Earlier this week, European central bankers for the first time, spoke publicaly about the possibility of Greece leaving the Eurozone.

It was a much taboo topic, often denied, but as Greece's political uncertainty grows as a government fails to form, more and more financial leaders are contemplating a Union without the Hellenic state.

Overnight, the head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde told France 24, that if the country's budgetary commitments are not honoured, its bailout plan needs to be revised, otherwise an orderly exit from the Eurozone may need to be considered.

Even Australian based businessmen are commenting, like ANZ CEO Mike Smith, who told Bloomberg Television overnight, that a break-up of the eurozone was quite likely.

I’ve been reading about chickens. A bit. The birds in the photo are a commercial breed; the kind of chicken you get when you go to the supermarket or butcher and buy one. They’re very closely related to every other single bird available commercially in the country – regardless of brand. They’re the same species (but a different variety, or breed) as the chickens I have laying (well, moulting thanks to the season) in the hen house. Difference is, these ones are bred as the thoroughbred of meat birds. They fatten quickly (they can quadruple in weight in the first week). They have fat breasts, short legs, and they really don’t have a great deal of instinct left in them.

Even more interestingly, they have to be fed a superfood diet in their first few days and weeks or they simply cark it; curl up their tiny yellow toes and keel over. These birds are fed, as one breeder calls it, rocket fuel, and they have hardly any of the resistance you’d expect of a normal chicken. They also go from the egg to the pot in about 35 days.

According to the Australian Chicken Meat Federation, a shed 150 metres long and 15 metres wide can house 40,000 of the birds. That’s right, an area less than a quarter hectare in size can house 40,000 birds. When they talk about intensive farming, this is what they mean. The stocking rates seem astronomical and it takes some breaking down to really get the gist of what that many birds in a certain space would look like. My old pig paddocks and barnyard could house about 30,000 birds, where I, until a little cull of numbers earlier today, had 18. Admittedly, my chooks didn’t bother with much of the space, so commercially it would be considered wasted, but the numbers are staggering. Imagine a bird in every .06 of a metre squared. Or, the other way around, 16 birds per square metre. That’s 28-40kg of bird per metre squared, the actual rate determined by ventilation. I’m trying, but I simply can’t get my head around these numbers. I think I’ve made a mistake with my calculations – measure out a square metre at home and imagine 16 chickens on it – but the ACMF’s website quotes the 28-40kg of bird per metre, and 16 birds that dress out to be no.18s in the freezer section of Woolies would easily weigh less than 40kg.

Cyclists shadowed (Getty Images)

If you've been around the traps for a while observing the to-ing and fro-ing of cycling discourse you'll find two kinds of stories that never seem to die.

One is the hard to take seriously big media blowhard banging on about Lycra louts on either the AM airwaves or in the pages of one of the big city tabloids.

Stepping into the breach yesterday for one of those yarns was failed shock jock Steve Price, who threw the entire bag of hammers in his head at, wait for it, “Cycle Nazis”.

Now Internet lore has it that "given enough time, in any online discussion, regardless of topic or scope, someone inevitably criticises some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis”.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney (Getty)

Just hours after President Obama announced his support for same sex marriage last week, the Washington Post presented a story about Republican challenger Mitt Romney that could not have painted a more different picture of a man who wants to lead America.

The Post journeyed back to 1965 and Romney’s year as a high school senior at the prestigious and elite Cranbook School. Romney, remember, was not just any kid. He attended the school, where students wore ties and carried briefcases, as the son of Michigan Governor George Romney.

The Post tracked down five fellow students who told, independent of each other, of an incident where Romney led a cheering and baying gang in pursuit of one John Lauber, a new student a year below Romney who was an apparent non-conformist and presumed to be gay.

The future want-to-be President believed, according to the accounts, that Lauber’s bleach-blond hair, draped over his eye like a future synth pop star, did not belong at Cranbrook. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Romney said, according to Matthew Friedemann, his close friend at the time.

Romney later led a mob who pinned Lauber down and forcibly cut Lauber’s hair as the younger student sobbed, humiliated. Meh, you might say. High school high jinx should not reflect a character over 40 years later. Many would agree.

One of the hardest comments to get out of market watchers is their opinion of where the Australian dollar is going.

And that's because there are just too many factors, often unpreidcatble factors, influencing currency moves.

Interest rates, global politics, economic growth and carry-trades are just some of the variables.

The recent slide in the Australian dollar has been attributed to the escalating political uncertainty in Greece.

Peter Sagan won the first stage of the Amgen Tour of California (Reuters Images)

For Anthony Tan, Peter Sagan’s incredible, come-back-from-nowhere victory on the opening stage the Amgen Tour of California brought back memories of a vintage Robbie McEwen, circa July 2007.

Did Peter Sagan’s come-back-from-nowhere win at the Tour of California remind you a little of the opening road stage of the Tour de France five years ago?

