real reason for Australia’s failure to win the test match was because the physio and the 12th man were out on the pitch holding things up for maybe all of 5 minutes. The way Ricky Ponting calls it, you’d think it had been a five hour pitch invasion.

So roll on Lords. And hopefully this won’t be the only opportunity I’ll have this year to laugh at Australian cricketers desperately making excuses for the result…

Flicking through the TV guide that came with the Herald Sun (that would be Rupert Mudroch’s Melbourne tabloid) this weekend, I was amused to see that the final episode of Australia’s Next Top Model on cable channel Fox 8 (that would be one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV channels, on Rupert Murdoch’s pay TV network) listed as this week’s “Must See TV”.

Apparently:

The shining light of the show this season has been [host Sarah] Murdoch. A model of composure in the hosting role. There’s no chance she’ll suffer the same fate as her predecessor, Jodhi Meares, who lost the gig after succumbing to stage fright.

Hmm. Sarah Murdoch. Yeah, I reckon her job is probably fairly secure…

So I’m about half way through Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News at the moment. It’s engrossing and depressing in equal measure to read Davies’ detailed insider account of everything that’s wrong with the 21st century mass media–an industry so dominated by commercial pressures to fill space as quickly and cheaply as possible that its journalists are reduced to what Davies calls “churnalism”: the regurgitating of press releases and stuff copied from the internet and the wires, with neither the time nor resources to fact check.

Of course I knew that this sort of thing went on, but I never really noticed just how widespread a practice it is. Now I see it everywhere. I can’t read anything on the news websites without looking between the lines for the source and the vested interest that planted it there.

And yes, I expect that if I pick up a copy of the shabby freesheet Mx, our local evening version of Metro, that it will be mostly recycled PR, stuff they’ve copied off Twitter and very little in the way of actual journalism, but I didn’t expect to start to notice so much of this stuff in the pages of supposedly reputable news sources like the Beeb and the Grauniad. Davies quotes research into the UK quality papers over a 2 week period that showed at least 60% of all stories in the “quality press” “consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and or/PR material”. Adding on articles where the researchers weren’t sure of the source (another 8%), and those where some original content had been added to the PR/wire copy (another 20%), they were left with just 12% of stories where all the material had been generated by the reporters themselves.

Those are some depressing statistics.

In the middle of all this, just after reading the bit of the book where Davies describes how time-poor journos sometimes just mass email out to PRs asking for content, I arrived into work to find an email asking me to prepare a couple of hundred words on one of our new products for a New Zealand technology magazine, and one asking for the same for an Australian industry publication. I fully expect both my replies to run largely unaltered in the respective forthcoming issues.

On a lighter note, on the subject of not checking your facts, I was highly amused to see some quality Australian journalism escaping onto the airwaves of Channel 9 last week, via Stephen Colbert. (The ABC’s ever excellent Media Watch had this to say on the matter.)

While there are many reasons why Sal and I moved over to this supposedly sunny side of the world, we certainly didn’t do it for the quality of Aussie telly. As we’re increasingly discovering during these long, dark, wintery nights, Australian TV is, for the most part, pretty rubbish.

Not that they can’t make decent shows over here–the first series of Underbelly, for example, is testament to what local talent can do given enough money and network support (and incidentally it looks like some gunmen were out on the mean streets of Ascot Vale–which is to all intents and purposes where we live–writing a new chapter in that particular grisly story yesterday afternoon…)

Sadly, quality original drama like that is somewhat thin on the ground. Hardly surprising in a country with such a small population, where even a wildly popular show on the commercial networks might be seen by just a million people. The advertising revenue clearly isn’t enough to sustain the big budgets we’ve been used to back home, and so the schedules are mostly filled instead with cheap, imported tat, usually from the US or the UK. Channel 9 might have been the network behind the aforementioned Underbelly, but the rest of the time it subsists on a diet of Two and a Half Men and Who Want’s To Be A Millionaire? Which is Not Good, of course.

