Short attention span

One for those of you who can't concentrate on one thing for longer than... uh... hey, I heard Mark Webber's joining Red Bull. Presumably he'll be given wings. And wheels, an engine, a cockpit and hopefully the other key components of a functional, competitive Formula One car. By 'functional' and 'competitive' we obviously mean 'not this year's Williams'.

AMERICA: FUCK YEAH
The Seppo Major League Soccer fraternity have been lording it up big time after their All-Star side managed to arse their way to a 1-0 win over Premier League champions Chelsea. In a sure sign that American dominance of world football (sorry, soccer) is just around the corner, American pride and skill came to the fore over Euro diffidence and ineptitude. God bless the Stars and/or Stripes. Oh say can you see, by the dawning floodlights... The winner, a cracker from the edge of the area, was hit by Houston midfielder Dwayne de Rosario. Who is actually a Canadian. Hey, it's the American way.

BOLLOCKS TO LANDIS
Meanwhile, Amish Floyd's PR people have been even busier than his chemist, as the spin machine cranks up to try and make failing a drug test, twice, look like nothing particular out of the ordinary has occurred. Which for cycling is pretty much the case. The latest excuse for the finding that synthetic testosterone was found in his system was that he actually has synthetic testicles. This resulted from a disasterous surgical mishap when he asked his doctor to give him the secret advantage of Lance 'Less in the pants' Armstrong.

DOOHAN YOURSELF A DISSERVICE
Multiple world 500cc MotoGP (before it was called that) champion, Mick Doohan, came within a pube of having a conviction being recorded against his name this week after being booked for nutting a bouncer at a Darwin strip joint called 'The Honeypot'. The bouncer's attention was drawn to the 1994/5/6/7/8 world champ around 3am when Doohan, apparently a little under the weather, attempted to emulate the work of the talented performers around him by starting to nude up himself. It took a concerted effort on several individuals' part to convince him this was not a good idea, including the local constabulary.
Mick Doohan is from the Gold Coast.

IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO SUCK IF YOU'RE WEARING SUPERMAN LEATHERS
Meanwhile at Brands Hatch, another Aussie motorbike ace was having a better sort of weekend. Troy Bayliss extended his lead in the World Superbike championship aboard his Xerox Ducati (a full factory one, not just a cheap copy) with a win and a second in the two races. He really needed to do well given that through a cross-promotion deal for a certain rubbish fillum he and useless wog teammate Lanzi were wearing natty blue leathers emblazoned with the Superman logo. Bayliss was even persuaded to wear a red cape onto the podium after his race one win. Not to be outdone, after just managing to edge out Bayliss for the victory in race two, Yamaha loon Nori Haga jumped onto the top step of the podium in a Batman mask. Touche.

FUCK RUGBY'S SHIT
A quick geography quiz. When a dour, sparkless, grinding 13-9 game is described as a scintillating, heroic, good old-fashioned Test Match, whereas a similarly awful 20-18 game a week later that at least had the good grace to finish with a late winning try and sideline conversion, is reported as a woeful, appalling, embarrassing joke of a game that both nations should be humiliated to have taken part in... what country are you in? Special marks for guessing which NZ media outlet was most brayingly responsible. (Answer: all of them.)

DEANO: GOD NO
Let us not speak of Deano's madness, the most monumental episode of foot-in-mouth in a cricketing com-box since Tony Greig observed of an Asian bride in a wedding ceremony adjoining the ground, "Do you think she was flown in?"
Memo for the attention of all bit-part international cricket commentators (those not hideously injured in skating-related reality TV mishaps, of course.) For future reference, if overcome by the urge to have a bit of a crack at old mate Hashish Amla off-mike because he looks like Arsenio Hall with his head on upside down, just pause a while. Take a breath. Relax. Let the feeling fade. Do not, repeat NOT, call him a terrorist, even in jest; Muslim types are a little bit over-sensitive about that sort of thing for some reason. If you must say something, restrict yourself to asking the rhetorical question, "Whatever happened to the other members of ZZ Top?"


