Ten years gone

We begin, uncharacteristically, with gratuitous self-reference:

"Okay, so they’d renovated the function room. Okay, so the décor was markedly less vomitiferous and the carpet didn’t look like it’d been salvaged from the set of Don’s Party. But it was still the Bowlo, dammit. There were still dead things living in the beer lines and the bistro’s vol-au-vaunts were still made from animal entrails and vulcanized rubber. As ten year high school reunions went, it had been pretty run-of-the-mill. Of course, having attended none before or since my own, I’m basing my frame of reference solely on the acclaimed Hollywood documentaries Grosse Point Blank and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, but the fact that McCarthy and I didn’t get to (a) turn up in a thunderous Corvette with Fabulous Hair or (b) blow up a convenience store in a gun battle with a disfigured midget hitman meant that our own reunion was never going to cut it by comparison."

- In The Worst Possible Taste, 'The Parable of Glenn McGrath's Haircut'

The boys from Gasket were one-up on us, though. At least they got a ten year high school reunion. With the signature half-arsedness that characterized our year, noone could be bothered organizing one. There was, I'm told, an eleven year reunion, basically organized by and for the girls who'd hung around and bred with locals (cue Tex Perkins and the Dark Horses' 'You'll Do'). Organization went as far as putting an ad in the local paper. World of Bollocks Rural Correspondent AJ got an invite. I'm led to believe not even he could be arsed with it.

But bollocks to that, because there's only two reasons anyone actually wants to go to their ten year high school reunion. One, to laugh at the crappy lives the wankers you hated ended up making for themselves; and two, to try and cop off with the hot chick(s) from your year who weren't ever having a bar of you whilst In Uniform. And if that sort of miserable, small-minded shite is still motivating you a decade or more after leaving school, for fuck's sake get a hobby.

Like, erm, writing f'rinstance.

Truth is, we didn't really need any high school reunions. We had one, of the impromptu variety at least. Up until about five years ago, every year after we graduated and (mostly) left the area, at the Pacific Hotel in Yamba on Christmas Eve, for some strange reason either to do with the quantum strangeness of the universe or the wish to get out of the house and away from our families, there would be half our year, catching up over a few schooners. Usually the interesting half, at least. The half with the hot chicks. The other traditional school reunion - because most of my best mates are my oldest mates - is the Boxing Day BBQ, where it remains tradition to gather at the Yobbo Beach House to imbibe, talk bollocks, sacrifice burnt offerings to the gods, cast aspersions on the character, cognitive abilities and/or parentage of one Richard Ponting of Mowbray, Launceston, and then once the heat is gone from the day, bust out the prehistoric bat and the scientifically taped-up tennis balls for backyard (actually front-yard-of-neighbours-and-mostly-on-the-road) cricket, as discussed in previous media commitments.

And so this is Christmas. And has been for years. Sadly, not for much longer. The Yobbo Beach House, the only permanent sort of home I've known, will probably be retired from active duty (read 'filled with other people') by next Boxing Day. It's a big, rambling, two story place hidden amongst towering casuarinas, palms, paperbacks and the odd Moreton Bay fig, all of which were seedlings when my folks began building the place 35 years ago. (You can tell our place from aerial photos, it's the only house you can't find.) All of which means it's now getting well beyond their repair-and-maintenance capabilities, as it was always going to be eventually with advancing age and wear and tear. So this is probably the last Christmas here at the YBH, and the last Boxing Day BBQ (which, by our usual organizational logic, will be on the 27th. Don't ask.) But the Boxing Day BBQ will continue. Somewhere. Wherever there is beer to be drank, sausages to be incinerated, and cricket to be eviscerated (by word or by deed), you will find us. For we are the Pissheads of the Boxing Day BBQ. We are legion. And we are legend.

And we're coming to the Gabba on the 28th to shout rude things at Victorians. Be warned. Especially you fucking Victorians.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Dirty tramps get sprung

There are many, many reasons why being a kid today is palpably more shit than it was in my day, or in your day, or in your old man's day, or in pretty much any day you could name that wasn't the Industrial Revolution when being a kid largely involved being sent down t' pit for tuppence a millennia with nowt to eat but a cup of cold sick with a pube in it and when we came home after 25 1/2 hour shift to hole in t' road with wet newspaper over't we had to lick road clean wi' tongue and our Dad would thrash us to death with a broken bottle etc etc etc.

That minor discomfort aside, being a kid now sucks more than at any stage in the past fifty years. Because people are always THINKING about you. 'Oh won't somebody think of the children?' will howl a veritable battalion of pious screeching mavens, and yet that's all people - punishing, straightening, gimlet-eyed anti-fun people - seem to be able to do. Kids these days might get iPods and designer smack but they also have to put up with milquetoast bullshit the likes of which had never even been heard of ten years ago. Time out. Naughty steps. Peanut allergies. Jesus Christ, whatever happened to sorting out your differences behind the bike shed and still having time to get in a quick game of backyard tackle footy before Mum saw the state of your school gear and kicked your arse from here to Christmas.

Eventually, though, things reach a tipping point. Eventually, society reaches a Rubicon, a point beyond which there can be no turning back.

People of the World (of Bollocks), we have reached that sorry, sick day. We have reached that point of no return. And it is called Springfree™.


Designed by gimlet-eyed God-bothering Cantab fun police, Springfree claims to be the world's first springless trampoline, and as such, the world's first completely safe trampoline. No rusty springs, no rotting eyelet hooks, no exposed bare steel frame. Netting to catch the offspring before they spring off. Padding on every available surface. In short, no possible way for your darling little angels to hurt themselves in any way, lest they take in the Nerf bats and try to go each other UFC styles.

I think you can see where I'm going here.

WHAT

THE FUCK

IS THE

FUCKING

POINT

OF THAT.

This thing absolutely fucking horrifies me on multiple levels, two of which I'd like to shout at you about here. The first is the most obvious, to me at least. And it's a serious point. If kids can't hurt themselves, how the hell are they meant to learn what's safe and what's not?

