Tiger Tiger Woods Y'all

No-Shave-November 14-16

On Sunday, I awoke at 6 AM after a night out with the boys. The reason? The Australian JBWere Masters golf tourney. I do enjoy whacking a golf ball around a course, I must say, but I had never been to a tournament or watched anyone really really good play the game. I would soon find that in the case of the pros, it was not so much playing a game as making repeated, precise calculations to battle a course. Like what missile attacks must've been like before smart bombs that can put a warhead on a fire hydrant from across an ocean. Anyway, we threw on our preppiest gear, got down to Flinders Station and hopped on a train filled with dudes with visors and umbrellas. Luckily, it didn't rain a drop on us even though a downpour was predicted - must be Portland weathermen. When we arrived, a bunch of Australians we had never heard of were teeing off. Soon enough, we got to watch Sergio step up to the tee box and send a ball screaming through the sky into the abyss. That was about when my jaw started dropping. I have to say watching golf on TV can be incredibly boring, and it's probably because the cameras do not do the game justice. When guys like this tee off, your heart races. They swing so hard but make it look effortless and its a wonder the ball doesn't just explode.

So then Tiger steps up. We had been watching putt balls around the practice green, knocking multiple balls at different holes in no real pattern, like a kid at a mini-golf course. We ran to the first green to watch the ball fly down the hill to a drivable par-4 green. All we could see was his Sunday red polo and then a ping that echoed off the gum trees. The ball came sailing in and landed on the lip of a bunker in some nasty rough. Great, so the first shot I ever see Tiger play looks about like my average. Then what happened was extraordinary, even to a normal golf fanatic. Tiger intentionally punches the ball out into the sand trap, completely away from the green. His caddy, the calf guy, nonchalantly hands him the sand wedge and Tiger hops in, not worried one bit. He proceeds to loft the ball to within a couple feet of the hole. Ridiculous.

We followed Tiger through most of his round, watching him drain another incredible shot off the beach and drive the ball further then I could shoot it out of a pistol. At one point, I positioned myself right along the path from one hole to the next and was close enough to touch him as he walked by. Standing in his presence was like waking up to catch Santa Claus in your living room on Christmas Eve. Like standing with a God among men. Tiger was real, not some mythical hero athlete that was some kind of computer projection the golf channel had created to make people watch (the mistress scandals must have been created because people were becoming to attached to a fictitious superstar). There was an astonishingly competitive cloud surrounding him. It was as if nobody, including the number of private security guards and VIPs who were following him, was actually there and he was playing alone with his caddy, against himself. It was also really cool to know I was one of very few Americans there, and Tiger was our player in the tournament. It got annoying battling with the Australian fans for spots and listening to them yelling "Go Tigah" when his damn name is Tiger, or Mr. Woods to them.

Tiger didn't end up winning, although he had a really good Sunday round. Stuart Appleby, who I do like even though he was one of the endless number of Aussie players, took the title and we watched the middle of his round as he crept up on the lead. Also got to watch two little kids run onto the course and start playing in a sand(box)trap behind a couple pros on the green. Pretty funny.

I realize I'm way too close to the camera on this one. My friends aren't actually on Little People, Big World. But that is Tiger in the background warming up the putterooski.
"Goodbye fried rice, hello fried chicken!" -Dave Chappelle

I spent the entirety of Sunday night and Monday studying for my first final, which was quite interesting. I discovered that my class was about four times bigger than I thought, once everyone had to show up in the same place at the same time. That made me realize why my final had to be at the Royal Exhibition Center instead of....well, our school....It went well, although there was one question where the actual answer, which I knew very well, was not an option and the closest choice was only 20 million years off the date. No big deal I guess. One down, two to go, then USA bound! After I finished, I followed my final with a kebab from Lamb's on Lygon and "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution." Felt great.

Tuesday Rant

So there's a few things on my mind on this fine Tuesday, besides the fact I missed the $12 pot n' parma night at Turf's.

