Last night Karen and I took a gondola cruise up the Nerang River and through some Gold Coast canals. This was part of a wedding gift given to us by my friends. The cruise included dinner, and it lasted about 1.5 hours. It was magical. Instead of giving a detailed account of where the gondola went, what we saw and what we ate, I’m just going to recommend that you go and do it some time, if you haven’t already. Thanks once again to everyone who contributed to this gift; we really loved it!
Month: September 2006
I spent most of the week down in Canberra, where I attended the Safeguarding Australia Summit with Karen and a few other NICTA people. The summit consisted of a plenary stream, a NICTA stream, and a satellite technology stream. The last day of the summit was taken up by the Research Network for a Secure Australia (RNSA) Conference. A number of good speakers gave keynotes in the plenary sessions. Perhaps the most impressive talk was given by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke of the Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom. His presentation covered a whole set of operations that the police carried out and are carrying out in relation to recent terrorist activities in the UK. For the most part, the keynote presentations avoided Left/Right political bias, but there were times, during the panel sessions, where political bias quite visibly crept in. One slightly uncomfortable moment arose when, during a panel session on “Homegrown Terrorism”, Ameer Ali, Chairman of the Muslim Community Reference Group, fielded a question from a Zionist lobby group about Hezbollah. However, during the same session, Federal Agent Frank Prendergast of the Australian Federal Police, gave what I thought was a very considered presentation on the role of the AFP in combatting terrorism within Australia, and the relationship of the AFP with the Australian mainstream Muslim community, who, for obvious reasons, are one of the community groups most directly affected by ongoing investigations into terrorism and so on.
The conference was quite different from what I’ve been used to in the past. The plenary stream was very interesting, but the technology streams were more or less a bunch of industry people trying to market their wares.
Movies and CDs
I’ve seen three movies at the cinema recently. The best of them was Thank You for Smoking, which I saw with Karen. This film was funny and sharp. It follows the story of Nick Naylor, the frontman for Big Tobacco’s lobby group. Somehow, Nick has to convince the world that smoking isn’t such a bad thing, and that the tobacco companies are not evil. At the heart of the film are questions to do with freedom of choice and the role of individual responsibility. These issues were explored via Nick’s relationship with his son, Joey, who comes to respect his father for sticking to his values and for his considerable argumentative skills. This one is definitely worth seeing.
I then saw Fearless, supposedly Jet Li’s last Kung Fu film, with my brother. As far as martial arts films go, it was a pretty good one, though it was in a different vein to recent cinematographic masterpieces such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The House of Flying Daggers and Hero. The action was good, but the plot was rather formulaic, and the attempt to promote harmony in Chinese-American and Chinese-Japanese relations could have been a bit more subtle.
Last night, Karen and I saw Friends With Money. This film was completely character driven, with pretty much no plot to speak of. Character driven films can sometimes be really great, but this was not a great film. It is essentially a snapshot in the lives of three married couples, and one of their single friends. One marriage is on the verge of breakdown; one of the wives is depressed and angry, but really shouldn’t be because she creates expensive designer clothes and has a very loving husband, whose only “fault” in the eyes of some of her friends is to appear a little bit on the gay side of straight; and the other couple seem to have the perfect marriage. As for the single woman, she’s a qualified teacher working as a house maid and flitting from one relationship to another. That’s pretty much the plot, the minimality of which would not ordinarily be a problem, except that the movie didn’t develop any of the characters in this film to a great enough depth.
In the way of CDs, I’ve recently acquired an album called Feeding the Wolves by Josh Pyke. I particularly like Middle of the Hill, Private Education and Fill You In. Before that I picked up Sufjan Stevens’ recent album, Illinois (although, the album cover says Illinoise). That album has a number of gems on it.
Weblog theme change… again
It has come to my attention that my Shades of Grey theme does not render correctly in Internet Explorer. For the time being I’ve switched themes because I don’t have time to play around with style sheets and so forth right now.
