Australia's Most Bestest Town In Australia

And the winner of the Australian Traveller award for Australia's Best Town, 2009, is...

YAMBA???

WHAT THE FUCK??!!?!!1!eleven!?!!

Don't get me wrong, Yamba's not a hole. It's a complete and utter fucking shithole which needs a 'dozer run through the length of its preposterously and ponderously long main drag, but that's not the point. How does Yamba - YAMBA, for fuck's sake - beat bigger, brighter and better-known holiday spots like Byron, Margaret River, Apollo Bay and Woodenbong to snare the one and only national trophy for Most Bestest Township, Village Or Hamlet In Australia Evaaaaaarrrr, awarded by the country's leading (and possibly only) tourism and travel mag and selected by a panel of tourism and travel experts? And more to the point, how does Yamba win the above without the head of the local chamber of commerce having to personally blow every member of aforesaid panel of tourism and travel experts?

The clincher, it was reported, was the deciding question put to the panellists to sort the wheat from the chaff: on a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend a friend add one hour to their trip just to see this town? Now considering Yamba is a good 20 kays off the highway and the road out there is truly fucking dire, this would give the panellists approximately fifteen minutes out of their hour having got into town to actually see the joint and get back on their way. Which in fairness is plenty of time to see all the myriad sights and delights of Yamba in their entirety. Even inclusive of a stop for petrol and a slash at the public facilities.

Now, there are many good things about Yamba. Or at least, there used to be. The Pacific, the most spectacularly positioned pub in the land, used to have Reschs Smooth (RIP, God rest its soul) on tap, and the bakery in Coldstream St - midway along the drunken downhill stagger from the Pacific back to the Captain's shed for more beers - used to open after Pacific closing time to sell freshly baked pies to half-cut munters like ourselves, probably as the smell of the pies baking would have enticed more inebriated and/or impatient souls than ourselves to rip the fucking doors down and help themselves to the steaming meaty goodness being concocted therein. And a bunch of slammin'-hottie surfie chicks from my high school lived there. But it's unlikely any of the above attractions, even if they were still available in today's Yamba, could be properly enjoyed by the average traveller in their fifteen minutes in town. Well, maybe some of the girls, depending how poorly the passage of time has treated them in the interim, and whether they could get time off from serving in the surf shop or the fish co-op.

So what to do with your fifteen minutes (give or take a few depending on bladder pressure) in the thriving metrop of Yambahole? Bewildered? Perplexed? Mildly disorientated? Well never fear as the World of Bollocks presents Fifteen Minutes Of Lame: What To Do In Yamba, Australia's Most Bestest Town In Australia 2009, Or So Some Yuppie Wanker Travel Mag Reckons, The Lot Of Choad Warriors.

• Visit the legendary surf break of nearby Angourie. Get dropped in on by legendary surf king Nat Young. Punch him in the head. Marvel at the mystery and wonder of the famous Angourie Blue Pools, daredevil swimming hole for generations of local kids. Wonder not at the lack of mystery as to why noone has been allowed to swim there in ten years since it became the Blue-Green Algae Pools.
  
  
• If, by chance, you happen to be have mistakenly packed a bucket full of golf balls which you have found surplus to requirements, the water hazard off the fifth tee at Yamba Golf Course, affectionately named 'the Shit Hole', is an excellent place to lose them. However, entrepreneurs should note it is a poor place to dive for them, being as it is the overflow pond for the neighbouring sewage treatment works.
  
  
• Go wildlife spotting in Crystal Waters, a.k.a. Blacktown-On-Sea, in the hunt for the elusive Snaggle-Toothed Bogan (Bevanus dazzanshazza) in its natural habitat - the TAB at Yamba Shores Tavern on dole day.
  
  
• Marvel at how two generations of apparently qualified state and council town planners could fuck up a township of 5600 people quite as spectacularly as to have two completely separate town centres - the Old Town and the Bogan Western Suburb - separated by a 5km stretch of road, limited to 50 km/h, along which approximately eight billion cars have to funnel every day in either direction. Or the fact that a town of near-as-buggery six thousand people has no high school and the nearest such mythical creation is 20 kays away. Or that the Bogan Western Suburb in question (Ipswich Waters to most) is built on a bed of reclaimed swamp, sand and hastily-bulldozed mangroves and makes Ross River look mosquito-free by comparison.
  