This does mean, however, that every time a Boy with an Arse for his Face-esque documentary comes on one of the local channels, Sal and I get to play the fun game for all the family: “guess which UK terrestrial network produced this piece of rubbish” (and then we have to wait for the credits to find out). The day that I can no longer pick between Channel 5 and BBC 2 will truly be the day that I have finally lost touch with British popular culture…

It’s also interesting how some of the cheap local programming makes shows I wouldn’t normally go near back home look like TV masterpieces. So poor an interviewer, for example, is Rove McManus, the host of the TFI Friday-meets-Jonathan Ross shambles that is Rove, Channel 10’s Sunday night talkshow, that when we stumbled across The Graham Norton Show–something I haven’t watched since I was at uni–one evening the other week, it suddenly seemed as if our Graham had become the world’s greatest presenter and interviewer. Oh dear Australia: what have you done to me?

The one beacon of light is the government-run ABC, who do some great news, current affairs, and comedy, despite having no licence fee and consequentially a minuscule budget. This year we’ve already enjoyed The Gruen Transfer, a discussion show about advertising, the hilarious Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure, the dependable music quiz show Spicks and Specks, The Hollowman, a sort of Australian Thick of It, and most recently The Chaser’s War On Everything, a satirical comedy show that returned a couple of weeks ago only to be yanked off the air following our very own local Sachs-gate affair–this time it was over an ill-judged sketch depicting the “Make A Realistic Wish” foundation (“why bother spending money on terminally ill kids when they’re only going to die anyway…”) Which is a shame–the sketch itself wasn’t particularly funny, but as someone who actually watched the show when it was broadcast (unlike, I suspect, most of the outraged voices in the media…) I don’t think it was worthy of the outrage it sparked. Even Kevin Rudd weighed in on the debate–admitting at the same time that he hadn’t actually seen it. I can’t help thinking that he might have better things to do, though, like, um running the country…

Still, all of this makes me realise–as if I didn’t already know it–just how good the BBC is. People of the UK: next time someone in the Daily Mail is complaining about “TV Fakery” or using some other hypocritical stick to beat Auntie with, tell them where to go from me, OK? Thanks…

Sal and I spent an entertaining couple of evenings down in St Kilda last week, at the Film Festival. I’d picked up a leaflet about the 6 day event one lunchtime a few week’s earlier, and we’d decided to buy a couple of midweek tickets, which would get us in to as much short film as we could take over the space of two nights.

I was a bit worried that we were being overly keen when I turned up in advance to buy the passes only to be sold ones with the numbers “1” and “2” written on the back of them in felt tip, and my concerns were compounded when we turned up to the first session on our list to a half empty cinema to watch an hour and a half of Mexican shorts.

Luckily this was a one off, though, with bigger and bigger crowds for each subsequent session. I guess the filmgoers of St Kilda just don’t care about Mexican film, but I really enjoyed the selection, most of which happened to be about death for some reason. I particularly liked La Curiosa Conquista del Ampere, in which an electrician survives death to provide free electricity to his friends and family, and Rogelio, in which the protagonist refuses to accept his passing and keeps popping back out of his grave to go drinking with his mates.

The following session was the first of 16 shown throughout the festival to cover “Australia’s Top 100” short films of the year. There were significantly more people in the cinema, but sadly the quality was much lower: it opened with something about a dog playing the guitar that was so bad I didn’t even realise it was one of the films, closely followed by a pointless five minute short about a heroin addict shooting up into herself and then a small bird. In fact I only realised that the dog thing was one of the films when people started clapping at the end. It seemed somewhat unnecessary to me, but apparently this was to continue at the end of each short for the rest of the festival. Even the shockingly poor Lover’s Walk, a film about old people who couldn’t act, got a round at the end, albeit half heartedly and after a short pause.

Luckily the session was redeemed by the excellent Love Market, a well made, interesting, and moving documentary following four hilltribe girls from Vietnam who sell embroidered tat to tourists while dreaming of better lives elsewhere.

The following night we were back for more, occasionally mixing it up by sitting in a different part of the cinema. Thankfully Sessions 2 and 3 were much stronger overall. The highlight for both of us was another documentary: Christmas Lights, a hilarious look at what drives some people to cover the outside of their houses with flashing lights and assorted Christmas paraphernalia every December.