Mark Latham may have been potty mouthed, his policies may have been misguided and he may have ended up being universally despised. But one thing he had going for him was conviction. To me, he came across as knowing how he wanted Australia to be, and he believed in his policies. In other words, he had a vision, even if most Australians clearly disagreed with that vision. Kim Beazley, on the other hand, seems at a total loss when it comes to articulating a clear platform for Labor, beyond the expected vociferous opposition to the Coalition’s workplace reforms. Worse still, Beazley seems intent on hijacking his own tilt at the prime ministership by announcing policies that appear to be completely devoid of anything resembling logic.
His most recent idea, which can only be described as stunningly ill-conceived, is to have all those coming to our shores – even tourists – sign a pledge to respect Australian values. Not only is this idea unworkable, it’s just plain stupid, because it won’t have any effect whatsoever on improving migrant integration. This laughable policy follows hot on the heels of Beazley’s confused uranium policy, which I’ve commented on previously. I note with interest that Bill Shorten, the secretary for the Australian Workers’ Union and new Labor candidate for Maribyrnong, has also called for Labor’s “half pregnant” uranium policy to be scrapped.
Kim Beazley is trying to match John Howard’s political savvy by attempting to appear clever and wise. Unfortunately, all he’s managing to do, in my eyes, is prove that he is incapable of leading this country. John Howard’s call to the state Liberal and National parties in the wake of their humiliating defeat in the Queensland election was basically “get a plan, get a vision and spend time working on them”. Federal Labor would do well to take that advice on board, too. Beazley has been completely reactive, continually playing catch-up, and therefore relying on half-baked policies which he feels compelled to introduce to look as though he’s providing a sensible option to the Australian people. It won’t do. Labor needs to provide us with an alternative to the Coalition at the next election; but on current form, I can’t see that many people will trust the management of our country to the Labor party, workplace reforms or not.
Wine Tasting Tour
Karen and I finally found a spare weekend to enjoy the wine tasting tour that was given to us as a wedding present by some of my friends. It was wonderful. We drove around the Mount Tamborine area in a Landcrusier with our guide and another couple, stopping at four wineries and a park where we had a picnic lunch. We tasted pretty much all the wine that was on offer. Since we had to drive back to Brisbane, I ended up spitting most of the wine into the little bucket things that they provide for that purpose.
We knew the first winery, Cedar Creek, very well, as that’s where our wedding reception was held. It was great to go back and visit it, because it brought back some very happy memories of our special day. It was especially nice that some of the staff at Cedar Creek remembered us by name. We ended up buying some Tawny Port. However, we’d also previously bought a couple of bottles of wine (their trademark Rosé and some kind of Semillon I think). No doubt we’ll visit Cedar Creek many more times yet.
The next stop was Mount Nathan winery. Neither of us thought that much of the wines at this place. A lot of the Mount Nathan wines have honey added to them!!! However, we did like the cream-based drinks. They had chocolate cream, butterscotch cream and coffee cream. I think they all had honey in them too. We bought a butterscotch cream and a coffee cream. Then it was time for lunch.
Perhaps the best winery of the lot was Albert River Wines. It was a nice setting: an old colonial style home on a vast acreage, some of which was used to grow grapes. The wines here were good, and we got a lesson in wine tasting. They had a delicious port, which we purchased, and a pretty good Merlot (some people won’t drink Merlot; in general, though, Merlot is probably my pick of red wines). I’d like to visit Albert River Winery on a Sunday so we can enjoy the Vineyard Grill.
Our last stop was Witches Falls Winery, back up Mount Tamborine. Our favourite wine at this place was the Saignée, a sweet Rosé like wine. We picked up a bottle of that as well as some caramelised balsamic vinegar.
It was a terrific day, and we’d like to thank Anna, Ian, Matthew (Boggo), Nathan and Rhys for giving us such a cool gift (we’re going to use up the other half of your gift, the gondola cruise, the weekend after next). Sadly, most of the stuff we bought along the way is not for us!