Horse 1342 - Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Boring, Boring, Boring!

Foxtel recently ran a competition for people to come up with a better national chant than "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi, Oi, Oi".

http://www.foxtel.com.au/whats-on/competitions/chant-your-way-to-10-000-176723.htm
But more coverage means we’ll be hearing a lot more of our national chant. So we want to know – is ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie’ the best we can do?

The thing is that the chant:
a) isn't very good
b) isn't even Australian

From the little amount of research I can find, it came from Cornwall and was originally "Oggy Oggy Oggy". The word "Oggy" is a derivation of the Cornish word "hoggan" which is a Cornish Pasty. The theory is that pasty sellers would should "Oggy Oggy Oggy" to hawk their wares and the reply "Oi Oi Oi" indicated that someone wanted to buy said same.
The Welsh comedian Max Boyce popularised the chant it appears as a bit of a catchphrase; extending to Welsh Rugby crowds by the end of the 1970s. Perhaps it mutated into "Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy" during the early 80's because of Tottenham Hotspur's Argentine midfielder Osvaldo Ardiles who became something of a cult hero and was even the subject of a Chas and Dave song which made it to No.5 on the hit parade.

So having firmly established that "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi, Oi, Oi" is not really that Australian, what would be the most appropriate thing for a national chant? Moreover, how does one even start or make a national chant? My experience on football terraces, leads me to believe that chants are highly organic things.
Back in 1997 during an England Cricket tour of Australia, a chant of either "El Fayed has got The Ashes" or "Paula Yates has got The Ashes" were sung in response to the deaths of Lady Diana Spencer and Michael Hutchence respectively.
Most chants in terraces either blindly extol their team and/or show abject hatred for the opposition. However the strangest chant that I've ever heard goes like this:


Have you ever seen? Have you ever seen?
Salmon in a tin. Salmon in a tin.
Here comes your mum with a loaf of bread,
Better watch out or she'll hit you in the head.
Oh salmon, salmon. Get it in a big tin, get it in a small tin,
Get it out of Tesco's, Okay!
To this day I've never worked out what it's for or even who or what it was about.

A good chant should be easily remembered and have a very limited tonal range. In the World Cup in Japan in 2002, for instance, when England played, one chant that went up frequently was "Oooooooooooh. You've got SARS!" in reference to the SARS outbreak of that year.
For some utterly strange reason in that tournament, German fans would sing the theme song of Vicky The Viking in the streets. Even more bizarrely, Netherlands fans would try to outsing the same song but with the Dutch lyrics.

Perhaps the most famous chant that got out of hand was the song "Yankee Doodle":

Yankee Doodle went to town,

Riding on a pony;

He stuck a feather in his hat,

And called it macaroni

Barring the extensive rewrites to this, the chant basically says that "Yankee Doodle" or an "American Idiot" looked goofy on horseback, and was so unfashionable that he thought that just sticking a feather in his hat would make him look dead fancy.

A great deal of chants in Europe don't have any words at all. The tune of "Go West" by the Pet Shop Boys can be heard throughout Europe and there's variations on the "Humba" right through southern Germany and into Italy.

If there is going to be a national chant, I think that the best place for it to come from would be pop culture of some kind. To be fair, it doesn't even have to come from the country in question either. Eng-er-land (deliberately misspelled) sing to the very very American tune of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" by John Philip Sousa. I don't think that a national chant needs any words either, it is quite common to hear the theme from "The Great Escape" at football grounds with no words.

The most obvious thing that I can think of which should replace "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi, Oi, Oi" is the music of Route 1 from Pokemon Red/Blue . It's very easy to learn, has no words, and can be sung continuously for a very long time.

I'm still singing it now!

Horse 1341 - This Defies Description

Organic water. Organic water? Yes, Organic water.

I tried to think of a less apt description for something and short of calling the entire of the Second World War "a bit of a tiff", or perhaps as "inadequate", I failed to do so.

Marketing people in their rush to get us to buy their particular product amongst the godzillions of competitors out there, will resort to all sorts of uses of enticing language, appeals to empathy, authority, vanity even, in an attempt to make you part with your hard won dollarpounds.

So why organic?

The word "Organic" should by definition mean a class of chemistry which originally meant relating to plants and animals but was extended to include all of carbon chemistry.
In that respect, I suppose technically the only thing "organic" about this bottle of water is the bottle which the water comes in because it is made from Polyethylene Terephthalate - that's C10H8O4 for those interested.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but having organic material in drinking water is not only undesirable but in some cases lethal.
After the so-called Great Stink of 1858, the British Parliament was finally convinced by people like Joseph Bazalgette who undertook the gargantuan task of building the London sewerage system at the then astronomical price of £5 million (or £9.1 billion in 2012 terms) and the physician John Snow who had traced the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak, people began to think seriously that having any organic material at all in drinking water was a bad thing.

I did some very low tech research after I'd seen this and worked out that most people think that the word "organic" means that the water is natural and or chemical free. There are of course a few problems with this too.

Just because something is "natural" is in no way any indication that it's safe for human consumption. Things like Arsenic and Osmium are also natural but if you were to actually drink either of those, in the words of Smithson Tennant who isolated the element Osmium you would find yourself "extremely dead".
How can water not be "natural"? By natural I assume that we mean something which comes from nature. Owing to the vagrancies of the Water Cycle, water has this habit of going around and around, so it is very much possible that the water contained in the bottle may have been drunk several hundreds of times over by all sorts of organisms.

The other problem with this particular bottle of water being "chemical free" that that the bottle openly states which chemicals are in it. It says that the water has been purified to 1 micron and sterilised with ozone. It also says that a typical analysis is that it contains 28mg/L of Chlorides, 13mg/L of Sodium, 5mg/L of Magnesium, 13mg/L of Calcium and 2mg/L of Potassium.
Never mind the fact that water itself is a chemical itself which according to the rules of chemical nomenclature could be called Dihydrogen Monoxide. Also, Dihydrogen Monoxide has been found to cause rust and corrosion in various metals, if heated above 65°C produces a full thickness burn in less than a second of exposure and if inhaled in sufficient quantities will cause asphyxia due to suffocation.

I would have contacted Active Organic Beverages Pty Ltd to ask them about their product but the phone number didn't give me any response and there is not website or email address I could find.
After doing a search for their company name, the only reliable instance I found was an article from the Sydney Morning Herald from April 2011 in which another bottled water company is supposed to be in breach on an Australian Standard by the ACCC:

"Everybody knows water is an inorganic compound, so you can't certify water as organic. The next best thing, we believe, is bottling water at the source; our farm is organic, so we think that our brand name is not misleading in that regard. We believe that, of all products in the marketplace, if any of them should have the word organic, ours is one," Mr Stack said
- Sydney Morning Herald, Elise Dalley, Apr 21 2011.