  
• Go to Iluka instead, the fish and chips are better and the drive out there's less likely to bore you into a drainage culvert. Or Evans Head, or Wooli, or any of those other quaint little NSW North Coast fishing villages. Just don't go to Brooms Head. Stay right the fuck away from there. It's really bloody awful, honest. Noone in their right mind would possibly want to go there, so don't. Particularly not any of you fucking punishing yuppie fucktard readers of Australian Yuppie Fucktard Traveller. Brooms Head is definitely not a place you want to go.
  

On second thoughts, Yamba is probably about right for you lot. Go there. You'll love it. Plenty of room to park the Lexus 4WD, plenty of trendy streetscape cafes to be seen in, plenty of scope to tell Alistair and Marjorie back in Ascot or Mosman about your tremendously rustic adventure slumming it amidst the simple rural folk. Yup, Yamba it is. Bestest town in Australia, beautiful beaches, friendly locals. Tell 'em Dr Yobbo sent ya. They'll probably just look at you blankly, scratch their balls and tell you to fuck off, but at least it'll be a laugh for me.

The Doctor is OUT.

______________

PS An afterthought - so the more pertinent question is, if Yamba's the town you'd add an hour to your trip to see, which are the towns you'd add an hour to your trip to avoid?

A quick Arsebook voxpop turned up Tamworth, Guyra, Walcha, Muswellbrook, Scone... pretty much anything on the New England Highway actually, which is hereafter renamed the 'Don't Fucken Bother' Tourist Route (Farmadale gets a pass for pretty autumn leaves, pretty UNE first-years (read 'pretty pliant after a couple of RTDs') and a couple of pretty clever buggers who just emerged from their shed with a fully operational market-ready electric car), Denilquin, West Wyalong, Casino ('The Happy Place To Shop', allegedly, and home of the Beef Week Queen, the only beauty pageant in which the contestants are difficult to tell from the breeds they seek to represent), and of course Gympie, an exercise in nominative determinism if there ever was one. However, no suggestions got close to the Holy Trinity of Arsebag Townships, the Warrego Highway Triumvirate of the Switch, Gatton, and above all others, Woombie Land, home of redneck ute-driving fucktards called Brad who invite themselves along to one-day games.

Suggestions, as ever, welcome...

FAO Morissette, A., ref: definition of 'ironic'

Alanis... I know you're listening. We're not talking and shit 'cos of that thing I said on your Bebo page the other day about you being crap on You Can't Do That On Television back in the day. But I know you're listening. So listen up. Rain on your wedding day isn't ironic. It's just not, OK.
You want ironic?

This shit's ironic.

Apologies to all the many Plath freaks out there. Including, of course, my three-unit HSC English teacher Maz, who bore a disturbing resemblance to Margaret Pomeranz with stupider hair and was a Plath freak in excelsius day-oh daaaayyyy-oh daylight come and me do walk of shame back to own digs. Sorry, channelling first year. Stuff I learned from Maz: (a) poor Sylvia was a martyr to her talent; (b) Ted Hughes was a cunt; (c) addressing late-teen English students as possum, blossom, petal or sweetie is entirely appropriate when you look like Margaret Pomeranz with stupider hair; (d) T.S. Eliot was a gobby cock who had an opinion about everything and was wrong about pretty much everything he had an opinion on; (e) I am also wrong about pretty much everything I have an opinion on; (f) I'm not quite as wrong about everything etc as my man AJ who always got two less marks than me out of twenty, even the time I got two and he got zero; (g) according to AJ you don't get a mark for spelling your name correctly in HSC English practice essays.

AJ was and is a gentleman and a scholar, even if we had to teach him how to pour a beer off a five litre keg on one of his many visits to the various Chateaux Dodgy across the early part of the decade, and has amounted to far more than getting blot out of twenty in a 3U English practice essay would predict. AJ is of course the World of Bollocks' Rural Affairs Correspondent (though he's had to stop having them since he got married) though as this prestigious gig pays two fifths of fuck all is obliged to moonlight for the local God-awful parochial rag.