This lot are always chucking stuff. Usually rocks and Molotov cocktails.
Ah shit. No chance of getting the Nine gig off Mark Nicholas now am I?

YOU PICKED A FINE TIME TO LEAVE ME, LOOSE WHEEL
So sayeth Fred Alonso at the wet-weather Hungarian GP, after shooting the whole field to bits before wobbling out of the race after a rear wheel-nut was cross-threaded in his last pitstop. Instead, England has a new hero to cheer, then obsess over, then deride, then destroy in true Tim Henman style. World, the time has come to push the Button. After over a hundred GP starts for absolutely nooooo wins, Honda's Jenson Button managed to win the race after everyone had crashed into everyone else and blamed each other for it. As a result it was the most entertaining race in years, probably since the last wet race when everyone crashed into everyone else and blamed each other for it, and some random won who'll never achieve anything again in his career.

SOUTHS WON AGAIN
Souths were the second-longest odds of the whole NRL weekend for their game against the Panthers, and stuffed 'em. This is why the TAB are going broke, people. Elsewhere the knives are out for pensioner Wayne Bennett who appears to have diverged from the plot sometime last century and is showing no signs of a happy reunion. You heard it here last: the Storm and the Bulldogs will contest the Grand Final. I for one will be cheering for the paramedics on the golf cart. Go in hard, early and often, lads. The more we see of you guys the better.

And on that medically unethical note...

The Doctor is OUT.

Mel malingers

We're back, we're bad, he's black, I'm mad.

Seriously. I'm MAD. Mad as a cut snake. Crazy as, I'm tellin' ya. Not "I'm crazy and therefore I'll give you large discounts on Telstra-branded mobile communications products" crazy... no, I'm more "sink vast quantities of piss then try to wobble home down the coast road at a good 120mph, then offer La Polizia a free character reference on arrival, along with my incisive dissection of the Middle East crisis" crazy. I tell ya, son, the Jews are a lot of fuckers, they're to blame for everything. Wha?... I swear, Drinkstable, I haven't had a cunt all night...












Bollocks to Glover, I'm too old for this shit

The Weak's theory du joir? That we should stop trying to use pretentious French phrases we don't understand. And that Mel lost the plot once he followed the lead of Pakistan middle-order wrist-merchant Mohammed Yousuf, previously Yousuf Youhana until he figured being called something as Christian as Joseph Joseph wasn't getting him selected or laid in a country which is more Muslim per head than Lakemba, and grew a big fuck-off beard.

This by way of feeble segue to:

Poms regain plot; Ashes may be a stretch
Having failed dismally to install a Rheem in their clueless khaki-green opponents in the first test a week or so ago, the English cricket team (that's what their function appears to be anyway) rolled Pakistan with drinking time to spare in the second test over the weekend. 'Twas indeed one of those Pakistan performances that leave smiles on the faces of noone but the bookies (primarily shifty subcontinental types going by the name of 'John'.)

Meanwhile back on the shifty subcontinent, Home of Wrist, Sri Lanka completely fucked over the Saffers after Jayawardene and Sangakkara (aka The Kumar At Number Three) put on approximately six billion runs (oh OK, six hundred and twenty-four) for an all-wicket world record partnership in Test Match Kriggit. Which brings us to our Next Overarching Theme:

How bad are the Saffers?

Bad enough that all their decent cricketers are back wanting to play for England again, like in the '70s and '80s - and there isn't even the excuse that there's no SA team allowed in international competition.

Bad enough that their only good netballer, goalshoot Irene van Dyk (she isn't, since you asked) plays for New Zillund, even though they insist on putting her in cretinous Fisher and Paykel commercials which basically have the entire world champion Silver Fern team told to get back in the kitchen and make the man some eggs.

Bad enough that most of their best rugger buggers - your Rathbones, your Vickermans - would rather play for the Wallabies. The Wallabies, for Christ's sake.

