Visiting the Ghents

As you know, I'm shit hot. Hell, if you didn't know it, you wouldn't be reading this. The research game is how I roll; I be in it up to my sack and I be in it fo' tha riches and tha bitches, representin' my peeps and smacking down the perpetrators who dare be frontin'. But you know junior G's, the research game ain't for pretenders. It's not all glamour, sophistication, and hot chicks in skin-tight lab coats that go right up to breakfast time. Sometimes we also get to go on massive fuck-off aeroplanes on massive fuck-off junkets at taxpayer-research-funded expense.

Which the 2nd European Evolutionary Developmental Biology Meeting is most definitely not.

No.

Not since the cunting fucking organisers moved the conference from Barcelona to Ghent, anyway.

'Who or what is Ghent?' you may ask. I certainly fucking did. So in order to inform and enlighten our audient (singular) here at the World of Bollocks, as well as to have a series of very cheap laughs at the Belgians, we present the world's laziest travel guide, written without having actually visited the fucker. Can I have my Lonely Planet cheque now please?

While we're waiting for that to clear we present:

'Why the fuck?'
Dr Yobbo's Guide to Ghent
Ghent, also known as Gent, Gant, Ghendt, Gout, Goat, Terence and Gurney Gurney Whoopie Fuck, is a regional city in East Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium.

Belgium: chocolate and pedophiles
Belgium is an irrelevant country in the middle of western Europe where your grandfather's mates are buried because the English are cunts. Belgium, which gained its independence from the Dutch in the 1800s, remains split into two provinces, French-speaking Wallonia in the south and gibberish-speaking Flanders in the rest. Helpfully, and somewhat inevitably, both sides of Belgium hate each other and would rather piss on each other than communicate constructively. As a result they have a reputation for government instability rivalled only by the Italians, Papua New Guinea and the 'gramophone' republics of South America - those with 45 revolutions per minute. Just ask the current PM. He's got time on his hands while he's waiting to see if the King is going to accept his resignation.

Aside from chocolate, pedophiles, female tennis players and fuck-off-scary race circuits, Belgium is most famous for beer. In particular, Trappist ales and lambic beers made with billion year old wild yeasts which impart into the beer delicate tastes of stonefruit, washing detergent and vaginal thrush. The only thing fruitier than the taste are the pretentious ponces who drink the stuff. In particular the highly punishing aficionados of Hoegaarden, a spicy, clove-scented witbier whose name translates rather aptly from Flemish Dutch as 'compost of the prostitute'.

Then again, there's always Wifebeater.

Is Belgium irrelevant?
Try and name three famous Belgians.

Go on.

Plastic Bertrand doesn't count.

Flanders: dull as fu-diddly-uck
The capital of Flanders is Brussels, which is also capital of Belgium, the EU, and Sprouts. Flanders is divided into five prefectures, each duller than the rest. The tortured existence of Belgian politics can be summated by the following excerpt from Flanders' Wikipedia entry:

Immediately after its establishment, the region [of Flanders] transferred all its constitutional competencies to the Flemish Community. The current Flemish authorities (Flemish parliament, Flemish government) therefore represent all the Flemish people, including those living in the Brussels-Capital Region. Hence, the Flemish Region is governed by the Flemish Community institutions. However, members of the Flemish Community parliament who were elected in Brussels-Capital Region, have no right to vote on Flemish regional affairs.

Got all that? Good. If you do, please explain it to the Flemish, they've been scratching their heads for a hundred years or more.

The largest city in Flanders, other than Brussels, which is in Flanders but isn't actually considered part of Flanders for administrative purposes, except that it's the official capital of Flanders... God my brain hurts... anyway the next biggest city in Flanders is Antwerp, site of the dullest Olympics in history in which nothing of note actually happened, largely because the sporting public of several participating nations was still buried in the surrounding countryside on account of World War I.

Fuck that, let's talk about Ghent
Need to find the Ghents?
Ghent is the third-biggest city in Belgium with some 230,000 inhabitants, less than you'd expect of whom want to top themselves. It lies at the intersection of European Highways E40 and E17 (no relation) and has the third busiest railway station in Belgium. Oh Christ, my face is falling off this is so fucking dull.

