Movie of the Week: The Announcement

Lindsay's Label:7.5/10

This is an absorbing and moving documentary about the famous NBA star Earvin 'Magic' Johnson and his diagnosis with AIDS. It spreads its tentacles beyond the actual announcement to look at Magic's life before and after the announcement and is more of a documentary about him and how being diagnosed with HIV changed his life than it is a film about HIV and HIV related issues. This is a good thing.

Johnson's grace and charm are evident throughout the film, which he narrated, with his family,  personal doctor and close personal friends from in and outside of basketball all being interviewed. Unsurprisingly, the film presents a very positive impression of Johnson, who is, in any case, so charismatic that director Nelson George would have found it quite the challenge to make a boring film with this man as his star.  

The fact that Johnson was so willing to go public once he was diagnosed amazes me, as most people in 1991 only went public with their diagnosis after they collapsed in hotel lobbies (Rock Hudson) or were hounded by the paparazzi to the point of madness (Freddie Mercury). George takes the time to explain why Johnson has survived when the diagnosis was a death sentence when he received it.

Nelson George succeeds in re-creating the drama and tension of the moment whilst presenting a sympathetic portrayal of how one man learnt to cope with the most feared diagnosis of the age in a very public space. 90 minutes long, the film doesn't overstay its welcome and is strongly recommended, even if you don't know the people involved.



At the time of writing, you could watch the film in its entirety here
The preview is listed below.

 

Book of the Week: Seven Deadly Sins by David Walsh

Seven Deadly sins is the superb account of David Walsh's long struggle to demonstrate that Lance Armstrong cheated his way to seven Tour de France titles whilst consistently bullying any people who were silly enough to oppose him.

Walsh has been a long time sports journalist for the Sunday Times, who lost a million pounds when Armstrong sued them for libel and won due to Britain's very tough libel laws. The Sunday Times are now in the process of suing Armstrong to get their money back.

The true heroes of this story are the people who stood up for honesty in cycling at great personal cost, as the leadership of professional cycling and the majority of the media had little interest in unearthing the truth. Walsh is excellent at explaining how the lack of enforcement regarding drugs placed great pressure upon cyclists and he presents a balanced view of why it was often difficult for journalists and members of the professional cycling community to seriously challenge the status quo.

He explains how his love of cycling and some of the cyclists led him to soft pedal an Irish cyclist who was taking drugs too. If you have any interest in how Armstrong escaped consequences for so long and how his actions finally caught up with him, this is the book to get. You can find it here at Booktopia. 

May the 4th Be with You

To celebrate the upcoming release of Episode VII in the Star Wars series, I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day re-watching the original trilogy with Allan McGregor at Event Cinemas George St in their wonderfully comfortable Vmax cinema!

Only $25 a person but as they sold out, they'd have grossed over 10K for the day which isn't a bad return. Watching the films with a sympathetic audience is so much more fun than sticking them in the DVD player for another re-run, clapping and laughing and cheering added a great atmosphere to the viewings, with one brilliant interjection of "Don't do it!" just before Leia kisses Luke on the lips in Empire.

It was, of course, the 'special" edition and while it's now 17 years since I last saw them on the big screen, my overall dislike of the changes remains - which I think is testimony to the fact that the initial barrage of complaints from Star Wars fans wasn't just a beat up. The additions generally slow up the films, and the first 2 in particular are so beautifully paced that there was no need for additions. And in several cases the changes made the storytelling worse, Greedo shooting first still jars, Solo was too smart to allow that, Darth Vader growling "Bring my shuttle!" was a fabulous reflection of how pissed he was that Luke had slipped his clutches.

The celebratory sequence in Jedi is OK, but what was wrong with the original? I don't think the change improved the story and it reduced the personal element that Jedi's original finish emphasised, showing Luke privately burning Vader's body was moving. Using Iain McDermaid to re-record the Emperor sequence in Empire was an excellent decision, it improves the scene and the storytelling. Some of the additions of new visuals in the background work well too, eg the cityscape image when Lando Calrissian is telling the citizens of Cloud City to leave. Overall though, I prefer the original cut by a considerable margin.