We rounded off our first St Kilda Film Festival with SoundKILDA, a collection of cracking music videos, a bit like one of those Adam Buxton BUG things, but this time hosted by the very amusing Kiwi Alan Brough off of Aussie music quiz show Spicks and Specks.

And as if 7 and a half hours of film wasn’t enough value for money out of our $40 passes, there were free drinks in the cinema bar afterwards. I think we’ll be back next year…

Yeah. Sorry. I know. It’s been a while.

And not for any particular reason. Time just seems to whizz by these days and before I know it another month has passed and I’ve only written two posts. Or in the case of this month, none at all–with only a couple of days left to go in May 2009 I’m in danger of letting a whole calendar month pass me by with no new entries for the first time since I started this thing way back in January 2003…

Even Google has noticed: I’m sure the little “PageRank” bar on my Google Toolbar used to look a bit healthier than it does these days and from a brief bit of vanity googling (at least from the results I’m getting here in Oz) it appears that it’s only my Flickr photostream keeping me in the top ten, and I’m even way behind on that. I may still be taking a dull photo every day, but you wouldn’t know it from looking.

And it’s not like I’m going to get around to sorting that out any time soon–Sal and I are off to the St Kilda Film Festival tomorrow night and the one after, I’ve got an awards ceremony to go to on Friday (long story…) and then we’re out for Elise’s birthday drinks and to watch the FA Cup Final on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

I wouldn’t want you to think that things haven’t been happening here, though: I could tell you how we went to South Australia for Easter (and learnt that you shouldn’t try and have a big night out in Adelaide on Good Friday as all the pubs are shut by law…); I could tell you about all the great stuff we saw at the Melbourne Comedy Festival; I could tell you about the houses we went to look at that went on to sell for silly money at auction; I could even tell you how I spent Saturday night dressed as a Teh Beatles at a fancy dress party… but most of that seems like it happened ages ago now.

But anyway. Sorry teh internets, I know I haven’t written to you for a while. I promise to try harder in future.

I might be in need of some strong coffee this morning, but I’m nevertheless very happy with my decision to stay up into the small hours to watch Everton secure their place in the FA Cup Final early this morning. When I made the decision to stay up for what was a 1AM kick off here in Australia, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of the game going into extra time and penalties, and thus depriving me of an additional hour of sleep, but it was all worth it in the end. Roll on the 30th May, when I’ll have to find myself a pub somewhere in Melbourne to watch the final (it’ll be a midnight start for us, but at least this time on a Saturday night…)

Earlier in the day I’d heard a news report on one of the main Aussie channels describing it as a clash between Manchester United and “Tim Cahill’s Everton”, as if the Australian midfielder is manager and owner as well as being just one of eleven players. I wonder if they’ll be playing down his involvement when they cover the game on tonight’s news, given that he was the only Everton player to miss his penalty…

After the final penalty had gone in, and after I’d finally finished (quietly so as not to wake anyone) jumping around the living room, I noticed that the cameras had picked out a despondent young United fan–maybe about 10 years old–still sitting in his seat next to his dad.

For a second, I wondered what it must feel like to be a United fan when they lose a big game like that. As an Evertonian I’m well acquainted with what it feels like to watch the team I support lose–they’ve been doing it to me for years–but for a young United fan it must be a strange new sensation. Perhaps for the first time that young lad in the crowd would be coming to realise that life isn’t quite the way he’d thought; that your team doesn’t always win; that you can’t always get what you want; that life is full of small disappointments.

But then I remembered that, in the words of the BBC:

For United and manager Ferguson, there was only disappointment and they must now turn their attentions back to the pursuit of the Premier League and Champions League.

Oh yeah. They’re only top of the league, having already won two trophies this season and with a Champions League semi final coming up. They must be gutted.

It’s fair to say that the aussies like the odd bit of sport. Although cricket might nominally be the national game (at least when the aussies are winning), and although there’s a growing national interest in “soccer” since the last world cup (at least when the aussies are winning) and while folks in Sydney and Queensland might like a bit of Rugby, down here in Melbourne there’s only one game in town. Aussie Rules. Rules.

With the new AFL season kicking off a couple of weeks ago, vast swathes of newsprint and television time is now being devoted to coverage of this funny game played by guys in short shorts throwing around an oval ball on an oval pitch.

