The Tang Dynasty in Kingston, Canberra, was one of the classiest Chinese restaurants in Canberra. It’s long gone now – I believe it closed in 2005, and I do mourn it a little still. For it had one of the best and most reasonably priced wine lists I have ever encountered.

It was a Shanghai style restaurant, decorated to look somewhat Art Deco, as Shanghai did in its 1920s heyday, before world wars and communist revolutions ruined it.

I have a very fond memory of a dinner I had there one Saturday night in late August 1999, just before I moved back to Melbourne after working in Canberra for seven months. I had become friends with two of my colleagues (we are still close friends now, over two decades later), and we were having dinner to mark my imminent departure.

On looking at the wine list, I saw that the Henschke Hill of Grace Shiraz 1977 vintage was available for $148 (there were a lot of other bottles on that wine list at relatively hefty but still, even then, reasonable prices given the quality and bottle age).

As a result, mindful that I was about to get my rental deposit refunded, I announced to the table that I was buying the first bottle and it would be the Hill of Grace. The response was that I would not, after that gesture, need to spend a further cent on drinks for the rest of the evening. (I suspect, given the subsequent amount we drank before I called time at 2am and grabbed a taxi from a night club, that the $148 I spent was much less than a third of our alcohol expenses for the night, so it was a shrewd move.)

Still now, 22 years later, I think that the 1977 Hill of Grace is the best wine I have ever drank. And I have (in company of course – fine wine is not to be drank alone) bought and drank several other quality premium wines, such as several vintages of Penfolds Grange (1971, 1985, 1994, 1995), Elderton Command Shiraz, Langmeils ‘The Freedom’ Shiraz, Wolf Blass Black Label, Mount Mary Quintet….

But beyond the extravagance of paying $300 for a bottle or three of the 1994 Grange (one still sits in what passes for my wine cellar), I do not think it sensible to spend more than about $70 normally on a special bottle of wine. And being lower middle class means that whilst comfortable, I am not wealthy enough to go all out in the extravagance stakes.

Nor have I gotten particularly curious about French wine or other foreign wines, even though there are many amazing wines to try from beyond Australian shores.

As for wines which are hugely expensive and collectible, they are best left to super-rich people, like royalty, dictators, and oligarchs.

Which gets me to the book I read this week, Stalin’s Wine Cellar, about a wine collection whose ownership passed from Czar Nicholas II to Joseph Stalin and probably now to some oligarchs or other kleptocratic types in the former Soviet Union.

The main author and narrator of this book, John Baker, was an upmarket Sydney wineshop owner who was approached in the late 1990s about a wine collection in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, which might be for sale. This sees him embark on an adventure where he visits Georgia, meets various shady characters, and inspects a giant wine cellar holding tens of thousands of bottles of wine.

Some thousand of those wines were from the Czar’s personal cellar and were imported from France in the 19th century. Others were Stalin’s personal favourites.

The story is an engaging one, and I finished the book almost in one sitting, which these days is rare for me. But it does illustrate to me that whilst I do know a lot more about wine than the average person, and probably drink a lot more of it and spend more on good quality stuff, there is still a whole lot that I do not know, and will never know. And that even if I wanted to know more, I would need an unlikely event like a lottery win or a major Poseidon sized share market windfall to make accessing and drinking such wines feasible.

I’m part of the Countdown Generation. That comprises the callow youth growing up in Australia in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, when Countdown was the ABC’s most popular show, probably the only thing the ABC had which could compete with the commercial networks in terms of ratings.

We got our colour TV with the superior reception which made it possible to get the ABC and start watching Countdown in early 1981, and I was just about to start high school. That’s when Jim Steinman’s solo album Bad For Good came out, to great fanfare. Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through remains one of my favourite rock songs, although I eventually came to the conclusion that Meatloaf’s 1993 cover of it, on Bat Out Of Hell II, was a better version.

But despite Steinman’s comparatively weak vocalisations, the Wagnerian Rock Composer’s lone solo album, Bad For Good, had so much good stuff on it that it is the only record I have ever owned in all three formats of vinyl, cassette, and CD.