Busted, rusted, verging-on-collapse trampolines - of which there was one in every Australian backyard by some form of legislative writ possibly dating back to Hawkey's first term, or maybe even No Pants Fraser - taught the nation's youngsters a lot of very valuable lessons. Primarily about risk assessment, hazard mitigation and accident avoidance. Just as sure as you knew not to ride your bike off stormwater drains because it'd cause you significant injury, or into the surf at the beach because your dad would, you knew, because you learned pretty quickly, what not to do on a trampoline. You KNEW not to bounce on the sides because you'd fly off into the paperbark trees. You KNEW to stay away from the springs, because down that path lay significant groinal trauma, and detaching one's prepubescent scrotum from a partially distended trampoline spring is not an experience that one should need to take into adolescence with them. You KNEW to stop doing drop-in bombs off the overhanging tree-branch after reaching your teens because touching down on the bricks underneath is not the kind of surprise your kidneys like to have. You KNEW not to look up the dress of your older cousin's cute best friend when she came over for a bounce during Xmas hols, because you'd get slapped, regardless of whether it was totally worth it or not, which it was. And you KNEW not to double-bounce your little brother into the stratosphere such that on his return to Earth he plummetted into the frame head-first, because claret would ensue, and you'd inevitably get unfairly blamed for his lack of spatial awareness, and/or consciousness.

In short, you knew how to identify hazards in your environment - like your parents, after pitching your bro into the undergrowth - and mitigate them - by running the fuck away and hiding at your mate's place. How the hell are kids going to get that sort of real-life training with this confection of unmitigated arse? Make no mistake, people, Springfree is child abuse. It's sending your children out into the world without the proper training, instruction or experience to deal with it. The real world isn't fucking 'Springfree', people. If it was a trampoline, it'd be a rotted old piece of shite with no pads, a collapsing frame, and rusty springs laced with tetanus, scrapie and TEH AIDS. That's right, parents. Buying this unmitigated pile of driftnet-lined arse is akin to INJECTING YOUR CHILDREN DIRECTLY WITH THE HIV-1 VIRUS.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like responsible parenting to me.

But secondly, and far more importantly... I don't see how the fuck anyone is supposed to use this bastardized whitebait net for the most important role the backyard trampoline is pressed into, later in its life, as the kids start growing into teens and the grass starts growing around the long-abandoned frame-base of the tramp. That is, as backstop and automatic wickie for the all important World Series of Backyard Cricket. Every backyard cricketer knows that if personnel are limiting, you don't waste fielders on wicket-keeping. It's a shit gig anyway, standing at the back and collecting all the crap other people miss. You're telling me the goalkeepers in football get all the roots? Caddies in golf? No. Any gig where you can be replaced by a wall, a garage door, your Mum's camellias or, as world's best practice, an old rectangular trampoline tipped on its side and offset slightly from the stumps to account for right-handers batting on off stump (which, being a wheelie bin, was technically also middle and leg), is a pointless and thankless gig not worth doing by anyone. Even Gilly. Even Havock.

And yet these child abusers from the University of C*nterbury want to take that experience away from kids, and force them to crouch ad nauseum over a stinking wheelie bin in the middle of summer, miserably watching and waiting as their ex-grade cricketer mate tonks their other ex-grade mate's appalling excuse for leg spin over cow corner and into the neighbours' veggie patch.

To which there are only two rational responses.

One, set fire to the Springfree factory. The address is on their website. Better burn down UCanty as well, just to be certain.

and

Two. Go buy a proper (i.e. properly broken) old trampoline.

And a bag of $2 shop tennis balls.

And a multi-pack of insulating tape from Bunnings.

Apply (c) carefully to one side of (b).

Bring self on to bowl from the Southern or Garden Shed End.

Bowl fast, seam upright.

Wipe smile off face of ex-grade cricketer mate by swinging one in from three feet outside off and castling leg.

Then go raid the old man's beer fridge, because you can, because you're all old enough. If not quite old enough to know better.

I love Christmas.


The Doctor is OUT.

Random fragments

I have a pretty shit phone. It's not an iPhone, so at least I'm not one of you weird sick Pod People who think it's entirely appropriate to drop a grand on something which will probably just get run over by some fkn muppet the next time you have a minor traffic incident. It has Bluetooth, but only version 1 which is less use than the Liberal Party of Australia. It has a camera, but that's even more desperately shit than the aforementioned. However, even a shit camera is better than none. And with that by way of setting the scene (thanks v. much HG Nelson) here are a bunch of Random Fragments of Yobbo Life as captured by a crappy old Panasonic X70 bought off the interweb and subtitled by a man drinking a beer.


Te Reo Maori is the official second language of New Zealand. You can answer questions in University exams in it if you want. Personally I have to admit to being cynical about the practical utility of a language developed by a seafaring island warrior people for modern, technologically confronting Western life.

I now stand corrected. Te Reo Maori's fucken tops.


Beer. It's good. Particularly random, obscure, delicious, crystal-clear German pilsners deposited on a pallet in the middle of a local supermarket for $45 a case. That's the kind of bargain-hunting win we like to celebrate here at the World of Bollocks.

Bit of a tribute to German precision, this, with the Tucher Pils reclining on the nearest available flat surface - that being the boot of our Audi A4 2.6, which was the best four grand I've spent on a car in the history of spending four grand on cars. It's fucken tops too.


Was markedly less so last month when some muppet reversed into it at an intersection, for reasons known only to herself, however.

Still, all good now.








Got the Audi the week after Bathurst. I know this because it was in a post-Bathurst hungover stupor I received the news our Astra had been written off in our last traffic bingle, two weeks before the Sunday of the Great Race. This, more happily, was one of the 'Before' shots from that monstrous day of competitive drinking and bingeing on low budget barbequed animal extract. I still involuntarily shiver when anyone mentions safety cars.

This was the view from the lads' place we watched the race at, up on the ridge overlooking St Clair Beach in Dunedin. I can see my house from here. Not very well but. I did say it was a shit phone.


Tried one of these for Beeso, since he rates them so. In the process forgetting (a) I'd already tried them several summer seasons ago and (b) they were and remain sickly-sweet confections of arse; a heady confection of ginger, bush honey, cloves and something which crawled up the arse of the head brewer and died. Recommended for cough medicine aficionados and people who don't like beer. See also Radler, Monteiths.


Movember, which has just been completed by our AWSM TEAM OF AWSM AWSMNESS the Magnum PI All Stars, saw the first occasion upon which I've actually had to purchase shaving cream in approximately five years.