History: Pimpin' since 1775
Ghent wasn't always so face-unfasteningly dull. As early as the late Middle Ages, or indeed as late as the early Middle Ages, Ghent was one of the largest and richest cities in Europe, on the back of the flourishing textile industry. Until the 13th century only Homosexual Pareeee housed more peeps, perps and lo-ridas. Then a bunch of wars happened and shit began to occur and fuck me if the whole thing didn't go tits-up like Pammy Anderson outside a Goldie KFC. Trade with the Poms went to shit during and after the Hundred Years War. After a spate of 14th century council amalgamations the Ghentites cracked the shits with having to pay heavy taxes to some clown in Burgundy, rarked up and got smacked down. Then after the Spanish Empire rolled into Dodge, Charles V (born in Ghent, later Emperor of Spain - the European transfer market was invented long before football found a use for it) beat the snot out of his townspeeps following the Revolt of Ghent (1539) where again taxation without representation got the locals a bit peeved, figuring the high taxes were just used to fund starting wars overseas, including the controversial War on Terra (Latin for land, given they were trying to invade Italy at the time.) Chucky V personally rolled back into his hometown to suppress the rebellion and obliged the city's nobles to walk in front of him, barefoot and with a noose (Dutch: strop) around the neck. He then proceeded to rip up the town in a way that would make Amy Winehouse look like a debilitated crack whore (huh? Oh really? Oh) and basically took a massive shit in his own nest. Since this incident the people of Ghent have taken on the sobriquet Stroppendragers (noose bearers) in a desperate attempt to seem interesting. In the ensuing centuries, the city was fucked over more times than a lap dancer in an English rugby team's hotel, only regaining some dignity once the Dutch took charge after the Battle of Waterloo, gifting the city a university and restoring port access to the sea. Which lasted a whole 15 years until the Belgian Revolution...

History: reminding you that people aren't just fucked, they've always been fucked.

Things to do in Ghent

• Leave
• Drink
• Look at old buildings
• Get bored of that shit after about 5 minutes
• Laugh at fat American tourists with their matching checked shirts tucked into pastel slacks, cameras around neck and dazed Starbucks-withdrawal eyes
• Make piss-awful jokes about being 'stuck in the Ghents'
  
• Start some sort of strop (see what I did there?)
• Avoid the park after dark in case you're mistaken for a homosexual, in which case you will either have your bottom violated by another homosexual or beaten up by dickheads pretending they are not indeed latent homosexuals (note: this may not apply if you are actually a homosexual)
  
• Actually go to the conference you're meant to be attending rather than sitting around on street-side cafes swilling Leffe Blonde and staring at chicks
• Try not to fall in, that looks pretty fucking rank in there

And my favoured option:

• Get back on the Eurostar as soon as the meeting's over and fuck off to London to sink piss with Sorbs and Chris and go watch the Superbikes at Brands Hatch

In conclusion, one can expect one's visit to Ghent to be both fun and educational.

London, however, will just be fucking epic.


The Doctor is OUT (to try and shambles together some results for his conference talk.)

Not a sausage

(First of all, like all my good ideas, this is someone else's. Namely John Birmingham's. Credit where due.)

