100. The Retirement.

This is the hundredth post and time to hang up the typer. I started this blog in my teens, I am now an old man- in my head and relatively at very least. I will probably start another, hopefully more focused, blog. I like writing, I need writing and a blog with a mild readership of friends is as good a reason as any to write something and flex the muscle in this world of crippling apathy. Or all the reasons I seem to put forward as realistic reasons not to write, the fire hasn’t burned for a while.

In this last post, I want to wax on the number itself. What 100 means in different circumstances and contexts and where the meaning is in all that, if there is any meaning in anything. 100 is a sort of a milestone, not that it should be in this case, which provokes reactions from different audiences and is as fascinating as any other number. 

100 Runs.

A Special Ton, Like A Bunch Of Special Tons.

A ton, as we cricket fans call it. If you are on the card as a batsmen that is what you aspire to. There is nothing better than a ton, except a ton on a special occasion. A boxing day ton, an ashes ton, a ton on debut. That a ton is so celebrated, the minority of Australian non-cricket fans out there might think a double-ton all the more so.

No. It is much easier to make the second 100, in the same way that rich guys say the first million is the toughest.  It is nevertheless an achievement, but a ton is the first bite of the cherry. There is a reason that so many good knocks end on 98 or 99, a bees proverbial shy of being great.

100 Years. 

122 Years Young, I'd Root Her.

To live that long is nothing if not an achievement. It is around 30 years long of the global life expectancy. Take Jeanne Calment, a French woman who is the oldest verified person to ever live. She met, or says she met, Vincent Van Gogh. The artist seems to us to be just a moniker in the vast catalogue of history. 

But to Calment, he was a breathing tower of flesh. Even if she never met him, who can dispute that? History of that era is not definitive and until 1997 you could talk with someone who lived in it. Pretty cool.

100 Percent.

This Is How Much The Blues Needed To Give In Origin.

This Is What They Gave.

This has bigger implications than mathematics. Larry Wilmore had a whole bit about ‘keeping it 100’, sportsmen aim to give ‘100 percent’  and most things are measured that way. To look at an approval rating of a politician we usually thing of perfection as 100, same as a mark on an essay you spent like all night on, same as the interest rate they are charging you just because you wanted to go to Sea World- one time. 

100 Bucks.

I Am Gonna Spend Mine on Moustache Wax.

What can it buy now? How do you work it out? The economy is a fluid and relative beast. To me it is two slabs and two maxibons, but I am kind of fucked up. To the bell of the ball it might be a hair-cut and one  hands worth of manicure. The gambler sees it as the necessary door to the bigger money, the addict sees it as a half a day, a day, a week or a months worth depending on where they are at.

To the rich man, my boss, it is nothing. To the poor man, me, it is everything. There is nothing, I mean nothing, more relative than money.

Goodbye,

NP.

The Hayne Plane: On A Really Dumb Press Coining.

You have heard of this, I know you have. It is all over the news and it should be. It is a remarkable thing, even for someone so talented. A change of codes is no cakewalk, even from the obscurely similar rugby league to rugby union, or vice-versa. But from rugby league to yankee football- while not unheard of, pretty unlikely in this day and age and given the levels that sport across the board is at. Where no longer is the plumber or the baker playing full-back.

My objection, which you all knew I had one, is with the term the press have coined to cover this remarkable story. Thats it, you got it, the ‘Hayne Plane’.  It could be just me, though I doubt it, but I don’t get it.

It is illogical, nonsensical and, really, ‘Plane Dumb’. 

A Successful Athlete, A Failure of a Media Experiment. 

I can only assume the press got tired of using the ‘train’ rhyme with things that do rhyme and resemble that trajectory. In this case though, it is far more sensible. The path Hayne has taken is much more that of the locomotive than the jetliner. He has pushed forward, ever forward, strong, tough, relentless and overcoming things.

A plane, by contrast, and not a powerless machine does not invoke the same imagery. It loops around when a spot on the tarmac is not readily available, it dodges turbulence, it dips and dodges, rises and falls and if you have ever been on one, you know they bullshit you with taxiing and seat-belt signs. A train is slower, sure, but it is more direct.

We all know it is built on the bedrock of the rhyme with the surname. Though I suppose I will now give a couple reasons why I think they chose this title and counter it with why it is stupid. Because hey, it’s what I do.

 He Is Flying High. 

The ‘plane’ image is one that is skipping across gods bearded face. He is up there, way up there, as up there as a plane. And, don’t miss this, his last name is also Hayne. What brilliant luck. I do wonder. If his name was, say, ‘Jaryd Climp’ would he be the ‘Climp Blimp’- evoking images of a gently floating overweight guy who stumbles upon his dream of a reasonably priced fish and chip shop.

He Is Overseas.

As we know a train cannot reasonably traverse the ocean, at least not in time to turn into a tight 75 kilo running back. As such the ‘Hayne Plane’ has kept in plain sight the fact that the man is overseas.  You take a plane to get overseas, right? That’s where he is, Jarryd! If he had gone to play   for an city or eastern suburbs side, would he then be the ‘Hayne shitty green Western Line rattler’, probably not.

I suggest, despite all the points of logic I have raised, there is one severe and significant reason to abandon this moniker for a genuinely remarkable story.

It Is Naturally Hobbled By The Tongue.

We, as a species, are now too dumb or complacent to accept a rhyme headline that alters from the obvious. ‘Hayne Plane’, just sounds weird. It doesn't sit well in the mouth, it jumps back off the tongue and is not at all digestible to the ears. It is spell-check telling you the real spelling even though it discomforts you, it is the friend missing both eyebrows when you could have sworn he just had a haircut and it is the homicidal silence over a large household when the youngest son is on a sleepover.

Basically it is Uncanny in the intellectual sense. Jentsch described the concept as “something one does not know one’s way about in”. In a, perhaps aesthetic sense, this is true of the ‘Hayne Plane’. It is being disoriented. Linguistically there is nothing more disorienting, or uncomfortable, than trying to say as an adult; ‘I have been following the Hayne Plane’. 

NP.