The West Lake Restaurant is preparing for a huge wedding ceremony. The bridegroom is a wealthy businessman and the bride is a beautiful girl, who was a waitress in the restaurant. She says that money and marriage are co-dependent. The betrothal gifts that her fiancé gave to her family were worth over 180,000 yuan.

With the lavish ceremony unfolding, the owner, Mrs Qin, reveals her ownlove story. She divorced when she found out her husband had cheated onher, and raised her daughter on her own whilst still supporting herparents. At the age of 45, she married her driver.

Uruguay's World Cup hopes will once again be decided at a rocking Centenario stadium and I for one can't wait for the latest instalment.

I’m busy fixing up a trip to Montevideo to cover the second leg of the World Cup play off between Uruguay and Costa Rica.

Booking the flights, organising the hotel, imagining the occasion – inevitably it sets the mind spinning back to this stage in the two previous qualification campaigns.

November 2001 and November 2005 - both times on gorgeous spring afternoons in the Centenario stadium to see if Uruguay were going to snatch that last World Cup place. Both times it was Australia who was barring the door.

It feels like a huge weight has been lifted at Gold Coast United while the latest national team squad has sparked a fresh round of A-League debate.

It feels like a huge weight has been lifted at Gold Coast United while the latest national team squad has sparked a fresh round of A-League debate.

When the cap doesn't fit

What a difference a week makes. On the field we still have a long way to go but off the pitch it feels like a breath of fresh air has swept through Gold Coast United.

Composer Hans Zimmer is an Academy Award-winner for "The Lion King" and has been nominated five other times including for "Gladiator". But his newest blockbuster score is for the highly anticipated video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2".

Recently, Zimmer took time to talk about the experience. "I thoroughly enjoyed it," he said. "It makes it very exciting for me to work with people who tell stories in an entirely different way." The game is all about modern warfare. Not to be confused with modern asymmetrical warfare where stability equals security plus development. Oh, no. We're talking exploding pixels and blowing shit up. Flaming helicopters tumbling out of the sky. Outrageous carnage in outer space. Raw emotion as best friends die. Razor sharp suspense. Brooding mystery. Twiiiiists. This game has got it all. (Don't believe. Click the second link for the official trailer. It kills.)

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2009/11/qa-with-modern-warfare-2-composer-hans-zimmer/1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=429l13dS6kQ

Matthew Johns has announced plans for his return to television, with the help of John Singleton [AAP]

It's time to welcome back rugby league's scapegoat, writes Jesse Fink.

One of the best bits of news for a long time came late Friday at a press conference in Sydney's Sheraton on the Park hotel.

Matthew Johns, the whipping boy for Australia's morality police, announced he would be making a comeback to television – albeit in an unexpected way.

Johns was starting his own production company with John Singleton, having foregone the opportunity to re-sign a contract with Channel Nine. Johns will be pitching projects to all the networks, including Nine.

Is Pim Verbeek one of those coaches who picks players on form, or based on which club they play for? Either way, his latest squad indicates a boss who knows what he's doing.

There are people who buy clothes for the quality of the fabric, the cut, the design. Then there are people who buy clothes for the label. There are also coaches who pick players for their quality and those who pick them on the basis of their club (in effect, their label).

For some time now I’ve been grappling with trying to determine what kind of players Pim Verbeek picks: quality or label. Overwhelmingly, the evidence seems to suggest he is a label man. There are few players who have been selected for any of his “A” teams who have come out of nowhere, possibly with the exception of Chris Coyne when he was at Colchester United.

Pim has shown a propensity to pick players on reputation alone and have some of them play out of position just so he can have them all on their park, even when a better option is available on the bench.

The last two days I've watched most of Media140, or at least had the discussion on in the background. One of the advantages of having a 50hr+ week and dual monitors.

To get this straight first: The conference was brilliant, with outstanding speakers and well-moderated panels raising pertinent questions and using Twitter, Skype, Streaming and many other technologies seamlessly. The way it should be. What it was - and no one seems to have noticed though - was in fact a practical expression of questioning journalism through journalism by way of twitter and the other new media forms.

Hence my little intervention into the whole conference.

Today NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen was heard and seen live fromNew York via Skype and restreamed globally on UStream. Jay was actuallyspeaking about Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media.You can read his summary on here.

I watched and listened fromthe SBS office in Sydney and tweeted a question to the conference whichJay then answered in NY. Neat - and a bit more than that: A radicalcommunications model that is challenging traditional models ofbroadcasting.

But what's more, it's also challenging traditional conceptualisations of how we find out and talk about the important things in live. The world we live in.

Take me out to the ball game: New York Yankees WAG Kate Hudson. And Kurt Russell, who is not a WAG [GETTY]

Kate Hudson stars in a major league of WAGs and an Aussie fast bowler likes Miranda Kerr's music. It's all in The Circus.

MLB MVP and WAGs
Japanese baseball star Hideki Matsui won the Most Valuable Player award in MLB's World Series after putting the Philadelphia Phillies to the sword with the bat. See The numbers game below for the impressive figures. And Matsui's remarkable World Series actually took some attention away from a thing certain US media organisations thought was the biggest news of all – just how many famous WAGs there are in the Yankees dugout.

There's Kate Hudson, who hangs out with A-Rod; actress Minka Kelly, who is Derek Jeter's squeeze; actress Joanna Garcia, who catches Nick Swisher's fly balls, and Michelle Damon, wife of Johnny, who is not an actress but has been fending off accusations that she's a stripper.

Matsui, who apparently has a massive collection of porn movies, also has a wife, but she is even less well known than Burt Cockley. Who? Read on...

If there is a fundamental point behind the first episode of The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World, it is that West Lake Restaurant is big. Gargantuan, really.

The restaurant contains five kitchens and a capacity to seat 5,000 guests simultaneously in a variety of themed banquet halls and hundreds of private rooms overlooking the ostentatious, traditionally-styled gardens. A quick run through the kitchens documents the thousands of kilos of pork, tonnes of fish, flocks of duck and greens that are poured into the restaurant's gaping maw, not to mention the metres of live snake. Chili, an ingredient that is vital to the cuisine of Hunan (the region where the restaurant is located) is consumed at a tonne a week.

Around a thousand workers (three hundred of whom are chefs) make their living from the restaurant, under the leadership of Qin Linzi, the restaurant's exuberant owner who opens the first episode leading her staff in a rousing chant: "solidarity is strength" "stronger than iron and steel". It’s a small nod towards Maoism but it's a mere socialist façade layered over capitalist underpinnings.

In part, the restaurant is a microcosm of the greater trends occurring in China. Since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the ascendancy to power of Jiang Zemin and his Shanghai clique, the very model of capitalism in China has come to be dominated by gigantic state-owned companies and multinational corporations. It is a market where size and urban location are vital. While rural Chinese incomes languish, incomes in the cities and coastal regions are growing. With that growth comes a demand for the lavish entertainment that West Lake provides.

In my ACL preview back in March I wrote that this could be the year in which Saudi clubs return to prominence. I'll stick with that – Al Ittihad to win.

Last December, I attended the re-launch of the AFC Champions League at, somewhat oddly, a car showroom smack-bang in the middle of Yokohama.

A typically well produced AFC event complete with a host of Asian footballers past and present, football jugglers and some kind of bicycle stunt crew all there to usher in a new dawn of Asian football – one that will reach its conclusion this Saturday in Tokyo.

But has it been a success?