Bad enough that their only decent race driver, Tomas Scheckter (son of 1979 F1 world champ Jody), supposedly targeted for Big Things, these days can only parlay his trade in an IRL team with the arse out of their collective trousers, because he was kicked out of the Jaguar F1 test team years ago for kerb-crawling his evenings away in his company XKR. And we don't mean bouncing two wheels over the red-and-white stripey bits like the V8 Supercar lads get up to.

OK so that's largely irrelevant to the argument, but it IS funny. You'd think a F1 driver, even if he was only a test driver and even if it was only Jaguar, could get laid without having to trawl for hookers in Northamptonshire back streets.

Toys-Pram Dissociation Factor > Zero
The best tanty of the week also comes from the IRL - that's the going-round-in-circles version of Indycars that do the Indy 500, not the ChampCar series which is kind enough to provide background ambient noise for the monstrous pissup that constitutes the Gold Coast Indy - where series darling Danica Patrick proceeded to throw a massive wobbly on her car sputtering out of gas a couple of laps short of the finish. Insert cheap gag about this being inevitable, because women never remember to fill their car up... pause for editing... and we're done. The tanty, for those who missed it, was a masterclass of stamping one's little feet, kicking over plastic bollards, setting them back up and kicking them back over again, and generally carrying on like an Absolute Pork Chop. Danica, who announced the weekend of the race that she's giving the Rahal-Letterman team the arse in favour of Andretti-Green (more hyphenated names than AGM night at the polo club), will likely learn to make such announcements at the END of race weekends rather than in plenty of time for the lads on the crew to take their frustrations out by pissing in the fuel for the last pitstop.

Seemingly, it was a weekend for childish antics; preceding little Danica's hissy fit for the ages was an old-school(yard) exhibition of hair-pulling and handbags in the Bledisloe Cup test, described by rugby tragics as 'a good old-fashioned traditional test match' and by anyone who didn't go to a private school as 'tedious as the Jesus fuck'. The All Blecks, who as we've learned do handbags at ten paces better than any international XV around, busted out Guinness-pint-on-legs and renown piss-artist (the turf still hasn't recovered) Jerry Collins, who responded to the ruckmanship threat of Wallaby flanker George Smith by... pulling his hair and calling him rude names. It all worked out in the end though - Jerry apologised after the game. He even gave him his lunch money back.

Department of Corrections
We would like to apologise for a typographical error which slipped into one of the previous editions of our august journal. Following South Sydney's monumental trouncing of the Broncos about eleven weeks ago, we stated, "Every ten-game winning streak has to start somewhere, and ours starts here."
As it turns out, one of the words in this sentence turns out to be opposite to what it should have been. I think you can guess which one.

Anyway, that shit's done with. Slate wiped. Big up the Bunnies for schtuffing the Green Machine (themselves fresh-off duffing up the Saintses the week previous) with four O-for-Oresome first-half tries, most of which were set up by the lanky genius of former NSW Origin fullback (times one) David Peachey. Vaguely serious query of the Weak: how much of a bargain does the Peach look at this stage of proceedings? Souths picked him up for match payments and cab fare on his return from the UK, and he's single-handedly sorted Souths' halves dramas by taking the pressure off their young 6-7-13 combo (currently Champion, Williams and Sutton) at the line, giving them another option. Not that he was ever allowed to bust out the spare-five-eighths skills playing at Cronulla under Brett Kimmorley. It's my spotlight, sister.

Souths appear to be buying half the NRL's decent players next year - well, at least half the Kiwis' larger international train-on squad (Jeremy Smith, Nigel Vagina, Roy Asotasi, one of those big fuckers from Penrith with the hair, a few others I can't remember - plus you can't forget Russell and Martin Crowe, even if you want to) so it should be fully choice eh bro down Redfern way next year cuz.

And finally...
It's gonna be a boy.
That should save sending out a few emails.


The Doctor is OUT.