Cultural Cringe

Yesterday my local was full of tattooed guys with beards and moustaches wearing football jerseys, drinking beer and yelling at the football on TV. Sadly, I didn’t time travel to 1975 - it was just a huge group of hipsters watching Super Bowl XLVII.

American football, baseball and basketball have never been more fashionable, at least judging by the popularity of snapback hats, which universally make you look like a dickhead - I know, I tried once.

The thing is, the majority of those rushing to embrace NFL, MLB and NBA have NFI what they’re watching. The assembled tattoo canvases at my local didn’t even seem to notice when the New Orleans Superdome blacked out for half an hour during the third quarter of yesterday’s game. They probably figured it was just another one of gridiron’s frequent, tedious breaks.

Continue reading "Only dopes and hipsters watch American sports" »

As one of Australia’s pre-eminent forelock-tuggers for the royal family, there was something faintly hilarious in hearing Tony Abbott firing up about the cultural cringe over the weekend.

It’s a term which dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, lamenting the drift of talented young Australians to emigrate and work in the UK in the belief there was something culturally and intellectually superior about the Old Country.

With the revelation that Britain’s conservative Prime Minister David Cameron had written to Julia Gillard applauding her “bold step” of putting a price on carbon, Abbott came over all republican, saying the Poms could do what they liked and Labor should stop kowtowing to the motherland.

Continue reading "One rule for Britannia, another for Abbott" »