So learning yesterday that he has passed away, aged 73 (he was 33, way younger than I am now, when he did that solo album), does make me a little sad.

His best work was what he did for other artists, who could sing better than him. Obviously, Meatloaf would not be the success he is now (AFL Grand Final fiasco aside) if it were not for the Wagnerian Rock Steinman composed. But the work he did boosted a lot of other singers, such as Bonnie Tyler’s 1980s revival, and even Barbara Streisand.

Wagnerian Rock could be cliqued to a high degree. When I first heard Barbara Streisand sing Left in the Dark on the radio, I suspected before the DJ said anything that it was a Steinman song.

However, there is one spoken piece on Bad For Good which does not require singing talent, and which I indeed recited (in part) from memory in the office yesterday after some colleagues had sung part of Total Eclipse of the Heart as we mourned Steinman. And that one piece is Love and Death and an American Guitar (which was inexplicably renamed Wasted Youth and covered by Meatloaf when they reunited in 1993):

I remember everything!
I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday
I was barely seventeen, and I once killed a boy with a Fender guitar
I don’t remember if it was a telecaster or a stratocaster
But I do remember that it had a heart of chrome and a voice like a horny angel
I don’t remember if it was a telecaster or a stratocaster
But I do remember that it wasn’t at all easy
It required the perfect combination of the right power chords
And the precise angle from which to strike
The guitar bled for about a week afterward
And the blood was ugh dark and rich, like wild berries
The blood of the guitar was Chuck Berry red
The guitar bled for about a week afterward, but it rung out beautifully
And I was able to play notes that I had never even heard before
So I took my guitar, and I smashed it against the wall
I smashed it against the floor
I smashed it against the body of a varsity cheerleader
Smashed it against the hood of a car
Smashed it against a 1981 Harley Davidson
The Harley howled in pain, the guitar howled in heat
And I ran up the stairs to my parents’ bedroom
Mummy and daddy were sleeping in the moonlight
Slowly I opened the door, creeping in the shadows
Right upto the foot of their bed
I raised the guitar high above my head
And just as I was about to bring the guitar crashing down
upon the centre of the bed, my father woke up, screaming “Stop!”
“Wait a minute! Stop it boy! What do ya think you’re doin’?
That’s no way to treat an expensive musical instrument!”
And I said: “God dammit daddy!
You know I love you, but you got a hell of a lot to learn about rock an’ roll”

Jim Steinman created Wagnerian Rock. It dies with him. We are a little poorer for its loss.

The Western Bulldogs (aka the Footscray Football Club) are sitting on top of the AFL ladder after round 5, undefeated and with a huge percentage (thanks to recent matches against current easy beat teams like North Melbourne and the Gold Coast).

Commentators are saying that this is the best start to a season the Bulldogs have had since 1946.

This piqued my curiosity, so I looked up the 1946 VFL season (NB for any non-Australians who might read my blog, the VFL did not become the AFL til 1990), particularly as our first premiership did not occur til 1954.

For the record, in 1946 the Footscray Football Club won the first 9 matches in a 19 round season, and then another 4 out of the remaining 10 to finish third on the ladder with 13 wins. They then lost the semi final to Melbourne and ended the season fourth.

So, whilst it is amazing to see my team make the sort of start to the season which I have not seen in my entire lifetime (I think our best start was 1985, and that is still the only year where we beat each team in the league at least once), I am more interested in the spirit of 2016 (our amazing 4 finals in a row march to premiership glory) than the spirit of 1946.

But so far, we are looking good, and whilst I am not pencilling in what I am doing on Grand Final day yet (I probably would just watch it at a pub this time and let some other supporter go to the match instead), I am quietly hopeful that this might again be our year.

That is what Footscray supporters do – we quietly hope.

www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-56713953

Quite touching to see how revered Prince Philip is amongst the followers of his cargo cult.

I look forward to learning which of his descendants inherits the divinity.

