Grimma Dimma

The subject for today is Australian Rules, which I know bugger all about and which confuses me greatly. A perfect topic for comment on this blog, then, which specialises in such matters.

But anyway, it's hard to escape football in Melbourne, since whenever people aren't playing football, they're talking about playing football, or talking about what the people that were playing football a few months ago get up to in their spare time, when the people that were playing football a few months ago will start playing football again, or, in the case of today and yesterday, what the people playing football a few months ago took while they were getting up to stuff in their spare time, how much of it they took, and just when did they take it? All quite engrossing really, but I'm not here to talk about the Essendon shenanigans.

My team the Tigers have been ambling their way through the doldrums for the past thirty plus years, neither being particularly successful nor particularly noticeable. They have an especially grumpy coach, Damien Hardwick, 'Dimma', whose facial expressions seem to reflect this, veering between the disappointed frown to the grouchy glower. It is true, sometimes the habitual contours of his face are reversed, and you get weird phenomena which you might call inverted frowns, or retrograde scowls. But sometimes the effort is all too hard and his face seems to become confused at the effort.

He was born like this, I think, with his face naturally relaxing into the features soulful melancholy, or outright crankiness; the worried furrows of his brow must have come in at an early stage.

Personally, I think happiness and the facial expressions that come with it is a bit overrated - as you will have probably deduced from my previous post. So I find the many and varied grouchinesses of Dimma quite life-affirming, really. It is a pleasure to be reminded of his displeasure. Well, just a bit, anyway. Can he take our team all the way to winning the grand final this year? I might just as well ask the chickens what are the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity in the light of modern string theory. If he does, though, heaven knows what it'll do to his face - the effort in all those retrograde scowls and inverted frowns might be all too much. But one might say he would not be greatly undispleased. Not greatly undispleased at all....