NQ Cowboys coach Murray is Beelzebub?

I wonder which team the photographer supports?

I'm going to do my best to not rant about the Grand Final this week. However, I simply couldn't go past this image that cropped up in the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of days ago. As for the final itself, we need Roy and HG in the dressing room to get the boys to relax, do a bit zen meditation and picture the Cowboys players wearing Manly-Warringah jerseys. Caaaaaarn Weeeesssts!

Something else I never thought I'd live to see

One bus sized living giant squid at 1000 metres down

Lordy! It's a week for firsts. After literally hundreds of years of searching, we finally have incontravertable proof of the giant squid (dead bodies don't count, people. Settle.) In true Japanese style, the researchers managed to mutilate the thing to get their pictures, as they hooked it and it eventually tore off it's own tentacle to get away. It'll grow back, but I don't think it would be wise to run into this very pissed off calamari in the near future. More details can be found here at the Herald.

Can lightning strike twice?

Never thought I'd live to see this...

What can I say. After a lifetime of waiting, it all happens in the space of a few hours. The swannies win the flag and the Maggies make it to the big one. The dream lives on.

It’s all got me a bit nostalgic for the sunny autumn and winter afternoons back in the mid to late eighties when following my marriage collapse, I fell in with a few of the core folks that would become the Phoqaawiies and we would troop off to the SCG to laugh and Warrick Capper and cheer on the Geoffrey Edelsten owned Swans. How could we forget the Swanettes? Or trophy bride Leanne Edelstens dress sense? (Was pink leather ever in?) Or the day Collingwood came up to play and we had the Magettes behind us (right name, wrong spelling). Ah, the 80’s. So very much to forgive.

Anyway, those red and whites snuck into our hearts in between throwing abuse at Captain Cucumber (as Capper was laughingly referred to back then), so to see them, after all these years finally back on top is more than a little gratifying. Onya Sydneeey!

Funnily enough it’s also got me reflecting on the subtle but dramatic changes that have happened during the last decade. Today I was on the train with my MP3 player, listening to the entire AFL final as called by Roy and HG and trying not to look too much like a goose first thing in the morning by laughing insanely at the call (…it’s just a pile of BUTTOCKS!! BUTTOCKS EVERYWHERE.!! All that’s missing is COX!!) and I remembered my first visit to Norway, back at the outbreak of the first Gulf War. I got my news from Armed Forces Radio in Oslo, or by getting hold of 2 to 3 day old English newspapers. Or tried to tune into Radio Australia on the SW Radio.

Now I can get Roy and HG on a Podcast, download the TV broadcast (eventually) via Bittorrent and read the reports on the web. It’s a different world.

As for the Westies next weekend, I simply can’t bear to think about it too much. Wake me when it’s over. When you grow up supporting Western suburbs, you grow up being used to disappointment.