For as long as humans have walked the Earth, there have been other humans absolutely gagging with evangelical fervour to tell them exactly how to live their lives, and to punish them relentlessly if they fail to comply. Fundamentalist religion has lead the charge for compulsory self-improvement by force, from the Crusades, the missionaries and the Spanish Inquisition of years gone, to Hillsong, World Youth Day and World Vision - sanctimonious twunts getting their jollies from directing others how to live their lives, largely because they get no enjoyment from the way they live their own. Through the years fundamentalism has worn many faces, each of them uglier than Kyle Sandilands and equally as morally reprehensible. However the new fundamentalism is not Islam, nor corporatization and globalization, but the twin pillars of health-and-safety nazidom and environ-mentalist-ness. OH&S is the new church, the National Health and Medical Research Council the new deity, and you will worship. All over the crystal bucket, be it the news or an endless barrage of reality TV effluent, self-appointed guardians of humanity are telling us what not to eat, what not to spend our money on, what suburbs not to buy in, and even what not to wear - and the latter from a haggard pair of skeletal mavens you wouldn't root for practice. And you can already hear the deafening chorus of self-righteous green-gilled arsewits craving the coming apocalyptic clusterfuck of high fuel prices, high food prices, credit crunchy goodness and global warming just so they can wheedle out a half-mongrel over the experience of lecturing the rest of us that THIS IS ALL OUR FAULT for driving cars, flying on planes, using electricity and breathing air, and not joining them over in the corner munching on soylent tofu bran-snacks, plaiting their armpit hair and wondering why they haven't scored a shag in four and a half years. The most miserable part about it is that unlike the fundamentalist Godbotherers, there is the sliver of truth to what this lot have to say; the world is in a bit of a state, and it's proving difficult to pin the fuck-up on anyone but ourselves (or at least our parents'.) But they still don't have to be so fucking smug about saying it, because making someone else's life miserable merely for enjoying themselves more than you do is what we like to call in the trade a Cunt's Act.

Anyway. Health gimboids in white coats ahoy - and these jokers are particularly embarrassing for anyone in the world of research, because one utterly clueless press release declaring 'meat is murder' - which must therefore follow, as Tony Martin once pointed out, that yoghurt must be burglary - and everyone stops thinking 'Scientists, hey. They're clever, in touch and relevant, they deserve much more money' and starts remembering 'Scientists. They were the snotty little nerdlingers at school who we used to beat eight grades of shite out of, and justifiably so apparently.' The cringe factor remains persistent, from one of ours (unfortunately) at Otago's Wellington campus who declared that the only way to decrease NZ's above-average rate of salmonella and campylobacter food poisoning was to ban the sale of fresh chicken - which would have really impressed the multi-million dollar poultry industry, not to mention the number of the Ingham brothers' race horses who would go short of a feed - to the self-promoting media-tart head of the NHMRC who decided amongst himself to redefine four standard drinks in a session as binge drinking. A session being any timespan of unlimited duration, including presumably one person's entire life (that one person possibly being K-Rudd's.)

The latest evangelical plot-evader to grace the media spotlight is Dr Bruce Neal of the George Institute for International Health in Sydney, who presumably share premises with the Ponds Institute and the Ministry of Fucking Cretinous Decision Making (who I understand are a NSW state government body.) He's declared the humble Aussie snag sanger to be a VIRTUAL TIME BOMB JUST WAITING TO GO OFF. AS VIRTUAL TIME BOMBS DO. OR AS ACTUAL TIME BOMBS DO, WHEREAS VIRTUAL ONES PROBABLY ONLY DO IN A VIRTUAL SENSE. I THINK HE CAN STOP SHOUTING NOW. It's not just the fat, salt, sawdust and processed animal-extract badness of the snag itself, but the salt and sugar in the tom sauce, the lack of fibre in the invariably white bread, and the carcinogenicity of the barbequing process as well. Anyone who eats a sausage sandwich will DIE SOONER than anyone who doesn't. FACT. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the instant prohibition of any butcher, supermarket or delicatessen selling any form of high-fat, high-salt cylinder of offal, in a synthetic lining or otherwise. Won't someone think of the children, etc.

Thanks. For. That. Your point being?

Neal's barrow-of-choice becomes pushing well obvious when you read the final quote: "The government now needs to make salt a national health priority and lead negotiations on maximum salt targets for different products," said Dr Neal, who chairs the Australian Division of World Action on Salt and Health. Translation: I am The Salt Guy. I want to be as famous as fuck. I want food producers to cower in fear at the mention of my name. I want governments to give me money to do research into things I've already decided the results of so I can continue to barrage people about how sick and dead they will be if they don't LISTEN TO ME GODDAMMIT. I am The Salt Guy, and I will keep pushing my barrow until the fucking wheels fall off. Or until it rusts. (See what I did there?)