He also knows why this is funny, having hammered seven shades of crap out of Sensible Soccer and subsequent equivalents over the years. And having seven shades of crap hammered out of him, of course, as Your Correspondent was, is and remains The Shit when it comes to Sensi. Largely because of copious use of the inherently arsey early-90s AC Milan lineup in head-to-head matches against the infidel. Gullit, van Basten and Zvoni Boban FTW! (And a bunch of handy wog types across the back of course.)

The Doctor is OUT.

Craptastic 4: Return of the Ginger Minger

In the immortal words of South Park's Ned Gerblansky... oh maaan that's naaaasty.

So it'd appear that Ipswich's favourite former fish-and-chipper, celebrity bigot and electoral funds misappropriatrix may or may not have got her condiment shakers out several ago in the presence of an ex equipped a Box Brownie and basement level standards in bedfellows. The mind boggles. I'd have preferred Hungry Hungry Hippos but Toyworld was out of stock.

There's two possibilities here. One is that the photos aren't actually of her and that the fullah who sold News Limited the photos, he who claims to be an ex of the Perilous Pauline, one Jack Johnson - no, not the barely talented Hawaiian ukelele strummer, but someone else who's managed to turn a profit from a load of old tits - is common-or-garden-variety lying scum and has taken Unky Rupert's minions for the grand total of fifteen large, by means nefarious. In which case, we at the World of Bollocks are prepared to nail our colours to the mast (those colours being coachwood and myrtle, colours with very long memories) and declare this conniving act of Murdoch-fraudulating bastardry to be noted here and forevermore as Nice Fucking Work My Son.

The other possibility is that the nudey snaps ARE of Ipswich's favourite fishwife. In which case the fullah deserves all the compensation the relevant government departments can be compelled to provide. He's suffered enough at the hands of old salt-'n'-vinegar tits. Dipping his chips in her sauce, battering his sav in her deep fryer, and spilling his tartare on her orange roughie. Let's face it, he's seen horrors no mortal man can imagine. Let the man have his meagre compense.

And, in the end, what's $15K of News Ltd play-money up against a couple of hundred thou's worth of White Nation electoral funding lost somewhere in the ether?

The Doctor is OUT to throw up this evening's cod 'n' chips.

The art of being a crappy guest

In general, visiting someone's house and making your host look a complete twunt isn't the most socially acceptable of habits, but it can be profitable and rewarding on a personal basis. Ask Liverpool Football Club, who Sund'y morning Australasian time wandered through the gates of Old Trafford, enjoyed the prawn sandwiches in the hospitality suite, stuffed Manchester United 4-1, then got on the bus and pootled cheerfully back to Merseyside. Neutrals, Kop faithful and ABUs alike are rejoicing across the globe as the vaguest mirage-like possibility of United maybe possibly not winning every fucking trophy in international club football apart from the A-League and the LDV Vans Cup reared its unlikely head. With a four point lead and a game in hand, they're still odds-on for the Prem, but at least it does mean they can be beaten. Badly. In their own building.

And speaking of which...
NRL Round 1: Sunday, March 15, 2009, Sydney Football Stadium
Sydney Roosters 12 - South Sydney Rabbitohs 52

Doesn't matter what kind of footy you play. League, union, AFL, even gridiron. A forty point loss is an absolute fucking touch-up. And when it's an absolute fucking touch-up at the hands of your arch-enemy... well, just ask your friendly neighbourhood Man U fan how they're travelling this morning (presuming they're not of the recent-adopting arriviste variety) and you'll know how Easts' fanbase will have reacted to Souths smashing the living shit out of them this afternoon. That is assuming (a) Easts still have a fanbase and/or (b) 80 minutes is sufficient timeframe for the extraction of all of the shit from your average Easts supporter, given how jam-packed-full of same they appear to be.