1. Grocery shopping. So at my favorite local grocer here in the heart of Melbourne, I've found some very annoying patterns. One of them is that nobody who works in the store has any idea where things are. The last three times I have asked where an item was, I found it on my own and went on my way as they wandered through the aisles trying to show it to me. I have a feeling they turnover employees faster than Taco Bell, or else the employees only work like once a month so understandably don't really know their store whatsoever. The other thing is that if you don't go through the self check-out, it is not only a slower process to have someone scan and bag your items but they give you as many bags as possible with the groceries you buy. It's bad enough they don't even offer paper bags, but instead of trying to conserve some of the endless stacks of plastic (and therefore our world's resources) they have lying behind the counter, they put a maximum of three or four items in each one. My checker-outer today had no idea what I meant when I kindly asked her to consolidate.

2. Basketball. I was lucky enough to find a rec basketball team that I've been playing with the last couple weeks. It's been very fun considering how little I was getting to play bball here. However, on Sunday, we played and I admit we lost to a team of old men. I take full accountability for our loss and they did play much better team basketball than us. But, it was a joke. By the end of the game we had just three players left on the court who hadn't fouled out. Next time we play a team of 40 and 50 year olds, I am going to request a referee of a neutral age. Our 50 year old official just couldn't bare to see his peers engaged in a contact sport against us youngsters and the game quickly switched to a netball-esque match where both boxing out and posting up was questionable. Blocking shots was right out.

3. Strangers and the USA. After a night out at a nearby, multistory club called Cookie, a couple of girls we have known for months left just after us to head home. A complete stranger and his friend began to talk to them outside and upon learning they were American, quickly brought up 9/11 and how it was an inside job and that whole conspiracy theory. Are you kidding me? The first thing you're gonna bring up to a Yank when you meet drunk on the street is 9/11, one of the biggest tragedies in modern history? Then to go on about how Bush and his boys were behind it and all that crap (I'm not defending George W. but still) is ridiculous. Like who are you and what did you do with the arguably normal soul that hopefully used to inhabit your physical being? Woulda been like going up to Prince Paris after Troy gets thrashed and burned and being like, "Hey, I know you guys are blaming the Greeks but we all know who really built that horse." Of course, back then Poseidon would have then swept that a-hole away in a tidal wave, that is if Zeus didn't toss a lightning bolt through his head first. But who knows, maybe that dude's taxi driver robbed him on the way home or he got hit by a bicyclist or something.

4. Final exams. Yeah everyone hates finals; I don't need to get at that. But, here at the University of Melbourne, they came up with this brilliant system of sending us to the fairgrounds or some shit for our finals. Apparently they don't have room for all the finals on campus (even though they had room for all the classes on campus all semester...) and have to ship us out to God-knows-where to take finals in groups. So, now as I sit down to take my plant biodiversity final I'll be with a mix of a few other classes taking their own respective finals. I'll probably end up next to some metaphysics genius who will look deep into my mind to try to cheat on his exam and finding nothing but crassulacean acid metabolism and creeping rhizomes.

Tasmania

October 28-31

On Thursday the 28th, it came time to leave for Tassie. Now the things I had heard about Tasmanians were quite interesting. They mostly consisted of a whole nother breed of people (many of the Aussies suggested at inbreeding...) who were simply different. The rest I had heard was about the fauna: it has a number of unique and weird species of animals running around. The most famous was the Tasmanian devil, a large, carnivorous rodent that looks and acts like it wants to rip your face off. However, this was a species in a lot of trouble because of a mysterious cancer. Anyway, Thursday afternoon three of us grabbed a taxi to head to the airport. It was not the normal taxi ride. For one, our driver was making all these racists comments against the young Indian taxi driver, and how they cannot drive. Then, he had to drop off a package to some woman on the way to the airport and ended up cursing up a storm at her in front of us. We finally arrived at the airport, with just 5 minutes before boarding, and hurried to catch the flight. As soon as we had reached cruising altitude we were on our way back down. The flight was maybe an hour. After getting off the plane, we walked into the airport to find a quarantine test (they do not allow any food, plants, seeds, etc. into Tasmania to keep out diseases that have ruined some Australian crops and other stuff like that). A hound dog sniffed everybody's carry-on and checked bags as they came through. What was incredible was that we watched as the dog sniffed out a huge suitcase, sat down to signal a problem, and the lady produced a small, unopened bag of gardening seeds. Impressive. We headed into Launceston, the second biggest town in Tasmania, to find hardly anything. For those at home, it was maybe like Eugene. If that. We found a backpackers on the edge and the lady in reception straight up laughed when I asked whether they had room for us three on such late notice. Dumb question. We found an Irish bar that night, enjoyed a couple beers, noticed every woman in the bar had a tattoo, and called it an early night. The next day we wandered into town and quickly redirected to the gorge:

