The unbearable lightness of crap

Crap. It's everywhere, and it's craptastic. And more to the point, it's available on sale on the internet at Never To Be Repeated prices. The Crap Sale has become an institution at NZ discount products website 1-day.co.nz in the very short duration of its lifespan. Like most sites of its nature 1-day puts up three heavily-discounted Things every day at midday, with which one may dispose of one's disposable income, if one is so disposed. It's been a roaring success for the site, which started as a spinoff from an online cycling equipment site. But the jewel in the crown is the Crap Sale, where every few months everything left over in the warehouse gets flogged off at giveaway prices. F'rinstance the Globe skate shoes (RRP $129) I bought off them the other month for $55 turned up for $30. Bastards. Almost bought another pair. The issue of whether 31 year old men should be wearing skate shoes in the first place is not one which we will be addressing in this context, so go intercourse yerselves with some form of objet d'art, preferably a pointy one.

We are currently eight hours into the latest iteration of the Crap Sale and so far the Visa has sustained only light shelling - a stunt kite for the boys (i.e. to show off to the boys) and a pair of sunnies. Which means, it would seem, that my old cherry-red Julbo frames are headed for retirement. Which in itself is kind of a shame. They're old and ragged and scratched to buggery, and one of the lenses occasionally pops out like a geriatric's hip, and they're a fugly colour. But... they've got character. Because they've got history.

First of all, they cost me nowt. Nada. Not a sausage. Found 'em in a teaching lab I was demonstrating an undergrad course in, wayyy back in 2000 (PhD first year, for those keeping records). Across the semester, noone had claimed them, so I did. If you can afford to forget you own a pair of sunglasses you can afford to buy another pair. The tours of duty were hard and onerous, and the new rims weren't spared. Four Livid festivals. Four Homebakes. Five Big Days Out. Three Gold Coast Indys. Many, many drunken days of cricket at the Gabba. Australia Day/Hottest 100 BBQs. Boxing Day BBQs down at the folks' place with Team Old Skool. Missions to the V8 Supercars at The Switch (cue Duelling Banjos theme). And countless, endless days at the beach, the park or the RE beer garden, roadtrips up and down the coast, backyard cricket (aka 'backyard sledging'), playing fucking ordinary golf and swearing about it, or just kicking back in the sunshine on campus with Dr Craigos and ogling exceptionally hot underdressed women. Before DMDY turned up on the scene of course *cough*

(Pre-event drinks for Homebake 2003 high above Hyde Park. Classy. My best man and both my groomsmen are in amongst that lot. Not picked for their culture or decorum, you may be surprised to learn.)

Through all those tours of duty, through bushfires, snakes and tinea, drizzle, drought and flood, the old shades fought the good fight and completed their mission objectives to a tee: (a) keeping the sun out and (b) not getting lost.

Old, dodgy, busted-arse sunglasses nicked from a teaching lab in 2000, we salute you.

Now bugger off, I'm off to check the Crap Sale again. Walkie talkie watches for 40 bucks? Sign me up matey!

The Doctor is OUT.

Even flow

Shitbox, frustrating, pain in the arse day. Long story or series thereof. Suffice to say, one hopes that John the Dodgy Indian Bookie is content with the result of the final one-dayer between the Poms and the Aussies, as he would be with the Manc derby, in which the ref played seven minutes of the four minutes of injury time scheduled. Coincidentally Man U scored the winner 6m58 into injury time. Choads. Key point is, got in the car feeling fucking fucked off with fucking fuckers from arsehole to breakfast time. Stuck a CD in the playa. And got Even's Black Umbrella. Thus, in a matter of moments, went the black mood by the wayside, replaced by a faraway grin and some fairly woeful attempts at harmonizing. Instant pain relief? Fuck Panadol. Just add Even.