I can’t pretend to understand the rules. Sometimes I can’t even understand the newspaper stories. Many of the articles in the aussie press (at least the ones that aren’t just copied out of UK or US papers) seem to be written with the assumption that the paper’s readers will understand fully the context and history behind the story, which makes reading the papers a confusing business for a recent migrant.

The stories about AFL are no exception–for someone who didn’t grow up with the game they can be utterly baffling. A few weeks before the season started, for example, the papers were full of stories about “the bump” after an incident in a pre season game in which a Collingwood player broke the jaw of an opposing player. The offending player was initially banned by the AFL for four matches, but then this was somehow overturned on appeal, prompting the Herald Sun to ask: “Is The Bump Back In Footy?”

But no one ever explained what “the bump” was. To make matters even more confusing, some people even wrote to the papers to say that it was all the other guy’s fault–the guy with the broken jaw–for getting his face in the way of the first guy’s elbow. Apparently these people were not joking either (something to do with teh kids no longer being taught how to respond to “the bump” these days).

I still don’t understand what this bump is or how it can be the fault of the guy with the broken jaw (who of course was out of action for the first half of the season…) but this weekend I went to my first live AFL game. I did see one on the telly a few years ago when we inexplicably got up in the middle of the night in London to go to a pub, eat meat pies, and watch the “Grand Final”, but this was the first time I’d been to one live, joining Ad and Andrew in a half empty Etihad Stadium to watch Essendon play Freemantle. As an introduction to the game, it wasn’t exactly the finest example of Aussie Rules–I’m not sure what I’d think of football if my first game had been something equivalent to a goalless draw between Hull and Stoke on a wet Wednesday evening, but I could see flashes of entertainment in there in the midst of a lot of dull play. The AFL seem to like changing the rules of the game every five minutes, so perhaps I should write to them and suggest they shave off about 30 minutes from the playing time, at least for the games between the rubbish teams…

Whatever they are, it will be some time before I really get to grips with the rules (I couldn’t tell you, for example, if the home crowd’s annoyance with the ref every time he gave the opposition a free kick was justified or just the usual supporter’s tunnel vision) but perhaps the funniest thing for me coming to the game at this late stage in my life is the way the scoring system is set up. There are four posts at each end of the ground: you get six points for kicking the ball through the central rugby style posts, but if you miss those you still get a point for either hitting the post or getting it through the outside posts. Surely this is the only sport in the world that rewards failure by giving you a point even if you miss.

Perhaps it’s a consolation for the fact that you can expect to have your jaw or neck broken at any time (and it will probably be “your fault”…)

So I’m about three weeks late on this one, but anyway I just stumbled across this blog post explaining Facebook’s philosophy behind their latest redesign.

When I first saw it I thought that the philosophy behind the redesign was “let’s try and make Facebook look as much like Twitter as possible and maybe all the people going on and on about Twitter will come back and start talking about us again…” but for some reason Zuckerberg doesn’t mention this at all.

He does say…

In 2007, we popularized the term Social Graph to describe how Facebook maps out people’s connections.

Jeez. Yeah, I remember 2007. You couldn’t move without someone talking about the Social Graph. Social Graph this. Social Graph that. It was everywhere. By December I was sick of hearing about the Social Graph, frankly.

But mostly he talks about how they’ve made Facebook as much like Twitter as possible. In fact, why not read through the whole thing but in your head add “Just Like Twitter!” to the end of every sentence:

Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Just like Twitter! Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. Just like Twitter! These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. Just like Twitter! You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. Just like Twitter! This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe. Just like Twitter!

We’re also going to make some changes to the home page. The new home page will let you see everything that’s shared by your friends and connections as it happens. Just like Twitter!

And so on. It’s a fun game for all the family.

Sorry Zuckerberg, you’ll just have to face up to the fact that you’re no longer the hottest property on the web. I mean, do you have Stephen Fry? Can I use your social networking service to shout messages in his direction? No? Sorry. Not interested, and no amount of rearranging the deckchairs is going to change things. But don’t worry, it’ll happen to Twitter too, eventually.