There can't be a human alive who seriously doubts sausages aren't the best for your health. In their lowest-common-denominator form, the generic supermarket snag, they are seriously toxic, more flour than offal. But there equally can't be a human alive who, having figured this out, is prepared to take this information in hand when choosing to consume sausages. And such individuals don't need nosy medico-fucktards-by-appointment to help them distinguish their arse from their elbow, given they themselves would struggle without the illustrated edition of Gray's Anatomy. (I HAVE spelt that right, you soapie watching twunts; the medical text is by Gray, the soapie writers had to change the name because they couldn't get the rights. At which point they should have quietly dropped the idea.) To paraphrase (i.e. utterly misquote) Denis Leary, excess salt and fat will shorten your life by years, but they're the crappy, incontinent, senile, doddering, colostomy-bag years at the end, so who gives a flying fuck? Given that thanks to little Johnny we all have to pay for our own health care, it's not as if the do-gooders can argue they're being sanctimonious for the good of the nation. Too much salt? Too much fat? Evolution wouldn't have made us find them both so damn tasty if they weren't essential for life. Argue against sausages and you argue against evolution, you argue against science, and you argue in favour of Intelligent Design, Southern Baptists, black slavery, breeding with your relatives and playing the banjo with your toes. And that IS a FACT.

The most cretinous argument of all, though, is that we should ban the sausage because highly agriculturalized meat production causes global warming, and that makes the Earth sad. Boo hoo. According to some stat that a vegan plonker pulled out of their arse on JB's blog, 18% of our carbon dioxide emissions are from meat production. On top of the cars YOU drive, the planes YOU catch, the power YOU use et al, the meat YOU eat (and WE of course don't) is causing global warming.

Jesus suffering fuck.

This just in: LIFE causes global warming. It also causes cancer, acid rain, Parkinsons, the global credit crunch, the breakdown of the nuclear family, the cost of iPhone 3G call plans, gout, tennis elbow, Coro Drive traffic, Phillip Ruddock, the inability of the All Blacks to kick drop goals under pressure, tinea, Starbucks and the clap. If you want to feel personally responsible for any or all of that, feel free. If you want to try and make ME, any of US, or any of our fellow sausage lovers (hmmm, I don't think that came out right) feel personally responsible, you've picked the wrong target demographic for unloading your guilt trip. In short, anyone standing between Dr Yobbo and a tasty snag in bread can take their 18 percent CO2 and find an appropriate place to sequester it.

And more to the point, despite these unfounded communist gutter-press allegations of Australia being the most obese nation in the history of lard, how often do you see Aussie kiddies winning the big fat events at the Olympics? Weightlifting's never been the same since Dean Lukin tested positive. For that matter, when was the last time the Wallaby scrum had a set of gigantic front-row lardos to strike genuine fear and loathing into the heart of the Bok, the (All) Black or the Pommy Bastard? As a nation, Australia is still yet to produce a decent hammer-thrower, NFL linebacker, caber-tosser, or even one of those fat bastard roid-merchants from the 'World's Strongest Man' on ESPN. Even our Gladiators look underfed and a bit mangy compared to the steroidal-cattle-fed Seppo variety.

Bollocks to the medi-nazis. We're not nearly fat ENOUGH.

Think of the children indeed! What kind of role models are we leaving for our kids to emulate? Our nation's sporting heroes of the past weekend are (a) Tour de France leader Cadel Evans, an anorexic whippet in lycra; and (b) German MotoGP winner Casey Stoner, a small boy with prepubescent bumfluff who appears to have fucked off off on his old man's motorbike for a burn around the farm. Where's the AIS when you need them to churn out Australia's next generation of genuinely obese sporting superstars? To be frank, it's time the Institute - only marginally more credible than the the George and the Ponds - hurled their precious Sustain into the skip and replaced it with the breakfast of champions - some form of animal extract fried in lard. With chips.

So say it loud and say it proud: SAUSAGE ON my friends. For the good of the medal count in London 2012, if nothing else...

The Doctor is OUT.

PS Get in while you can to Walters Butchery in Maclean to get into the finest sausages in the land, because it can't be long before old Sid hangs up the butchers' stripes and/or drops off the twig. And into the mincer, presumably.

Dick gets shafted

...Well, what else would you expect from our Uber Spesh 150th Edition than to begin with primary school smut. It was either that or 'Dick gets the arse', which is less anatomically correct.