Even are my favourite underrated, underappreciated Aussie band. They don't really fit with the rest of my music collection, which is largely a bunch of garage punk acts, post-grunge metallurgists, old-skool four-on-the-floor rockers and Sunset Strip hair farmers - for further details see one's highly self-indulgent comment ref. tops albums around halfway through this lot (11.21am) - but I like that. They're resolutely old-skool in their own way, stuck between Sgt Peppers-era Beatles and Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, and if frontman Ash Naylor's hair was any more 60s bowl-cut, Noel Gallagher would be asking for it back. But they make fucking awesome music. Soaring harmonies, irresistable riffs, just damn good songs. And lots of 'em.



I first came across Even - as much as I remember anyway - watching the Rage version of the '99 Hottest 100 at The Hovel in Randwick. The filmclip to Black Umbrella was a cleverly conceived, neatly executed one-shot exercise following Ash Naylor and a bunch of randoms through the streets - YouTube ain't allowed to stock it, courtesy the record companies of the world being abject arsehats who don't understand how music sells these days - and the song itself is a gem. First got to see them in 2001 when long-time colleague in league and master of disaster Moff scored half price Livid tickets on festival eve - we'd survived the refugee camp conditions of the previous year and swore Never Fkn Again to that lot of bollocks, but half price tix are half price tix, the ridiculous crowds and temperatures of the previous year were nowhere to be seen (probably because they'd booked no real big names) and we went and had a fucking good time. Longer version of that story and a bunch of other festy-related tales here. The afternoon Moff called with the offer we had the J's on in the lab and Even were playing a couple of their tracks live in studio. Found out they were playing on Sat and headed to the stage up the back amongst the Moreton Bay figs to see them go around, having just seen Eskimo Joe do their stuff in the Big Fuck Off Tent. And Even were good. One of those sets where the loudest sound in the back of your mind is pennies dropping - so this is who does that song. Not even some truly woeful standup between sets by a massively off-chops Wil Anderson - apparently Kieran Perkins' advertising claim to having his name on his milk is null and void because Klim is 'milk' backwards (I think I needed more drugs to make that funny. Don't think he did though) - nor the need to pissbolt halfway across the RNA showgrounds to catch anything more than the last couple of songs of Ash's mainstage set (Ash as in the Kung Fu artists not as in Naylor - and yeah they finished with Kung Fu and it Went FARKEN ORRFFF MAAAATE) dampened the afterglow from Even's set. Saw them again in 2003 at the Zoo with DMDY, the night after seeing the Black Keys thunder and tear through a deafeningly brilliant live show at the same venue - so I was tired, deaf and hungover - and yet they did great work again. More of that here as well.



Of course, only a handful of other peeps (relatively speaking) reckon the same. Even have only ever had a cult following, the sort of band that music critics rave about and everyone else ignores. Fair enough, a lot of music critics are navel-gazing one-upmanship-perpetuating wanktards, but the ones who say shit like 'If Ziggy Stardust hadn't burnt out he'd be fronting Even today' have to be on to something, other than a large pile of non-prescription pharmaceuticals. Despite releasing a bunch of albums that shoulda-coulda-oughta been igfuckenormous, Even got the arse from their original record label in the early-to-mid Noughties - much like their mates You Am I, except Timmahhh Rogers et al managed to bounce back with an EMI contract shortly thereafter. The J's don't play their stuff much any more - perhaps 3RRR do, but hey, who listens to community radio these days - and the feeling is that Even remain, now and in the future, the best-kept secret in Australian music. And that's a damn shame.

Bit of a treat to finish with - Even with Timmahhh and Davey Lane from You Am I cranking through the awesomest rock song in the history of awesome - other than Back In Black - the Stones' Jumpin' Jack Flash, at Even's Xmas 2006 show. Sure the sound quality's arse and the vision's wobbly as fuck, but think of it as authentic gig ambience - after eight Heinekens and being camped ten feet from the PA all night, this is pretty much what you'd see and hear. Two fifths of fuck all.



So that's my ten cents (in Pacific Pesos) worth. Ladles and gintlepong, the floor is yours... favourite underrated, underappreciated band? Your time starts now. Approved course notes are permitted.

The Doctor is OUT.