Right now, I am watching season 2 of the Apple TV series For All Mankind, which is about an alternative reality where the Soviet Union won the moon race and how that causes the space race between the USA and USSR to continue. Giant moon bases and more powerful rockets are the result.

Risks get taken. Rockets blow up or fly out of control, planes crash, cosmonauts get shot.

But the original space race itself was an interesting story in itself, even though the reality of the Cold War and the 1973 economic crisis meant that funding did cause it to taper off after the Apollo missions.

Several brave men did die, some in horrible circumstances, in the course of the real space race. And the near disaster of Apollo 13 illustrated both the courage and the enterprise of the people who put men on the moon.

Courage is what is needed to reach the moon. You need to be brave to take such risks.

I am talking about the long lost era around the time when I was born, some 3 1/2 months before men first walked on the moon. Times have changed

Everyday life requires that people take risks. We choose to cross the road, or to walk outside in a storm, to eat that Big Mac or that extra slice of pizza, or to open a second bottle of not-so-fine red wine, or to date someone who we really know will not make us happy in the long run.

Or to take a flu shot….

Which is a good way of shifting from Astronauts to AstraZeneca. Due to a very small statistical incidence of blood clots (a single digit number per million), the Australian government and its medical experts have changed their recommendations on the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid, and the subsequent knock on effect is going to cause a delay in the vaccination of hundreds of thousands of people. Similar decisions are being made in Europe.

I would wryly observe that perhaps the risk of getting a blood clot from this vaccine is significantly lower statistically then the risk of contracting a particularly unpleasant variation of Covid. And no, the vaccine is not going to make you autistic either.

But we have forgotten how to take risks – not just in the courageous things that mark the greater nobility of Mankind, like the moon landings, but in the banal everyday things we need to do to just continue to survive, like take vaccinations or to generally live our lives free of fear. And not only have we forgotten our courage as a society, but our elected leaders have totally lost theirs.

As a fairly staunch supporter of the British Imperial Monarchy, I am saddened by the death of Prince Philip.

But some people might argue that this creates a global leadership vacuum.

Former soccer commentator and currently uber-eccentric conspiracy theorist David Icke claims that the world is secretly ruled by a race of reptilian aliens living in secret amongst us, and that the Royal family, all US presidents, many UK prime ministers, the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, and many other powerful people, are all reptilians.

People do read his books and pay to watch David Icke rant for many hours on stage about his theories, so I suppose there is a market out there for such quaint ideas.

Whilst I have not found anything online to say so in particular, I am pretty sure that I have read somewhere (I do read many strange things to amuse myself) that Prince Philip was the chief of the reptilians and therefore the secret ruler of the world.

If that is indeed so, then there is a power vacuum right now.

That some people believe such stuff just goes to show how awesome Prince Philip was. Not only is he worshipped by some Vanuatu tribesmen as a Cargo Cult God, but he is also considered by first world conspiracy theorist nutters to be the secret alien leader of the world. You cannot plan to become such a legend in your own lifetime.

Prince Philip would have to be the coolest Royal. He even had his own cargo cult worshipping him – and not even within the boundaries of the British Empire:

— Read on www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/royal-wedding-vanuatu-duke-of-edinburgh-god-prince-philip-tanna-pacific-island-celebration-eat-many-pigs-a8362046.html

And much as I am a bit annoyed with the Sussex branch of the Royal family right now (ie Ginge and Whinge), I think it would be fitting for Harry to inherit Philip’s cargo cult divinity.

As a Footscray boy, I do believe in the underdog. In NFL history, you can’t be more underdog than the Cleveland Browns.

I now have the fan gear to support them.

Go Browns!!!!

www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/university-newspaper-capitulated-after-removing-article-critical-of-chinese-communist-party/news-story/49566f19ffc077525881ce7d84449bcd

Whilst not familiar with the current dynamics inside the student union at Sydney university, I think that calling Honi Soit a ‘renowned’ university newspaper is a rather long bow.

It’s the campus publication of the student union, with, unless things have changed in recent years, elected editors with close links to one side or another in the campus student politics.

But such papers used to have the courage to attack the status quo, unless there was some sort of challenge to their own ideological or long term political interests.