I found Palpatine's attempts to seduce Luke to be utterly woeful when compared to the subtle, complex web that he constructed over many years in order to ensnare his father. By the end Palpatine was relying purely on force to keep his empire together, but he'd built his empire through his ability to develop alliances and play politics. In Jedi he rejects his alliances and isn't trying to build any more. Absolute power had corrupted him absolutely and thus these scenes work better with the addition of the prequel trilogy, the weakness of Palpatine's efforts to seduce Luke become a demonstration of how much damage has been done to Palpatine by how he chose to live, rather than a poorly written script that made one question how a character of Vader's strength and power would ever choose to serve this man. The Dark Side has betrayed him too, as he could have been a great and loved Chancellor, instead of this feeble, hate riddled, shell of a man.

 Anakin had been moved to save his life once because he saw that he needed him to save his loved ones and because he viewed Palpatine as a good man in a difficult situation, that mask had been blown by Jedi, which meant that the basis of Vader's loyalty was no longer solid. Now that Palpatine was seeking to kill Vader's loved one, it became an easy decision for him to intervene. Too easy for mine, I consider that Vader's saving of his son's life fails as an act of redemption, most people would save their own children, no matter how sick and twisted they are generally. This is a man who killed children and other civilians for fun, and who had proceeded to spend decades with minimal respect for life, he killed on whims. Does saving one life, that of his only son to boot,  truly balance the scales for him?

Speaking of Star Wars, I saw a totally hilarious Harry Potter v Star Wars mock battle on YouTube the other day, made by 2 Adelaide brothers, it's brilliant! Hope you enjoy it!

NSW Politics

I confess that I am completely disgusted by how blatantly our NSW Parliamentary representatives have been in the pockets of the rich and how cynically they have been exploiting rules aimed to help them be more effective representatives!

However, my purpose in writing this little piece isn't to ramble on about their many shortcomings but to ask a question. Is  NSW politics full of corrupt politicians who are not to be found in the other States or is just that NSW is the only State with an Independent Commission Against Corruption that can investigate these matters and therefore catch them?

Are your Federal representatives being investigated for such links? Or are they able to investigate themselves?

The Went Report

As part of updating the blog, I've named it properly as The Went Report!!!

The Went Report was the name that I gave to my opinion pieces that I wrote about rugby league when I was back in Year 5. I would finish my work, ask for a piece of art paper and go write a report about what was happening in the game. The title was stolen from Geoff Prenter, who was the editor of Rugby League Week at the time and wrote a weekly column titled the Prenter Report. 

The Went Report recurred in some other guises during my high school years and I've retained a fondness for the title, hence its selection as my blog.

As a perusal of the archive will show, I set up the blog 6 years ago and entertained varying visions of becoming a prolific blogger, now that I'm not entertaining such visions, I've finally organised the blog and started telling people about it.

The main purpose for the blog is to give me a space to write longer spiels than fit in a Facebook status post. Sometimes I'll include updates about my family and career, other times I'll write about my interests. I expect that most posts will be fairly short and that lengthy spiels will be irregular.

My interests include books, current affairs, sports, sustainability issues, science, education and so most of my posts will relate to one of those. However, I will write about whatever I feel like writing, irrespective of whether I have promised to write about it previously. I don't intend to make money out of the blog and I'm not particularly concerned about how large the audience is, which frees me to write as I please.

I'm not certain as to how regularly I will post,  so rather than making any grandiose claims that subsequent events will disprove, I will simply post as I feel like it and see how many posts I make.

There are still a few things I have to do with the updating process so there's a good chance that additional changes will occur here.

I've finally made the blog look presentable and I'm sharing it with people I know - this is rather exciting! 

Chris Rogers

I was completely thrilled to read of his spectacular, match winning double century at Lord's overnight. For me, he's been the biggest feelgood story of Australia's recent Test cricket renaissance, a man who's worked hard his whole career to play just 1 Test in rather unflattering got an opportunity to spend some time as a real Test cricketer and has now scored 4 Test centuries and enjoyed the highs and lows of being a Test player. Chris's  article about his debut Test was fantastic and showed that he may have a fine future as a writer about the game once he retires.

Khan Academy

One of the important parts of my tutoring is Mathematics. Currently I'm capable of teaching Maths up to Year 8. There are sections of the Stage 5 curriculum that I can teach as well, but I don't know all of it well enough to teach so I can't advertise myself as a K-10 Maths tutor.