Strange Brew II: The Revenge

Home brew. Beloved by pottering retirees and cheap-arsed uni students alike, it's renown for being almost always horrendous, overgassed and overskanked, its nastiness in direct proportion to the perceived qualities imparted by the description provided by the brewer. So just like VB then.

We started homebrewing at Chateau Dodgy back in 2002, in our second year at CD v2.0 on Sir Fred Schnell Achtung Drive. Craigos (now Dr Craigos, well near as dammit) had been muntering and chuntering away about getting into it, and when I spotted him a brand-new homebrewing starter kit for his birthday - well actually a brand-new-in-1973 homebrew starter kit (complete with Kmart receipt for $8.95), bought by a mate of the old man's but never actually used, the purchaser rightly scared off by the fusillade of explosions that marked the old man's own home brewing experiments at the time - there was nothing stopping us. Not even lack of talent.

Now there's two types of home brewers, as noted above. There's the dodgy uni students (often industrial chemists or engineers), usually found in the homebrew aisle of the supermarket, buying Home Brand brewing kits and bags of table sugar to churn out the cheapest, nastiest excuse for fermented malt they can, because bugger paying twenty bucks a carton for Tasman Bitter. At the other end of the scale there's the hardcore amateur brewmasters, the older, usually retired blokes who laugh hoarsely at the idea of using commercial kits, choosing to malt their own barley and brew their own mash, maturing it all in their own stainless steel refrigerated draught setups, the whole obsessional deal.

Craigos and me were of the Third Way of Brewing: brewing as experimental science. Different kits, different malts, different hops, drying enzymes - even a few ropier experiments with leatherwood honey (thumbs up) and fresh basil (thumbs very much DOWN), as detailed in the dull-but-worthy precursor to this post, Strange Brew, containing all our recipes and tasting notes from the years we actually kept recipes and tasting notes. Never as hard-core as the crusty old buggers with their small-scale models of CUB Yatala in their sheds, but we made some damn fine beers and learned a hell of a lot about beer, hops and malts. And never once descended to the level of our mate Chrisso who bottled his beers in discarded two-litre Coke bottles and wondered why his brews were flatter than Holland.

I brewed for a while once over in NZ too. The great advantage of NZ - in particular the cellar at our place in NZ at the time, which consistently held temps in the low teens Celsius - was that you could use proper lager yeasts for brewing. Queensland temps meant you were limited to using ale yeasts, which ferment at higher temps (18-25 degrees), as well as being limited to brewing in the cooler months lest your brew vessel turn skankier than Amy Winehouse. Lager yeasts are the basis of a lot of fantastic beers - pilsners, bocks et al - and while you can imitate them with an ale yeast, these were the ones I wanted to try out with a proper lager yeast once set up at our new place in D-town (aka the 'Ski Lodge', as it had more yellowed pine panelling than a Scandinavian sauna.)

As it turned out, I threw the home brew caper in after a few months over here, due to two factors: (a) it's a metric arseload of work for one set of hands, and (b) NZ beer was (and pretty much remains) far cheaper and tastier than it was in Queensland, rendering DIY brewing a bit of a waste of time. Though I did manage to crank out three good brews - my first true lager, a pilsner, and a bock. The thing about home brew is that ideally, you're meant to leave it in the bottle to mature for a good few months, but equally, you're best off consuming the contents within 1-2 years. Theoretically the yeast will protect and insulate the contents fron microbial degradation or spoilage - for the same reason that bottles of Coopers have a 'Best After' date rather than a 'Best Before' - but common wisdom suggests more than a couple of years is well beyond the use-by date for most home brews.

Join me, then, as I enter the realms of Experimental Live Blogging as I crack the lids off a couple of time capsules well past their use-by date, and report back on the glory and consequence (thanks v. much Ben Harper) within.


