Showing posts with label 2011 australian open. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2011 australian open. Show all posts

Saturday, January 22, 2011

AUS-SOME

happy saturday morning...

time to make the coffee (while i watch this one again).

jan 22, 2010. rafa in rod laver arena. photo: ben solomon/tennis australia via australianopen.com

jan 22, 2010. tomic in rod laver arena. photo: ben solomon/tennis australia via australianopen.com
nadal def tomic 6-2, 7-5, 6-3...jan 22, 2010.photo: mark baker/ap via tennis.com

Friday, January 14, 2011

MFW at the AO: " with just the stars for company"

aussie open photo via tennis.com

i have a pretty good heart for winter--a snowfall can still feel and look like magic to me--but the cold here in nyc these last two days has been nothing short of stunning.

and so i dream of sunshine (it's summertime in australia)...

and now i dream of stars: read the career (watching) slam (maximum favorite writer is posting--thrice daily-- and podcasting from the open). i caution that he might inspire a little envy. who wouldn't want to be down there now? and: who wouldn't want to be able to turn phrases like:

"Outside was a Milky Way like I’ve never seen it. It looked like a thin cloud of stars stretching from one end of the universe to the other. How can it be that for all of human history we couldn’t fly, didn’t believe we were even meant to fly (see Icarus) until the Wright Brothers did it at the start of the 1900s? Now, a little more than one century later, we fly at 40,000 feet over the equator with just the stars for company, and no one gives it a second thought..."

and

"It’s always the same, but it never gets old. You fly in total black-hole darkness for hours, and then you come down in blinding brightness. The windows are all open now; you get the green countryside below you, and then you hit the clouds. They make the whole cabin flicker with light, while they rock the plane up and bring it down with that slightly sickening but fun unpredictability—you’re on an amusement-park ride now. Seeing New Zealand for the first time, I remembered again how flying makes the world seem so much less separated..."

and

"If I ever get my dream job as a cloud-watcher, I’ll move to New Zealand. I wish I could have stayed for a while."

***
ps. he will write just as brightly about the tennis too.


it's practice, man...
nadal/djokovic, jan 15, 2011. photo @ ben solomon via australianopen.org