Wandering around the stunning winter wonderland of Munich with my Nikon…
©Steve Williams 2019
Tag: Europe
Australian soccer needs a drama queen
So Australia is out of the World Cup. Again.
We didn’t make it beyond the Group Stage, by forgetting the premise of the game – get the ball into the net – especially against that football superpower Peru.
Right now, the clipboard-wielding boffins at Football Federation Australia are locked in crisis-think tank-workshop-post mortems, ruminating where our campaign went wrong,
and hopefully looking down the back of the lounge for a striker.
As Australia embarks on the sandblasted “Road To Qatar”, I have the solution, and it has nothing to do with kicking said ball. It’s acting.
Stay with me. Some of the performances we have seen in the World Cup have been brilliant. Brazilian superstar Neymar took a pathetic award-winning dive and the piss, falling to the pitch mortally wounded, like he’d just had a Brazilian.
See, this is where Australia falls down. Or not. We need to get onboard this diving caper. It’s essential.
Forget combing the world (Europe) for our next unpronounceable coach to not take us past the Group Stage in 2022, we need actors in charge. Bloody good actors. Luckily, Australia has produced some of the finest in the world.
I call for Cate Blanchett to be annointed as Socceroos coach.
This is inspired. Imagine what the Academy Award / Golden Globe / BAFTA / etc, etc-winner could do to make Australia competitive on soccer’s greatest stage. The subtle nuances of mock-agony… the unworldly talent of clutching your face, screaming like you have just been shot, when you only received a mere fairytap on your knee. Penalty. Thanks Cate.
There’s been talk of not enough “mongrel” in the Australian team… hire Alf Stewart from Home and Away as Assistant Coach. He’d flamin’ sort ’em out, quick smart. Geoffrey Rush could chime in with brilliant character acting expertise, very handy when convincing the ref you have been critically injured by a non-existent elbow. Penalty.
Don’t you see? We would beat those dive-and-piss-taking-thespians from Europe and South America at their own game.
This is the future of Australian soccer. Let’s create our own Theatre of Dreams.
“Hello, Cate…”
©Steve Williams 2018
Munich’s English Garden – A Winter Wonderland
Munich’s magnificent English Garden is one of the world’s largest urban parks, and an absolute must when visiting the city.
Stretching around five kilometres from the heart of the city, the English Garden boasts lush fields, 78km of paths utilised by walkers, bikes and horses, two fabulous beer gardens, restaurants,
a Chinese tower, Japanese tea house, Greek temple, surfers and nudists.
Though wandering around with my camera in the last few days, I obviously didn’t encounter the latter. The Kleinhesseloher Lake was frozen over, adding to the whole spectacular winter wonderland atmosphere…
Words and images ©Steve Williams 2017
An open letter to cigarette smokers
Dear smokers. I know you and I don’t get along that well.
I’d like to ask you some genuine questions, from someone who has never had a cigarette.
1. Why do you throw your cigarette butts on the ground? (#notallsmokers)
I know you very thoughtfully then stamp on it, grind it into the footpath / road / grass / beach
in case a random passerby treads on it and bursts into flames, thanks for that. But, pun intended, why don’t you pick it up?
Congratulations. You are adding to the several trillion cigarette butts discarded each year.
If I threw my empty bottle of whatever on the ground, trod on it and walked off, would you think that was odd? If yes, then what’s the difference?
But what am I supposed to do with it?
Good question. That is your problem. You’re the one who is smoking. Find an ashtray, a garbage bin or preferably put it in your pocket. However, throwing it on the street / beach / pot plant / garden / drain or wherever, like everything else with your smoking – including the disgusting smell, risk of cancer etc – becomes my problem.
The street is the worst option. Street = drain = harbour or beach or river, causing untold damage to marine life for the simple fact butts are obviously not biodegradable. Surprisingly, they don’t magically evaporate in water, in fact all that lovely cadmium, lead and arsenic leaches into our environment within an hour of contact with water. They also don’t evaporate in air, evidenced by bushfires started by some moron lobbing a butt out of a car window.
2. What do you think happens to that cigarette butt you have just thrown on the ground?
A rhetorical question, because you obviously don’t know and / or care. Do you think the magical Cigarette Butt Fairy appears and spirits it away to whimsical Cigarette Butt Land?
More likely a bloke with a bastard leafblower blows it down the drain and then see above.
3. What do you do at home? Is your floor / backyard / balcony a Great Pyramid of Butts?
Hopefully you dispose of cigarette butts properly, well, as properly as one can…
so why don’t you do that when you are out?
I know, I know… you non-smokers don’t get it, it’s an addiction, smoking is not illegal,
the government makes a fortune out of us smokers… blah, blah, blah.
Again. I don’t care. You have no rights as a smoker. Perversely, actually you do.
You can sit outside a nice restaurant “enjoying” your cigarette, the view and the “fresh air”,
while I have to endure your recycled smoke and that stench. Why should I be forced inside?
I know Australian state governments have acted on this to their credit, but this doesn’t go
far enough. I’m talking to you, Europe.
If smoking just stayed your problem, I’d be happy. Butt it doesn’t. So I’m not.
©Steve Williams 2016
*This piece also appeared in The Huffington Post Australia:
I Wish Smoking Was Just Your Problem. Butt It’s Not