No, there are no wild peacocks in Tasmania, but at the end of a gorge was some old British cafe and landing, complete with a number of these exotic birds, a swimming pool and a chairlift across the gorge. The one creature we wanted to see most, an echidna, was nowhere to be found, despite everyone insisting there would be one there. Later in the day, we met up with the Arcadia crew and started driving for Cradle Mtn. National Park. We traveled through tiny towns separated by miles of farmland. Eventually we hit the subalpine zone. I knew because it was suddenly freezing, the trees were starting to disappear, and almost everything was covered by small, basketball sized shrubs. About the same time, we started seeing wombats everywhere. We almost ran over two or three, then would stop the van, jump out and run after them to take pictures. Or at least, everyone else did. I did not take any pictures, just observed these goody looking creatures running around. That night, we stayed in a few cabins in a caravan park, where possums and wallabies shared the camp with us. In the morning, we drove up to Dove Lake in the park and started hiking. We climbed through alpine slopes and pouring rain up to Crater Lake (nothing like the one in Oregon, but very nice) and then further up the ridge towards Cradle Mountain (the one behind the lake that looks like...well, Cradle Mtn). The place was exactly like I expected. Something comparable to the alpine regions of Alaska. Definitely could have been in Middle Earth even though that is New Zealand.


We went out of our way to find a patch of snow (I don't know why, it was already freezing), but it was pretty cool to play in the snow in Australia.



At midday we went back down to the visitor center to dry off and warm off, and this is who I found on the way in (a pademalon, related to kangaroos and wallabies):

In the afternoon, we went back to walk around the lake on a boarded trail. The fog had set in strong and created a beautiful and erie scene. It was time to head through the mines of Moria, the mountains were becoming impassable.







Saruman even sent spies after us:

Later in the evening, after seeing the wallaby below in our camp,

we went to Devils at Cradle. It was a Tasmanian devil sanctuary, a place where devils were raised in captivity to keep healthy individuals around and try to keep a strong gene pool. The problem with these animals is DFTD, or devil facial tumor disease. It is a cancer transferred from devil to devil through skin grafts swapped during aggressive behavior, where two devils will snarl and clash snouts/jaws. It has wiped out a majority of the population and left such a small number that inbreeding depression is taking over (maybe this is where the inbreed jokes about the Tasmanians come from). Anyway, these animals are incredible, mean and worth saving.

We found out a few crazy things. One is that their normal heart rate is 200 bpm. Two is that they are called devils because as they fight and get angry, they cannot pant efficiently enough to give off heat. Instead, blood rushes to their ears and turns them bright red. Three is that Taz from the Looney Tunes is depicted spinning all the time because when devils get pissed, they pace in circles. As they get more agitated, the circle becomes tighter and tighter until they are almost spinning. Four, a devil will eat about half of its body weight in a 5 minute sitting. We got to watch these devils feed, as a trainer took out wallaby legs and let them go at it. We also saw its closest relative, the Spotted Coal, which drops out of trees to attack its prey below. Really sick.

That was about the end of our trip. On Sunday, we did a couple short walks in the rain before heading back to Launceston. The weather finally shaped up, but all we did was return to the gorge we had been at before. We got back to Melbourne that night to find that all of our friends had celebrated Halloween the night before since Saturday night was more fun. First Halloween I've ever missed, but worth it.