I think that calling any bottled water "organic" is misplaced on several fronts but I suppose that no-one is going to do anything about it. I personally thought that this was just dumb on the part of the marketers but I hadn't realised the legal implications.
Maybe I should start touting this blog as "organic" because it was made by natural processes (my brain). The light which comes out of the device you happen to be reading this on is probably almost certainly "chemical free" or if you printed this on paper, that is also "organic" by virtue of the fact that paper is made from trees.
Or maybe people should just think for ten minutes before they put words on packaging.

Horse 1340 - Coffee And Fascism

I think that the one of the most elegant devices of the Twentieth Century, surely has to be the Moka Pot. Patented in 1933 by Luigi De Ponti for the Bialetti company, the moka pot or "caffettiera" (coffee maker) in Italian is both elegant and simple and very very reliable because it has no moving parts. As a result of its incredible reliability, the same moka pot can be used on an electric or gas stovetop or even used on a barbecue or open fire.

The coffee which a moka pot produces will not usually have the same crema as something made with a fancy espresso machine because the coffee itself isn't under the same amount of pressure but because the water is forced through the coffee bucket in the device, all the flavour of a fancy espresso machine is retained. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars, a moka pot can be had for under thirty. There's something delightfully subversive about the moka pot though, and it has to do with the Bialetti company.

Mussolini brought Fascism to Italy in the 1920s but Italians are all far too cool to ever pay attention to what their governments think. There is a curious phrase in Italian "La Dolce Vita" which literally means "the sweet life". Fascism was never going to properly work in Italy, not in a nation who ride about on motor scooters without a helmet and who pay a fortune for badly cut suits and poorly built motor cars.

 Alfonso Bialetti chose as the logo for his company a caricature of his son Renato with one finger raised as if ordering an espresso, or at least that is the official explanation. Bialetti himself later joked after the war that it was a parody of the Saluto Romano or "Roman Salute" employed by both Fascist Italy and more famously by the Third Reich.

I find it quite fitting that l’omino con i baffi or "the mustachioed little man" should survive and be loved by millions and that the horrible Fascist regimes died off, oh so many years ago. Old Alfonso would have been proud I think.

Horse 1339 - How To Improve The England Squad

Yet another tournament has been and passed and whilst Spain have proven that this squad is one of the best of all time, England have yet again been consigned to the pit of mediocrity and whimpered their way out of the tournament.
The song "Three Lions" by Skinner, Baddiel and The Lightning Seeds which became the unofficial song of Euro '96, has two soundbites which even 16 years later, could have been said yesterday:
"We'll go on getting bad results"
"We're not creative enough and we're not positive enough"
This was said all the way back in 1996 and yet despite a so-called "Golden Era" which again yielded nought, nothing of serious consequence was done to fix the problem. We're quickly moving from "30 Years of Hurt" as the song suggests, to well on the way to 50.
Many minds have thought about this over the past 20 or so years but I believe I have a relatively simple answer: Britain.


From 1884-1984 the Home Nations (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northen Ireland after the invention of the republic) played in a competition called the British Home Championship. The idea is crudely simple, get the four national sides to play each other.
The idea works perfectly well in Rugby, although that competition has been expanded from the original four Home Nations, to including France and later Italy. I can see no reason why it shouldn't work in football either. The only opposition I can see is the stubbornness of the English FA and of course the clubs themselves.
The idea of course also works perfectly well in football and in 2011 the other four nations Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northen Ireland resumed on what will be a biannual basis, the Nations Cup. The "first" edition was won by the Republic of Ireland 1-0 over Scotland.

It seems somewhat stupid to me that if England keep on failing for tournament after tournament and playing in  "friendlies" which the crowds themselves shy away from, that the FA  rejoin the tournament. Surely more passion, interest and of course travelling fans would be generated within the UK. The lessons of hooliganism which existed 30 years ago, have surely by now been laid utterly to rest what with the Taylor Report, the introduction of all-seater stadia and various pieces of legislation designed to ensure that hooligans are kept away.
I bet that an England v Scotland fixture would pack both Wembley and Hampden Park. The Millenium Stadium in Cardiff would also probably have people piled up to the rafters for a Wales v England fixture.


England's chronic problem is that the players do not play together often enough. Mostly it's because of resistance from their clubs and not wanting them to travel. I would find it very strange indeed if Manchester United wouldn't release Wayne Rooney to play for England at Old Trafford for instance; why would it be an issue for him to play at Wembley, when it wouldn't have been to play at Stamford Bridge the week before?
The Republic of Ireland has almost certainly benefitted from playing in the Nations Cup. Their performance at Euro 2012 whilst it wasn't exactly ground breaking, was in part made to look worse by the fact that they had what would eventually be both finalists in the group stage.


 If I was Grand Poobah and Lord High Everything Else, then I'd be entering England into the Nations Cup. It wouldn't just be because of so much tradition but rather a very real need to improve the national side.

Horse 1338 - News Corp. Snapped in Half?

The story which shot around the world last night was that News Corporation is toying with the idea of snapping the company in half; with the print section being in one company and moving pictures (sport, news, film, television) being in the other. No word was given as to what was going to happen to the online portions of the existing businesses, though you'd expect that they'd likely follow their current counterparts into the new companies.

Newspapers face the same sorts of overhead costs as books, magazines, CDs and DVDs have: the physical production of product and the distribution of product. The music industry seems to have survived quite happily without selling anywhere near as much physical product anymore and I'm sure that News Corp will have seen that and if it could would like to make its newspapers follow suit.

The big problem with moving to a digital only platform is something which I think scares News Corp. Although there is a physical cost in moving dead tree product around, the very fact that it appears at newsstands means that the messages which a newspaper wants to push, are seen by the general public. Remove that physical stimulus and to some degree, the reflex reaction which people are going to have which causes them to buy a newspaper is entirely snuffed out.

In the UK, newspaper circulation peaked in about 1977 and although The Sun has been topping the charts since about 1979 its 2011 sales were less than every year going back until 1975. Even so, to lose that sort of visibility altogether is probably going to make a very large dint in market power; other newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror would only be too happy to fill the void.
In Australia where the newspaper market is more or less a duopoly (or in some cities an effective monopoly), the effect would be utterly devastating. In the cities where there are no Fairfax newspapers, a vacuum would be created and the cities where there are Fairfax newspapers, then Fairfax would either cover the hole left behind, or launch a new tabloid.

You could argue that news outlets like the ABC and the BBC effectively deliver news content far quicker and with a much wider scope of people on the ground than either Fairfax or News Corp. who largely buy overseas reports from AP or Reuters but there is still something tactile about reading a newspaper; even if the news is in some cases a few days old. The Financial Review shows in part that even with a digital alternative, people will still pay for quality journalism and the Fin which is a specialist publication and retails for $3.00 hasn't really seen a drop off in circulation numbers in the same way that dailies like the Sydney Morning Herald or the Daily Telegraph have.