It wasn't the worst of looks in the end. Though the Speights 'Duck Shooting Season 2009' camo cap (which I choose to wear ironically) perhaps doesn't go spectacularly well with the NSW Country Origin jumper.







Still, you gotta dress up right for the big occasions on the social calendar. Like test cricket at the University Oval. Best sustained five days of test cricket since the Aussies and the Saffers at the SCG last Jan, IMO. And a nail-biting finish to boot.




















Five dollar plastic bots of Speights I could have done without though. Bastards.











Went to Moeraki last week for our work Xmas lunch. It's a little fishing village about an hour north of D-town, not too dissimilar to the sort of town I grew up in. Nice spot. We went there for Fleur's Place, a famous seafooderie renown by foodies, cuisiniers, critics and punishing food-porn addicts alike. Food was excellent, view was likewise. A laptop and mobile broadband, and you could even call it your office, should you be so lucky as to call the South Island your office...

Which is another topic entirely, but we'll leave that discussion until after tomorrow's job interview.


Lastly... is it just me, or is there some, erm, ambiguity to the interpretation of this headline?

...No?

Just me then?


Hmmm.




The Doctor is OUT.

No silver lining

It cost the city of Pontiac, Michigan eight years and $55.7 million of your American dollars to build the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium, later the Pontiac Silverdome. Yesterday, 34 years after the Silverdome first opened, it cost a bunch of Canadian business types $583K to buy it off the city, now too broke to afford the $1.5 million annual upkeep on the massive indoor dome. In its time, the Silverdome hosted the Lions in the NFL and the Pistons in the NBA, the 1982 Superbowl, a bunch of 1994 World Cup games, a Papal mass and a Pink Floyd tour. So not all beer and fuckin' skittles then. Unfortunately Pink Floyd can't be blamed for sending the City of Pontiac broke - the Global Financial Clusterfuck and serial incompetence on behalf of Motor City can probably put their hands up there - and it was the Lions moving to bigger digs across town which was the first stage in the Silverdome's abandonment.


The Canadians have plans for a Major League Soccer franchise in the stadium, which is about the only bit of good news here. Not that another MLS team is necessary, or even newsworthy. Just that old stadiums deserve to have people in them. There's something about old, abandoned sporting arenas - like old, abandoned theme parks - that makes them among the saddest places in the world. The World Expo site in Brisbane was the same for the late 80s and early 90s, at least until it was reborn as South Bank.

The theme park analogy isn't chosen lightly. There is nothing left of Australia's Wonderland in Sydney's west. Not a thing. The entire place was levelled. I had no great affection for Wonderland. Had some good times, like on a school trip there in '93 when our man Dawso rode every dodgy, stomach-churning ride he could find with belligerent glee, then contrived to throw up on the bus home. But nothing that could predict the sense of desolation that came along with aerial images of the site after the demo crews had moved in.


Next door to what was once Wonderland is Eastern Creek Raceway, which was built for two reasons: one, to steal the MotoGP off Phillip Island, and two, to replace Amaroo Park, a wonderful little racetrack once described by Nelson Piquet (Senior, the old man of the crashing-F1s-on-purpose muppet) as a mini-Nurburgring but which was put to the sword in the late 90s by the need to build more obnoxious fucking McMansions on prime bushland. So it goes. Oran Park, further west, is about to fall to the same fate. I never got to see racing at Amaroo, but about ten years ago the King of Seed and I caught the V8 Supercars at Oran Park. It was a damn fine place to watch a motor race. It will be missed. Particularly because Eastern Creek is by no means a damn fine place to watch a motor race. Then again, I suspect the Olympic precinct at Homebush might yet turn out to be, even if the sight of a full grid bellowing up Bitupave Hill at Amaroo and teetering into the right-hander over the crest is long lost.


Old racetracks are a personal favourite (of sorts) - quietly happy they've reopened Lakeside, even just as a club venue, which has more charm and history in its entry gates that the benighted bogan hell of Willowbank in Ipswich has in its entire complex - but the same stories could be told for old, abandoned AFL grounds or NRL venues. It's a combination of the sense of history, and the poignancy of failed human endeavour - failed because by definition these places are no longer. A graveyard for human memories, emotions, hopes and dreams. The housing estate that now befouls Amaroo Park, the deserted and cavernous Silverdome, the peeling advertising hoardings of Belmore Oval where Canterbury used to go round. Race circuits have this even more so because often they are graveyards in more than just a metaphorical sense.

I tripped over a bit of racing history last time I was up in the Blue Mountains. In the council's dog-off-lead area, a bit of slightly cleared bushland in a gully behind the town centre, lies Catalina Park. An impossibly narrow, winding rollercoaster of a track (check the photos in this link, seriously) lined by wooden fences still with the paint-shadow outlines of ancient advertising hoardings for Craven A and Dunlop, it hadn't held national touring car championship races since the '60s, when the Mustangs of Pete Geoghegan and Bob Jane were duelling for the title, long before Monaros, Toranas and Falcon GTs fought for supremacy. Even then it was considered too dicey, and was infamous for actually making some drivers carsick mid-race.


Later, after the capabilities of '70s touring cars had outgrown the place, it was used as a rallycross circuit where Peter Brock and Colin Bond used to scare people witless in a V8 powered Holden Dealer Team XU1 Torana nicknamed 'The Beast'. Then or in its previous guises it would have been an amazing place to watch racing. Walking around the circuit, overgrown and seemingly retreating into the grey gums and the Katoomba mist, you could smell the history, damp and poignant, in the air around Catalina.


Or perhaps that was just the fences rotting.

The Doctor is OUT.

Not very PC

The words you are reading, along with all the others written by Your Correspondent since years came with a '2' in front, were typed on a Mac. A MacBook 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB SD RAM, running OSX Leopard, to be precise. All I've owned for the last ten years have been a series of Mac laptops. My honours and PhD theses, various research papers, job applications, wedding invite lists, all the bits of In The Worst Possible Taste which I've read and you haven't, all were written on a Mac. Add to that a series of iPods, and a minor but persistent case of tech-widget-droolage whenever Steve Jobs and his experimental bionic liver unveil the latest and greatest out of Apple HQ in Cupertino, and you could safely presume that as the ad campaign runs, I'm a Mac.

