Down Under, Day 5: Everything, All at Once

I took this photo back on Thursday afternoon Melbourne time - the view from just inside the "gantry" set for ESPN outside Rod Laver Arena (the Australian Open's Centre Court). Things were quiet then, only a few staffers moving here and there in Melbourne Park.

Things got a little louder and noisier today.

Like any event where there's a lot of to cram in over a short span of time, the first couple of days' action in a grand slam tennis tournament is an exercise in controlled chaos. Throwing a further wrench into the plans is the fact that it RAINED today. In the summer time, in Australia. First everybody stood around for 10 minutes saying "What the hell is this?", and then panic hit the streets. Well, kind of - they had to go to all the trouble of closing the roofs over Rod Laver & Hisense Arena. Terrell Owens, who just decided to fly over here on a whim, found the whole affair funny and was quite surprised that tennis players would be allowed to play under a closed roof in order for matches to continue in adverse weather. T.O. also found time to:

1) Tweet about a live interview with Tim Rinaldi
2) Decide he wouldn't be any good at Australian Rules football (the kind with no pads)
3) Back track on not giving Aussie football a go and figure that, along with hitting some tennis balls, he'll try anything once
4) Think of more reasons to complain about every quarterback who ever threw him the ball (with the obvious exception of Buffalo QBs, who have to learn how to throw first)

In any event, the rain threw off the plan to take in "everything at once" for tennis fans because action dropped from 21 courts down to 2, but the rain wasn't all-encompassing like it was at the US Open last September, when full days of competition got washed away; only a few matches are likely to be delayed until Wednesday and then we'll be all caught up.

Unless, of course, the rains come back.

Down Under, Day 4: Monopoly Money

One of things which I have picked up on over the years is how wildly unique currency can be, and not just because of the Treasury Department's big marketing pushes to get us to the US the dollar coins or collect all '50 states' quarters. Every country has a wildly different idea about how to mark and identify its bills of sale - even the Euro design will alter depending on what part of the continent you happen to be in.

I know it's slightly odd to even be discussing such things, but Australia might just have my favorite style of foreign money. Everything is bright and stylized, printed on a heavy, almost starched brand of paper and embraces the full spectrum of colors. I was a little disappointed there wasn't a bill made in jet black to complete ensemble. To wit: $5 - Pink, $10 - Blue, $20 - Orange, $50 - Yellow, $100 - Green. Laying them out together makes a line of Australian bills look like the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:


Not also how (and the more I travel the more I see that this happens every country except the United States), size does matter - a $100 is considerably bigger than a measly $5, not only in what it can by but in the number of times you need to fold it over in order to fit comfortably in your wallet.

The question I keep coming back to is "Why?" To be perfectly honest, I think the system we have in the US is just about as perfect as it gets when it comes to organizing and prioritizing our money. Every bill the same size, every bill the same color - and as long as we're on that topic, we should all agree that green = money. Must we feel the need to use orange and fuschia bills? We save those hues for when we want to buy Park Place precisely because they are so comical and out of place.

Despite preferring my home country's stlye, I have to admit I like seeing all the various shades and sizes that other countries put on their bills, because if the standardized "presidential green" system that we have in the United States were everywhere, traveling abroad wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun. Saving a couple of oddly sized and colored bills to put in the travel memory book is part of the proof that you went somewhere new and experienced something different. Speaking of which, although this transmission is coming back into the blogosphere early on Sunday morning, it's already late into Sunday night in Melbourne - and the real work begins at 11:00 AM sharp tomorrow as the tennis gets under way - and once that happens, things will be very different for me as far as the schedule is concerned.

To be continued...

Down Under, Day 3: Time Has Come to Today - Unless it's Already Tomorrow

When I wanted to dump Rhona Davies - she knew about it, moved to Australia, I had to wait two whole years to tell her we were through. -- Johnny Drama

It could be the time or the geography, but it quickly does seem like things are happening at a completely different pace in Australia, to the point where it seems like coming here was the equivalent of telling the rest of the world to take a big "time out - let's pick this up when I return from Brisbane. Whenever that may be."

Down here we're 17 hours ahead of New York City, so it's way beyond the 5/6 hours that separate most of the US and Europe. It's full days - if anybody happens to stumble onto this webpage and reads it tonight, by the time you were going out to party on a Friday night (let's say 10 pm your time), my Saturday was more than half over. Coming back the other way is even weirder, as you actually manage to return to the States on the same day you left - but before you actually left; roughly speaking, a plane departing SYD at 1:00 pm Monday returns to Los Angeles at 10:00 am...on Monday. People thought it was cool when Doc Brown traveled through time in his DeLorean? The pilots who fly the Sydney to Los Angeles route do it every week.

