End of Financial Year Runout Special

It's June 30, which means (a) this fullah (below) is half a earthly solar orbit old and (b) it's End of Financial Year and tax time again*. Meaning it's time to dig through the old, leftover, half-chewed receipts in the shoebox under the bed and see if any value can be wrung out of them. For 'receipts' read 'ideas'; in the same spirit, World of Bollocks presents all the old, leftover, half-chewed ideas which never quite made it far enough down the S-bend of the creative process to be successfully flushed out into the settling pond of the interweb.





















If all else fails, read the instructions

*In point of fact the NZ financial year actually ends April 30... and noone puts in tax returns because the rate of tax is comparatively fuck all... but that would mean this whole column is pointless and without base. How that would make a perceivable difference from standard operating procedure is left up to the reader to surmise.
On with the smorgasboard of slightly stale leftovers.

Redemption
Redemption was a theme of one column which never got written because it was going to be a just a little bit shit, like the NSW Origin team or Powderfinger's latest album. The central tenet of the piece was to be 2007 as a year of redemption, revival, renewal, reincarnation and/or a string of other 're' words (other, most probably, than 'rent boy'.) Case in point, the South Sydney District Rugby League Club, reincarnated from perennial wooden-spooners (as distinct from perennial wooden-spoonerisms, largely as that would make them sperennial pooden-woonerisms) to a slick, professional outfit that it isn't actually embarrassing to support any more. Case in point, Ant West. West wasted the last five years of his promising Grand Prix bike career tooling about on shitbox privateer 250cc Aprilias because he didn't have the backing to get a works ride, then on declaring 'Fuck this for a game of soldiers etc' and quitting Grand Prix racing (not being paid by his team for the past 6 months probably had something to do with it), magically found himself planted on a works Kawasaki MotoGP bike, his first factory ride ever. And case in point, Dario Franchitti, the least Scottish sounding Scot in the known universe. Back in the '90s Franchitti was meant to be the next David Coulthard, back when that actually sounded like a promising result - he was marked for greatness by Mercedes, who had him under contract and farmed him out for a brief stint in US Champcars while waiting for a McLaren drive. He never made it back across the Atlantic. But he did manage to win the rain shortened Indy 500 a month ago - probably the greatest single-race accolade motorsport can offer. And he did manage to marry Ashley Judd, certainly one of the greatest accolades Hollywood had on offer at the time...

Actually the whole column would have just been a poor excuse to run photos of Mrs Franchitti elatedly bounding down pitlane in a rain-soaked summer dress. Which we can do anyway without actually needing to write the fucker.





















To the victor go the spoils

Our next half-chewed, half-baked and/or half-arsed concept is as follows:

When I am king, you will be first against the wall
Notice is hereby served to the following: watch your backs.

• Mobile billboards. Usually poxy little Merc A-classes or supposedly 'Smart' cars towing fucking billboards on trailers. This shit needs to be banned fucking yesterday. Creating gridlock, contributing to global warming, and generally uglifying the place up. I don't want to go to the cunting casino anyway, why would I want to now that I've missed that orange light because I'm queued up behind you, you vapid, cretinous arseburgler?
• Real estate agents in general, but particularly the ones who sent out cutesy little newsletters full of cutesy little homilies, handy hints and other warm-fuzzy snippets in the hope that they will appear somehow less of a bunch of inveterate cunts with the morals of pirahna and the professionalism of sports agents.
• Leaf blowers, and lazy-arse motherfuckers who use them instead of, oh I don't know, a fucking broom, which does the same job 96 decibels quieter and several litres of two-stroke less.
• Radiohead. For making me quote you dreary, miserable, self-involved bastards. Where are the fucking karma police when they're needed? Parked out the back of the karma donut shop, presumably.