Except I'm not.

Because I didn't choose to be a Mac. And more to the point, I didn't actually pay for any of those Macs. This one was bought off the grant which employs me. Its predecessor, a G4 iBook was a handover from DMDY, procured under similar circumstances. Before that it was a G3 MacBook inherited from my PhD supervisor - it was higher-specced than the base model he was offering to sort for me, and had a swag of not-entirely-paid-for software licences for useful apps like the full version of Photoshop, not that *cough* that would be of any use to someone preparing scientific data for research paper figures.

In fact, the last time I spent any of my own money on a 'puter, to wit the proceeds of selling my first car en route to uni, it was a PC. Pentium 166 MMX. Big fuck-off graphics card. Old-school. 1997 in the house, y'all. And of course there were a couple of workplace interludes on PCs.

So yeah, Apple FanBoi Numero Uno I ain't, or at least ain't got the credentials for. Still, if there's a Mac-PC stoush in the offing, I'm keen to assist. Not because I love Macs... just because I hate PCs. Just because I genuinely do not believe any appliance supposedly designed to make our lives easier could have had more of a history of doing exactly the opposite than the Wintel PC. Think back through the endless, endless catalogue of clusterfucks, of bug-filled beta releases.

And because I was on the losing side on the last big war of the OSs. I'm not a Mac, nor am I a PC. I was an Amiga. Fucking brilliant platform. Fucking boneheaded company. When Amigas were taking it to the PCs - not in terms of market share, though Macs are similarly 'selective in their appeal' (thanks v. much Spinal Tap) to this day - Macs were an afterthought, found only in primary school classrooms, design studios and sheltered workshops. Most of the Mac-PC dynamic echoes the Amiga-PC battlefronts. PCs were computers for all, particularly the stupid. Amigas were for gamers, graphic artists, discerning creatives. They had better graphics, better sound, better processors for gaming applications. But they had thumbless muppets running the company and went tits up. Consoles and dedicated PC gaming systems claimed the Amiga's gaming market, while the reborn Macs - starting with the first of the 'lollipop' designer iMacs in the late '90s, on which my honours thesis was extruded - claimed the creative market. Or the smug wanker market, if you prefer.

AJ, my former fellow soldier from the Amiga-PC wars, is claiming Win7 is all gold and Snow Leopard is a confection of arse. I've pointed out his obvious conflict of interest, given his modelling appearance in the ad campaign above, which is why he's not talking to me at the moment, but to be honest, I don't rate either system. As Leopard has developed from Tiger, so has OSX morphed more into Microsophistry, with second-guessing checkboxes and annoyingly-querying dialogue boxes getting in the way of what used to be the Mac's strongest point: shit just WORKS. Straight off. Out of the box. Without needing to download drivers, consult online help and call tech support in Mumbai. That said, Vista was and is fucking appalling, like drag-racing a road grader with the handbrake on. The most pleasant, workable, flexible and intuitive system I've used in the past six months was a CentOS Linux install on a bioinformatics workstation. Then again it was running dual quad-core processors, had more memory than God and needed a Rolls-Royce Trent XWB jet engine as an cooling fan, so it did have a bit of toe to cut down spinning-pizza-of-death related downtime. But there's that certain whiff to Linuxites, that whiff of... I don't know what you'd call it. Anorak. Parents' basement. Lynx Africa. Really, they're just as dull and punishing as the PCistas, just with that alluring dash of proto-anarchic 'I'm bringing down the system from within, really quietly, so like totally up yours Uncle Bill' which pulls all the chicks. For sufficiently low levels of all.

So, in short, (a) I'll use whatever I'm paid to, (b) Mac users are smug and PC users are dull, bollocks to the lot of 'em; and (c) no matter which platform you use, Microsoft Office will still perform to its key performance aim: to shit you to fucking tears.

The Doctor is OUT.

One shot for glory

Tonight the New Zealand All Whites play Bahrain in a one-shot, winner-take-all playoff to decide which team is going to the 2010 FIFA World Cup Finals in South Africa, and which is a bunch of choking dogs who will be spurned by their nations and forced to seek asylum on a leaky boat off the coast of Indonesia. It's all ON. The Cake Tin in Wellington is completely sold out, the team anthem (fairly catchy as football songs go* despite the awful vid clip featuring fat clownsmiming badly in downtown Auckland) is all over TV and radio, and confidence in the nation's footballing talent (I use that term advisedly) is at an all time high - probably even more so than in 1981 when the All Whites won their first and only trip to the World Cup.

*Though this is damning with very bloody faint praise given the history of same is uniformly appalling, particularly England anthems as outlined here and here


It's traditional, if not a requirement of holding a passport, for Aussies to death-ride any and all Kiwi achievements in sport, largely because they do it so well in return (being ever so balanced a nation, enormous chip on both shoulders) but I'm backing the Whites in this one, even though supporting NZ in any sport feels vaguely sick and wrong. I'm backing the Whites not just because Bahrain are there on cash instead of talent, using their oil money to coach a bunch of ordinary hackers into a well-oiled (sorry) international squad, with the requisite number of 'naturalized' imports to up the skill level. Not just because the NZ squad is full of decent, likeable players from the A-League and good, honest bastards like Ryan Nelsen from Blackburn. Not just because any win for NZ football is a loss for NZ rugby, and that's something everyone can enjoy.

No, I'm backing the Whites because we Aussies know what last-chance, sudden-death World Cup qualifiers are like. They're horrendous. They're miserable and desperate and they fucking kill you to watch them. They suck. And we kinda miss them.


Australia moving into the Asian confederation did both sides of the ditch a huge favour. It meant Australia's world cup qualifying, instead of being hell-for-leather home-and-away playoffs against Uruguay or Argentina or whoever else finished 5th in South American qualifying, was a series of sensible, manageable round-robin fixtures against beatable mid-ranking sides like Oman or China. And it meant NZ not only avoided running into Australia early in qualifying, but ended up with that playoff against the fifth-placed nation, but in Asia, not South America. UR Gay or Maradona's Argies would have been an ugly prospect for the Socceroos, let alone the All Whites, given they smaaaashed our World Cup dreams in 1993 and 2001. Bahrain? That's winnable. Even for the All Whites, who looked handy in a scoreless draw in the away leg in Manama (do dooo do-do-do) Manama (do do-do-do) etc.