The time warp is definitely one thing that's still blowing my mind a little bit, in case you couldn't tell. Between always trying to do the math in my head about the time back home (for whatever reason I'm constantly doing double takes even though nearly every room at the Australian Open broadcast compound has two clocks, one from Melbourne & one for Bristol) and grasping how a NFL playoff game is on TV 'live' a full day after it's been played (picking the Saints big in one game, and hoping a meteor destroys the Metrodome during the second quarter of the Cowboys-Vikings game), I see where all the puns and jokes come from about Australia being its only little world. The country is big enough for it, seeing as it's the only nation-continent.

I know I'll get the hang of this time shift in the next couple of days, which ought to be just enough for me to be totally used to it by the time we all leave in two weeks, and then there's no telling what might happen. I saw what went down during seasons 4 & 5 of Lost!

Flinders St. Station main building says it's 6:30pm Saturday in Melbourne, which would make it...um...late on Friday in the US?

Down Under, Day 2: The Little Differences

If Quentin Tarantino ever feels the need to make a prequel and/or sequel to Pulp Fiction, he might set things up where the character of Vincent Vega (or the thinly veiled second coming of him) has just returned from Melbourne. Similar to Amsterdam, they got the same stuff over here that we have back in the states, but it's just a little different.

Examples?

Well, let's start with the answer to the fast food riddle "What would happen if Burger King married Jack in the Box and had a child?"


It looks like Burger King. It tastes like Jack in the Box. Do I recommend it? Not unless you happen to be stumbling home at 2:45 in the morning and are in desperate need of something greasy to scarf down. Despite the outward appearances of being some bizarro knockoff, Hungry Jack's is indeed Australia's Burger King, Whopper and all. No matter what you call it, however, Brian Kelly would advise that anybody who gets caught eating here at 3 AM is most definitely not an RKG.

Turning away from the greasy underbelly of fast food to the slightly more dignified world of the "Sandwich Artists" at Subway restaurants. Surely we can find the comforts of home there, right?


Wrong. You'd think the magic power of the $5 dollar footlong would be appreciated in any language, and certainly it would go over well in Australia considering they speak English here! Apparently not. Not only have they turned their back on the $5 footlong, their so-called "value meal" is a six-inch sub! The one positive we can take here is that this isn't some kind of drastic fleecing like it would be in the other country that puts Queen Elizabeth on its money. The US Dollar is actually slightly ahead of the Australian dollar, so $4.45 in Oz Bucks is basically $4.35 US (as opposed to Britain where the £5 footlong is really a $9.50 footlong before you include the chips and drink). Economic pluses aside, I'm not happy about leaving the footlong deal behind.

And speaking of being left behind:


Can't find it on shelves in the states. Readily available at every corner 7-Eleven in Melbourne. Which is ironic considering that it all began to unravel for Tiger when the alleged mistress was allegedly spotted allegedly checking into a Melbourne hotel...allegedly.

I may not be the world's most traveled individual, but I am definitely expanding my reach to the other side of the globe, where it certainly seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just have to be aware and appreciative of all those little differences.

Down Under, Day 1

Sitting in the lobby of the Melbourne Westin, an ornately decorated hotel that would look right at home in any city of the world, it's a little stunning to consider how it was by my recollection yesterday that I left Connecticut, but in reality it was close to 55 hours ago. Time flies when you cross the international date line.

Melbourne, The World's Most Liveable City

For those of you who might be reading this in search of a context (and who could blame you, as I have fallen way, way, way off the wagon from my original pledge to put up one blog post per day) my assignment with ESPN's Event Production department has brought me to Melbourne as part of the team covering the 2010 Australian Open tennis tournament. Now that we're here, everybody is taking a moment to relax and re-charge before the real work begins over the next 17 days. Good thing too, because if I were asked to sum up the experience so far in a single sentence, here goes: "Anybody who ever said 'getting there is half the fun' has obviously never flown to Australia."

That's where the rift in time I mentioned already comes in. I left my house in Bristol around 11:30 AM on Tuesday, cramped into the regional aircraft that services Hartford's Bradley Airport and spent two brief hours within striking distance of home during a stop at O'Hare in Chicago. By the time I touched down again a little after 7 PM Pacific time at LAX, the travel portion of this trip was actually ahead of schedule yet - wasn't even close to being halfway done. Then things got interesting.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles the entire ESPN crew was greeted with the news that the plane's departure for Sydney would be delayed due to the purposely vague and always encouraging reason of "aircraft servicing". Those of you familiar with George Carlin may immediately be defaulting in your head to the phrase "BROKEN PLANE!" With a couple of extra hours already in hand I met up with First Lt. Paul Jacobs of the USAF and visited one of about four things I actually miss now that I now longer live in Los Angeles. You can all have three guesses as to what it was but if you need to use more than one you clearly haven't been paying attention.

