new BRW Rich 200 List:: first thoughts

The 2008 BRW Rich 200 magazine was released this morning.

I am generally a keen reader of the Rich List (my local newsagent noted that I was the first customer to purchase the magazine this morning). Unfortunately due to work pressures I haven't had a chance to read it properly yet.

My first thought is that this is finally the year a Macquarie banker makes the list - Allan Moss, the very-recently-retired former CEO. It has puzzled me for years now that the Macquarie guys can pull in $20m+ / year over a long period (and presumably it doesn't all go on lifestyle) but not make the list. Moss (at $225m) still looks low to me.

Nick Moore? David Clarke? Bill Moss? I'm looking at you guys. What are you doing with it all?

more later...

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

It is hard to believe, but Starship Troopers 3: Marauder is apparently soon to be released.

See the trailer:


Poor Casper Van Dien. He once seemed like a rising star. Now he's reduced to semi-ironic posturing as Johnny Rico still trying to Kill 'Em All

Transformers

Finally got around to watching Transformers on DVD, and I have to disagree with Lucas [who I cannot insert a link to because he's taken his blog down] - I thought the film was really really crap.

The script was incoherent, the "funny bits" felt forced (and almost without exception weren't funny) and the film perpetuated cheap and unnecessary stereotypes such as the nerdy teacher who can be sweet-talked into giving a student a better grade. There were a few moments of character-development sunshine - such as the family's solicitous and unexplained devotion to their chihuahua and its pain medication - but overall it felt like an underwritten crappy film about a teenager who wants to be cool, interspersed with lots of explosions.

Also - why did the Autobots speak to each other (and have interior monologues) in English, while the evil Decepticons usually spoke to each other in 'robot language' - although when Autobots and Decepticons were speaking to each other it was in English.

Anyway, there were somewhere between 1.5 and 2 good reasons to see the film (and between 0.5 and 1 of those reasons is Australian). See below.

Rachael Taylor (the one that's not Megan Fox) is a Tasmanian girl who scored a mid-size part in Transformers out of basically nowhere.

Slick Rick will (probably) not be deported

Governor Paterson of New York has announced he is pardoning Slick Rick for his attempted murder and weapons convictions. See NY Times article.

Back in the 80s - at least for a moment - Slick Rick was a huge rap star. He shot his cousin (who he believed was trying to kill him) and another man, and went to jail for 6 years. Because he was born in England and moved to America at 11, he is liable to deportation - even though his wife and children are American. [note that Australia has similar laws]

There appears to still be legal proceedings to be had, where Rick will need an immigration Court to decide to exercise its discretion in his favour, but he is inching closer to a decision that will allow him to stay in America.

Ashes of Time (redux)

Wong Kar-Wei has put together a new (and shorter!) version of Ashes of Time - shown out of competition at Cannes.

Out later this year. Looking forward to it.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Wong has explained that he set out to make the definitive edition of “Ashes” after he discovered that there were many versions floating about, authorized and not. Culled from prints gathered from around the world, this newly re-edited and digitally tweaked iteration runs about 10 minutes shorter than the original, and rather more coherently. The fragmented story involves a melancholic desert dweller (the late Leslie Cheung), who functions as a kind of broker for various swordsmen (Tony Leung Chiu-wai included) and their clients (Brigitte Lin, among others). Drenched in shocking color — the desert shifts from egg-yolk yellow to burnt orange under a cerulean sky — the film is Mr. Wong’s most abstract endeavor, a bold excursion into the realm of pure cinema. It also now seems like one of his most important. “Ashes of Time Redux” will be released by Sony Pictures Classics in September. We’ll have more to say about it then.

Holy Relics - from forbes.com

Amazing article on forbes.com about the trade in Christian relics [souvenirs from Jesus or from the Saints - bone fragments, hair, items that touched a saint... you name it, you can buy it]. My favourite bit:

Some of Broomer's clients are people who have parted from the church or been shunned by it. "Perhaps owning a relic is a way back in," she speculates. Her typical customer is male, single, middle-class and gay. Priests and Catholic church parishioners make up the rest of her clientele.