Then again, we've been here before, just in gold shirts rather than white ones. The fateful France '98 qualification campaign, where Australia took a precious away goal from a 1-1 draw in Tehran into the home leg of our last-chance-qualifier again Iran, at a heaving, sold-out MCG. And took a two-nil lead, 3-1 on aggregate, into the last twenty minutes of the second half. And lost on 3-3 away goals. I can still see Johnny Warren breaking down on live TV, Les Murray beside him, in the dumbstruck, deafening silence afterwards. We were in France, except we weren't, and wouldn't be. Getting towelled up 3-0 by the Uruguayans in Montevideo in the away leg in 2001 (after Kevin Bloody Muscat's penalty in the home leg put us up 1-0) was just as painful, but somehow, because it happened in the middle of the night on the other side of the world, less immediate. It was only the 2005 penalty shootout win over the same (well, slightly older) UR Gay side which finally exorcised the demons of 30-odd years of misery and got us to a world cup, where we moved our misery and frustration to a new level after our underperforming and scrappy side arsed late goals to squeak past higher-ranked Japan and Croatia in the group stage, then got gypped by a furiously dodgy penalty late in the second round against the eventual winners Italy.


By comparison, qualifying for the Big Show this time round has been a piece of piss. From the last team into Germany 2006, Straya almost became the first to qualify for Sarth Efricor 2010, just edged out by our old mates Japan. It's been great... yet strangely unsatisfying. The drama, and horror, and potential disaster and misery of a LCQ sudden death playoff, just hasn't been there for Australia.

But it will be for New Zealand. Tonight, 7.30pm NZST.
One shot for glory.



The Doctor is OUT.

Position A, Sandy

There's weird doings afoot on my televisual screen, and it's not just the glass of Cooper's Sparky I'm viewing it through. It's that there golfing tournament, the Strayan Masters, in which it is oft said, usually by nasal one-armed golfing drunk Jack Newton, 'The Tradition Continues'. Except, in this year's Masters, the tradition does not continue. It fails to continue. It is, indeed, discontinuous. And there's nothing more profoundly objectionable than discontinuities in one's tradition.

It's not the fault of Tigger, or the decision to get him in for the tourney. Paying three mill to get the golfing world's favourite mobile media circus (and reasonably handy hacker) down under looks like chickenfeed when set against the saturation media coverage, ratings increase, box-office benefits and sponsorship exposure thus produced. It's not even the shift from Huntingdale - the, erm, traditional home of the Masters - to Kingston Heath, the tight and twisty Monaco street circuit of the Melbourne sandbelt.

No, it's the fucking coverage.

Golf should be covered the same way cricket is. By the same people, on the same network, for the rest of time, or until all the presenters wither and die of old age. Any attempt to remove Richie, Bill, Tony and Ian from the Nine cricket commentary team will result in me coming around to your house and setting fire to something important, like your cat, or your pubic hair. I don't care that they're old and shit. They ARE cricket commentary. Conservative, old-fashioned, long-form sports need conservative, old-fashioned, long-form commentary. And so it is with golf. I don't even like golf. I don't play it - not in a form that is recognisable AS golf, anyway - and I don't watch it. Except for the Australian majors, on lazy summer afternoons, with a beer in my hand and an absence of thoughts in my head, listening to the gentle discussion between Seven's commentators. While waiting for the ad break in the cricket to finish so I can flick back to something more watchable, of course.

So what happened when I turn my TV on this afternoon to check out the end of the first round at Kingston Heath?

Fucking Warren Smith. That's what happened.

Warren Smith is a rugby league commentator for Fox. He's OK at that - shouty, random, annoying, but it goes with the territory. He tried being a motorsport commentator, briefly, before someone at Fox actually listened to the playback of him and Kevin Magee dribbling and fumbling through the call of world superbike races and changed the locks on the motorsport studio door.

It doesn't end there, either. Not only do we have a B-grade football commentator, but we have Mark fucking Nicholas and his pink shirts, filling in time before the cricket season. And to top it off, there's the promise of the most egregious man on Australian television, more ubiquitous than chlamydia and equally as entertaining, Eddie McGuire on hosting duties.

There are rules to summer sports coverage. Nine does the cricket and Seven does the golf and the tennis. That is the fucking END of it. Nine doesn't do the golf, because they will only fuck it up. And have, by sticking Collingwood apologists and cricket presenters on screen in place of Sandy Roberts, Pat Welsh and Bwuce McAvaney. Headhunting a couple of colour guys from Seven and ringing-in the Dark Shark from the Golf Channel in the US just ain't gonna cut it.

This is bollocks, and will fail. As sure as Jack Newton swims in circles.

The Doctor is OUT.

Whatareya?

You're a yob
Or you're a wanker
Take your fuckin' choice
So who is your favourite genius
James Hird or James Joyce?
You ever seen a 'live performance' -
Join the wanker club
You thought I meant tabletop dancing -
Well, you're a yobbo bub....
- TISM, 1998



A fair question, well-posed. And as the man says, 'Yob or wanker, wanker or yob, pass me the brush to tar ya; make your choice then live your life, c'mon pal whatareya??'

I made my choice and I live my life. I like beer. I like V8s and footy and bacon and chicks with big boobies. I swear like it's an Olympic sport and I'm in repechage qualifiers for national selection. Farts are funny. I have mates called Moff and Dawso. My ears are still fucked from AC/DC at the Sydney Ent Cent in January 2001, and no, I don't want them back. I have an advanced certificate in RSL carpark circlework. I'm so fucken rural I feel ripped off when TV ad breaks don't contain at least one commercial for cattle dip. Fairly content in D-Town then, as it happens. Basically, there's a sign on the wall and it says Yobbo. You might want to be sure, 'cos you know sometimes words have two meanings, but I can confirm, I am a Yobbo.

But.

