Pearls before swine

Me? A'ight, I guess. Fuckin' completely fuckin' over fuckin' looking at fuckin' houses, since you fuckin' asked. Yourself?

This eve's WoB is a GROHL - not a beardy ex-Nirvanan drummer type but a Grab-bag of Random Offcuts, Herpes and Leftovers. Herpes, of course, being the gift that keeps on giving. Speaking of communicable diseases:

Swine Flu. It won't kill you. It won't kill anyone you know. It hasn't even killed anyone worth knowing in terms of the actual numbers of WHO-confirmed victims - about as many as your average NASA shuttle mission gone tits-up. Basically, it's a bit shit really. It's a disease contracted and perpetuated primarily through the media, like SARS, Y2K and Kyle Sandilands. But it may have an upside... one hell of an upside. It may, nay almost definitely will, make pork cheaper. And paying less for quality pig extract is something that's worth the odd global pandemic for. (Says he, smugly, at the furtherest end of an easily defendable island at the other end of the globe from Oinkflu Ground Zero.) I'm not about to recapitulate here my own or others' persuasive arguments as to why or how Ms Piggy's most succulent bits are the king, queen or demographically elected head-of-state of meats. They just are, FACT. Objectors, disputers and playa-haters are directed to ingest a bacon sarnie, a bag of pork scratchings and a large earthenware gourd of shut the fuck up.

Meanwhile, in unrelated news, Facebook memes are fucking annoying. You know the ones. Five greatest 80's music videos. Five best cities I've lived in. Five most impressive shits I've done, with net weights and photographic evidence. Seriously, who gives a fuck? That said, there were two I wasn't even game to get started on, for fear of being there all day. The memes I mean, not the... anyway. One, fairly obviously, was my five favourite beers. Only five? You mean this week? Tried just picking a subset, like the five best beers which Carlton and United managed to fuck up by no longer making available to the general public, but after Kent Old Brown, Reschs Smooth, Sheaf Stout* and Empire (technically not much of a beer but somehow getting one in an actual glass bottle from a beer tent at Homebake has elevated this long-lost CUB concern to deity status) I just got depressed and went looking for amateur girl-on-girl porn instead.


* Yeah OK, Sheaf Stout is still available, but it's brewed at Southbank in Melbourne since those venal CUB douchefelchers shut down and sold off the Kent Brewery on Broadway. Ditto Reschs Real, DA, Poisener and all the other Sydney-based CUB produce. Could be worse of course, they could be brewed at Yatala, CUB's south-east Qld facility, where beers go to die. I challenge doubters to bench-test Sydney-spec Carlton Draught (brewed in Melbourne) against its Brisbane-borne equivalent and tell me it's the same beer. Moral of the story: SEQ water is arse filtered through arse.

The other, unsurprisingly, was the 'five albums which shaped me'. Which being an insufferable music git I took Very Seriously and interpreted as NOT my five 'favourite' albums necessarily but the five which had the most bearing on my musical tastes. Resulting in:
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced (1967)
The Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols (1977)
Motorhead, Ace of Spades (1980)
The Datsuns, The Datsuns (2001)
The Black Keys, Thickfreakness (2003)

Of course as soon as pressing the big Confirm button on that lot I thought of half a dozen others which could or should have been there. AC/DC Live only missed out on the basis of not wanting to undeniably prove to everyone I know that I am an irredeemable bogan from the sticks whose dream car is a Monaro GTS. The Stooges' Raw Power should have been there. And hell, TISM's Machiavelli And The Four Seasons got played until its ring got lasered off when I first got it back in the day, as did the Presidents of the USA's debut, Veruca Salt's 8 Arms To Hold You, Regurgitator's Unit, Frenzal Rhomb's A Man's Not A Camel, Airbourne's Runnin' Wild... could have been there for weeks. To noone's benefit, least of all my own.

Framing the same question of beer rather than music tends to tease out the cheap 'n' nasty end of the spectrum. The old man tended to populate the fridge with Reschs Real and Tooheys Red, (a) because he was cheap and (b) as it was as convincing an argument against teenage drinking as ever there was. Rubbish like Carlton Cold and Hahn Ice tended to figure prominently in early dispatches. Uncle Ted (Extra Dry) was a big favourite for many years, then international lagers, homebrewed creations and God knows what else. Nowadays, my favourite beer of the moment - whatever moment - is the beer I'm drinking in that moment, because it's the one which has been picked out to accompany and complement that moment. Except for the 500mL cans of Grolsch which are packing out the lower half of my fridge at present; they were chosen as they were Cheap As Fuck. ($6 a 4-pack. Argue with that to your detriment.) It's the hard-to-find shit which triggers the nostalgia, though. Southwark Stout, if you can find it, may be the greatest dark beer in the history of stuff. It's black as pitch and richer than Rupert and had a justly-legendary reputation in the college I stayed at during my early yrs at uni, largely because the bottle shop over the road stocked it (as well as something called Polish Drinking Spirits - 80% proof - in no way recommended for consumption by anyone). Little Creatures Pilsner off tap from the Australian Hotel in the Rocks is purest concentrated Win. There's a brew-pub in Canberra - perhaps the only redeeming quality of the Nation's Capital - called the Wig and Pen which does an Aviator Bock which is truly awe-inspiring. But, in all honesty, finding good beer - any good beer - for cheap is one of life's simplest and most rewarding pleasures.

So our World Of Bollocks Challenge for this Weak is - name the album and/or the beer that shaped you, in 25 words or less. Cos I'm in a position to take the moral high ground when it comes to brevity and shit eh.

Bonus points if you can explain (a) what the fuck this girl is doing to this lizard, and (b) what the fuck it has to do with getting a career in science.

The Doctor is OUT.