The Man U-Pool analogy is a fair one, given the bitterness of the rivalry between the Rabbitohs and the Roosters. Other than everyone vs Manly, the Souths-Easts (or whatever they're calling themselves this week) divide is the oldest and fiercest in the league. Neighbours, rivals, competitors for the same junior catchment area, and the only two intact foundation clubs left after Unky Rupert's retarded son fucked with the league to the point all the other foundation clubs either merged in desperately ill-advised shotgun marriages or were obliterated entirely, North Sydney Bears styles. Of course, if Easts had their way, they'd be the only foundation club left, having spent much of the past hundred years stealing our best players or trying to have us annihilated. With some success, it would seem, given the holiday News Limited organised for us between the end of 1999 and the beginning of '02, and the fact that apart from being minor premiers in '89 and making officially The Shortest Ever Finals Run In NRL History the season before last - finished eighth, played one game, crushed by Manly, went to the pub - we've been perennially shit for nearly 40 years, while they've made four grand finals in the past ten years. We hate Manly too, since you asked, given they pillaged our last decent side of the early '70s to form the basis of their first decent side of the mid '70s - but not quite as much as we hate Easts.

Obviously, my usage of 'we' is the Royal 'we', meaning what ESPN might call Rabbitoh Nation. My personal reaction to the Roosters was always more along the lines of 'meh'. They were largely an irrelevance when I was growing up - there or thereabouts but rarely troubling the form books - and seemed to be trading on faded glories and overpaid, underperforming stars. Hell, they even signed Fatty Vautin at one stage. They sucked for the entire duration of the '80s and '90s - even becoming the flagship of the establishment during the Super League wars and having cherry-picked stars sent their way didn't help them make a grand final. They were deeply and consistently mediocre. Which meant that in the late '90s (and probably to this day, given they've just been stuffed by 40 points by their next door neighbours) the Roosters had a significant issue on their hands - how to pull some sort of crowd to their home games, other than a hard-core clique of deluded tragics, the ones you see on gameday coverage waving witty banners of the likes of 'WE'LL BEAT THEM WITH OUR COCKS!'
(Actually, that's a pretty good one.)
















Nothing actually to do with Easts whatsoever, but good to see the youth of America standing up for what they believe in

The Hovel was in Randwick, on the boundary of Souths and Easts territory, but more importantly, a reasonably manageable drunken stagger across Centennial Park from the Moore Park Precinct. I lived there two years, '98 and '99. It disappoints me profoundly that I only discovered on the occasion of Easts' last home game of the 1999 season that gameday tickets to Easts games were a pitiful five bucks for students. If we'd known that earlier we'd have turned up every week, even just to cheer whoever they were playing against. That week it was St George, who were always going to get the thumbs up given our man Browny was playing hooker. (We're a bit parochial - and a bit rural. Not too many other blokes I went to school with made it as professional footballers. Nudgee College it weren't. Though one bloke from my year still holds the junior grades pointscoring records at the Sea Eagles - I think - but blew his knees up at the Cowboys and now lives with his missus next door to one of my mates, coaching the local team.) Anyhoo St George won with a last minute try and sideline conversion and went on to be cheated out of the premiership by a dubious penalty try awarded by a former Super League ref. And the Dragons' own vast and fathomless ability to choke like Greg Norman doing his best Michael Hutchence impersonation.

So South Sydney hates Eastern Suburbs - and anyone who's ever met anyone from the Eastern Suburbs would understand exactly why that would be, given the pretentious, superficial, cashed-up, over-entitled shower of fucktards infesting the suburbs east of Anzac Parade (sorry Therbs) - and, so it follows, South Sydney hates losing to Eastern Suburbs. Which is a bit of a bastard given we've lost 18 of our last 20 against them and haven't beaten them since the mid-90s.

Until this afternoon, of course, when they got beaten like a ginger stepkid. And there was rejoicing across the land.

