Much has evidently been made of Australia's performance at the London Olympic games. Some are arguing that Australia should be providing more funding to sports, I even saw a graph that suggests that the rise in sports funding correlates with a downwards trend in how many Gold medals Australia has won.
But I just think back to the Beijing Olympics. My favourite moment involving an Australian didn't end with a Gold medal, it ended with Silver. Sally Pearson's pure joy at attaining a silver medal in Beijing, dancing about with her fellow competitors following the race, was the best moment of the Olympics because of the joy and surprise the occasion presented.
Thursday 2 August 2012
Wednesday 1 August 2012
Aurora
I've recently been asking around who was the better villain in the Dark Knight. Was it The Joker or Two-Face/Harvey Dent? Most would answer The Joker. The Joker was, after all, the focus of the entire film following the death of Heath Ledger. I make the argument that Harvey Dent was the better villain. The Joker is meant to be inconsistent and unreadable, completely impossible to relate to. Two-Face comes about as a result of the grief and pain Harvey Dent endured through the death of Rachel Dawes. You can relate to him, you can relate to the feelings of grief and despair he feels at the death of Rachel. One of the underlying plots of Christopher Nolan's batman movies seems to be how differently people deal with death and chaos.
The coverage following the events at Aurora Colorado was obsessed with trying to find meaning from the events that took place. The media were asking whether the perpetrator had been impacted by violent video games, societies obsession with violence, the ease of attaining firearms in the USA. Like The Joker in Batman, the perpetrators motives are almost non-existent. Yet people need to find a reason behind the slaughter of innocent lives. Sometimes their isn't a reason. Sometimes things just happen. Hell, most of the time things just happen. There is no clear answer to what took place. If video games are to blame, why are the millions of people who engage in violent video games not mass murderers? If societies obsession with violence is to blame, then why aren't there more people going out looking to shoot up cinema theatres? If it is so easy to attain weapons in the USA, why wasn't there someone in the cinema able to shoot him? There is no simple answer that can be determined without input from the perpetrator himself. People deal with death and chaos by searching for answers, but sometimes there is no clear answer.
The coverage following the events at Aurora Colorado was obsessed with trying to find meaning from the events that took place. The media were asking whether the perpetrator had been impacted by violent video games, societies obsession with violence, the ease of attaining firearms in the USA. Like The Joker in Batman, the perpetrators motives are almost non-existent. Yet people need to find a reason behind the slaughter of innocent lives. Sometimes their isn't a reason. Sometimes things just happen. Hell, most of the time things just happen. There is no clear answer to what took place. If video games are to blame, why are the millions of people who engage in violent video games not mass murderers? If societies obsession with violence is to blame, then why aren't there more people going out looking to shoot up cinema theatres? If it is so easy to attain weapons in the USA, why wasn't there someone in the cinema able to shoot him? There is no simple answer that can be determined without input from the perpetrator himself. People deal with death and chaos by searching for answers, but sometimes there is no clear answer.
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