Newspapers worth the money

It's Sunday morning & the rest of the house is in bed sound asleep. That's not unusual here. Yesterday was a perfect day. We started the day with a 10km run (the team - Gene & Ange & me) in warm conditions followed by a swim at Bondi & breakfast at the beach, then home to the eat more food, give the yard a quick clean & troop up to the Junction to do the weekly shop. All good. We came out of the shopping centre into a major thunderstorm - lightning, heavy rain & strong wind which would have been fine except that it's still overcast, windy & raining this morning.  The plan for today was to start with a swim but that's been put on hold, hence the blog.

The training has been slowly ramping up again.  I was in Wagga Wagga during the week & managed a 10km run along the river bank which went well in hot conditions.  The knee has continued to give me problems but is slowly improving.  Last Tuesday I went back to track for the first time in ages & just ran the track while the guys did their sprints. Again that felt good with no knee or archilles problems. And I managed to squeeze in a session on the bike as well which always feel good.  The next event is a 10km race that finishes in the Olympic Stadium & we've all entered to do that.  It's on today fortnight giving us an incentive to push things a bit over the coming two weeks.

Work took me to Brisbane this week to a Forensic Laboratory in a large hospital to start the preparation of a Conference, then back to Sydney & then off to the bush for a conference there. The coming week will see me back in Brisbane & also in Canberra for two days so it'll be a deal squeezing in the exercise.

But back to Sunday morning: I was reading the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this morning & was so impressed by the quality & the variety of the stories that I just had to tell someone - & you're it - as the rest of my listeners are all still sound asleep.

To start in the Spectrum section, Ross Fitzgerald (an old prof at the Uni of NSW & himself widely published) reviewed a just released book titled Power Crisis by Rodney Cavalier. The book chronicles the demise of the NSW Labor Party (& Govt) & asks " how can a small cadre of union officials, some (most) of whom have never toiled in any industry, continue to wield such power in the ALP when only 19% of the current workforce are union members and when in 2010 trade unionists comprise a mere 8% of NSW voters?"

I knew Cavalier as the Education Minister when I was a teacher at Cabramatta High School in the 1980s. I lead the industrial action against the then Government for better conditions for refugee students, which resulted in 39 of us getting the sack. The first & last time in this state's history that teachers had been sacked for taking industrial action. They were tense times, and Cavalier was a tough & smart political operator. He ended up loosing his seat & retreating to the Southern Highlands where he's become one of the most astute commentators on state & federal politics in the country. I'll definitely be buying the book & will let you know what he has to say.

The newspaper ran the review by Fitzgerald.  It's not the New York Review of Books, but it got me in.

And then there was a short piece on Endurance Running by Lissa Christopher which sparked an interest & I learned that Pat Farmer, a 48yr old former politician, is an ultra-runner & in 2011 will be attempting to run 21,000km from the North to the South Pole without taking a day off. The research tells us that daily running, even at what are extreme distances such as running every day for 70 days in the Trans America Footrace, is less dangerous than spending 70 days doing nothing & lounging around the house watching the box.

The newspaper ran the story. It just so happened that it hit the mark for me.

Then there was a piece by David Lesser that Gene drew my attention to: Two for the Road about a couple of mates who spend 10 days in Ireland & come away richer for it. As Lesser concludes: "George Bernard Shaw wrote that Ireland was "like no other place under heaven; no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse". As Gene & I are going to be spending more than 10 days in sunny Ireland in December/January I'll let you know whether we come away better or worse.

Again the newspaper ran the story & it makes you want to go there.

There are quite a number of other pieces worth reading in the weekend paper.  To finish that theme however, I always read the obituaries by browsing through the list of fellow human beings who are no more. I look at each person's name, then scan for their age (it annoys me when the age is not mentioned) & read a selection of those who die young, those who die around my age or thereabouts & those who manage to die after they've hit the golden century. Today we saw Phyllis Watts from Drummoyne who died at 102 yrs of age, from old age (I guess).  That's quite an innings.  There was nothing about her life however expect that she died peacefully. Then we had Susan Coghill who died at 53yrs of age from cancer, which is always distressing & difficult for families & friends. And finally we had Alexander Krzeszkowski who took his own life at 19yrs of age. The family asked those coming to his funeral in Canberra next Tursday to wear bright coloured clothes, a baseball cap & to bring their favourite photos of Alex to pin to a photo wall with comments. That's about as tough as it gets for families & friends.

And again the newspaper told me these things.  That's good value don't you think for $2.50. BTW this isn't a paper owned by that ratbag, sad-arsed, pathetically unhappy & insecure Rupert Murdoch.  (Maybe it was his mum's fault for calling him Rupert in the first place - that would take a lot of getting over for most people. Though I do know a Rupert who's nothing like him . . .)

Here's hoping you get a chance to read a good newspaper this week