Token sporting analysis bit. Easts' problem, and Souths' great advantage, is the advent of the two-referee system for officiating games. Fair to say it's been a general success across the first round of the comp in terms of (a) being pretty unobtrusive, (b) getting shit right and (c) making for decent games of football - even if dressing them in fluorescent baboon-arse pink might seem counter-productive in terms of garnering respect for their authoritah - but what it has created has been a quite dramatic speeding-up of the ruck area, with the result that teams full of big pie-eating lard arses are no longer able to park their pie enthusiasts all over the bloke with the pill, in order to slow the play-the-ball, kill the attacking team's momentum and give their defenders plenty of time to retreat back into the line. As such the big fatties are getting caned by the increased pace of the game and the lack of respite afforded therein, and once crafty little bastards like Preston Campbell or Matty Bowen start running at heavily fatigued busted-arse pie enthusiasts late in the half, they're getting ripped up the guts like John Hurt in Alien. Judging by the evidence on show this afternoon, Easts have a lot more pie enthusiasts in their ranks than crafty little blokes. Meanwhile Souths have a military-fit bunch of largely Polynesian forwards who don't seem overly interested in pies, and a squadron of midget terrorists led by the likes of Chris Sandow who like nothing better than tormenting the hell out of fat blokes. Apart, in the case of Sandow, from putting in heroically stupid shoulder charges on opposition players at least twice their size.


















What the hell do you mean, 'how the fuck would I know about winning anything since I played for Norths and all?'

However, the best moment of the weekend wasn't watching Chris Sandow have to get up on a stepladder to iron out the Easts fullback. And it wasn't even the enjoyment of watching and listening to Phil Phucking Gould, who bleeds tricolours, having to squirm through the entire nine-tries-to-two shellacking of his beloved Chooks in commentary (at least I think that's what he's supposed to be doing up there) for Nine. The moment of the weekend actually came from the one-day cricket. India have been shit guests here in NZ recently, duffing up the BLACKCAPSLOCK with extreme prejudice in the recent one-day series - being put into bat and clubbing 390-odd from 50 overs in Christchurch was the social equivalent of farting at table during the punchline to the host's best dinner party anecdote, if not proceeding to shag the host's missus in the broom cupboard afterwards - but the Kiwis did actually turn up to play in the last game, bowling out the outfit promoted here as the 'Rockstars of Cricket' for 149 and getting the requisite runs at a pace that would have been handy had they been chasing 390-odd from 50 overs. (A game late, but decent effort nonetheless.)

Star of the show was the legendary Jesse 'Kegs' Ryder - pisshead, pie enthusiast par excellence, and a fucking excellent cricketer. He took three wickets with his arsey medium pace seamers and smashed a quickfire fitty-plus to win man-of-the-match. Kegs is the sort of player you want to succeed, because if he can, there's hope for the rest of us. Warnie is the greatest spin bowler ever not in spite of, but because, he spent large amounts of his time scarfing baked beans, smoking Winnie Blues and banging the arse off English tabloid slappers. Kegs is the last in a long bloodline of barge-arsed tonk-merchants stretching back through Boof Lehmann to Boonie and beyond. Australia's most recent great white beached whale hope was Mark Cosgrove, but he didn't work out. (Literally. They sent him home from the AIS because his 'fitness training' largely consisted of getting in the car to visit the KFC drive-thru.)

So the best moment of the weekend involved Kegs, profoundly unlikeable spindly Indian paceman Pissant Sharma, and the construction site over midwicket at Eden Park where the new stand for the 2011 rugby World Cup is going. Along with three or four of Pissant's previous deliveries.
Pissant trundles in again.
Kegs belligerently dispatches him into the hard hat area, again.
Pissant stands in McGrath-esque teapot formation mid-pitch and gives him his most pointed death-stare.
Kegs shrugs, as if to say 'well what the fuck did you want me to do with it?'
Pissant chucks his toys, blows up deluxe, gobs off royally and has to be restrained.
Kegs hooks Pissant for another six over midwicket next over to bring up his fifty.

The World of Bollocks salutes Kegs Ryder. A smashing effort. (Well, better than his last smashing effort.)

The Doctor is OUT.