TASTING NOTES
Microbrew creations from the Ski Lodge Brewhouse, D-Town 2005

Peter Bock, bottled 3 July 05
• Muntons Bock kit 1.8kg
• Black Rock Amber Malt 1.1kg
• Saflager yeast

Bocks are fantastic beers. They're enormous, malty extravaganzas, heavily alcoholic but smooth as silk, when done properly. Drop into the Wig and Pen brewery pub in Canberra Civic and try their Aviator Bock (presuming they still do it, and do it properly) for a sample. This was the inspiration for our original ale-based bock back in Brisvegas, but it's meant to be a lager.The defining characteristic of a bock is Bloody Enormous Malt. Instead of hops, you add malt, and then you add more malt. The result is quite immense. Even after four plus years there's still action aplenty on cracking the seal, but the initial inch of head soon dissipates and there's immediate concern that too long in the bottle has killed the fizz. The colour, though, is gorgeous, deep and dark with liquid-amber highlights when you hold it up to the light. As not illustrated particularly well in this rubbish photo.


Despite the decrease in fizz the mouthfeel is still good though, with small, tight bubbles, and the taste... still immense, malty and biscuity. Not a lot of nose, but that's through not a lot of hops. Few hop flowers were harmed in the making of this beverage. It's smooth, too, deceptively so. Only after a good few swigs do I realise this stuff is scaring 7% alcohol by volume, based on my admittedly dodgy specific gravity numbers back in 2005. By two-thirds done am feeling vaguely pished. Those three Speights prior to tasting may have been contra-indicative to successful homebrew samplage. Time to knock this off and move onto the next tasting.


Proton Pils, bottled 29 May 2005
• Brewcraft Czech Pilsner kit 1.7kg
• Black Rock Blond malt 1.5kg
• Saaz hops 12g, steeped 10min
• Saflager yeast

Next in reverse crono... chrona... fucken order of oldness is the Proton Pils. This was an old recipe that got a fair hammering back in the Chateau Dodgy days. It's basically a pilsner with a dash of Saaz hops thrown in - think Tooheys Pils or similar. Bloody good summer beer. So fucken perfect for bottling in the middle of a Dunedin winter. This is more heavily malted than you'd usually go with, but it's very light (blond) Munich malt as used in something like Becks or the unpronounceable Czech pilsners this is inspired by.


On cracking the bastard open there's audibly more hiss and visibly more action as the precious is poured into glass. Colour is gorgeous, a shade darker than what you'd typically see in a glass of Urquell or Budvar, but that's volume of malt talking. The malt talks in the mouth too with an up-front sweetness that may be the residue of the Bock doing its thing (goes off to rinse)... nah still there... as well as the sharp counterpunch of the Saaz doing its thing. Original tasting notes suggested a drying enzyme (to clean up the residual sugar and hence 'dry out' the beer a la Asahi or something) might have been good. Can't argue, but equally, can't fault this one. Smooth, clean and clear, with the action of a proper store-bought one. This simply should not be the case after four years under half an inch of dust, not to mention being twice hurled into moving vans and shifted across town. Bloody lovely. Kudos to Western Suburbs Home Brew (just off Moggill Rd in west Indro) for coming up with the recipe in the first place. Damn fine home brew shop that one. If it's still going of course.

Am now thinking about digging homebrew vessel out of storage in shed, but there's a fucking lot more than half an inch of dust in it and it may need boiling in Domestos for a week, like the shower after our old flatmate [name deleted] had finished with it. Fucking pubic hair factory she was. Could've knitted Elton John a new rug weekly with the proceeds out of the shower sinkhole. And Heineken is $20 a dozen at the supermarket down the road so what's the fucken point ay. And pouring/capping/sugaring bottles is a slunt of a job single-handed.

Better off seeing if any more of those Bocks are cold enough to drink yet. Oneski? Waheyyyy!


Kleinlager, bottled 16 April 2005
• Black Rock NZ Lager kit 1.7kg
• Brewcraft Brewblend #15 - Lager Enhancer 1kg
• Cascade and Hallertau hops 12g, steeped 10min
• Saflager yeast

Fucken stupid piss poor name, sorry about that. Erm... what was the point of this one? Ahh yeah. First shot at doing a lager. Cascade and Hallertau used cos they're a good combo. The best combo, for the record, is Cascade and Goldings - makes a fucking awesome summer beer in a light ale or lager, very quaffable - but Goldings wasn't available in NZ. Seems a bit bloody odd considering most of the hops in the southern hemisphere come from Motueka in the NZ south island - I can fucken DRIVE THERE in a day and a half and pick up a bootful of the shit by reversing through someone's paddock with the boot lid open - but what the fuck do I know about international supply and demand in hop trade.