See, there's a problem. Cos I drive an Audi. It's an old, crappy one, but it's an Audi - and worse still I BOUGHT it because it was an Audi, and not a Toyota. And I have one of them PhD things, and spend all my time with highly verbose and edjumacated people. And I refuse to drink instant coffee, and think I can cook, and go on about being half-Italian like it's a point of difference between me and the proletariat. And I use big words like proletariat. I'm currently drinking an expensive beer which I suspect to be actually a very cheap beer in an expensive bottle, and I don't really give a shit that I've been gouged hideously by a blatant megabrewery exercise in style over substance. I don't buy cheap supermarket sausages, I buy the expensive ones that appear to have recognisable animal content. I own several Macs, but have never bought a Big Mac. And the last time I was out west (well, more westerly than the 'Switch) I almost got run out of town - or at least lynched on Rosewood station platform - for mildly inferring that most of our fellow Ipswich 500 V8 punters were snaggle-toothed bogans called Cletus who could play 'Duelling Banjos' with their toes as a result of generations of inveterate inbreeding. For which I blame Moff. (The insults, not the inbreeding. He even married someone who wasn't from Queensland. Jesus.)

So maybe TISM were wrong. I know this is blasphemy of the highest order, but it's possible. Maybe the Yob and the Wanker are the true Yin and Yang of the Australian male, and we are all part of the Yobwanker spectrum. As Ween might have put it, There's many colours in the Yobwanker Rainbow. Don't be afraid to let your colour shine.

The Doctor is OUT.

Movember reign

Folks. Given my dubious history with facial hair you'd think I'd be the least appropriate signup for a front-running premiership-chasing Movember franchise, but the Magnum PI All Stars (captained by fine citizen Naut) appear to think otherwise. And they've already got Major Havock's dubious ginger mo in the train-on squad so what's another dose of dodgy ranga facial fuzz between mates. Of course these Movember bastards seem to want an Actual Identity for registration porpoises so be warned, an Amazingly Inventive Pseudonym *cough* may have been employed on the part of Your Correspondent.

Further details, preamble and reminiscence (ruminescence?) at magnumallstars.blogspot.com. It's for a good cause, so remember to get on our Movember MoSpace page and throw money at us, even if it's in an attempt to make us stop.

That is all. Return to your shanties.

The Doctor is OUT.

The WoB Educational Supplement

By Christ it's been a while. Sorry about that. Been otherwise occupied doing battle with munters on the nation's highways. There is reserved a special kind of hell for those tiny-penised arseclowns who immediately greet the arrival of an overtaking lane by adjusting their velocity from ten km/h below the posted limit to ten above. It's called Christchurch, and they're fucken welcome to it.

Anyhoo. To boobies. Rachel Whitwell has them, apparently, and has engaged in a commercial agreement with a magazine called Australian Penthouse involving the exchange of funds for photographic images of said boobies, and other generally-concealed parts of her anatomy, for the publication thereof. Rachel describes herself as "a 26-year-old single schoolteacher from New Zealand that would love to get into modelling. I've written erotic stories for an R-rated magazine and run my own pole-dancing studio." She also describes herself as Lexy, which is a stupid name, but we'll forgive her that 'cos she's purdy. She's lied about her name, she's lied about being single and she's lied about her age - by a year - but that's all well and good. Australian Penthouse have to pay Birmo's bar bill somehow after all, publishing snaps of tidy Kiwi lasses with their reproductive finery on display is hardly against standard operating procedures.

Except, except except except, for one word in that description. Schoolteacher. Anyone else see where this might be headed? Yup, with investigation by the educational authorities and outraged quotes spouting from Family First spokesnimrods while furtively bookmarking australianpenthouse.com.au for future guilt-ridden sessions of self-abuse.

Now the Hot Teacher is a persistent cultural meme, from Van Halen's Hot For Teacher and the Casanovas' 10 Outta 10 to Claudia Karvan and that gay Greek dude in The Heartbreak Kid. There's a reason real life stories with headlines like 'Teacher wanted to be boy's sex slave' end up on the Fairfax and News Ltd most popular lists at the end of the week. However, as discussed in previous media commitments, it's a meme I missed out on. My high school was unremarkable in every way save for its total and overwhelming lack of crumpetlicious goodness on the teaching staff. Even the giddy twenty-something blonde IT studies teacher wasn't really optimal, as she had teeth like Makybe Diva and was commonly (and one might say aptly) referred to as Milo, on the basis that she most certainly wasn't Quik. That nickname worked better before they renamed it Nesquik, but the march of time claims all my friends, including incredibly witty write-offs for giddy twenty-something blonde IT studies teachers.

The ultimate evolution of the Hot Teacher Myth (cos it is one, dammit) is the Hot Teacher Photographed With Kit Off Myth. I've had at least two mates who've independently claimed to have been taught by a Hot Teacher who at one stage or another - one while she was (allegedly) still teaching at the time - turned up in Playboy Or Metric Equivalent with naughty bits akimbo. Don't believe a fucking word of it. Never have and never will. Teenage male hormones can't be trusted as far as they can be kicked.

And neither can Rachel 'Lexy' Whitwell. 'Kiwi teacher 'shocked and gutted' after nude photos outrage' bleats the headline, but that's probably a fib too. Her infamous, arch-self-promoting boyfriend, pornographer Steve Crow - and what you wouldn't give to have THAT job description on your business card - has claimed Ms Whitwell was surprised/saddened/shocked/gutted by the uproar and by the besmirchment of her reputation by the investigation, yada yada yada. But the authorities seemingly have yet to actually kick off an investigation or talk to Ms Whitwell, and one wonders if they would have even known about it had their attention not been drawn to Mr Whitwell's extracurricular activities (see what I did there?) by the original story being planted in the Sunday News tabloid in the first place.

Then again, most of the readers of Australian Penthouse would hardly be surprised, saddened, shocked or horrified by this. Even being in a position to be lied to by a pretty girl with her clothes off is a massive improvement on their usual status.

The Doctor is OUT.

Believe it or yacht

...Is the worst pun yet used for a World of Bollocks intro. But it's on-topic, barely, courtesy some dirty Dutchie claiming the 1983 America's Cup yachting victory by Australia II over the Hated Yanks was down not to the design genius of legendary Aussie boat-drawing freak Ben Lexcen but down to... him, funnily enough. In disputation, to borrow a phrase from the yardglass-skolling union-boss days of then-PM RJL (the R standing of course for 'Arrrrr') Hawke, is the providence of the winged keel, a bit of true-blue Aussie genius which the stinking Seppos led by the vomitiferous Dennis Conner tried to get banned in the lead-up to the comp. (Backstory on the boat and the goings-on here for those who came in late or left their course notes in the car.)

