Posted in Uncategorized on August 27, 2003| Leave a Comment »
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What Is Your Battle Cry? |
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Skulking on the wasteland, brandishing gilded boxing gloves, cometh Ozfille! And she gives an ominous howl: “For the love of carnage and discord, I tear into the enemy like the world’s mightiest bad-ass!” |
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Find out! |
Ichi – “That one with wisdom”
What would your Japanese name be? (female)
brought to you by Quizilla
So after I get over my berserker rage I’m wise?
Posted in Uncategorized on August 27, 2003| Leave a Comment »
|
What Is Your Battle Cry? |
|
Skulking on the wasteland, brandishing gilded boxing gloves, cometh Ozfille! And she gives an ominous howl: “For the love of carnage and discord, I tear into the enemy like the world’s mightiest bad-ass!” |
|
Find out! |
Ichi – “That one with wisdom”
What would your Japanese name be? (female)
brought to you by Quizilla
So after I get over my berserker rage I’m wise?
Posted in Uncategorized on August 25, 2003|
Posted in Uncategorized on August 25, 2003| Leave a Comment »
Maybe it is a plot to induce people to go out and buy plane tickets and head for New York or a way of inducing more tourism for the US but the amount of publicity this show is getting here is ridiculous –
Another Boy from Oz calls Broadway home
August 23, 2003
The Wolverine pulls in his claws and dons the lurid shirts of an Aussie icon, writes Philip McCarthy in New York.
In a rehearsal room high above New York’s 42nd Street, Hugh Jackman and a cast of svelte young things are shimmying their way through a high-energy rendition of Peter Allen’s I Go to Rio, complete with dips, twirls and toothy grins.
It’s enough to make Wolverine, his irritable movie alter ego from X-men, draw his claws in horror. But that’s how it is for America’s favourite Australian right now.
Comics, mutants and Hollywood one day; castanets, maracas and Broadway the next. (And perhaps babes and guns after that – this week Jackman was voted on a James Bond fan site as the favourite to replace Pierce Brosnan in the role).
“Actually I’ve done another film, Van Helsing, in between X-Men and starting on this,” Jackman said. “That guy is pretty surly as well. So it’s great to just melt into Peter Allen’s effervescence. He had all this positive energy. And it’s a relief to do a project in America where I don’t have to put on an accent.”
The project, of course, is the American version of the 1998 Australian stage hit, The Boy From Oz, which begins previews in three weeks and opens on October 16. The $US9 million production is the hot ticket of the new Broadway season with advance sales of more than $US6 million. Variety speculated that Jackman’s name recognition “and perhaps a hitherto long hibernating legion of Peter Allen enthusiasts” were behind the early box office bounce.
Still, it’s a big show with 26 parts and – playing in one of Broadway’s larger houses, the 1417-seat Imperial Theatre – it will need to earn around $US500,000 a week just to pay for operating costs before it begins recouping its investors’ hefty outlay.
In the show, Jackman and company run through about 21 of Allen’s songs in the singer’s inimitable, high-octane style that featured piano playing-as-gymnastics and lurid Hawaiian shirts. The show’s narrative, heavily reworked from the original version by the American writer Martin Sherman, traces Allen’s life from Tenterfield, NSW, through local success on television’s Bandstand, to his American “discovery” by Judy Garland, his marriage to Liza Minnelli and his eventual death from AIDS complications in 1992.
Jackman says his own appreciation for Allen as a man – as distinct from the better known caricature of a larger than life gay showman – deepened as he slipped into his life and milieu.
The more successful you become, he says, the more pressure there is. “I know from my own career that there are now more people watching what I am doing and telling me what to do than ever before.
“Peter never at any time in his career, even at the pinnacle, played it safe. He always took a risk. It’s very inspiring, really. This is going to sound very cliched, but Peter embodied a lot of what we hope we are as Australians. I mean, Peter was prepared to have a go. To really go with his instincts and be his own man.”
It might be one reason why Jackman, 34, signed on to do Allen until at least September next year. This is far longer than most Hollywood stars are prepared to take out of their lucrative film careers.