It was July 8, 2007. As part of a three-day British sojourn, the second day entailed a 203-kilometre stage from London Greenwich to Canterbury in the east. As per usual in the opening week of the Tour it was a jittery peloton, who, with 20 kilometres remaining and just having crested the third and final climb of the day, the 1.1km long Cote de Farthing Common, were nervous as a clutter of cats on a hot tin roof.

A high-speed crash found pre-stage favourite Robbie McEwen in the thick of the melee, landing heavily on his knee and wrist. And with the bunch inexorably approaching top speed he was not expected to return to the fold.

Get set for a wave of Aboriginal-themed movies, docos and TV dramas.

It may be too early to proclaim a resurgence in indigenous filmmaking but this year we’re witnessing an unusually high level of films and documentaries from directors such as Ivan Sen, Wayne Blair, Rachel Perkins and Catriona McKenzie.

Toomelah director Sen (pictured) is getting ready to shoot Mystery Road, a murder mystery. McKenzie is putting the finishing touches to family drama Satellite Boy.

The out-of-competition screening of Blair’s soul singer drama/comedy/musical The Sapphires at this month’s Cannes International Film Festival will shine a global spotlight on Australia’s indigenous cinema while Perkins’ doco Mabo will premiere at next month’s Sydney festival ahead of its ABC-TV airing. Mabo features Jimi Bani as Eddie Mabo, the Torres Strait Islander who led the High Court challenge that led to the recognition of native title in Australia.

Tight unit... Garmin-Barracuda has made the the team trial its own. (Getty Images)

You do not have to be a team of winners to be a winning team, writes Anthony Tan.

It’s our thing. It’s part a question of motivation. We take it so seriously; we train really hard for it. And we really think through every little detail… and I think that makes the difference in the end.Let me ask you a simple question. When you look at the Garmin-Barracuda band of nine riding this year’s Giro d’Italia (Jack Bauer, Robert Hunter, Tyler Farrar, Ryder Hesjedal, Ramūnas Navardauskas, Alex Rasmussen, Sébastien Rosseler, Peter Stetina, Christian Vande Velde), which name/s stands out from the crowd?

That’s right: they don’t. No one exhibits a preternatural level of ability or talent above anyone else. No one man is what you would call a prolific winner or superstar in their own right, nor would they describe or perceive themselves that way.

Save for the very odd occasion, none of these guys would finish in the top three in the individual time trial at world championship level. But combine their strength and it’s a different story.

This week, Idris Elba from The Wire becomes Nelson Mandela, Simon Pegg goes on a pub crawl to end all others, and Jon Hamm heads to India in the name of baseball.

The English actor Idris Elba has had not one but two great television roles to his name. In the epochal American series The Wire he was canny drug dealer Russell “Stringer” Bell, while in his homeland he’s portrayed the obsessive police detective, Chief Inspector John Luther, in the series Luther. As is the way, film roles that didn’t really stretch the imposing actor followed, including Thor and The Losers. Now, however, Elba is in two major science-fiction films, Ridley Scott’s imminent Prometheus, where he joins Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace on the wrong planet, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim, a futuristic tribute to Japanese giant monster movies where soldiers pilot battle robots that fight Godzilla’s contemporaries.

After that Elba gets a real challenge: playing Nelson Mandela in the biopic Long Walk to Freedom. The film, which has secured the former South African President’s life rights, is to be directed by Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), and will follow Mandela’s life from childhood poverty to a young radical who opposed his country’s repressive apartheid system, to a figurehead who was imprisoned for decades before being released and becoming leader of the nation that had locked him up. Morgan Freeman, in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Sidney Poitier and Danny Glover, have already played Mandela in his later years, but Elba will have to provide the definitive portrayal of a complex man.

The success of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz, a pair of cluey, distinctly British, genre mash-ups written by actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright resulted in to the pair being in such demand that they couldn’t reunite for a third film. Pegg was an unlikely co-star in blockbusters such as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, while Wright went off to make Scott Pilgrim vs .the World. Finally they’re back in sync, along with rotund co-star Nick Frost, and will collaborate on The World’s End, the story of a group of middle-aged men who reunite to attempt a legendary pub crawl. Their pint-laden effort somehow becomes connected to averting the end of the world, which actually sounds plausible where Pegg and Wright are concerned.

Steve Kean, a man with no prior managerial experience, replaced Sam Allardyce as manager. (Getty)

Blackburn Rovers are rightly considered one of the staples of the EPL – they won the league in 1995 and remain just one of four clubs to have won the revamped Premier League.

But this weekend they were relegated, with hardly a whimper, after a 1-0 home defeat against Wigan Athletic, and only the most deluded of Blackburn fans could have said they didn’t see it coming.

The rot began in November 2010, when the club was purchased by Indian chicken company Venky’s for GBP 23 million.

Their owners, Verkatesh and Balaji Rao greeted fans on the pitch at Ewood Park before a 2-0 win over Aston Villa, and soon after promised to sign a host of big-name players, the most eye-opening of which was former Ballon d’Or winner Ronaldinho.