The '83 America's Cup win was memorable for a lot of reasons. It broke the longest run of wins by any country in any national sporting event. It saw the first successful challenge for the Cup in 132 years. And it saw the Prime Minister of Australia on national television, pissed as 40 bastards, in a jacket so breathtakingly appalling even airport souvenir shops would refuse to stock it, delivering one of the most famous lines of his time in office: 'I tell ya, any employer who sacks a worker for not turning up today is a bum.' Whether RJL was using the term in its American context, meaning worthless clown, or its Australian one, meaning area of the body where poos come out, remains obscure. It was, however, a pivotal moment in the history of the young Australian nation up there with Gallipoli, Federation and Brocky's final Bathurst win.

And now the dirty, dodgy, drug-smoking, animal porn propagating Dutch want to take it off us.

Sure, there was a lot that was dodgy about that America's Cup win. Even setting the Silver Bodgie's jacket aside, if it's possible to do that without BBQ tongs. Chief financier Alan Bond was about as trustworthy as a three bob note and equally as legally solvent by the end of the decade. Skipper John Bertrand backed up the win in 1983 by losing the next two challenges and breaking his boat in half on the third. But boat-floating boffin Benny Lexcen... he was the one whose name or honour was never besmirched, right up to his untimely passing in 1988. Well, apart from Toyota naming their fucking ordinary badge-engineered version of the Commodore after him. And then making God-awful confections of arse like the following in a vain attempt to get any bastard to buy the woebegone piece of shit.



The contROWversy (thanks v. much Ray 'Rabbits' Warren) surrounds the requirement for aforesaid dinghy type thing to have been designed by nationals or residents of the country from where the competing yacht club originated, in this case the Royal Perth Yacht Club of Straya. The Dutchman, a bloke called Peter van Arseanen or van Oosthuis or van der Hoogenband or some loopy gob-on-people-when-you-talk-to-them shite but who is clearly descended from slave traders, Boers and Nazi collaborators like the rest of their horrible, wee-smelling, unnecessarily flat country, claims he was contracted by Bondy to knock up the winged keel on the sly. For this Bondy spotted him $25K hush money, which in 1983 was a lot of money, around $25K in fact. John Bertrand denies this, though expecting validation from the skipper seems akin to asking the bus driver who designed the bus and expecting much of an intelligible answer beyond confirmation that the wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long. Bondy can't recall, funnily enough.

Ironically van Arseanen became an Australian citizen almost 20 years ago, and is motivated, he claims, not by a wish to denigrate the Australian team's accomplishments or scare more cash out of Bondy (honest mate, he can't recall), but by wanting to get the credit he thinks he deserves for his work. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is this. Any Australian citizen who takes a dump on Ben Lexcen's grave for nothing more than the pursuit of personal vanity is a bum.

The Doctor is OUT.

The real Grand Final

Simple maths. What does 161 times 6.213 equal? If you answered 'Drunk', gold star for you. For this weekend is Bathurst, and there ain't no Bathurst like one spent thoroughly off-chops. What, you're gonna sit through six and a half hours of V8s sober? Fuck that for a game of soldiers. With that, welcome once again to our annual, and ever so slightly recycled, Guide to Bathurst 2009: Better Watching Through Brewistry, a.k.a. BATHURST BEER BINGO.

OK, so the combination of drinking and driving ain't really that politically correct, even if it's you doing the former and them doing the latter. And it's not as if The Great Race - Australia's home-grown combination of Le Mans, Daytona and a Saturday night demo derby at Alabama Speedway - hasn't courted controversy in the past for social irresponsibility, or been in the headlines as much for pissed bogans setting fire to utes in campgrounds as the race itself. In the past, through its various naming rights sponsors, the Bathurst 1000 has been accused of glorifying immoral and unsavoury activities like the abuse of alcohol (Tooheys), smoking cigarettes, particularly obscure Irish ones (Gallagher), smoking brake pads (Hardie-Ferodo), sending insurance agencies broke because you're a clueless fucktard, Rodney (FAI), and giving your employees mesothelioma (James Hardie). Currently, the race is sponsored by purveyor of nasty plastic goods parallel-imported from China and still whiffing of melamine, SuperCheapAuto, whose major crime against society is their continuing employment of aging irrelevance Rusty Ringpull as 'The Enforcer' in their once-funny TV ads. (Though that one time he gives the guy in the old Lancer a Dirty Sanchez is still gold. Fact.)

With that said, we can now unveil this year's edition of the Bathurst Beer Bingo Rules Of Engagement.


'Drink' Incidents
The following incidents have a priori been determined worthy of a Drink, that is the consumption of a quantitative mouthful (at minimum) of standard alcoholic beverage. Others may be added at the discretion of the Organisers or Participants after due consideration.

* Gratuitous pre-race shots of grid girls (unless minging)

* Minor spins, overshoots, lawnmowing adventures, sandpit action or inter-car nerfage, live or on replay, other than resulting in a Safety Car (see 'Vessel' Incidents below)

* Rusty giving that bloke the Dirty Sanchez in that Supercheap ad (gold, I'm telling you)

* Any crowd shots showing total and utter snaggle-toothed bogan fucktards looking like extras from Deliverance

* Examples of absolute fucking wank on the part of the Seven Commentary Team, inclusive of but not limited to:
- Tossing on about how they invented Racecam, just like Al Gore invented the internet
- New in-car camera footage from any angle so obscure you can't figure out where or how the fuck they managed to get the thing to stay on, or why they bothered (bonus vessel if any such dubiously placed camera gets Irrevocably Fucked Up in the process of the motor race)
- Any references to 'race management', 'buying a ticket to the last thirty laps' or 'the action is really hotting up now, don't go anywhere'
- Cutting to an ad break as soon as something interesting happens, then returing from break and pretending it happened live
- Neil Crompton busting out the 3D CAD walk-thru shit for no justifiable reason whatsoever
- Random, gratuitous, unnecessary sponsorship namedropping eg KFC Zinger Replay, Armor All Race Update, Medibank Private Accident Report, Acme Urinal Cake Slashers Break

Note that any and all sightings of Mark Larkham in the presence of a whiteboard with intent to cause a grievous disturbance of logic and sense are considered a Vessel Incident (see below) and are to be terminated with Extreme Prejudice.