Jackman recognises the risk. “I really wanted to do this but you’ve got to make it a proposition that will appeal to investors as well. There’s something very exciting about making a Broadway debut in a show not done here before. I like the fact that it’s the first Australian musical on Broadway. But there’s also a risk.”
And living in Manhattan for a year will enable his wife, the actor-director Deborra-Lee Furness, to pursue some projects of her own and allow their son, Oscar, 3, to go to a regular school.
At yesterday’s rehearsal, Jackman – looking about 10 kilograms lighter than at his Wolverine peak – pulled a flimsy shirt over his black pants and green T-shirt to better evoke the song and dance man.
The producers, including the man behind the original Australian version, Ben Gannon, opened the afternoon session to an Australian media contingent, for whom Jackman added a verse or two of I Still Call Australia Home.
“We’ve reworked the context and the placement a bit, but the song is still in the show,” Gannon said. “Now it’s a kind of wistful moment when Peter looks back through his life. But, you know, this idea that in Australia it was the big show-stopping number I thought was a bit off the mark.
For me, Tenterfield Saddler was the big number, and it still is in this production. We’ve actually replaced a few songs we used in Australia with other numbers that sort of bring out the emotions of the moment better.”
One feature is the beefed-up part of Liza Minnelli, who lives in New York and, in an echo of the Allen relationship, recently split from another husband.
Is she happy about seeing part of her life on her hometown stage? “It’s not really a story about Liza, which she knows, but about their relationship which worked on some levels and didn’t on others,” Jackman said.
“But I know that she’s coming. I’ve talked to her about it and she pulled me aside straight after a concert one night and was very serious. Basically she said that apart from all the glitz and glamour, Peter was one of the strongest, most loyal men she had ever encountered.”
On another unrelated note I saw in the paper this morning Ewan McGregor is in town at the moment filming Star Wars: Episode III. Wish I’d been there but he was reading a selection of French poems as part of a charity event at the Wharf Theatre last night. There was a photo published in the paper looking suitably wind-swept but they did not put it on their web site so I could not post it.
“Wind-swept” because yesterday and last night there were howling gales of about 140 km/hr all up the south-eastern seaboard of Australia. Really scary stuff. Trees and power lines going down, roofs pulled off houses and buildings. People killed and injured under fallen trees. 190,000 homes without power because of the wind damage to infrastructure. Taxi drivers had to take firemen to jobs in Sydney last night because all fire-trucks had been called out. Really hairy stuff with many streets impassable because of the fallen trees. Thank heavens in our local area just minor damage by the look of it.
Posted in Uncategorized on August 25, 2003|
Posted in Uncategorized on August 25, 2003| Leave a Comment »
The following article says it all about the situation in Iraq. The only good to come out of it might be the demise of Dubya and his cohorts at the next election –
The DIY terror threat
August 23, 2003
The United States confronts a menace of its own making in Iraq and the only way out appears to be via the United Nations, writes Marian Wilkinson.
General John Abizaid arrived at the Pentagon two days after the horrific bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Abizaid pronounced that Iraq was now “at the centre of the global war of terrorism”.
The senior commander for all US forces in the region, Abizaid warned that terrorism was the “No.1 security threat” in Iraq and his forces were scrambling to come to grips with it. Terrorist cells were becoming firmly established in Baghdad, he said, having successfully moved from isolated strongholds in the north and west of the country.
Asked if these cells were Saddam Hussein loyalists, foreign jihadists from Syria and Saudi Arabia or the al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam, Abizaid agreed all were active. “It’s not good for us when they get established in an urban area, as you can well appreciate,” he said.
Jessica Stern, a Harvard University terrorist expert, put it more bluntly: “[The] bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.”
Less than three months ago, President George Bush, in a Top Gun performance, landed in a US Navy fighter jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln returning from the Iraq war, thanked the crew for their successful mission and declared major combat operations in Iraq over.
The same day, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, told a cheering audience in Washington: “A Iraqi government that is of the people, by the people and for the people will serve as a dramatic and an inspiring example to other nations in the Middle East.”