Extracts below - read them - it's good stuff, I promise:

Broomer sells the skulls of martyrs ($4,500 each). She sells the teeth of saints ($300). For $975 you can get what may be a tiny splinter from the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. It takes a certain amount of blind faith to believe all the claims attached to religious artifacts.

Other items in stock include, ostensibly, pieces of the body of Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower, made into paste; clothing worn by Saint Anthony of Padua; and a "touched" nail, meaning a nail that once touched a nail from the Crucifixion.

Vendors have a lingo in which relics are classified into grades. "First class" pertains to body parts of saints--a fingernail of the Apostle Paul, say, or a strand of the Virgin Mary's hair. Items (supposedly) touched by Jesus often are first class. The second class encompasses the relics of lesser figures--Mother Teresa's tennis shoes. The third class has items that have touched something first class--the "touched" nail described above, for instance.

Some first-class relics come with a red papal seal (meaning they've been vetted by the Vatican) and papers, usually in Latin, describing the item and its history. But if saints' bones can be faked, so can pieces of paper. Broomer says that while her clients care about authentication, in the end, "They want to believe."

Trade in relics arose in the Middle Ages, when Catholic pilgrims returned home from the Holy Land with tokens of the burial places of martyrs or of the martyrs themselves. These relics were believed capable of working miracles. Predictably, copies began to flood the marketplace--the fake Louis Vuitton handbags of their day. Sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Calvin once quipped that there were enough pieces of the True Cross to "form a whole ship's cargo."

Catholic canon law now plainly forbids their sale. But the door to buying them is left open by an injunction that Catholics "rescue" relics. If, for instance, a Catholic sees a relic in a pawnshop, he or she is obliged to buy it, so that it won't be used for blasphemous purposes by a nonbeliever.

The Vatican itself owns what it believes to be a fragment of the table from the Last Supper and marble stairs that are the same ones Jesus ascended on His way to appear before Pontius Pilate. Asked if the Vatican's collection is one of the best in the world, a spokesman says, "Yes, it is that."

Broomer, a native Londoner, opened her antique store in Manhattan in 1987, selling mainly ceramics. Two years later a friend brought her some relics. "I loved them at first sight," she says, especially the ornate reliquaries. Soon afterwards she began selling relics almost exclusively. She's built up a small (300) but active list of clients. Being Jewish, she does not believe in the holiness of the objects. But, she says, "I very strongly believe in my clients' experience with them." One customer told her that while he lay in bed one night his relic emitted a strange sound. He got up to inspect it and was thus saved from being crushed when a wall collapsed upon his bed. Other customers report relics with palpable heartbeats.

Some of Broomer's clients are people who have parted from the church or been shunned by it. "Perhaps owning a relic is a way back in," she speculates. Her typical customer is male, single, middle-class and gay. Priests and Catholic church parishioners make up the rest of her clientele.

Father Paul Halovatch, chaplain at Southern Connecticut State University, is a customer. He has 100 relics and likes to use them during Mass. "I pick out a favorite saint of mine, and when his feast day comes up, I'll lay out some relics." He has ten purported to be from the True Cross. "I'm confident that with ten, at least one is the real deal," he says.

ames Jackson, owner of Jackson's auction house in Cedar Falls, Iowa, first wandered into Broomer's shop a decade ago. "I thought it was sacrilege," says Jackson, who describes himself as a devout Catholic. "I bought a whole shelf of stuff, to get it out of circulation."

Later, however, he began selling relics himself, through his auction house. How was he able to circumvent the church's prohibition? What the winning bidder would be buying (stated the catalog) were reliquaries, not the relics they contained. The relics would be given to the winning bidder "as a gift." Jackson's December 2006 catalog, for example, offered a pair of gilt bronze reliquaries containing relics of the Apostle Paul for between $6,000 and $10,000. Buy the box, and you got Paul gratis. Jackson has since had a crisis of conscience and no longer sells relics.