Up until this point, printed newspapers in the News Corp stable have been subsidised by massive profits elsewhere in the group; Rupert has probably kept them on as some sort of plaything. To be perfectly honest, as we move further into the 21st Century and a new generation expects to find everything online, are they really going to bother going to a newsstand at all? Moreover do any of his six children actually want to inherit what will become an ever increasingly unprofitable business? Rupert himself has suggested that printed newspapers will cease to exist by the end of the decade and at least in the UK and Australia (the US is too far disjointed, as is Canada and neither South Africa or India which are the only other two Anglophone countries in the G20 have a tech dependent economy), I think that will probably ring true.

The underlying question that I have about snapping News Corp. in half is what happens to Fox News? Unlike the BBC which sends reporters out all over the world through the world service, Fox News doesn't to anywhere near a degree. Currently Fox News in theory has the ability to ride the same editorial and news networks as its print cousins but if the print division is cut off, what then happens to it? Probably a change in character and Fox News would become more like existing TV networks. I don't think that Fox News in the United States at least will magically cease to be the cesspool of right-wing nutjobs that it currently is because that's where it chooses to pitch itself.

I think what the snapping of News Corp. in half marks, is symbolically the undulation point which marks the beginning of the end. The top of the curve was reached some time ago, what we'll be seeing in future are accelerated declines as if newspapers are poor players who struts and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more.

Horse 1337 - Ten Suburbs. No.10 Oatley 2223

If you look at a map of Oatley, three streets stand out immediately. Oatley Avenue and Oatley Parade could very well be the same street but are separated by a strip of park and Wonoona Parade East appears on the map as a double street because of a line of trees which form a line down the middle.
At the end of Frederick St, stands a clock tower made from red brick which looks like it could very well be a sewer chimney. The high street in Oatley is one of the prettiest in Sydney and the gentle hill sloping downwards towards the railway station makes it ideal to wander down.

The reason why I mention Oatley though is that once a upon a time, before there was television and when they used to walk faster in the movies, the Oatley Pleasure Grounds was home to a miniature zoo of sorts. I imagine that it must've been similar to Alexandra Park & Zoo in Bundaberg, Queensland, but the reason why the zoo was closed wasn't due to the animals, but the people. The Oatley Pleasure Grounds for a few mad seasons in the late 1920s gained a reputation for having a pretty wild Wine Bar. I found at least three headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald by accident when looking for something else entirely, that when Dame Nellie Melba performed operatic pieces in the park in supposedly "low-key affairs", the police were called in.

Just to the north of Oatley Station are a set of railway sheds. In 1926 when Sydney finally saw electric railways arrive, Oatley was the end of the electric lines and there still exists a crossover point. When the electric trains first saw operation, the very first services ran from Oatley and ran to Museum and St James. However unlike those two stations, Oatley never received any of the fancy tiling.

In the west of the suburb; beyond the line of houses, Oatley Park juts around Jew Fish Bay. What makes this patch of parkland interesting is that its probably one of the few refuges in suburbia where playtipii and echindnae are found in the wild. Traffic doesn't go through here and the Georges River is not as busy as either the Parramatta River, Port Jackson or Middle Harbour; so they're left more or less in relative tranquility.

Oatley has one rather remarkable hidden gem. Within the unassuming building of the Hurstville Christadelphian District Ecclesia, there sits a pipe organ dating from 1905. After the Grand Organ in the Sydney Town Hall was finished in 1890, the same company was comissioned to build a pipe organ in Wahroonga. That organ was moved and after rennovations, now occupies its current home.

Horse 1336 - Ten Suburbs. No.9 Narellan 2567

I suppose that including Narellan in the definition of a Sydney suburb is pushing it somewhat but the truth is that the connurbation of Sydney is so vast that in terms of sheer size, it eclipses other world class cities like London and what is loosely alled Tokyohama. Narellan is on the very fringes of this swirling metropolis and has its own problems that the people with money and power living in the inner suburbs do not know or care about.

For a start it takes so long to get anywhere. The M5 and M7 have helped I suppose but they've been built more with the motive of taking money from people's wallets, rather than making lives any easier. There are buses and schools which make feeble attempts to cling on but the only real concession to proper development is a Woolworths.

This tryanny of distace does come with certain benefits though and one of these is the tremendous space. Up the road the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens sprawl over a massive 416 hectares and if you just want to run headlong at the horizon and get totally lost in the countryside, then then this is the place for you.

I found myself wandering into the Mt Annan Club Hotel and unlike the pubs you get in the city, the locals seemed friendly and said hello. There would be a distinct oppotunity for them to regard outsiders with suspicion but I as with most of Australia, I find that the further you move away from postcodes 000 (2000, 3000, 5000 etc) the more likely you are to find real characters.

Traffic through Narellan has a strange habit of moving at only two speeds. Either it rips along at 100 clicks irrespective of whatever speed limits are posted, or else it crawls along; even on Camden Valley Way which mysteriously has been widened from a two lane road to a six-lane behemoth.

I that that people have a distinc trespect for speed out here. Maybe it's because they know only too well of the consequences. You don't have to drive too far to see fences made of barbed wire and hitting the scenery will more than likely put you face to face with livestock than a house. Get it wrong and you'll hit redgums.

I did notice whilst coming to one particular junction that I was being watched by three kids in a corner paddock. Being the beginning of ute country, I doubt that they'd have seen many French hatchbacks out here; maybe I was a novelty for them. This illustrates something that this unfortunately becoming very different these days. These kids had ventured into that strange land which few kids see now, that magic place called "Outside".
With the abundance of space out here, kids can kick the ever-loving uss out of a footy and not worry about bumping the furniture, hitting mum's car or going over the fence and into Mr Franklin's pool. "Outside" was a magical place which was burned into the childhood memories of generations in this wide brown land but is in danger of becomng mere just that...memories. We might remmeber doe-eyes about playing by the creek ad perhaps for many people reading this, it is just a stylised canvas but for these kids it's in 360° living colour, widescreen and full super hyper HD.

I guess that eventually even this too will be swallowed by he encroachment of cheaply built houses, owned by the people with money and power living in the inner suburbs and that this part of Sydney will look like places like Auburn and Summer Hill may have looked 30 years ago but for the moment, the tyranny of distance which causes an annoyance acts as both a safeguard and a theatre in which the memories of this generation will be played out and burned into minds for safekeeping.

Horse 1335 - Ten Suburbs. No.8 Tamarama 2026

Bondi Beach to the north is arguably the most famous beach in Australia. Bronte which is immediately to he south is a flat beach with excellent but hideously overpriced cafes. Tamarama which sits nicely between these two is in my opinion the nicest beach in Sydney.
Firstly, I have to open this account with one important and overarching statement: I hate going to the beach. That is, I hate going to the beach as a concept, not specifically any particular beach. If this is true, why then would I include Tamarama in the ten? I personally don't think that you can describe Sydney without doing so.