Speaking of those who are for the long jump just as soon as I get around to sorting that world domination shit:

News update: artificial life created by artificial human
J. Craig Venter, bioscience entrepreneur and all-round-cunt, first came to international prominence when his private genome sequencing organisation tried to patent every gene in the human genome. Rather than following this up by trying to patent every bit of gravel on his driveway, he's turned his megalomaniac attentions to exploring the origins of life in the primordial ooze - at least the real researchers he's funding are doing the exploring and he's just on the bus ride when the news cameras come calling. Anyway Venter's lot reckon they're on the verge of being able to create a synthetic, self-replicating version of 'life', in a research lab. However their biggest struggle will be having their research findings accepted for publication. Peer review will be their undoing; as any scientist knows, the idea of creating 'life' in the lab is patently, utterly bollocks. There has never been any evidence that anyone or anything who spends time in a research lab has a life.

Apropros of nowt I've already created life - in your face Venter you smug git. However it wasn't in the lab as that's against health and safety regulations. The following summates the learning experiences which hanging out with a small person for extended periods have wrought upon your correspondent:

Stuff I learned in the first six months of Dadness

• Boobies can be both decorative AND functional (who knew?)
• The size of a baby is in now way proportional to the amount of shite which needs to be carried around in order to maintain its lifestyle when away from operational headquarters
• In order to grin inanely throughout a day's taping, childrens' TV presenters must either be on very strong drugs or are completely demented
• Everything I do is still wrong (no change there then)
• Baby rice tastes completely fucking arse (translation from original quote by Mr L.S. Smith, June 2007)
• The Hi-5 theme does NOT actually go 'Five in the ass, let's do it together'
• Regardless of what colour the food is when it goes in, it all seems to come out approximately the same shade
• Kim Possible is a bit of a hottie

And finally a bit of topical sport stuff:

Tim Henman: Britain's great white hope faces his best shot yet at Wimbledon glory
...Oh. Already? Ah. Next year then?


Happy end of FY and be sure to gouge plenty of the tax authorities down your end of the swamp. The Doctor is OUT.

Insert rant here

What do you mean, where the hell have I been? I've been here all along, where were you?
Actually I was in Christchurch. It's just like Adelaide except without the V8 Supercars or the serial killers.

Yachting: sport of the common man
For those who still think a boat race involves the furious sinking of piss in a competitive context, Television New Zealand would like to tell you about an event they own the rights to which is called the 32nd America's Cup. According to TVNZ, the nation of New Zealand is on tenderhooks, strung out like a junkie on International Methadone Free Day, unable to sleep, eat, speak or shit for sheer national obsession with the adventures of Emirates Team New Zealand and their undying deathmatch with the evil, EVIL Swiss syndicate Alinghi (see, it even SOUNDS foreign) led by evil, EVIL Swiss billionaire Ernesto Something-Woggy. Emirates Team NZ's race two win to equal the best-of-nine series 1-1 was breathlessly, yet straightfacedly declared to the nation with reportage along the lines of 'our long national nightmare is over'. Uh, yeah. Let the nation rejoice that a team of (mostly) Kiwis bankrolled by a Middle Eastern airline isn't losing to another team of (mostly) Kiwis bankrolled by a loopy Swiss-Italian moneybags. As a great philosopher once said, whoopee fuck. It'd be funny if it wasn't for the Kiwi media's desperate attempts to make the fucker interesting by trying to turn the hordes of Kiwis working for Syndicates Other Than Emirates Team NZ (either because (a) they like money or (b) they couldn't get on with the various megalomaniacs in the Team NZ tilt) into filthy, no-good, treasonous, bile-worthy traitors. When it comes to destroying their own sports idols, noone touches the Kiwis. They'll be busting out the Pakistani skills big time should the ABs fail to reclaim the rugby world cup (probably by getting mugged by the Wobbilies in the semis again) - if so expect burning effigies of Graham Henry et al in the streets.


















This is probably Ted.
Or it could be Bob Woolmer. Or Darrell Hair. Or Greg Chappell...