The Dick in question is shrivelled old Dick Johnson, Ford Bathurst hero of the previous millennium and owner of the most Austin Powers-esque name in motorsport since Dick Trickle retired from NASCAR. And unlikely as it might seem, the shafting was done by Dick's long time alma mater, the Ford Motor Company. Starting next year, Ford are spending a whole lot less money on V8 Supercars, concentrating all their bucks on just two teams. Neither of which are Dick Johnson Racing. FoMoCo's money will be split between their nominal 'factory' outfit, the long-running joke currently referred to as Ford Performance Racing (formerly Ford Tickford Racing and a bunch of other abortive titles as unsuccessful as the race team were) and Stone Brothers Racing. Out in the cold, getting cheap parts but bugger all else from FoMoCo, are not only Big Dick's collective load, but a little known outfit called Triple 8 Race Engineering, winners of the last two Bathurst 1000s and home of the last two championship runners-up.

Dick getting shafted has been the main story in this, the stories writing themselves for lazy journos ref. Dick's thirty years of loyal service to the oval of blueness, three Bathurst wins, a bunch of championships, the Rock, the Hardies Heroes stack, taking on Godzilla in the rain etc etc etc amounting to arse all of nowt when Ford's top brass started scratching their heads over the fact that nobody other than the taxi firms are buying Falcons, and decided to make a few cuts. But Dick's team have been ballsack for a lot of years - ironically Will Davison's round win at Eastern Creek earlier in the year, following on from a close third at Bathurst last year, were the first signs of life from DJR for a bloody long time. So pulling the plug from DJR wasn't unfathomable, more unpopular. It's the Triple 8 decision that proves Ford Australia would struggle to distinguish their arse from a hole in the ground. If releasing the AU Falcon wasn't already evidence sufficient, of course.

The reason, according to the Frauds, is that they wanted a better return on their investment 'going forward' in terms of brand identity, and felt they could better achieve this with FPR and SBR than DJR and T8RE. Translated from the original bullshit: the Choadafone stickers on Clowndes' ride are too big and Ford have their nose out of joint. Never mind that Triple 8 are comfortably the best performing Ford squad of the past three years or more, ever since SBR's Marcos Ambrose took his newly installed Steve Irwin accent to the States to fail to qualify for NASCAR races. Never mind that DJR are historically the best performing Ford team in the Antipodean history of the sport, and that Dick is THE name peeps associate with the racing of Fords in this part of the world, fellow Ford legend Allan Moffat having diluted his azure ovoid legacy with stints with Mazda and Holden, as well as those fucking awful GT Radial ads. DJR and Triple 8 have red cars and Fords are meant to be blue; the biggest case of corporate colourblindness in motorsport history just cost the aforementioned 20% of their operational budget from the end of 2008 on, and it wasn't as though DJR were doing that well anyway.

As for Ford themselves... Jesus fuck. No wonder these fucktards couldn't win Bathurst for eight years running. No wonder their 'factory' team FPR (nee FTR) spent season after season incapable of winning so much as the meat tray at their local RSL, let along a race. When you make decisions on what teams to support based not on their winning record or public image, but on whether the team will let you paint the doors blue to fit your corporate colour-scheme, you deserve to be going out of business.

Which is kind of the point. The coming global economic clusterfuck (fuel prices, credit crunch, carbon economy etc) equals less money for the likes of FoMoCo to spend on discretionary items like motorsport. Spending a bunch of money developing a new Falcon and having no bastard buying one can't help either. For their part, Holden's top brass will be sending Christmas cards aplenty to their Ford opposites as thanks for making them look like PR heroes, even when (as expected) they follow suit and slice their funding of underperforming teams like those of Larry Perkins and Garry Rogers. Then we get back to the situation at the start of V8 Supercars in the early '90s when there were only one or two 'factory' supported teams - other than HRT, who were crap, noone carried manufacturer stickers on their windscreens and it didn't exactly prevent the likes of Skaifey winning for the old Fred Gibson Winfield team with nary a Holden sticker on the car. So it'll hardly be the end of the sport. But certain individuals may have to pull their heads in - like V8 Supercar supremo Tony Cochrane, who's been carrying on like a prima donna with a Bernie Ecclestone complex in his dealings with various circuit promoters, media agencies etc. His track record of carrying on like a total berk (including suing former V8 broadcast partner Ten as soon as the deal ended, for reasons highly obscure) was highlighted in the past week when he unceremoniously slagged off the Australian Racing Drivers Club, promoters of the Eastern Creek round of the championship and declared the series would never race there again. Now Eastern Creek is a crap circuit with prehensile facilities - despite being built for hundreds of millions by a delusional state government trying to wrest the MotoGP off the Island, with initial success - and Cochrane is obsessed with rubbishing the Creek in order to make his dream of a race around the Olympic precinct in Homebush a reality - but the Creek is going to be the only race circuit within 50km of the biggest city in Australasia after Oran Park shuts at the end of the year. And when the economic crunch comes, there will be no Homebush street circuit, there will probably be no manufacturer support (let alone the long-dribbled-about prospect of another manufacturer joining in - who exactly? Daewoo? Lada?) and Tony Cochrane and his mates will need all the friends they can get.