For many Sydneysiders, summers are marked with seemingly endless days burned into the memory, of swimming at the beach, surfing, developing skin cancers etc, and generally having a whale of a time. I can not   swim and rather do not like the idea of being pricked by a million small particles in the wind. For me, going to the beach is a tedious affair and to be perfectly frank, I'd rather be back in the pavillion with a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce, a cup of Russian Caravan and a nice buttery scone.

Tamarama is a quiet, tucked away beach. Although it has no largish pavillions, it has a bus stop and is very easily accessable by road. Also, because it's protected by two very big headlands on either side, the long sweeping winds that you get at Bondi or even South Steyne, never show up. Most of the time the windsocks hang limp.
If you do decide to walk from Bondi, you'll can walk all the way down past Tamarama, Bronte, Waverley Cemetery and end up in Clovelly. Incidentally, this walk also hosts "Sculpture By The Sea" in the springtime, which I'm led to believe is Australia's largest outdoor and most attended art exhibition in the country.
Being a rather narrow and funneled beach, the breakers come right up to the shoreline, which means that surfers get more value for their efforts than elsewhere. Actually I should point out here that on a per mile of beach basis, Tamarama is the most dangerous beach in the world. During heavy swells, it's probably best that most swimmers do not go out, because rips of up to 4 knots can develop and waves as high as 15 feet have been recorded.

If you intend to take your car, then park all the way back in Birrell St. The very steep walk down through Tamarama Park passes through a its own micro-climate and in doing the research for this I discovered that that small park has its very own sub-species of Soft Tree-Fern, the Dicksonia Antarctica Tamarama. Whether or not it is native to this particular micro-climate or from somewhere else (we will stop the boat ferns) is unknown.

Apart from that, there's little else to tell. Obviously the people that live there, moved in because they want to be close to the ocean. There aren't any real shops to speak of at all in the suburb, and the houses themselves are all either sitting on small blocks or are squished up apartment complexes.

Except maybe this:
Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the ram
In the Tamarama ding dong?

Horse 1334 - Ten Suburbs. No.7 Pennant Hills 2120

As I sit here and type this out into my phone (whilst struggling with the Sydney Morning Herald) in the Corner Cafe Pennant Hills, I really do get an idea of the comings and goings of this suburb. The people in this suburb on the whole drive nicer than normal motor cars, they wear nicer than normal clothes, even the coffee which is sitting in front of me is nicer than normal.
Pennant Hills (at least this side of the railway station) is the quiet, peaceful; almost Norman Rockwell-esque version of what a modern Australian suburb is like. Almost conspicuous by their absence, neither Coles or Woolworths have set up a supermarket in Pennant Hills. I imagine that if the locals want to do their shopping, they they do it in Thornleigh, which is one suburb to the north.

Perhaps Pennant Hills is most famous for the 6 lane arterial road which roars through it. On the other side of the railway line to where I'm currently seated, there are a number of car yards (which are also nicer than normal - being Toyota, Skoda, Holden, Hyundai and Audi), a KFC but the Hotel Pennant Hills has obviously given up and has decided to barricade itself against the noise by blocking up and covering over any trace of the windows of what I imagine would have been a Georgian style pub. I am assured that there is a 350 seat bistro somewhere behind the walls but from the outside it looks as inviting as a Soviet power station.

Head a little bit to the east though and instead of the maddening bustle, you find yourself in Lane Cove National Park. Two miles from Pennant Hills Station and a million miles from care. It's curious that apart from Pennant Hills Road, if you head eastwards, there are no north-south roads until you get to Lane Cove Road which is another 6 lane arterial.
At this point Lane Cove National Park's main features are Scout Creek and Camp Creek. They both cut very deeply into the landscape which has created an area of quite tense, temperate rainforest. Lane Cove Valley Walk is somewhere down below at the bottom and that in turn forms part of the Great North Walk which eventually ends some 250km away in Newcastle.
I find it extraordinary that Sydney keeps on playing this trick again and again. You don't have to go very far at all to find yourself completely surrounded by no buildings. A lot of cities are built on grids but Sydney had to contend with a very squiggly landscape and changes in height; it coped by having roads meander and leaving pockets of bushland very close to people's houses. Less than 2km in a straight line from the offices of some of the biggest technology companies in the world like Microsoft, Orix, Lucent Technologies etc. you can find wallabies and wallaroos, rainbow lorikeets, galahs and big lizards going about their business; completely oblivious to the industry going on around them.

Before I completely paint Pennant Hills in a rose wash, I should point out that this is the first of the ten suburbs that I've actively been made to feel unwelcome in. Whilst seated here, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said "You look like you don't belong here"; I really had no idea why, for I was clad in a plum-coloured collared shirt, a black crombie coat and a nice pair of jeans. Was it supposed to be a compliment to suggest that I was of a better quality than the suburb? Was it a put-down? Either way, who goes around saying stuff like that anyway?
I'll assume that Pennant Hills possibly has nicer than normal people, though immediate experience might lead me to believe otherwise.

NB: This post was mainly written on Saturday 2nd May, and would have appeared as Horse 1332

Horse 1333 - Ten Suburbs. No.6 Merrylands 2160

Merrylands which in Sydney's west has gained a fair amount of notoriety of late due to a spate of shootings in the area but is the notoriety deserved, or is it just a victim of circumstance?

Merrylands is the seat of Holroyd Council, the home of a largish Stockland shopping mall, at least four established churches and has a fairly vibrant town centre. The obvious tensions which the suburb is likely to hold are on ethnic lines with more than half of the suburb's inhabitants settling from overseas. The council's website suggests that there are Lebanese, Italian, Assyrian and sub-Saharan African peoples living in the area, but again that doesn't account for the violence which has happened on the streets.

No, I'm afraid that violence in the suburb of Merrylands has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of Merrylands no matter how much the media tries to paint this picture. Merrylands is in the grips of a turf war between motorcycle gangs.
This is one of the sad facts about Australia; although we'd like to think that we're a reasonably tolerant society, certain sectors of the community think themselves to be pseudo-superheroes and above the law. If you were to take an ethnic survey of members of bikie gangs, I bet that the vast majority of them would be white.

The truth is that walking around the centre of Merrylands is for the most part a completely dull sort of experience. The most offensive thing that I saw was a woodfired pizza restaurant with a meal deal for pizza and chardonnay and I'm sorry but there's just no excuse for white wine ever.

This week's Parramatta Advertiser quotes a Mr Tony Georgiou who at the age of 60 is ready to retire from working at his greeting card shop:

Mr Georgiou wants to trade cards for keys and finally learn how to play the piano, but he insists that the past 19 years have been the most satisfying of his life.
“I’ll miss the sense of community,”
- Parramatta Advertiser, 1st June 2012.