I suspect that these days, there would be a risk of the PRC consulate ordering the PRC citizen students enrolled at Sydney to engage in a mass protest or occupation of the Honi Soit office if the article was published….

I consider Footscray as my home town, and when I eventually first got myself a passport, I insisted on including Footscray as my place of birth on it (I think I could have probably gone with the more generic Melbourne, but I was proud to insist on what is written on my birth certificate).

However, I have called Avondale Heights home for the past 18 years. This is not exactly a hardship – a first cousin lives a few streets away, one of her sons is just around the corner, and my godparents live (as they have for my whole life) not far from St Martin’s church (I was going to go there tonight for the Italian version of the Stations of the Cross, but piked).

A friend of mine recently wrote a review of Nick Gadd’s book ‘Melbourne Circle: Walking, Memory, and Loss’, which is about the author’s walks around the inner suburbs of Melbourne from Williamstown til Elwood, with his wife. The wife died just after the walks were completed, and the book is like a moving love letter to his late wife.

As long standing Yarraville residents, the Gadds walked around a lot of Yarraville, Footscray, and Braybrook. He writes of his wife’s sudden middle aged conversion to rabid Western Bulldogs fan circa 2014 and their watching, with 9000 other fans, the 2016 AFL Grand Final at the Whitten Oval (I was at the MCG that day with my brother cheering the Bulldogs on). He writes about the ETA factory in Ballarat Road (I do not remember there being a big Christmas display there in the 70s and 80s, but we only ever passed that way when we visited my aunts in St Albans and North Sunshine every few months and I always got a thrill at looking at the ambulance station). He goes into great detail about the White City greyhound track on Sunshine Road (I learned of this track about ten years ago, but just remember there being a train station there that the train did not stop at in the 1970s when we would go to St Albans – the station was removed in 1982).

And then Mr Gadd writes about Avondale Heights (or, as he titles the chapter, ‘Apocalypse Heights’):

‘Something happened in Avondale Heights.

A war, plague or tsunami. Or perhaps an explosion that killed the populace, but left the buildings standing. Or perhaps aliens took everyone to a remote planet.

Because some time between 2011, when the census was conducted, and today, 10,990 people were spirited away.

There must be some explanation. Because there’s no one here. No one visible anyway.’

A note at the end of that short chapter indicates:

‘One notable inhabitant of Avondale Heights, according to Wikipedia, was pilot Frederick Valentich, who really was abducted by aliens. Maybe.’

I do take exception to all that. Mildly. Although I am grateful of course that anyone will actually mention Avondale Heights in a book – it is a pretty obscure place with one bridge and main road, separated from the rest of the Western Suburbs on three sides by the Maribyrnong River.

Well, someone walking down Military Road who does not actually live here will not know that there is actual community. I know all my neighbours, like the elderly couple next door who have been here since 1972 and the young couple on the other side who are expecting their first child and who decided not to sell up after all. Or the several police officers living at various houses on the other side of the streets who occasionally offer me a lift to the tram terminus. Or the bogan two doors down with his family who makes some spare cash out of scrap metal foraging and who knows everything that is going on within a 1 km radius.

Or the bloke who built some town houses on the site of his former home and then moved off to some acreage, but then came back just before lockdown because he and his wife missed the suburb where they had grown up and all the people they know here.

Whenever I see people on the bus (like the bloke who has lived here since 1954 and is a treasure trove of living history about the area) or at the local Thai restaurant where I am a regular (like when I ran into my former neighbours there celebrating their son’s 16 birthday), or just walking down the street (especially in October 2016 where every familiar pedestrian face suddenly and unexpectedly was wearing their Bulldogs members’ scarves or hats), there is community. Elderly ladies I have never met before stop me and ask me how my mother is doing as they have not seen her in a while (FYI she has not visited my home since the plague started a year ago – I visit her!).

We do know each other, and it might take a while for people to get used to a 1960s brick veneer suburb which lacks a pub, but it is not a bad place to live. Nor are the streets really lifeless and empty.