I currently have some Year 8 students who I will lose at the end of the year unless I know the Stage 5 curriculum. So there's a financial and personal motivation to improve my Maths skills. They're all great kids who I love working with. 

Consequently I've decided to do work to improve my Maths, I've picked up a copy of the fine instruction book Understanding Maths Years 9 and 10. I use some of their books with the kids anyway because they're well laid out and place a lot of emphasis upon clear explanations with fully worked examples. You can pick up a copy from http://www.understandingmaths.com/. I'll be using this to assist me in updating my skills in some of these topics.

The big focus of my efforts has been at Khan Academy. This is another site I use with my students and it's a fantastic site. It's completely free and is intended to remain that way. It provides Mathematics instruction from primary school level to the end of high school. It's also providing instruction in a few other subjects with the long term goal being to offer  "A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere". It's not there yet, but it's a hell of a good site even so.

The site offers activities for you to complete about varying topics, to pass an activity you need to correctly answer 5 questions in a row. Instructional hints and explanatory videos are included to help you understand the topic. To master a topic you need to go through 4 levels, but you can complete Mastery challenges on subsequent days rather than completing another full activity. Additionally, you earn energy points for every activity and those energy points help you earn badges of achievement. You also earn badges for varying other things, such as quick, accurate work, persistence on a difficult topic, consistently working at the site on a daily basis, participating in forums, among numerous other things.

I like the motivational side of it and rather enjoy collecting points - I have 160 000 so far and hope to become a millionaire one day :) The hints work very well at explaining something if I don't get it. I find that the videos are of mixed quality, some of them explain the topic at hand very well, some of them simply haven't explained it fully enough, they've explained one part of the topic but not that part that I didn't understand!

I'm currently visiting the site and using it on a daily basis and I expect that to continue for a while as I'm having fun. It's all very well to have the long term goal of being a better qualified tutor but that isn't going to be enough to motivate me to do the necessary hours unless I'm enjoying the process of improving my skills. And I am.

Part of that is because it's a chance to put right what happened over a quarter of a century ago to my Maths performance in high school. At the end of Year 6 I was in the top 4 of my primary school in Maths, by Year 12 I finished about 55th out of 60 in 2 Unit Maths! And 26th out of 26 in Physics! OK, that was largely because I didn't do any work, apparently you need to work hard at new material in order to learn it - who'd have thunk it?

Nevertheless, pointing out that I wasn't working is the superficial answer - the real question is why wasn't I working? I was certainly suitably dedicated in all my humanities subjects and achieved results that reflected that. I've thought about this many times over the years, as I was a serious student, I may have been a bit lazy with the odd homework assignment, but doing well at school was important to me, being "smart" was the dominant part of my self-concept so it was  uncharacteristic for me to allow some critical subjects to go to pieces, it wasn't because I didn't value Maths in the way I didn't value Industrial Arts or some other subjects that weren't directly academic.

The problem was that I didn't know how to handle failure - I found some parts of high school Maths to be difficult and I didn't understand them, lacking anyone to explain them to me I decided giving up was better than admitting that I wasn't smart - 'smart' people should be able to get it right was my thinking. The idea that giving up on important subjects and failing them outright is the antithesis of smart never occurred to me :). I preferred to fail where I had a convenient excuse in that I didn't try as opposed to doing my best and still failing which was what I felt was happening.

That fear of failure leading to quitting something has turned up in other contexts subsequently so it's something I find I need to be watchful of when I'm trying to improve myself. But it hasn't been a problem so far because I have all these options to find out the information - beyond the resources offered by Khan Academy or my books, there's an ocean of additional resources a mere Google search away. So I feel very confident that if I can't work something out, that I'll be able to given some persistence.

Additionally, there's no pressure to pass exams and do a set amount of work every day, I'm doing it because I'm enjoying the learning. It makes little noises when I get a question right!  Yesterday I was looking at the topics that I will be studying once I finish my current Khan Academy mission and I'm looking forward to them. I never did get the hang of trigonometry at school and I only understood certain parts of calculus and I am excited about the prospect of finally being able to say that I can do it!

The ultra competitive little know it all that I was in high school is still cut about having failed at Maths, it still burns that I couldn't stand the heat in that particular kitchen.There's a little bit of redemption going on every time I log on to Khan Academy.

I don't get that from Bejeweled Blitz.