That there is the heart of Merrylands. It's a fairly normal, piece of suburbia. Head in any direction you like away from the centre of the suburb and you'll find people who go to work, send their kids to school, play in the various parks, do their shopping... whilst mostly living in free-standing, single storey, wood frame houses.


Although a friend of mine used to live in Guildford which is one suburb away (and which according to a piece of graffiti on Railway Terrace, Elvis is still purported to live), I would on occasion walk from Merrylands railway station simply because I liked the Al-Mouwal Chicken shop which is right on the corner when you get out. Their chicken Shish Tahouk was fantastic.

The more I walk around the various suburbs of Sydney expecting to find difference, the more I find that the vast majority are fairly much the same, even if the media doesn't think so.

Horse 1332 - Ten Suburbs. No.5 Rouse Hill 2155

The story of Rouse Hill is one marked with abject failure and probably 200 years of neglect by state governments because of a few historical events. Richard Rouse for whom the suburb is names after moved to the area in 1802, but it is the events of two years later which thrust this place into Australian history.

In 1798 Irish Catholic Republicans who were probably inspired by the American and French Revolutions rose up in bloody conflict against British Rule in Ireland. One such battle was the battle of Vinegar Hill in county Wexford and perhaps some of the veterans who were in that conflict eventually found their way to Australia as a result of being transported; most notably a Mr Phillip Cunningham who would lead a band of rebels.
Having settled in their new land, they were able to mobilise maybe a thousand convicts and between March 4 and about March 14, as many as 120 of them were killed by British troops once a state of martial law had been declared. Eventually nine would be sentenced with rebellion and summarily executed.
The place and the event would become known as the Second Battle of Vinegar Hill and probably took place where the current Mean Fiddler Hotel (which was also designed by an ex-convict Francis Greenway).

Rouse Hill was named in plans for an expansion of a railway line to service Castle Hill in 1932 to replace the existing tram service, however neither the trams were replaced and nor did the railway ever come to fruition.
In 1998 a proposed North West railway line was supposed to drive through the suburb, finally linking it to any sort of transport under the then transport minister Carl Scully, however the railway never came to fruition.
In 2008 a proposed North West Metro project would have linked the suburb to the city via Ryde, Gladesville and Drummoyne, however the project was cancelled forever and the railway never came to fruition.
Under the current O'Farrell government, plans are supposed to exist which would see the railway built by 2017, however given Infrastructure Australia's snubbing of the project and current transport minister Gladys Berejiklian's insistency to want to sell off te ferry network, I seriously doubt whether the current plan will ever come to fruition.

I digresss...

Rouse Hill is on the Windsor Road and grew up as a rest point for coaches and bullock trains servicing Windsor; hence the reason why the church and coachhouse in the area were built at all. However what really makes Rouse Hill interesting is a sterling piece of urban development that almost never happened at all.

It was only after repeated lobbying over a period of almost 25 years and the completion of the M2 that Windsor Road was improved from a narrow two lane road to a four lane arterial road. Trucks which used to travel down the road would often pass each other with only a few inches to spare and it was not uncommon to hear of cars which had been wiped out whilst trying to overtake.

Rouse Hill Town Centre is built on what used to be a 27 hole golf course. The first stage opened in 2007 and was finally completed in 2008.
Unlike any other shopping centre I have ever seen, the carparks are all under the facility and there is a criss-cross of streets meeting at a plaza on top. Quite literally the place has been designed as a fully functioning town centre where previously there was nothing. Unlike previous shopping centres which enclose everything inside a building, Rouse Hill Town Centre has streets open to the sky and proper fountains.
I'd go so far as to say that Rouse Hill Town Centre is probably the only embodiment of some of the ideas put forward for "the future" in the Life Science Library series book "Wheels" published in 1967. Admittedly Rouse Hill Town Centre exists purely because of the motor car, which I guess can't be helped that much.

Up the road is Rouse Hill Regional Park which is a portion of land which has been set aside for a time when the area is developed further. Currently it looks like open fields but I imagine once the bush has reclaimed some of the land and it starts to return to what it may have done in times past, that it will provide a nice contrast to the encroachment of housing which is inevitable.

The suburb of Rouse Hill generally gives you an idea of the potential of Sydney's suburbs; whilst sharing the flaws of the lack of inrastructure which is common of so many suburbs. I can only hope that proper investment happens which will turn the suburb into what it can truly be.

Horse 1331 - Ten Suburbs. No.4 Marrickville 2204

Newtown is often cited as the "trendy" area of Sydney but just one suburb to the south, Marrickville, is a far more livelier and experimental place. If Sydney is ever to be seen as a world centre for creativity then Marrickville will be the engine room of that creativity.
The little white sign at the end of the platform of Marrickville Station informs me that we're just 7km away from Central; keeping with its inner-city outlook Marrickville is a place of closely packed terrace houses, single storey and blocks of flats.

Usually when you bring a lot of people closer together, one of two things happens: either they start to display tensions between each other or they invariably start to produce more creative and innovative work. Marrickville it seems is possibly Sydney's greatest hotbed for the fine arts.
Marrickville Council last year hosted an event called MOST or the Marrickville Open Studio Tour, in which various artists, sculptors opened their houses and studios to the public. The council also runs such events as the Impossible Theatre in which short plays are performed in exceedingly small spaces like alleyways and the suburb holds a range of classes in oils, watercolours, the exploration of colour, light and dark and is also home to both The Pine Sreet Gallery and the Chrissie Cotter Gallery.
The neighbouring suburb of Enmore boasts the Enmore Theatre in which many many touring music acts from around the world have performed and The Factory Theatre in Marrickville proper, is more prodigious in the production of modern plays than any of Sydney's commerical theatre troops.

One of the jewels in the crown of Marrickville is a not-for-profit organisation called Reverse Garbage on Addison Rd. It is a place where industrial off-cuts, discards and things which would have otherwise have been wasted an be brought and resold to the public. It is something of an artists' treasure chest and is also a tremendous resource for craft supplies and schools.

However if you want a really fun night out in Marrickville, then head away from the centre of the suburb to the Alexander The Great - Greek and Macedonian Club on Livingstone Road. Although Melbourne is home to the largest Greek community outside of Greece, the Alexander The Great Club does its level best to distill everything Greek in one place. The music, the food and drink, the dancing; it's all there but all hidden away in a quiet part of the suburb on Livingstone Rd.

 Marrickville requires a little bit of exploration to enjoy properly but that's usually the case with everything worth finding.

Horse 1330 - Ten Suburbs. No.3 Auburn 2144

If you stand on platform 4 of Auburn Railway Station and look across at the shops on the south side of the street, you will find shop signs in Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Urdu, Thai, Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Take a short walk from Auburn Railway Station and you can find various Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, Anglican, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormon and Independent churches, a Mosque, Sri Mandir Temple, et cetera et cetera et cetera and that's not even a truly representative sample.
Auburn which lies 20km west of the city is noteworthy because of the multicultural expression found in the suburb but increasingly unremarkable precisely because of this same notion.