Naming rights... sorry, starboards
Emirates Team NZ's biggest problem might actually be themselves, judging by the rumblings over where the team would defend the Auld Mug should (or, as TVNZ would have it, when) they reclaim it. You see, while the NZ government were happy to tip twenty odd million into the tilt, they did so on the proviso that the Auckland waterfront would again be the beneficiary of all that lovely foreign money related to the challenger trials and cup defence races being based there, as Valencia is now. However, Emirates have mildly suggested that it might be preferable for the defence to be hosted out of Dubai. And given that Emirates have chipped in well over ten times as much coin as the entire nation of New Zealand has contributed - we're talking somewhere between Formula One and NASA budgets here - the air traffic controllers have a point. However, one predicts a simple, elegant compromise to win out, one which will keep all parties happy: keeping the cup defence here but renaming the country Emirates New Zealand. It's not as though they couldn't afford the naming rights.













Team New Zealand, so named because they have marginally more New Zealanders on their team than any other syndicate in competition


Motorcycle race team managers: for your attention
Want to win a world championship? Try combining an Aussie bloke and an Italian bike. No, not La Cicciolina - we're thinking something more along the lines of a Ducati, as flogged by Casey Stoner in the MotoGPs and Troy Bayliss in the world superbikes. Stoner has been making Rossi et al look vaguely stupid on his personal Bologna bullet, while following his nasty stack earlier in the year Bayliss has been proving that his little finger was indeed the ballast which was holding him back all along. Actually it's like 1989/90 all over again in the Grand Prix bikes - three Aussies in the reckoning (Stoner, Chris Vermuelen and monotonal moaner Ant West, in place of Doohan, Gardner and Kevin Magee), and the NSW government is again thinking about mounting a half-arsed plan to wrest the motorbike Grand Prix off Phillip Island. The last time they tried resulted in the construction of the sinuous turd that some call Eastern Creek International Raceway (and others 'that shitbox white elephant out on the freeway to Penrith'.)
















Troy searches for his pinky, Donington race one


Don't change a winning team.
Corollary: don't not change a not winning team.
QED.
Unfortunately when that lesson was being dealt out in class the NSW selectors were truanting down behind the bike sheds having a wank over junior netball practice, because the same pack of busted arses which surrendered the Origin series in record equalling time (granted, it's hard to lose a three match series any faster than by losing the first two games) have largely been recycled for the Who Cares Fixture than constitutes Game 3 in Brisvegas. Mercifully, busted-arse-extraordinaire Braith Anasta has managed to bust himself sufficiently to be too busted-arse to make the trip up to the painted sand of Suncorp, to which the NSW brains-trust (who as ever seem to have far more of the latter than the former) has responded by persuading a bunch of thugs from the Shire to turn up in their Cronulla jerseys next Wednesday night. That'd be the same bunch of thugs from the Shire who got touched-up by the only 17 uninjured players on Souths' books last weekend. Our predictions: Queensland to win by a metric shitload. Gould for NSW coach. Dr Yobbo for an extended course of Prozac.


Them darkies is a-comin', Cleetus
Apparently the New Jesus of Formula One (TM and copyright all British media outlets 2007) , Choadafone McLaren Ssangyong's nominal number two Lewis Hamiltron, is black. Who knew? This fact, heinously ignored by pretty much every news oracle in Europe, has thankfully been underlined by the American sportsmedia. They've also been kind enough to point out that this NASCAR's newest race winner and Eater Of All The Pies, Juan-Pablo Montoya, is Hispanic. Trust the Americans to know fuck-all about racing and yet still manage to make it all about race. Unless there's a minority angle to push for the warm-'n'-fuzzy PC angle, why bother reporting it? Expect more motorsport coverage focusing on other oppressed minority groups in the US, such as gays, Democrat voters and people who believe in evolution. Coming up on Sportscenter: why ESPN only gives two good shits about IndyCars when a chick is racing in it. Even though Danica's a bit shit and crashes more often than a Microsoft beta-release.





















Decorative, although not functional


We're sorry. Dr Yobbo's World Of Bollocks has suffered an unexpected failure and needs to close. Would you like to send an error report to Microsoft?

Didn't fuckin' think so.

Dr Yobbo OUT.