As for Dick, it might be time to put it away before he becomes impotent and gets the sack. Dick's record stands on its own but it's been a schlong time since he was relevant and one would hate all his hard work to have been in vein. One hopes he has the foreskin (sorry, sight) to figure this out himself.

The Doctor is OUT (and that was AWFUL).

Yobbo on Euro: the end

Sometimes, though not as often as it should, shit just works itself out. Spain played better than every other team in the tournament, scored more goals and conceded fewer - not a sausage since the knockout stages began - flipping the bird at the pragmatic styles that won the last World Cup for Italy, and instead playing fluent, attacking football from game one to the final minute of their final game, appropriately enough commonly known as the 'Final'. They'd waited longer to win than anyone bar the ex-Soviets, they were the best team in the tournament and they played the most attractive football; the only thing which was pragmatic about the result was the one-nil scoreline, which belied the 12-3 shots on goal stat. Spain deserved their win, took it classily, celebrated it respectfully (big ups to Sergio Ramos for busting out the Antonio Puerta memorial shirt on the victory dias), and only a miserable, bitter, delusional fool would say otherwise.

Cue German goalie Mad Jens Lehmann then, who's declared that the ref was biased for ignoring the blatant headbutt between Podolski and Silva (that'd be the one where Podolski headbutted Silva, yeah?), various penalties that should have been, free kicks that shouldn't, and other crimes against humanity that it's fair to say exist solely inside Jens' tortured head. Jens is leaving his job at Arsenal through choice, he says, and it has nothing to do with him not being able to get his first-team place back off former reserve 'keeper Manuel Almunia - who is not only Spanish, but apparently isn't even one of the top three goalkeepers in possession of a Spanish passport. Not in any way miserable, bitter or delusional then.

Speaking of liabilities, the captain of Germany Michael Ballack has long been unfairly associated with failure in big finals, largely because of unfortunate coincidence and statistical correlation between his teams making big finals and his teams losing big finals, right back from the Champions League final of 2002 between his Bayer Leverkusen and Zidane's Real Madrid, which he lost. Or the Champions League final just gone between his Chelsea (OK, Abramovich's Chelsea) and Ronaldo's Man U, which he lost. Or the World Cup Final of 2002 between his Germany and Brazil's Brazil, which he didn't even make it to having gotten himself suspended in the semi-final. However, this is obviously just a statistical aberration. The fact he's bottled it in every big Champions League game he's played is less grounded in statistics and more grounded in the fact he's fucking soft. And in the final: less driving-the-German-midfield, more running around bleeding from the temple screaming at linesman regarding imaginary headbutts. (The one which opened his head up wasn't imaginary, but equally it wasn't illegal. Yet another match-defining act from Marcos Senna that one.)

So, EURO 2008: fun, educational, over. Others have summated the tournament better than I can, or better than I can be arsed trying to do - it's 36 hours after the final whistle and smack-bang on schedule, on the usual post-major-tournament letdown, hanging out for the next big event (Tour de France in a couple of days...) Then again sleeping in past 6.30am on freezing mornings might not be a bad thing. And only 690-odd sleeps until the World Cup. Wherever it ends up being played.

The Doctor is OUT.