According to the 2006 census more than 20% of all people living in Australia were born overseas and this figure jumps to more than 50% if you include one or more of peoples' parents. Furthermore if you look at the 2011 census, Australia generally had who were people born in 204 countries. I personally know of people who can claim to have come from the 206th nation of the world, and the one exception is the Vatican City. Australia has people living here from almost every country on Earth bar one.
But something distinctly curious happens in Australia that doesn't really happen elsewhere in the world; within two generations of people finding a home in Australia, they almost always end up speaking like an Australian; with an Australian accent, irrespective of where on earth people's cultural heritage comes from. Auburn in particular is one of the most diverse suburbs in the country; possibly because it happens to have good access to road and rail networks, but even in Auburn which is visibly an ethnically and culturally diverse suburb, something distinctly Australian still shines through.

In the immediate streets surrounding the railway station, there are some rather imposing blocks of flats, up to 9 storeys tall but the further away from the railway station you move, the blocks of flat become smaller and are eventually replaced with free standing houses. Some of the housing dates back to federation, but a great deal of it looks like it was built during the wave of red brick frenzy of the late 1960s.

I'd say that Auburn is a little like taking a snapshot of Australia all by itself. If you wanted to put your finger on the pulse of the nation, it's attitudes, aspirations, hopes, fears, then Auburn is the place to do it, for within 2144, there's a representative of everyone.

Horse 1329 - Ten Suburbs. No.2 Parramatta 2150

Parramatta tries desperately in vain to cling to the claim that it is Sydney's second CBD and whilst there are some very big names such as Deloitte who have massive towers there, the claim doesn't quite stack up. Yet Parramatta performs another trick in that it is the suburb that the suburb of Sydney 2000 wants desperately to be.

Parramatta was the second settlement in the fledgling colony of New South Wales and where Governor Phillip decided to put his seat of government. Old Government House which is set within the 260 acres of Parramatta Park and is really Australia's first public building with parts of it dating to 1799 when John Hunter knocked in and build upon Arthur Phillip's house. Parramatta generally was seen as the place where experiment and model farms were set up and from where the colony would start its expansion from.
Modern Parramatta although it is aware of its colonial past is actually probably a more modern thing than Sydney ever was.

On the southern side of the railway line is the incredibly monstrous Westfield Parramatta Shopping Centre. As he largest single shopping centre in the southern hemisphere it has such a tremendous economic pull, that even the shops in the immediately surrounding streets are affected. It is not until you jump the railway line and head a little way north that Parramatta plays its conjuring trick.
Church St heading north has a host of cafes and restaurants, all with awnings and/or umbrella shades right out on the pavement. In the suburb of Sydney proper, it is rare to see outside dining and if you do, it's usually only really a concession with patrons huddled in the spaces that aren't filled up with massive skycrapers. Parramatta's outside dining spaces; particularly on a warm spring night, fill the air with all sorts of exotic smells and the whole thing is reminiscent of Paris or Rome, even Melbourne but certainly not Sydney.
Across the River is the Parramatta Riverside Theatre. Not I'm not suggesting that Sydney doesn't have the theatre but Parramatta's theatre has a patronage that is just as likely to arrive in T-Shirt and jeans than suit and tie. Parramatta's theatre is therefore somehow accessible to the masses. Whilst you're not likely to see Shakespeare or Ibsen being performed there, you will see comedy that is as sharp as what's found elsewhere in the greater metropolitan area.

Of course it would be remiss of me to write of Parramatta without mentioning their Rugby League team, the Eels. The name "Eels" is quite an apt name for any team representing Parramatta, for the word itself in the Darug language means "the place where the eels lie down".
Parramatta has quite a range from which to draw Rugby League players from. There are a number of private schools in the program, boasting a strong tradition in the game and this probably stems from a wave of post-war immigration into the area.
Actually the very existence of Leagues Clubs itself is a uniquely Australian thing, for the idea of Leagues Clubs and RSL Clubs has no direct parallel existence either in the UK (where the sport came from) or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

Parramatta is probably more complete as a thing than the suburb of the City of Sydney and for that reason, I think that it's a better place; that's usually the case with a second attempt.

Horse 1328 - Ten Suburbs. No.1 Mosman 2088

Located just 8km from Sydney and on the north side of the harbour, Mosman is a prized suburb on the property ladder, but scratch the surface even just a tiny bit and you find that gilt finish is ever so painfully thin.

Mosman purports to be a one suburb, one postcode council*; however if you send a letter within 2088, you soon realise just how much of an outright lie this is. Contained within the boundaries are the localities of Balmoral, Clifton Gardens, The Spit, Georges Heights, Spit Junction as well as Mosman. There are even two Post Offices, namely Mosman Junction and Spit Junction.

*From council records, 29th Nov 2005.
http://www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/file_download/612/051128-agenda.pdf

A quick scan of the area reveals that there are no McDonald's, no KFC's, no Hungry Jacks', no Subways and only a single take-away only Pizza Hut which is so far removed from the centre of Mosman it may as well be in another suburb. There are two pubs but neither of them are close to the heart of Mosman (if it ever had one), and if you were to make a quick run from the incorrectly named Spit Junction to Mosman Junction, you'd notice that apart from the almost empty boutiques selling clothing with three and four figure price tags, every other shop is vacant.
Mosman is a suburb whose residents for the most part do not work, shop or play within its environs. Being so close to the city, they're more than likely to be employed, find entertainment and go shopping in the city proper across the harbour. In fact it you were to walk from Spit Junction to Mosman Junction, roughly a third or all shops are boarded up. If this is a suburb supposedly where the money of the wider metropolitan Sydney lives, the evidence on the ground is in short supply.
Yet parked on the sides of the roads are a never ending column of Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volvo battle tanks, used to cart around kiddywinks. Certainly there are plenty of places to buy coffee in Mosman, and it is in these sorts of places where we find the driver's of the over-represented SUVs taking a rest.

Of the boutiques which do exist in Mosman, most of them will have flagship stores in the city proper, and so it  would appear that the reason for their presence in the suburb is mainly as a window display for those other stores.

I wonder if Mosman does represent something of the character of wider Sydney. Mosman appears to be rather concerned with property prices, position and making that vital impression. Underneath the vizage and we find a largely soulless suburb. Perhaps like the spirit of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, Mosman is about making the statement that the people of Sydney know little of style, taste or culture, but isn't the harbour pretty?