Bowled out

No, not the Saffers - not yet anyway (though Kallis just went for 93) - but one of Dunedin's best and bodgiest student watering holes. Seedy, seamy location of many a dodgy evening, as well as three consecutive editions of Bathurst Beer Bingo (including the infamous 'World Cup Wake' event, the morning after the All Blacks bombed out of RWC 2007; the Wallabies crashed out the same night, but oddly enough I got negligible stick over it that day), the Bowling Green Hotel (locally 'The Bowler') has closed its doors, suddenly and abruptly, after more than 140 years of thirst quenching and rabble rousing. The usual complaints - primarily noise related, not surprisingly given the Bowler was over the road from the hospital where both Lucas and his mother were born - hastened the demise of the ancient brown temple of drunken stupidity. However it was the Big End Of Town - namely the University itself - which had delivered the coup de grace some weeks earlier.

The University is Dunedin. It's the biggest employer, the economic driver, and basically the reason Dunedin isn't Invercargill. And it's a bit fucked off at the reputation it and its home town have been getting courtesy the antics of the pisshead element among the student populace, who are best described as complete fucking animals.

AB de Villiers has just gone for eighty-odd. He's a choad.

Anyway, things went to shit during O-Week with the Toga Parade going decidedly pear-shaped - although allegations in our yeehaa parochial arserag newspaper of buckets of poos being flung at student participants were never actually backed up by witnessed evidence - and the Uni flexed its considerable muscle amidst the Tartan Mafia and suddenly the liquor licence for the Captain Cook Hotel - who each year promote a number of large, squalid all-day boozefests entitled 'Cookathons', originally during O-Week but more recently repeated throughout the year - had been queried by the fuzzy muff and the establishment was forced to can the 'Thon and close midway through their biggest trading day of the year. Didn't stop the kids getting trashed first thing in the AM and heading out for a big day regardless... which, as per established Gen Y standards, lasted about three hours before passing out in a gutter on eighteen RTDs skolled prior to the opening of play in their grody animal-enclosure digs.

And herein lies the problem. Alcohol is disgustingly cheap in NZ. Beer and wine are sold in supermarkets for two fifths of bugger all. The bottle shops specialise in the spirits and RTD end of the market and heavily discount in order to compete. As such, it's far, far cheaper for Scarfies (archaic slang for Otago students based on their winter attire, though these days the uniform seems to be black puffer jackets, skinny jeans, bleached blonde hair and a deeply cretinous look on one's face) to stay at home and get fucking trashed in their third world scum-landlord flats than to head out at a reasonably social hour and knock back a couple of jugs at traditional student watering holes like the Cook, the Bowler, the Oriental or the Gardies. Which is what the fluoro-clad nuff nuffs of Gen Y do, before heading out much later in proceedings, more off-chops than a meeting of PETA, vomiting on each other and not being let into pubs.

In response the pubs have taken to more and more aggressive promotional activities to try and get students back through the door - usually involving loss-leading drink prices and promos encouraging the sinking of vast quantities of piss, thus undermining the only argument they had in their favour - that drinking in licenced premises at least provided a safe controlled environment which pissing it up furiously in one's flat would not. The Bowler probably never recovered from the stink surrounding an ill-advised promo a few years ago where they held a comp where first prize was their ancient putrifying brown couch - and a can of petrol to set the bastard on fire. Burning couches is an arcane and unlikely student tradition which began on the terraces at Carisbrook back in the days of international one-dayers there - once you've dragged a busted-arse couch all the way from North Dunedin to the 'Brook for the purpose of reclining thereupon to drink twenty cans of Speights and watch the BLACKCAPS lose like busted arses, you're hardly going to want to drag the fucking thing all the way back - but one which the University would rather the students ceased and desisted therefrom, along with most of the other deeply antisocial habits the residents of the student ghetto have developed over the years (seriously, there is no place on Earth where students behave like they do here. Google 'Otago student riot' or similar for a bit of an indication.) As an indication of how dimly the University (and, as things follow around here, the fuzzy muff) viewed the promotion, the bar's manager was charged with sedition. As in what terrorist/anarchist types making declarations seeking to crush the state are charged with.

