The 10 Best Things to Emerge from Australia
There might be nothing finer in the world than the random same-gender, no-romance-at-all-but-rather-bromance bar pickup. If you can see a dude intensely rooting for Ohio State down the mahogany from you, then casually remark, "Hell of a suspension for Terrelle Pryor, eh?," well, you'll likely be friends with this guy for the next 40 minutes and possibly long beyond that. (You may end up doing shots with him, at which point things get undeniably dicey.) To establish this kind of personal social greatness for yourself, though, you need to be well-versed in topics that may arise at bars.
We're entering a mild down period for sports: after the NFC and AFC Championship games this weekend, we've got two weeks until the Super Bowl. College basketball is fun and all, but it doesn't really matter until March. NBA is cool too, but again -- their playoff system takes two months to complete, so why focus intently on it now? MLB: pitchers and catchers is a day of great hope, but honestly, it's an eight-month season, so let's contain ourselves.
As a result, you'll see a lot of Aussie Open on at bars. No average bar-goer knows that much about tennis above and beyond Nadal, Fed, and maybe Joke-a-Vich, Roddick (mostly because of his wife) and Fish, so... we're here for you. Notions of Australia will come up often. Here are things to know and say.
1. Sydney Opera House
We thought about being snarky to open this list, but we wanted to have a modicum of tact here. The Sydney Opera House -- although designed, ironically, by a Danish dude -- is arguably one of the five most famous performing arts centers in the entire world, and one with among the most distinctive looks. In sum, it's completely awesome. There's also a bar essentially right next to it (underneath it) that's a great place to complete international calls to and inquire about work if you're having a mid-life crisis regarding where you stand and what you've been doing. This isn't to say that anyone writing this article has done this, but yes, he has.
2. The Koala
You know when one of your friends first has a child, and you go meet said child, and fawn over its cuteness and want to hold it and play child-like games with it? This is the emotion the koala inspires in most people. I'm fairly certain it might attack, or at the very least bite, a human, but nonetheless ... it's cute and it's completely unique to Australia.
3. Surfing
Australian surfing is fairly bad ass. Reference:
4. Aussie Rules Football:
Also fairly bad ass. Reference:
5. Errol Flynn:
Conventional logic would say Paul Hogan here, or maybe Geoffrey Rush (he's won some legitimate acting awards) or, at the very least, Eric Bana. We're big on Flynn. He's Aussie, was a heartthrob for a whole ton of time, and played Robin Hood, which is a quintessential British-type role. Now, there's not a gigantic difference between British and Australian people in terms of how an actor would approach them, but it's not like Russell Crowe was doing with the role what Errol was.
6. Keith Urban:
How an Aussie gets big in Nashville is a complete mystery to us, and probably any of the world that cares to consider it. Urban has a lot of good songs, and while his marriage to Kidman could be a sham (appears to potentially be, from afar), this is our favorite jam of his:
7. Tasmanian Devil:
The cartoon was pretty cute, the wrestler "Taz" was fairly intense (as was the entirety of ECW), and -- cool fact alert! -- the devil has the strongest bite per unit body mass of any living mammal. They are ugly f'n things, and would probably terrify you if you saw one live -- and if they get the tumour disease that happens within their breed, they look even worse -- but from a 'sheer cool facts / length of Wikipedia entry' alert, they're pretty interesting little buggers.
8. The Simpsons Australia episode:
"Beer."
"Coffee."
"Beer."
"Coffee. C-O-F.."
"B-E..."
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"I see you've played knifey spooney before."
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One of the better "Simpsons go abroad" episodes of the series run.
9. Beers
Everyone will talk up Foster's, but there are a lot more -- Toohey's, Swan, Emu, Southwark, West End, etc. If you have the opportunity to hit up a place with some of these options -- such as, perhaps, The Australian -- do so. The beers out of Aussie are generally pretty good across the board; Foster's could conceivably be the worst.
10. Its sheer origins
How many joints became a continent after essentially being a prison colony for years? That's a big jump; that's Rookie Ball to the bigs in one summer, to use a different type of analogy. Australia seemed cooler in some ways as a lawless, desert-laden, public-drunkeness-is-rampant type of outlier; when you add culture to the mix, it almost seems to confuse things more than we'd like. We've never been down there, but if we were to visit, our dream would be to see a fistfight and a kangaroo stomping on a dude's leg before seeing an opera, if you understand what we mean (we're not entirely sure we do).
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