Horse 1327 - Two Dollar Yelling

http://news.cnet.com/8301-33692_3-57432943-305/pay-$2-to-promote-your-facebook-status/
Pay $2 to promote your Facebook status?
Foxconn confirms there is an Apple television in the works, the makers of Angry Birds have a new game franchise, and you may be able to pay Facebook to promote your status update. Would you pay $2 to get your Facebook status message seen by more people? It's something Facebook is testing in New Zealand. 
- From C/Net, Bridget Carey  May 11, 2012 

In a word where Twitbook, FaceSpace and MyBebo are ubiquitous, it seems that everyone shouting into the void has created something of a problem. It would appear that we've created a cacophony of dunces, all yelling simultaneously; so much so that Facebook has thought it worthwhile to "monetise" people's need to be heard and decided to charge idiots $2 for the prvilege of yelling louder.
I think it is a top idea, and will do its bit to take money from people who are obviously to dumb to have it in the first place.

Over the past 15 years I've seen firstly people's homepages change, then people started blogging, and when that fell out of favour, microblogging on so called social media. It was suggested on ABC 702 Sydney's "Drive" program hosted by Richard Glover, that Facebook's move is both reflective and vanguard that people online are becoming more and more narcissistic but I really wonder if that's even true.

George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay "Why I Write" that there were four reasons why people write, and they are:
1. Sheer Egoism
2. Aesthetic Enthusiasm
3. Historical Impulse
4. Political Purpose

I think that it's fairly obvious that Facebook's latest maneuver is an attempt to make money off of people's drive to fulfill the first purpose on Orwell's list. If you prefer to believe that people are selfish from either a religious or secular perspective is entirely your business, but the fact remains that every writer wants to be heard. Selfish people which we all are, have a need for validation that doesn't go away very easily and paying to have your statuses promoted seems like a logical step.
The thing is though, that in order for people to actually take note of your promoted status update, people need to be logged on to Facebook at the time. If you happen to be like me and think that Facebook is largely a waste of time, then paying to have a status update promoted is a colossal waste of money and I wouldn't do it, likewise other people as far as I'm concerned are also wasting their money.
I find Twitter on the other hand most useful but not because have to know about what people had for lunch, but rather, Twitter lends itself to reposting and linking to actual news stories better.
Obviously I'd be lying if I said that I write with no desire to fulfil my ego at all (that's largely impossible) but the point remains, that I hardly ever use Facebook and even on this blog itself, I scarcely write about what actually goes on in my life because that is quite boring.

I will also suggest that if you are the sort of person who thinks that paying to have your Facebookiness promoted is worthwhile, then the chances are that you probably are driven by a bigger ego, in which case I am going to judge what you want promoted is more likely to be worthless and uninteresting.

Horse 1326 - Swanny's One Percenter

A "One Percenter" in Australian Rules Football are those little actions which a player undertakes which by themselves have only a marginal effect on a player's game, but add up all of the One Percenters and instead of them being only marginal, together they start to make a difference.
Treasurer Wayne Swan has suggested as early as the 2010 election campaign that the Company Tax Rate for small business should be lowered from 30% to 29% but as we shall see, that 1% does add up very quickly.

Firstly there is something special about small businesses' Profit & Loss Statements which large businesses do not have the luxury of dealing with. Most small businesses employ their directors directly and this has some rather important ramifications.
Company Tax is a tax which is assessed on a company's profits. Profits are directly affected by the level of input costs. The question therefore needs to be asked whether or not to pay a director either a wage which will reduce the level of Company Tax which is finally assessed, or whether to pay a director a dividend which can either be franked or unfranked. A Franked Dividend is only on which Company Tax has already been paid, and thus those Franking Credits can then be used to offset tax payable on the director's Individual Income Tax Return.

Owing to the fact that individual's have a tax-free threshold but companies do not, and that individual income tax rates extend higher than 30%, the break even point in which the total tax payable either through the company or the director's personal income is for the Financial Year 2012/13, $152,000. At that point anything higher which is paid as a wage is more expensive because the marginal tax rate of 37% applies from every dollar in the individual's hands from $80,001 onwards.
Had Mr Swan been able to convince the parliament that small businesses should have their rates  Company Tax Lowered to 29% then although tax payable in the hands of the company would be less, those franking credits available would also be less. The break even point for the Financial Year 2012/13 would have been only $126,474 because of that very fact.

A lower rate of Company Tax also would have had effects on people earning dividends paid by the company. At 29% instead of 30% a person receiving a dividend would not have as many franking credits available to them; the net effect in the hands of the recipient is either a loss of 1% in tax benefits or in the case of anyone earning more than $37,001 a 1% increase in effective tax on those dividends.
The thing is that although 1% reduction in Company Tax does result in less overall tax taken by the government, there is a sting in the tail because that shortfall has had to have been made up for by a 2.5% increase in the marginal tax rate from $37,001-$80,000 which is where a lot of people lie.

When we do people's Tax Returns at work, we often play with several results at the same time; using re-iterative calculations. If a business was straddling the line between being a small business and a large business (which again I don't really know where that would be because no official papers have been published), would a company have to keep two sets of franking accounts? I can tell you that in the years when the Company Tax rate was reduced from 36% to 33% and finally 30%, keeping several sets of  franking accounts was annoying for accountants and probably resulted in marginally higher accountancy fees.

What I want to know is, is the intent of lowering small business Company Tax rates to 29% purely about providing relief to small business, or is it about surreptitiously shifting the burden of taxation to individuals to collect more tax overall? I already think that Swanny is easily the best person for the job of Treasurer; I also happen to think that he's probably a lot more wiley and cunning than he lets on... and that's a One Percenter just there.

Horse 1325 - With A Few Words, Obama Lost The Presidency

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/president-obama-affirms-his-support-for-same-sex-marriage.html
"I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that 'don't ask, don't tell' is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,"- US President Barack Obama, in an interview on ABC's Good Morning America, 9th May 2012

Game Over, Obama.

At one fell swoop, Obama has killed his campaign for the 2012 Presidential Elections before it has even began.

Political dialogue in the United States is unlike in Australia where there is a pretence of a left-right split (apart from the ABC we have an almost entirely centre-right to right media landscape); because the whole political spectrum is so far right-shifted, instead of economic discussion, the loudest voices yelling into the void are the so called "religious-right" and the "liberal-left".

Anyone who spends more than about a week in the United States and gets a chance to read through the newspapers or watch the news on television, quickly realises how myopic and narrow-minded political discussion is. It's more akin to watching the two sets of supporters of Rangers and Celtic yelling abuse at each other, except that after 90 minutes, Rangers and Celtic fans go home. American media for whatever reason almost refuses to report on what goes on in the rest of the world except when it happens to aid the political fight at home.

Thrown into this, the "religious-right" who choose to label themselves as "conservative" will rail against issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage with such venom and bile, that they are able to shape the rest of political dialogue. This is really quite strange considering that the same group of people also generally support the use of torture, using the military to bomb any country which disagrees with them back to the stone age, and enact policies which actively ensure that poorer people are unable to attain basic medical care, afford a decent education or pull themselves out of poverty.
Basically whilst the "religious-right" in the US bandstand on issues which are both deliberately provocative and marketable, they represent one half of a very very toxic mix.