Anyway Kleinlager. First 'small attempt' (fuck me, how contrived) at lager brewing in NZ. Good action. Excellent head. I had excellent head once, but that's another story. [pause for resounding flatulence] Bit paler in colour than the Proton Pils, but that's the 'Brewblend Lager Enhancer' - from sketchy memory, powdered dextrose and maltodextrin with some hops and shit thrown in - as compared to the liquid malt used in the others which usually gives a darker colour. Foamy suds and a luverly sharp floral bite to the initial mouthful, the citrusy Cascade (think Boags Premium) shaking hands with the crispness of the Hallertau (think Hahn Premium) and uniting to KICK FUCKING ARSE MATEY. Better nose than the previous, dryer and crisper than the pilsner too, which speaks to a longer, more complete fermentation using up all the residual malt and turning it into Lovely Alcohol, which is backed up by the respective specific gravity numbers. According to these brewnotes anyway. fucked if I can figure out what the numebrs mean.

Bloody hell this is a tasty beverage. I can tell it's a tasty beverage because I have fuck all of them left. Goneski. Went years ago. However there's still quite a few of the Bock and the Proton Pils. HAHA! We'll soon see aboty that matey!!!! [tremendous resonant belch lasting several seconds and drawing look of abject disgust from Significant Other]

In short. homebrewing is fucken tops. Do it. It makes bloody awesom beer even four years or more after the fact. But get some other fucker to do the legwork as it sucks donkey balls. Small children or gullinble flatmates should do the trick. Preferably ones who dont have nevr ending fountain s of fuckin pubic hair. Not that SHE everl lifted a cnting finger to do shit around the fuckin house or pay her fckin share f the bills but that's another story. A story called In The Worst Possible Taste. But thats another story. Obviuously.

The Doctor is OUT too get more piss. HUzzah!!1!

We'll get him when he comes back in

The Ayers Rock Roadhouse outside Karuah is a surreal netherworld at 3am in the morning. Particularly if you've just been shunted off an overnight coach blinking and dazed into the harsh fluorescent lights and bewildering tourist-trap tweeness of it all. It's easy to dismiss it all as a hallucination brought on by too long crammed and cramped into a too-small coach pew inhaling the neurotoxic fumes from the skanky dreads of the Byron feral in the seat in front, ever since you got on this fucking elongated tin can at half-six last night back on the North Coast. You've not slept, not really. The video was something inoffensive and yet appalling, like Phenomenon with John Travolta. Every sinew hurts and a deep dark chloroform funk has descended upon you. And now you're ushered into the bowels of a massive rust-red concrete rock and presented with retail opportunities for God-awful coffee, digestion-endangering road food and bargain bins fill of genuine Australian fluffy koala souvenirs (made in China). While all around you, in the darkness, disintegrating into the bushland, the decaying, zombiefied ruins of a failed fun park lay in wait for the apocalypse.

Ayers Rock Roadhouse at 3am, stumbling off an overnight coach into the undead netherworld within, is indeed the long, dark night (or possibly tea-time) of the soul.


The Brown Hornet put paid to my uni-break-ending overnight coach trips south to Sydney, and its concomitant 3am stops at bizarre ornamental roadhouses, and for that I'll be forever grateful. What put paid to the fun park that surrounded it were early '90s 21% interest rates, and the cheerfully naive optimism of its developers. The park was Leyland Brothers World, the developers those self-same Leyland Brothers. The ones who'd travelled all over the countryside. Ask 'em. (Ask 'em.)



(Remarkable, and indeed applaudable, amount of wet T-shirt work in that intro. Well it was 1976 I guess.)

