I've written a number of times about my experiences with injury and the recovery process. However, aside from actual race reports and reviewing hikes I have done, I’ve written much less about my experiences since fully recovering.
The thing about setbacks is they certainly do put you back in certain aspects of your life but they can often have the effect of sharpening your focus and desire to achieve certain goals. Remembering the advertisers’ favourite caveat that individual results may vary, I thought I would share a little more of my experiences to illustrate this.
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"Don't politicise sport," has been the catch cry of conservatives this week when they finally figured out who Macklemore is and that one of his most popular songs was unashamedly written to support marriage equality five years ago. I can see how that slogan is kind of catchy, even if that horse bolted years ago (remember when we refused to play sport with Apartheid South Africa). Still, I get the appeal and I can even sympathise, as I often object to situations being exploited for political gain.
I feel the request rings a little hollow coming from creeps like Abbott, Dutton, Hanson and Morrison though. If we are going to talk about things that shouldn’t be politicised, here are a few other examples they might consider: I have been a little slack about updating this site in the last few weeks, as life sometimes gets a little busy. That certainly hasn’t stopped or slowed the pace of events that draw our attention. Having been asked why I hadn’t made any comment on a few of these issues, my only answer was that I had got a bit busy. Not wanting to let a lot of it go without any comment at all, I thought I would wrap a few of these issues from the last week into a single post.
Firstly, I had no problem with the photo of Turnbull at the footy with a beer. As anyone that reads this site often would be aware, I’m not shy about criticising our PM. I actually think he is doing an absolutely dreadful job and the only good thing I can say about him is that he is not Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton. But if I criticise every action he makes, regardless of whether it is justified, just because I don’t like him; my criticism loses credibility and just becomes white noise. I made the same comment about recent criticism of the HCC. Not since Crowded House have I seen this much fuss over chocolate cake.
For anyone that has been lucky enough to miss the hysteria, Woolworth’s decision to decorate some of their cakes with the phrase, “Happy Special Person’s Day,” prompted an angry online response from one shopper, which garnered supportive overblown outrage from all the usual sources. Now you might well be thinking, “Checkmate, Quietblog,” after I said three days ago the stories about a push to rename Father’s Day were massively overblown. Or you could have done a bit of research instead, in which case you probably wouldn’t. I don’t get all of my news from what you might call quality sources. I also flick through the trash news sites such as Newscorp websites to get an idea of what sort of news is being reported that I wouldn’t otherwise read about and how conservative commentators are lying to my friends. This is where I come across the push to ban Fathers Day that I wrote about on Saturday.
Another headline that I saw spawning a number of follow up articles was about a video going viral showing an aggressive racist copping a beating from another woman. Now I take the words, ‘going viral,’ with a grain of salt. After ‘patriot’ and ‘Australian values’ it is probably one of the most frequently abused terms of the recent years. Can a local council really ruin Christmas or are we just looking for something to be angry about?9/2/2017 If didn’t occasionally check in with The Mercury to see what Rupert Murdoch wants Tasmanians to worry about, I would never have realised how powerful Hobart City Council reportedly is. It turns out they have the unilateral power to ruin Christmas. Wow.
The HCC rightly cop a fair bit of flak for many reasons (such as the infamous Christmas tree installation in Salamanca). But for all their flaws, they are obviously doing better than the suspended Glenorchy and Huon Valley Councils. It is also a hard argument to make that they have handled any matter as shambolically as Kingborough Council’s handling of the proposal for the Kingston Beach Surf Lifesaving Club redevelopment. I know I am setting a pretty low bar at this point and I’m certainly not suggesting that this is a valid performance standard to judge councils by. I’m more drawing attention to the backlash every decision of the HCC receives. Not only are they roasted on social media, they also receive such negative headlines, you might think they were a Labor government. Now don’t get me wrong. Their handling of some matters has been decidedly poor, but when we complain vociferously about every decision they make, public criticism becomes white noise instead of effective feedback. Happy Father’s Day to all the awesome dads out there (especially mine) and all those who trying to be awesome dads. I’m not really one for making a big deal about special occasions, but I like anything that reminds us to show appreciation for people we care about.
In recent weeks, I have seen a number of articles about a supposed ‘push’ to rename Father’s Day to be more sensitive to those who are excluded from the day. Like most people, I reacted to this pretty dismissively and ignored it the first few times I saw it mentioned. But the headline was obviously good clickbait for the outraged responses it elicited, as commercial news websites continued to run stories around it and even online polls. |
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