'Vessel' Incidents
As per tradition, Competitors will be required to 'skol' (i.e. empty the contents of their drinking vessels into their digestive tracts) in the event of more significant events in the motor race. You will be required to drain the contents of your vessel into your fat piehole on occasion of the following taking place before thee:

* The start of the race, scheduled for 1030 hours AEST
If your religion forbids you from knocking one back before the sun is over the yardarm (or even before midday), change your religion. Seriously.

* The declaration of a Safety Car period
The continuation of any Safety Car period beyond ten laps is considered a separate and additional, or 'BONUS VESSEL', incident. Better hope nobody fucks themselves up like Radisich in the Team Kiwi shitbox a couple of years back and needs 20 laps to get scraped off the fence.

* Confirmed sightings in pitlane of any or all of the following low-budget solutions being employed upon million-dollar race entries: duct tape, cable ties, slide hammer, sledge hammer, disproportionate amounts of violence. BONUS VESSEL should the removal of a windscreen by brute force and ignorance be required at any stage.

* Greg Murphy hiding in the toilets again

* The Safety Car getting bunkered in a sand trap

* On occasion that someone from The Other Side fucks up royally and makes a race-terminating cock of themselves, eg Triple 8 spinning off for Holden fans, or HRT dropping its guts up Mountain Straight on lap 1 for the Fraudulators. Note that unaligned parties are strongly encouraged to cowboy the fuck up and pick a side or they're drinking whenever it goes pear-shaped for ANY BASTARD.


Penalty Vessels
The following are individual punishments of a Vessel, self-administered by any Competitor who commits the following acts of naivety or ignorance in the eyes of the Organisers or Fellow Competitors:

* Giggling whenever anyone mentions 'Winterbottom'

* Disrespecting the Brocky statue by pointing out it looks like the one of King Wally Lewis with a dodgy hairpiece (well, dodgier than the one the King actually has)

* Liking Craig Lowndes

* Not getting their fucking round in

* Wanting to watch the NPC rugby

* Bringing food (unless they brought enough for everyone)

* Bringing girls (unless they brought enough for everyone)


Finally, Bathurst is a race of endurance, and per the oldest maxim of motorsport, to finish first, first you must finish. Hence the winner is anyone who survives all of that and still makes it to work on Monday. Without calling in sick, claiming the chicken salt on the pub chips gave you campylobacter. Even though I maintain that WAS a stroke of genius at the time.


Good luck, good hunting, and may the best Holden win.

The Doctor is OUT (to get the recovery Powerades in for Monday morning)

Stitch that Jimmy

Custard are reforming. And you thought it was just if you left the stuff in the fridge long enough the skin would self-aggregate into a conscious lifeform. Not so much. Ten years or so after they pulled stumps, one of the cornerstone acts of the Brisvegas music scene of the 90s (along with the Finger, the Gurge et al) have reassembled - at the Finger's request and on their undercard - to play the Q150 Proclamation Day gig (news first broken by International Force for Awesome, Girlclumsy) at the Riverstage on December 10. Three days BEFORE we arrive for our Christmas trip. Yeah good. But, as Dr Mrs Dr Yobbo helpfully points out, we ARE there in time to see the Wiggles. Methinks I might find a pub to hide in that day. Or an A-League game. Or both. Better off sitting in the sun drinking warm beer from a plastic cup and watching the Roar suck arse than another round of Fruit Fucken Salad, Yummy Fucken Yummy. (I knew they'd regret doing that celebrity record with Kevin 'Bloody' Wilson.)

So I was going to tell you a bit of a story about the first time I saw Custard play... but then realised I'd already told that story. Here. And ripped the conversation about the Loch Ness Trough Monster off for use in the start of the Sydney roadtrip in In The Worst Possible Taste. So go read that cos it's good.

To summarise, Custard were a good live band. They might still be. Go see 'em and find out.

Meanwhile, I have been asked why I have failed to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and some chick has instead. I respond to this slight, though it remains clearly beneath me to do so, by pointing out that Nobel Prizes are for sucktooths and nimrods and that true science genius is motivated not by baubles and trinkets but by the pursuit of truth, clarity, understanding, and girls with big boobies. And anyway the IgNobels have more credence. They usually get a CCR tribute band to play the awards ceremony. The IgNobels, awarded by the Annals (that's ANNALS) of Improbable Research, are handed out yearly to individuals or groups that have made the greatest contribution to embarrassing, pointless or otherwise crap research in their field.

This year's crop of quote-unquote 'winners' was notably more crap than previous years, such as the stellar year in which someone won an award for extracting vanilla essence from cow shit. However, there was one shining beacon of fucken topsness amidst all the too-obvious played-for-laffs gongs (IgNobel Prize for Economics going to the heads of the Icelandic banks? Comedy GOLD!) - that being the IgNobel Peace Prize awarded to Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle. The findings, published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine And Glassing Munters In RSL Carparks, present the slightly counterintuitive result that while full beer bottles fracture with an impact energy of 30 Joules, empty beer bottles require 40 J of energy to break. To wit, while either will likely fuck you, empty bottles will fuck you good and proper. This intriguing difference in the energy required is explainified by the authors as relating to the state of beer as being an incompressible fluid, which propagates the energy of the initial impact throughout the glass in a way that the air inside the empty bottle does not. They also implicate potential effects of compressed gas inside the full bottle, in the form of carbonation, which would also increase the pressure within the bottle. They would furthermore like to know what the fuck you're doing shooting backwards from the 'D', advised you to stop fucken looking at their missus like that, and in conclusion, asked whether you want to fucken go, ay. You poofter.

Future directions of this work relate to determining whether the findings established by Bolliger et al. are translationary to an Antipodean context, ie from large-but-fragile 500mL bottles of Feldschlossen (understood to have served as weapon of choice of the venerable Field Marshall Therbs on his Oktoberfest sortie) in a beer tent in Munich, to glassing pissed munters in the Normanby Hotel carpark with the business end of a stubbie of VB.

I love science.

The Doctor is OUT to make his stockpile of potentially deadly beer bottles even more scarily weaponriffic by pouring the contents into his face.