Mike Leyland's no longer travelling all over the countryside, nor any longer available for answering your inquiries; he died today from a Parkinson's related condition. Ask The Leyland Brothers was a bit early for me - my only memories of TV circa 1984 when the show ended its run were Knight Rider, the A-Team and Brocky leading a Holden 1-2 at Bathurst in the day-glo HDT Commodore - but his and brother Mal's place in the landscape of Australian TV can't be understated. And while Leyland Brothers World was a fail, it was (as Naut pointed out today on Twunter) such an Epic Fail that it can't help but engender respect.

So on that basis I propose a PILGRIMAGE. In honour of the Brothers Leyland, and Mike in particular, to the Giant Red Turd north of Karuah on the Pacific Highway. Off you shoot. Obviously I'm a non-starter as it's a bit of a mish from here, but you lot should TOTALLY roadtrip it down there. And 'cos they have 24 hour fuel you can top up, turn around and come straight back, even if it's three in the morning. Trust me, there's fuck all to see there even at the best of times, you're not gonna miss much in darkness.

Also filed under the day's obituaries: Patrick Swayze. Which, while not unexpected, has resulted in a slew of 'Nobody puts _____ in a corner' (eg 'Baby' or 'pancreatic cancer') references on Various Social Networking Forums. I'm not going to reference Dirty Dancing here. Never watched it and never will. Lack the proper equipment to do so, i.e. ovaries. I watched Ghost under duress, in a compulsory religious education seminar at high school run by some bunch of touring Hillsong types who'd heavily edited the flick (i.e. binned the shootin' and the rootin') to push their message of life after death for those who live a virtuous life under God etc etc etc. I dare say the uncut version was at least as shit as the Christian Television Association version I sat through.

Nope, the only Paddy Swayze flick I'm gonna reference here is the only one I can remember watching, deliberately. Point Break. Possibly the most heroically stupid film ever made. I mean look at this fucking plot synopsis. Just LOOK AT IT. A gang of skydiving, gun-toting surfers dress up as former Presidents and rob banks, and a choady little FBI agent called Johnny Utah (Keanu in not the first profoundly homoerotic role of his career, resulting in the alternative title Point Brokeback) goes after their charismatic leader Bodhi (Swayze reaching the limits of his acting ability playing his first bad guy.) Throw in a pre-coke (mostly) Gary Busey as Utah's boss, spitting out lines like 'I was in this bureau while you were still popping zits on your funny face and jacking off to the lingerie section of the Sears catalog' (many many more alleged classics here) and generous dollops of gratuitous violence and naked boobies and you had... a bucket of absolute slop. Still, it was entertaining. In the same way lighting a brown paper bag full of dog poo, leaving it on someone's doorstep, pressing the doorbell and running like fuck is entertaining.

The highlight, of course, of Point Break is the climactic scene on Bells Beach... allegedly... where Johnny Arkansas finally tracks down Bodhi and they knock seven bells (see what I did there) out of each other on the sand, until Bodhi convinces Johnny to let him do the honourable thing and top himself riding a stupidly big wave to New Zealand. I'm sure it made sense when you were as baked as the bastards who wrote it. As Bodhi paddles out, you hear a voice say 'We'll get him when he comes back in...'

It's not Keanu's response that appalls. It's the voice. THAT VOICE. The single worst attempt at an Australian accent ever committed to celluloid. The bloke playing the Bells Beach copper sounds like a cross between a stoned Pakistani and a South African with profound boerewors-induced consipation. Let's be unequivocal. It made Meryl Streep's 'Dingo stole my baby!' sound harrowingly authentic. It was arse frosted with arse, served with a light jus of caramelised arse in an arse reduction. It was fucking fucked.

In conclusion, Point Break is a desperately bad film with next to no redeeming qualities, and I recommend you rent it at once. I give this film three Dolphs and a Rutger.

Vale Mike and Paddy. And Keith Floyd. He liked a drink.
(Anyone ever thought they'd be sharing billing in a WoB post? Anyone? Bueller?)

The Doctor is OUT.