A short time later, Bush released his much-heralded road map for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Today Iraq is rapidly becoming an inspiring example for terrorists throughout the Arab world who want to kill Americans and challenge the US occupation of an Arab Muslim country. A previously unknown group calling itself the “Armed Vanguards of a Second Muhammad Army” this week issued a statement to Al Arabiya satellite television claiming responsibility for the deadly attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed at least 23 people, including the respected head of mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Within hours of the Baghdad blast, Bush’s Middle East road map was also under threat when a suicide bomber blew up a Jerusalem bus packed with men, women and children, killing 20. The attack, claimed by Hamas, marked the end of the fragile ceasefire, beginning another cycle of violence as the Israeli army retaliated by assassinating one of the founders of Hamas.
FOR nearly two years since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bush has won the overwhelming support from the majority of Americans for his handling of national security. Backed by this support, he launched the pre-emptive war in Iraq in the face of opposition from the UN Security Council and the Arab world.
Now, both at home and abroad, the Bush Doctrine is under fire, fuelled by the growing security crisis in postwar Iraq. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are calling for hearings on the security crisis in Iraq and the failure of the White House to build more international support to help steer Iraq towards self-government.
Two leading members of the US Senate Foreign Relations committee wrote to Bush this week urging him to broaden the role of the UN in an attempt to get a “genuine international effort” in postwar Iraq, including more troops and police from other countries.
“We’re in a catch-22 moment,” said Rick Barton, from the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who recently helped write an independent report for the Pentagon on postwar Iraq. “We’re really at that very delicate point where the more security presence we have, the less secure things are.”
His report warned the Pentagon it had until September to turn around the security crisis in Iraq. “We’ve really got to engage the Iraqis and hope they will expand their ownership. And it’s not really just the Iraqi police or reconstituted Iraqi military; it’s got to be the Iraqi body politic,” he told the Herald.
Barton eerily echoes de Mello’s last report to UN Security Council. “[Iraqis] want to see themselves back at the helm of their country,” de Mello warned four weeks before his brutal death, “They also want to see the arrival of security and of the rule and law.”
After the bitter divisions in the Security Council over the war in Iraq, the White House insisted that the UN role should be severely limited, giving it no power in the political transition. This made de Mello’s job “a difficult balancing act”, as he put it.
Postwar Iraq is effectively run by the small US-led Coalition Provisional Authority headed Paul Bremer and dominated by Americans, Britons and a few Australians. The military occupation force also remains dominated by US and British troops with limited support from a host of small US allies.
Both de Mello and the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, made strenuous efforts to work with the coalition and supported the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council appointed by Bremer, even though it is dominated by US-backed exiles. The targeting of the UN and the killing of de Mello are reopening the question of how much the UN can support the US strategy in Iraq.
THE back-to-back bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have shaken the aura of confident certainty that surrounded Bush. The cracks in Washington are having a ripple effect.
In New York, simmering tensions at the UN over Iraq and the Middle East erupted. In an extraordinary outburst, the Israeli ambassador to the UN attacked Syria, which is this month’s acting president of the UN Security Council. He accused Syria of sponsoring terrorist attacks in Jerusalem and possibly complicity in the Baghdad bombing.
“Syria [is] the country from which most probably the truck that blew up the UN compound in Baghdad came,” the clearly furious ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told UN reporters in New York. “Syria – the perpetrator, the harbourer and the headquarters of Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and countless other terror organisations – is with one hand drafting a presidential statement condemning the bombing in Iraq and with the other hand drafting instructions to terrorist organisations to carry out horrible bombings and suicide mission such as the one that was carried in Jerusalem.”
At UN headquarters in New York, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, tried to assure both the UN and the US public that Bush would not shift policy either on Iraq or the Middle East road map.
“The end of the road map is a cliff that both sides will fall off,” he said, “so we have to understand the consequences of the end of the road map.”
But at the same time, the Israelis were launching a retaliatory attack on Hamas. “Unfortunately at the moment the only road we see is a road in Jerusalem with the bodies of little babies and children,” said Gillerman.
Inside the Security Council, the US strategy in Iraq was also under fire from Russia, Germany and France. Bush had sent Powell to New York looking for a new UN resolution that would encourage its allies to send more troops to Iraq. But the French ambassador, Michel Duclos, said bluntly it was time for the US to rethink its occupation and hand over to the UN. The US would not get more international troops in Iraq without giving up some political power.
