American Morons I Mean Idols

I didn't watch "American Idol" the other night. First, they don't show it in Australia (there is "Australian Idol" though, which is also pretty bad although interestingly, more people seem to play their own instruments here). And second, I wouldn't watch it anyway.

But I kinda wish I had, after reading Lisa de Moreas' hilarious description of the utter stupidity of the "Idolettes." Seems they were introduced to the music of some mid-century experimental musical group from the provinces of a mid-sized European country. And most of the Idolettes were unfamiliar with this musical combo.

The group? The Beatles.

Obviously, these kiddies had never Met the Beatles. Even if you held a Revolver to their head and threatened to have Sargent Pepper march them down Abbey Road, if you threatened to beat them with a Rubber Soul and to really give them a Hard Days' Night with no hope of Help, they would plead ignorance and just say Let It Be.

A couple of snips from de Moraes' column, which is almost ALWAYS worth reading anyway (the worse the show, the better her writing):

Michael Johns sings a 1 1/2 -minute cutdown of "Day in the Life." Why? Because it was his dead friend's favorite song. Mosh Pit Blondes are confused by the "English Army has just won the war" bits, but they do the Mosh Pit Wave anyway because Michael's cute.

Funny, but this one is better:

Jason Castro sings "Michelle" but does not understand a word of French. "I just found out 'my bell' is French -- I thought it was English," he tells the country. That's right -- he thinks he's singing about his bell.

Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce.

Rural Stuff

We went on Sunday to the small town of Yass, about 45 minutes north of Canberra, for the annual Yass Show. Think small-time county fair in rural America. It was pretty cool. First, we watched the cattle being judged. It wasn't a big show, so like in 2nd grade, every cow got a ribbon. There was more competition in the sheep category, this part of Australia having more sheep than cattle.

We watched a sheep-herding competition. Like the movie Babe, they release sheep into a pen and the dog has to round them up, run them thru a pen where the dog's owner can squirt some stuff into the sheeps' mouths, then into another pen where the sheep would (in real life) be loaded into a truck. It was a blast to watch. The best dog to my untrained eyes was a German shepherd mix. He was coolly efficient. He only barked once, and I never saw him nip at the sheep - he had the on-the-field presence of Dan Marino.

In another part of the showgrounds were dozens of ancient tractors and other mechanical devices, part of the vintage tractor pull and engine rally. Some of those machines dated to the 1920s. Unlike much of the show, this was purely a hobby for the guys entering. We saw one contraption that was steam-powered with a boiler like a 1920s train. While checking out a mechanical thresher and another device chugging away we caught a whiff of the smoke from coal and wood - a small reminder of what western cities were like as recently as the 1950s when London still had killer fogs.

Like American county fairs, there were competitions for flowers, plants, food - and funnily, a competition for vegetable art! The winner was a turtle made out of melons and other veggie bits. Never seen THAT before - an idea for the Arlington County fair organizers...

After the show, we went to a pub in Yass for lunch. The other times we'd been there, they tried to steer us to the "fancy" bistro in the back, not believing a bunch of fancy foreigners would want to eat pub food. This time, maybe they recognized us because we bellied up to the bar to order our Resch's beer and fish and chips without being directed to the posh room...

Hollywood in Canberra

There has been a grade A Hollywood celebrity hanging around Canberra these past few days. But it wasn't for a big movie premiere - it was on family business.

Jackie Chan came back to Canberra last week to accompany the body of his father, who recently died. Mr. Chan was buried next to his wife in a cemetery in Canberra. The connection - Mr. Chan moved to Canberra from Hong Kong in the 1960s to work as a chef for the US Ambassador and later opening his own restaurant. Jackie attended school for a couple of years in Canberra and spent lengthy periods here.

(I hadn't realized that Mr. Chan had been a cook. Maybe that explains why Jackie Chan is also interested in cooking. I once ate at Jackie Chan's Kitchen in Yokohama, Japan, which served tasty Chinese-style noodles while Jackie Chan movie clips played on the TV. Kind of a Planet Hollywood thing, only simpler and with better and not-overpriced food...)

Jackie joined with the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to open a new cancer research facility at Australian National University in Canberra, funded largely by donations from the actor in honor of his parents.

Road Trip!