The "liberal-left" on the other hand, represents a very vocal set of disjointed interest groups which appear to be in stark opposition to the "religious-right". Standing under the banner of "choice" they hold out freedom of choice with regards to issues like abortion, same-sex marriage as though if you do not happen to agree with them, then you should by rights be either ridiculed mercilessly or preferably kicked to death in the town square.

Unfortunately, such viewpoints because media travels so easily, spills over into other countries like Australia, Canada, the UK etc, and any chance of actual discussion is drowned out.

Numerically speaking there are more people who are "religious-right" wing-nuts than there are "liberal-left" wing-nuts and because voting is not compulsory in the United States, the voting turnout is made up of more wing-nuts and fundies on both sides of the political divide than in Australia. Apathetic people don't make their voice heard in the United States whereas in Australia, at very least they're required to show up at a polling place on voting day.
Simply by sheer weight of numbers, I think Obama will lose the job of President in November and it won't be because of a political track record or even any real shift in policy but rather a couple of dozen words which might not even have any relevance to the campaign at all...
...which was a pity because Obama probably is/was/will be the most sensible candidate for the job of President.

PS: For the record, I still don't see the actual utility in allowing Same-Sex Marriages at law. (Horse 1096)

Horse 1324 - FA Cup Final Preview

As far as league seasons go, neither Chelsea or Liverpool have been particularly fruitful. Chelsea sits forlorn in 6th with only an outside shot of playing in next year's Champion's League provided and only provided that both Tottenham and Newcastle lose both their remaining matches and Chelsea win both of theirs. Liverpool have no hope of even qualifying for the Europa League based on league position but will do so anyway because of their Carling Cup win.
This FA Cup Final is therefore a chance for both sides to redeem their seasons and curiously both of them are still chasing their own doubles. Chelsea will be looking to beat both Liverpool for an FA Cup and Champions' League double, whilst Liverpool will be hoping to claim both domestic cups.

On paper you'd assume that Chelsea would have the wood over Liverpool by virtue of having a Russian Billionaire Oil Sugar Daddy to outspend everyone bar Man United and Man City, FA Cups aren't played on paper though but by 22 players, green grass and a football.

Liverpool I think will be going into this fixture more desperate than Chelsea because for them, this really is the last throw of the dice this season. After this match, apart from a league fixture also against Chelsea and another against Swansea, which are both pretty well much irrelevant now as they are fixed in mid-table mediocrity, there is nothing else to play for.
Chelsea on the other hand still have a Champions' League Final against Bayern Munich to look forward to and whilst that isn't for another fortnight (May 19), I bet that the bean counters upstairs will still tell the management to be a bit more circumspect about selecting players.
Curiously both Roberto Di Matteo and Kenny Dalglish are former played for the clubs they now manage. Neither of them need any reminder of the history of the shirts out on the pitch.

Ultimately this match will come down to whether or not the respective clubs' "Wizards of Wembley" can pull something magic from their hats. Didier Drogba and Luis Suarez will be the gamebreakers if this match isn't going to end in a disappointingly dour nil-all which this match has the potential to do.
I think that this match is too close to call, but as always I'd like to see a Liverpool win. So I'd like to see a 2-0 win with goals to Luis Suarez and Andy Carroll.

Addenda:
José Enrique's defending mistake on Chelsea's Ramires cost a goal 11 minutes in; Didier Drogba put the ball through Martin Skrtel's legs to get Chelsea's second and despite a fightback and a goal by Andy Carroll, Chelsea did enough to hold out Liverpool and win 2-1.
Liverpool did play more desperate football towards the end of the match but two critical and frankly dumb mistakes at the beginning, gifted Chelsea a well deserved win.

Horse 1323 - The "Six Point" Fixture

Part A:

Monday's Manchester derby either has the potential to be one of a greatest matches ever played in the Premier League or a resounding disappointment. These sorts of matched are sometimes called (and I think wrongly) "Six Point" matches because the potential for one team to draw six points clear of another exists.

This then is the situation:
Utd. Pd: 35 GD: +54 Pts: 83
City Pd: 35 GD: +60 Pts: 80

If United win, they go to 86 points which given that there'd be only two matches for both of them in the season, the only possible way for them to lose the title would be to lose both fixtures AND for City to win both of theirs.

If City though the situation changes. Assuming City win by only a single goal, then table would look like this:
City Pd: 36 GD: +61 Pts: 83
Utd. Pd: 36 GD: +53 Pts: 83

If City were to beat United, then potentially the title race could still run down to the last few minutes of the season. If that were to happen then I think that most neutral fans (if such a thing exists) would be quite pleased to see a Man City win.

Part B:
Of course I can't leave this discussion without first making mention of what I think was the greatest match of league football ever played.

On 26th May 1989, Arsenal travelled to Anfield to play Liverpool in what would be the title decider. Originally the match had been slated for St George's Day (Apr 23) but only a week earlier, 96 Liverpool fans had been killed in the Hillsborough Disaster.


As it stood:

Liv'pol Pd: 37 GD: +39 Pts: 76
Arsenal Pd: 37 GD: +35 Pts: 73

Arsenal needed to win by two clear goals. If they were able to do that they would have been level on point and level on goal difference and would have won the title only on the number of goals scored for the season.
The problem was that no side had actually beaten Liverpool at Anfield in 1988-9 by two goals and Arsenal had not won at all at Anfield for 15 years previous going back to 1974. Liverpool themselves were on track to claim the League and FA Cup Double and would have been the first side in English history to have won it twice (having done so in 1986)

When Alan Smith scored in the 52nd minute The Kop fell silent; for the next agonising 39 minutes they remained subdued, for they knew that if Arsenal scored again the season, title and double was over.
This ten minute video gives a good idea of the events of that day:
If you don't want to watch the video (or can't), read on:

In the last minute of extra-time Michael Thomas collected a Steve Nicol mistake and scored the vital goal with 25 seconds to go.

Afterwards the table looked like this:
Arsenal Pd: 38 GD: +37 Pts: 76
Liv'pol Pd: 38 GD: +37 Pts: 76

Thomas would eventually be signed by Liverpool for the 1991-2 season and even score for Liverpool in the 1992 FA Cup Final, but he will go down in history for scoring the single most important goal which has ever been scored in English Football history.

Not only in the context of that season but for every season to follow. BSkyB would buy up the TV rights and steal from the public what they used to be able to see for free; stands would go from terraces to all-seaters following the Taylor Report and the fans themselves were reamitted to the human race after the riots and hooliganism of the 70s and 80s (and would eventually be priced out of the stadia they used to stand in).

The City v United match on 30th Apr 2012 will be important in the context of one season: the Liverpool v Arsenal match on 26th May 1989 was important in the context of all seasons evermore.