Great balls of fire

The World of Bollocks' Weekend Motorsport wrap:

• F1: Barrichello wins Italian GP, teammate Button extends championship lead
  
• V8 Supercars: Tander and Davison take Phillip Island 500 for Holden Racing Team
  
• NASCAR: Hamlin wins in Richmond, Chase For The Sprint Cup positions finalised
  
• Undie 500: Ends in complete fucking shitfight as usual
  

Lots of times when me and KG are watchin'
All the fuckin' shit that goes down at City Hall,
We get the feeling we should fuck shit up,
Yeah we should fuckin' start a riot.
A Riot!
We have 'em screaming in the streets,
We have 'em tippin' over shit and breakin' fuckin' windows of small businesses,
And settin' fuckin' fires!
- Tenacious D, 'City Hall'

Dunedin has a problem and the problem is this. Every year the Canterbury Uni Engineering Society organises a car rally down to Dunedin from their Christchurch digs. It's called the Undie 500, the conceit being that every car has to cost less than $500, be roadworthy, and make the 360 kays. So far so good. Except that every year for the last couple of years, it's ended with this sort of shit going down. And it's not the best of looks to have riot police clashing with drunken bottle-throwing students while the main street of Studentville burns like Paris 1968.

As you'd expect, every bastard blames every other bastard. The mayor of Dunedin blames the Canty engineers. The Canty engineers blame the Dunedin students. The Dunedin students blame the cops. The cops blame the liquor licencees. The liquor licencees suggest everyone grow the fuck up and learn to use their product in a responsible manner, which is never going to happen.



However it's pretty clear who's to blame. Whoever came up with the EFTS model of funding NZ universities.

The EFTS, or 'equivalent full time students', model is basically a bums-on-seats model. It rewards throughput. The more capacity you funnel through the front door, the more cash you get. EFTS funding has dominated the 'educational' component of NZ university funding (as distinct from the money doled out for research) for years. There are no caps on enrolment, no prerequisite mark requirements, nothing to sort the wheat from the chaff. For instance, first year health sciences, the course which leads to medicine (as well as the rest of the biological sciences), has an intake of 1500 students. How very egalitarian of them, I hear you say. And yes, it's that. It also means NZ universities end up accepting into enrolment a bunch of ABSOLUTE FUCKING MUPPETS WITH NO PROSPECT OF EVER ATTAINING OR DESERVING A DEGREE. And a higher proportion of rich little white kids with entitlement issues who think that forking out for uni fees is them buying themselves a qualification rather than what it is - nothing more than a the right of entry for the opportunity to gain an education. Who see the riot participants from the previous year getting away largely scot-free - courtesy the difficulty in pinning anything on the little bastards - and conduct themselves accordingly.

Obviously, under a bums-on-seats model, the unis will and do compete viciously for aforementioned bums on aforementioned seats. Otago, either NZ's number one or number two university depending on what metric you use, has until very recently traded on its reputation as a party town in order to attract students. The result is pretty clear. You want students who are here to party, you get burning couches and bottles thrown at cops. You get students who think getting pissed and trashing Castle St is a rite of passage of being a 'Scarfie' rather than something that makes you look like a desperately sad little wannabe. You get the shit Auckland doesn't want - Auckland, interestingly, have introduced Australian-style entry caps, and are reaping the benefits of the perceived exclusivity that brings.

So how to fix the crowd control issue? Obvious. Get rid of the shit students who don't want to be here, judging by their interest in acting like complete fuckwits. But it's not that easy, of course. Not when none of the parties involved wants to take ownership. The council is obsessed with banning the Undie 500 rally, even though it would be both impossible - on what grounds can you make it illegal for citizens to get in their cars and drive into your town? - and irrelevant, as all of the rioters arrested on the first night of festivities on the weekend were Otago students and non-student hangers-on (or 'Toolies' as they are more aptly known at Schoolies time) looking for a stink, rather than Canty rally participants. The cops busted out pepper spray this year and will probably want tear gas and rubber bullets next. I'd personally drive the constabulary's finest down to riot-gear Bunnings and shout them the stuff out of my own pocket, if the rest of Dunedin didn't offer to do so first. The university is yet to make any official statement, three days after this year's flavour of shitfight erupted. However, the student union, forever and a day bleating the case in favour of the rioting students, has this year shifted slightly. The rhetoric has been deriding anyone stupid enough to throw bottles at cops, rather than bush-lawyering the illegality of any move by the university to kick out anyone proven to be doing bad shit off campus.