“Iraq, unfortunately, has become a theatre of operations for terrorists,” said Duclos. “To emerge from this trap laid for us by the terrorists, we must give back to the Iraqis their responsibility and their sovereignty.” Only the UN, he said pointedly, had the legitimacy, the impartiality and the expertise to do this.
Until now, Bush has stood firmly against the Security Council and his congressional opponents on Iraq. Immediately after the Baghdad bombing he insisted that “Iraq is on an irreversible course towards self-government and peace and America and our friends in the United Nations will stand with the Iraqi people as they reclaim their nation and their future”.
For Bush, handing over power in Iraq to the UN would be a stunning backdown. It would also give control over his most important foreign-policy crisis to a body he does not trust.
But as next year’s presidential election gets closer, Bush is acutely aware that if Iraq remains a terrorist battleground, not only will its future be at stake, so will his own.
Posted in Uncategorized on August 25, 2003| 3 Comments »
Poor Grace, you are suffering a major cause of anxiety in the western world according to this news report –
Posted in Uncategorized on August 25, 2003| 3 Comments »
Poor Grace, you are suffering a major cause of anxiety in the western world according to this news report –
Fear of the new century: no email
By Sue Lowe
August 25, 2003
Loss of email would be more traumatic than a car accident or getting a divorce, according to more than a third of respondents to an international survey.
A British research firm interviewed 850 technology managers working for large companies and found that email is now so critical that 68 per cent of respondents said employees got irate after just 30 minutes without access to it.
Almost one in five of the managers believed their career would be under threat if the company email was down for 24 hours.
Almost 35 per cent of senior IT staff said a week without email would be more traumatic than a minor car accident, moving house or getting divorced.
After a fortnight in which email systems worldwide have been threatened by three different computer viruses, the threat has taken on new meaning.
Manuel del Valle, system manager for law firm Baker & McKenzie, was not surprised by the findings.
“People live in their email. As soon as they walk into the office it’s the first thing they do,” he said. “And if they can’t get it, they’ll call for help at 2am.”
Mr del Valle predicted that if the company email was down for two hours, “it wouldn’t be a huge issue”, but if it was down for two days it could possibly be “personally threatening”.
Barbara Olde, director of IT and communications at the Australian Catholic University, was also sympathetic.
“If people can’t connect to email from home they really do get quite upset,” she said, adding there was probably a correlation with the volume of email.
“If people don’t get very much, they anticipate it, just like getting a letter in the mail. I get so much I’d quite like to be without it for a while.”
Steve Cookson, spokesman for the Commonwealth Bank, said it was inconceivable that the bank’s entire email would be down for a long period, but admitted there were times when he could not get email through to someone.
“We’ve still got phones and most of the time we can even walk around and talk to someone,” he said. “I don’t let it get me down.”
Posted in Uncategorized on August 22, 2003| Leave a Comment »
Saw Hugh Jackman in a segment on the news tonight rehearsing in the musical, The Boy from Oz. Its a musical based on the life of Peter Allan. It went well over here when it was first performed about six years ago now. With Hugh Jackman in the lead role it should do well. He is a great singer and it looks like he can dance too. His career started here mainly doing musicals so really he’s returning to what he knows best and I think he would the best person for the lead role in this musical. Hopefully it will be a success. Wish I could go to New York to see it. It opens in October sometime. Maybe I can win the lottery in between and afford a plane ticket. Not likely though.
Posted in Uncategorized on August 21, 2003| 9 Comments »
Read an article this morning explaining why a locally made TV show did not make it in the US and the excuse given was that Americans found it difficult to understand the Aussie accent. It may be that it was just a not very good show. But our accent was described as –
“Many Americans find the Australian accent to be almost impenetrable. Imagine a roomful of Highlanders on speed, trying to talk over the top of each other — that seems to be how we sound to the American ear.”
Do we really sound like that? I once shared a room with a French Canadian who did claim that she could understand Brits and Americans but the Australians were really difficult to understand. But I thought that was just because English was a second language to her.
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