We recently took an eight-day road trip, Canberra to Byron Bay (northern New South Wales coast) to Brisbane to Yandina (Queensland), then back via Toowoomba, Warwick, Tamworth, and Cowra. 3020 kilometers/1830 miles, mostly on highways that to American eyes look like country roads.

Byron Bay

We were at the easternmost tip of Australia. Trivia point - the only north-facing beaches in NSW, apparently important if you are a surfer. It's a funky, vaguely new agey kind of beach town, with lots of young backpackers and aging hippies. Unlike Queensland's Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast, not all built up with highrise condos on the beach.

Brisbane

Cool city. Lovely riverside, which you can very nicely watch by taking the city ferry up and down the river for $5, rather than pay $50 to a tourboat operator. We saw the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art - the reason we chose this time to go up to Queensland. Lots of soup cans and Marilyn Monroes, if you are in to that type of thing.

We also saw Anzac Square, where an eternal flame burns, originally to commemorate Queensland's World War One dead, now covering all conflicts. The Shrine under the flame was open on the day we were there, full of plaques remembering different military units and where they had fought and died, mostly WW1 and WW2 but also Vietnam, South Africa, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Very moving and sad - though truth be told, I'm pretty much moved to near tears by any war memorial.

The Bigs

We saw several of the Big Things that Australians have built to attract tourists.

The Big Banana in Coffs Harbour was a disappointment - it was on the side of a building and didn't seem that big.

The Big Pineapple in Yandina was cool. First, it was really big - 3 stories tall, and you can go inside and see cheesy promotional displays by Gold Circle, a big Australian fruit and fruit juice producer. But there is other fun stuff to do there, like pet koalas and take train rides thru fragrant fields of pineapple. We even learned trivia - specifically, that the pineapple is essentially a man-made fruit that didn't exist in nature. Like corn.

The Big Apple near Stanthorpe was neat, mostly because it had a nice cafeteria/store selling local products, like alcoholic apple cider.

The Big Golden Guitar in Tamworth. Tamworth is the country music capital of Australia. But another town (Narrandera, NSW) already had a Big Guitar, so Tamworth a few years back put up the Big GOLDEN Guitar. Yes, it is big and golden. Oh well. Still, a pretty town.

(There is also a Big Merino sheep in Goulburn near Canberra, but we didn't see it on this trip. And a Big Prawn, I forget where.)

Warwick

Warwick is Australia's "Rose and Rodeo" capital. But the 2007 rodeo was largely cancelled because of equine influenza - horse flu. We saw all sorts of signs throughout our road trip describing the various zones we were in (amber, red, etc); you have to get permission to move horses around throughout much of eastern Australia, until they get rid of this outbreak.

Anyway, we saw the Rodeo Heritage Center in Warwick, which was a bit disappointing - a few little exhibits and mostly a list of the winners of various events going back to the beginning of formal rodeo tournaments in 1945.

But the Warwick visitors center had a really interesting display of photos from Australia's Antarctic scientific research base.

Cowra

The last major stop was the town of Cowra, a couple of hours north of Canberra. This is interesting - not just a pretty country town, Cowra was the sight of the largest land-battle in Australia in World War 2. There was a POW camp there that hosted Japanese and Italian POWs and Indonesian political prisoners (the Dutch claimed these nationalists were working with the Japanese; the Australians soon released them).

One night in August 1944, having heard that some of them would be shipped off to another camp, the Japanese decided to break out - or die trying, more to the point. Armed with baseball bats, kitchen utensils, and the like, they tried busting out in the middle of the night, after setting their sleeping huts on fire.

Two young Australian soldiers got to the machine gun first and mowed down dozens of Japanese before they themselves were overwhelmed and killed. A couple of hundred Japanese actually made it over the fence, but they were all caught or killed over the next few days by Australian troops. In the end, 231 Japanese and 4 Australians were killed in a sad little battle.

Cowra has embraced this history to become a peace center - kind of like Coventry, England. They have a beautiful Japanese garden designed by a renowned Japanese garden designer. They have a memorial at the site of the POW camp, which still has the foundations of a few camp buildings. And the only Japanese war cemetery is there, in the corner of Cowra's main cemetery, housing the remains of all Japanese who died in Australia during the war (civilian and military), including a few pilots shot down over Darwin, and the 231 who died in the break-out. A somber event, nicely commemorated by Cowra.