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"Hello, it's Russell Crowe, here..."

Poor Rusty Crowe.  He's been coping it a bit after engaging in a bit of a fracas with a hotel staff member on Tuesday.

I mean what's a bloke expected to do in the wee hours of the morning in a hotel a long way from home when the concierge is giving him the sort of attitude a celebrity shouldn't have to take? If you're a gladiator and you're holding a telephone, the solution is obvious.... you turf it at their head....

And whilst the UK Sun gave the tale the full tabloid treatment, complete with hilarious graphic recreations you can see here, the front of today's Daily Telegraph had a completely different angle thanks to reporter Matt Frilingos:

"Stretched on the couch watching TV, on the verge of drifting off to sleep, the last thing I expected late on Tuesday night was a call from Russell Crowe," is how Frilingos starts this backgrounder today.

That phone call, which proves that some hotel phones do work,  led to this front-page story in today's Tele, (and you've gotta love the headline!):

HOW MY BRAIN SNAPPED

EXCLUSIVE by MATT FRILINGOS

Shattered actor Russell Crowe has bared his soul to The Daily Telegraph, saying the violent incident that could see him jailed was entirely his fault.

In an exclusive interview, Crowe spoke of his shame over the altercation, but insisted he was "not aiming at" concierge Nestor Estrada when he threw a telephone in the lobby of an exclusive New York hotel. He conceded that the incident may not only see him locked away in a New York jail, but could prevent him from ever working in the US again.

He blamed his state of mind on "the combination of jet lag, loneliness and adrenalin," having just returned to the US after a flying visit to London for the Kostya Tsyzu fight, without wife Danielle. "I'm at the bottom of a well. I can't communicate how dark my life is right now," Crowe said. "I'm in a lot of trouble. I'll do my best to solve the situation in an honourable way. I'm very sorry for my actions."

You can check the full story here.  And some very funny letters in today's Australian

The Schapelle Corby "Case"

This isn't neccessarily a big idea, but it enterprising all the same:

"A Melbourne man has applied to register convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby's name as a luggage brand.

Entrepreneur Nick Barnes is hoping to get a large luggage manufacturer behind his charitable "Corby Case" scheme.

Corby, 27, last month received a 20-year jail sentence for smuggling 4.1kg of marijuana into Bali in October 2004.

Mr Barnes denied his concept was profiteering or in bad taste."

Not profiteering?  Sure it isn't..

Why don't we have Big Ideas anymore?

Why don't we have any big idea's anymore?

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einsteins theory of relativity.  And 1905 was a big year for ideas, says Peter Watson in the Observer- Matisse and Cezanne were at their peak, Lenin, EM Forster and Freud were all publishing seminal works, and the first regular cinemas opened.  In the face of such change, the year 2005 "can't begin to compete with 1905 in terms of important innovations."

Hmm.  We probably try to kid ourselves otherwise, but I kinda agree with Watson when he says that our present world is "nowhere near as interesting and innovative" as it thinks, especially when compared with past ages.  A view that is confirmed probably because I am currently reading Bill Bryson's excellent "A Short History of Nearly Everything" in which every page is full of discovery and great idea's.  It is an incredible read that reinforces how amazing some of our early thinkers like Einstein were.

Sure, we might have all of our new mobile phones, iPods, internet and DNA advances, but do these things fundamentally change the way we think?  Think about it.  Not really.

As Watson suggests, just stop and think about some of the real innovations of the past; the introduction of crop rotation, the adoption of Hindu numerals, the introduction of the factory and the steam engine and the theory of evolution.  But since 1950, what have we got?  Well,  only the pill and the internet are or comparative importance. 

Maybe it is simply a quirk of modern capitalism, we all get to "sample the fruits of earlier innovation" so we don't do much of it ourselves anymore.  We just don't see the need to

Without a doubt these are fast moving, ever changing and very interesting times, but they don't seem to be the times of big ideas.

Thoughts?

BRW's Rich List & The Overnight Billionaire

I finally got around to having a flick through this years BRW Rich List edition.  The usual suspects are at the top: multi-billionaires like Kerry Packer, Dick Pratt and Frank Lowy.  No surprises there. 

But the entry that really caught my eye was the story of a Dutch immigrant by the name of John Van Lieshout.  Van Lieshout miraculously debuted on the Rich List with a personal worth of $1 billion. Huh?  You mean that he just dropped from the sky as Australians 21st billionaire?

Obviously the people at BRW have cocked up in previous years by forgetting to put him on their list. It seems their definitive list isn't quite as, wel,l "definitive" as they would think.

It is a big omission, and you would have thought BRW would creep the missing billionaire up the list over a few years, rather than parachuting him straight into billionaire club, and highlighting its previous omissions. If you read the entry on Lisehout, it becomes obvious that BRW has been blundering for years by not including him.  His discount Queensland furniture chain Super A-Mart is hardly an invisible business, after all.

But it wouldn't be an easy exercise to compile the Rich List, and no-one could ever get even close to accurate given the secrecy of Australia's rich and the complexity of their affairs.

But if you haven't yet got yourself a copy, grab one.