The flight finally boarded around 12:30 AM, more than two hours after the originally stated departure time. At which point we waited...and waited...and waited, again being told that there was just some minor "aircraft service" that needed to be completed before we could officially depart. Is it just me or do the airline personnel have an unsettling talent for making a situation sound as dire as humanly possible even as they speak in an upbeat tone?

So the 14-hour flight took off four hours late and there weren't a lot of ways to speed up crossing the entire Pacific Ocean. The saving grace was setting my watch to Melbourne time before I left L.A., so I was mentally just trying to stay alive until about 11:00 PM Wednesday (Melbourne time) while in flight - 4 AM Los Angeles time. Then it was lights out until we touched down in Australia - which to my mild surprise we did, so I guess I have to pay homage to all performers of the aircraft servicing. Mild fear was a small price exacted for being able to get there safe and sound without crashing onto a mystical, shape-and-time-shifting island. (That will hardly be the last Lost reference during these two weeks of journals, by the way). It didn't exactly come as surprise though when one of my co-passengers said the flight attendant told them that, in-flight, there had been real concern we would have to divert to Fiji due to a lack of fuel. Where was Flight 815 heading when it first changed course in the pilot episode?!? That's right - Fiji!

At this point we were finally landing in Sydney around the time we should've been at a baggage carousel in Melbourne, so what was another hour or so delay - for, you guessed it, additional "aircraft servicing". There's a wonderful new addition to the great Carlin rant about the jibberish airlines use to cover up what they really mean, but I've been traveling for too long and don't quite have the wit to make it. Feel free to take your own crack at it in the comments section.

To top it all off, when I finally arrived here I discovered that "universal power adapter" I bought several months ago had the plugs for all outlets except Australian ones. That wasn't a total loss though, because I got to go experience the "World Famous Arthur Daley's Clearance House" right across the street from the hotel. I have, however, completely exhausted the laptop battery writing this, so that's the cue to wrap things up.

Also, check out the VIDEO!!! portion of the blog at the other website. Why put these in two different places? Because if there's one thing ESPN has taught me it's that you've gotta branch yourself onto as many platforms as possible. And I want to see a lot of hits on two different websites, that's why.

New Year - New Journey

Sweetheart I'm bidding you fond farewell
Murmured the youth one day
I'm off to a new land my fortune to try
And I'm ready to sail away

Far away in Australia
Soon will fate be kind
And I will be ready to welcome the lass
The girl I left behind

Must we be parted this fair one cried
I cannot let you go
Still I must leave you, the young man replied
But for only a while you know

Whether it's success or failure
I will always be true
Proudly each day in a land far away
I'll be building a home for you

Daily she waits at the old cottage gate
Watching the whole day through
Till a sweet message comes over the waves
In a new world to join two

Far away in Australia
Soon will fate be kind
And I will be ready to welcome the lass
The girl I left behind

I'll explain later.

Why I Don't Miss Working in L.A. - Part 8,792

Parts 1 thru 8,791 are around here somewhere, but here's how the folks at 20th Century Fox Television chose to get everybody in the Christmas spirit:



The actors (or "characters") featured are the cast of ABC's new sitcom Modern Family. Thomas will no doubt recognize the second gentleman featured as Vice President and Former Governor of Pennsylvania Eric Baker, and Joe will easily spot Jack's ex-wife from Lost, but understandably the rest of you might be in the dark. The two knuckleheads who bring the music to a screeching halt (and really, is there anything more retreaded than using the "record scratch" to indicate a change in moods?) are Fox TV heads Gary Newman & Dana Walden, who no doubt think they're being hilarious with their little wink/wink, nudge-nudge routine. Problem is unless your an industry insider you not only don't have the pleasure of being "in" on the joke, but also may very well be one of the writers, actors, or crew members who can't find a job in what used to be a top time of the year for employment because fewer and fewer pilots are getting made.

It's not so much that I think this is patently offensive because it quite obviously was made with satirical, completely innocent intentions. It's just that this is such a lame & predictable exercise meant to cater to the "insider's crowd" to the point of not only failing to be funny, but being just plain stupid.

I've broached the subject before and I'll revisit it again in the future (bank on that), but it just makes me conjure up the quote from "What Just Happened", a surprisingly self-indulgent look at Hollywood that featured Bruce Willis as an actor named Bruce Willis. In the film, Bruce Willis (as portrayed by Bruce Willis) gives the following eulogy:

Hunter S Thompson once said to me, "The movie business is a cruel and shallow money trench, where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.' Then he added, 'There's also a negative side'.