And so, at the end of last month, the Bowler's owners pulled stumps, as have the owners of a bunch of other Dunedin pubs, including the Backstage, El Sol and Murphys (meaning one less dodgy faux-Irish pub in the world - cause for celebration methinks.) The Cook's owners, ex-Scarfies themselves, run a burgeoning business empire which encompasses upscale city bars, a gourmet burger chain and a construction business - who conspicuously failed to finish their highest profile recent job, the refit of the Cook itself, before the return of the students in February - would probably be a bit more of a challenge for the Tartan Mafia, but the Bowlerers caved in the end and sold up. Of course, given our history at the place, we all wondered who the new owners were, and how long it'd be before they opened for business again - after all, even in a tight economic environment and even with competition from supermarket takeaway liquor, a student pub is and always will be a licence to print money, and no bastard alive would be stupid enough to buy a student pub and not keep it open as a student pub, yeah?

From the Vice Chancellor's report to the University Council, today:

Last week the University of Otago completed the purchase of the Bowling Green Hotel building, at the corner of Frederick and Cumberland Streets. Under University ownership this building will no longer operate as a liquor outlet. Instead it will be converted into academic offices for research and teaching.

The Bowling Green Hotel was a historic “student pub”, but it has also been involved in some inappropriate promotions in recent years. I think we can draw satisfaction from the fact that this establishment will now be helping to meet our pressing need for more space for research in the health sciences.

The University of Otago has also complained repeatedly about the inappropriate promotion of alcohol by retail outlets, including steep discounting and the sale of cheap liquor in the morning. In this respect, I can report that the University of Otago has lodged an objection and will be appearing at the hearings to oppose the renewal of the liquor licence held by the current proprietors of the Captain Cook Hotel...

Fucking gimlet-eyed Scottish Presbyterian moral recidivists.

The Doctor is OUT.
As is Duminy, thank Christ.

New Music Roundup: in which Dr Yobbo buys new CDs and complains about them

We begin (and, to be fair, pretty much end) this edition of the World of Bollocks' New Music Roundup (now rainfast in 2 hours!) with the usual whinge that shit ain't what shit used to be. Typically, the New Music Roundup involves actual reviews of albums recently purchased by Your Correspondent, with vaguely intellectual discussion ref what makes each better or worse than its predecessors or contemporaries. Except, in a sure sign that Your Correspondent is ancient, decrepit and washed-the-fuck-up, the last crop of buys were so unfailingly poor that a one-size-fits-all policy has been adhered to.

World of Bollocks New CD Review
__________________ [insert album name], the [second/latest/umpteenth] album from __________________ [insert band name], fails to live up to the heights reached by the previous release from this outfit, [insert name of last album which was a shitload better]. The songwriting is listless, with the spark and spunk of its predecessor lost amidst the self-indulgence, navel-gazing and general wanking on that characterises this effort. A veritable smorgasboard of filler, and precious little killer. Two stars.

Included in the above exercise in bone-lazy journalism (hey, at least we actually bought and listened to the fucking things, unlike US Maxim) are the following sorry efforts:

You Am I, Dilettantes
Fat, lazy and full of navel-gazing and in-jokes, which was what got them fired from BMG in the first place to make room for more Idol rejects. The fire and anger of Convicts (2007), their first album after being punted from their original label, has sadly dissipated, replaced by smug self-assuredness. They could do with being a bit less fucking comfortable again. Buy Convicts instead, particularly if you can get it with the 'Live at the Wireless' bonus CD - if only for the story of how Tex Perkins once butt-pounded Marcus Graham (allegedly for a prison sex education film.)

AC/DC, Black Ice
Physically pains me to write this, as a rural bogan of note, but while Black Ice is not a particularly poor album, it's no Back In Black, or even Ballbreaker. For an AC/DC record, there's a surprising amount of crap on this album. It's OK, but Your Correspondent's theory that the best AC/DC album released in the past few years was actually recorded by Airborne seems to have been proven by experiment. Go buy Runnin' Wild instead. And next time, Acca Dacca veterans, just subcontract the fucking thing out to the young fullahs and go back to the golf course.

The Fratellis, Here We Stand
Not a poor album, but no advance on Costello Music - just a shabbier, success-addled Xerox of same, with less hits and more self-indulgence. The single Mistress Mabel - if you're not already sick to the gills of it as Ten's beach cricket anthem - and Tell Me A Lie are album highlights, but you're better off filing through the bargain bin at JB Hi Fi looking for the original. That said, our old honours student reckons they go well live, and has a drumstick from last night's ANU show to prove it. Groupie.

The Datsuns, Headstunts
Like most old Datsuns, dependable and reliable but gradually becoming more crap with age. Still haven't recovered from releasing a fucking masterpiece as their debut album and never managing to top it in the years since. We're a glass-half-full concern here at the World of Bollocks, and this is certainly a glass-half-full album - So Long and Your Bones need to be cranked with extreme voluminence - but it's what the other half is full of that's the issue here.

The Wiggles, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing
Derivative, lazy and massively disappointing. Since losing their lead singer, it soon became clear that the highest grossing Australian rock act in history was headed down the INXS path rather than the AC/DC one. Many of the songs on this album are rehashed slop lifted note-for-note from previous recordings - including, astonishingly, the album's direct predecessor Wiggle And Learn! - and it's clear that the aging skivvied millionaires are taking the piss on this effort. They've even exhumed Leo Sayer for fuck's sake. Of course, this won't matter a toss - they're raking in the coin with a big fuck-off croupier's stick and are laughing all the way to the bank. (Unless it's RBS. Or Stanford's). The Red Wiggle already owns half my old street.


Since that lot largely amounted to a wet sack of shit, we choose to gratuitously pad out this edition of the WoB NMR by lazily swapping the first two words in the title, pluralising the second and extruding the following:

World of Bollocks Music News Update
All the news that's printed to be fit, innit
(with special correspondent Mike Skinner from the Streets, apparently)

• Powderfinger guitarist Ian Haug is suing Jupiters Casino, claiming their hired goons roughed him up in 2006 when he was celebrating a birthday at the neon-stained pit of human suffering that deserves one day to sink into an unholy vortex of pitiless evil in proportion to itself. The Fingerist, whose members have had a long history of kicking off and creating havoc when out on the turps, claims his wrists were “bent, twisted and restrained with significant pressure and excessive force” and that because of the incident, his playing technique has been forced to change. Which may explain why their last album was so desperately fucking ordinary.
  

• China have told Oasis to fuck off, labelling the act 'unsuitable'. Ostensibly this is the result of the band playing a Tibetan freedom gig 12 years ago, but the fact that both Gallagher brothers are gobby twunts (particularly Noel) of no discernable talent (particularly Liam) who haven't released a decent album since Definitely Maybe/Morning Glory (an argument in itself) possibly informed the Central Committee's thinking on the issue.

• Bono says Chris Martin from Coldplay is a wanker. Jesus, where do we start with that one, we could be here for days. A sanctimonious self-aggrandizing cock sledging a marshmallow-soft arriviste ponce - neither of which Your Correspondent would piss on if they were on fire - for the International Pot-Kettle Heavyweight Championship.
  You know what, fuck it, write your own material for that one.

• Maroon 5 have a new album out.
  Music has officially ended. Everybody get the hell out.

The Doctor is getting the hell OUT.

Is it cold in here, or is it just you?

In fact, it's none of the above, with all new BodyPerks!

BodyPerks may in fact be the most stupid, vapid and pointless invention since Kyle Sandilands. For those readers too bone lazy to even be arsed following the link posted above, we offer the following precis from their website:




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What are bodyperks?

They are lightweight, natural colored, silicone nipples that you insert into your bra and place directly on your own nipple. You can create your own look and wear them with tight t-shirts, sexy halters, dresses, twin sets, swimsuits and more.

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(okay, by 'precis of', we mean 'entire front page completely ripped-the-fuck-off from', but anyhoo)


Fake nipples. Seriously. Not only that, but fake nipples that cost twenty bucks a pair - plus shipping and 'handling'. Presumably that's what some fucker will end up doing - which can only end badly when they come off in his hands. Bit of a passion killer that one, on a par with genital herpes, Dutch ovens and Kyle Sandilands.

Ladies, take our advice on this. Save yourself fifteen bucks, invest in some double-sided tape and a pack of Tic-Tacs.

The Doctor is OUT, as after that effort he's feeling a right tit.