In truth, though, the biggest problem is that Gen Y are a pack of cunts who needed to be beaten more often when they were growing up.

The Doctor is OUT.

We waz rong.

Anyone else hanging out for the jockeys' strike just to see a picket line around Flemington on Melbourne Cup Day made up of angry little men in florid silks being stepped over by pissed munterettes in inappropriate frocks and heels?

Anyhoo, at the World of Bollocks, we don't mind admitting our mistakes. That's because WE DON'T FUCKEN MAKE ANY MATEY. Bollocks to that. No fault, no claim, no harm, no foul. Yes, we don't mind admitting when we're wrong, and will do so whenever that might happen, sometime in the next twenty years...

OK, OK. We've been wrong in the past. I got pretty wrong once at a Thai restaurant on six pints of Speights and a bottle of that Taylors red with the seahorse on it and talked more shit than Kyle Sandilands and Steve Fielding combined. Occasionally, though, I like being wrong. Most recently I've liked being wrong about the peroxided, pseudo-metro-homo excuses for cricketers who've populated the Strayan side with their particular brand of no-rounder skills and pouting pointlessness. In particular one Shane Watson, formerly of the Switch, late of the NSW SpeedBlitz Blues, and one Cameron 'Bear' White, a.k.a. the New Warnie, Captain of Victoria since puberty and by reputation the greatest living prospect for Australian cricket since the last one.

Both have been, unequivocally and indisputably, fucking rubbish in an Australian shirt since the day the Puntificating One handed it to them. White may be the only legspinner in history who can't turn the ball more than an inch off square. Watson has been broken more times than a Usain Bolt world record. Both are less use than a busted coight and appear to be in the side largely for the purposes of looking pretty in KFC, armpit-killer and Ford ute commercials. We have bagged and bagged and bagged some more the likes of Watson, White and the other decorative-but-functionless bits of Gen Y flotsam that currently stink up the Ashes-losing Australian cricket franchise in these pages, to the point of proposing that the lot of them be bailed up in a hotel suite by Roy Symonds with a spearfishing gun and replace the lot of them with washed up old drunks from the beach cricket tournament.

Except. Except except except.

Someone had the idea of making Shane Watson, the most injuredest man in a baggy green since Bruce Reid, the opening batsman in an Ashes test series. Now, I saw the experiment which was Watson batting in the top order for Queensland in shield cricket. It was not an experiment which would have passed muster at the relevant research ethics committees because it was FUCKING PAINFUL FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED. Yet someone had the idea of handing him a bat, and a helmet, pointing to the square and saying 'Yer up, son.'


Watson has now played three tests as opener for 240 runs at an average of 48. He is now the Test and ODI opener for his country. I have no idea how this happened, but it happened.

Likewise, someone, possibly to win a bet, has decided Cameron White should have a crack at batting number three for Australia. Yes, that Cameron White. The dude with the big neck who looks a bit special needs. Yeah like THAT'S gonna work.


Cameron White almost single-handedly won the third ODI against the Poms with an even-time 105 batting at number three. When alleged captain Richard Ponting returns from sick (of losing) leave tomorrow, it won't be Bear White who he replaces. It may well be stuttering Aussie V-C Lara Bingle, who appears to be still batting to try and save the fifth test despite the one-dayers having started a week and a half ago. Who else is he going to replace? Watson? New keeper T-Pain? Callum Ferguson, the Skinny Boof? Mike Hussey? Hmmm. There's your man, perhaps.

So, we waz rong. Big ups to Bear White and Shane Watson. And about time we just dispensed with the pleasantries and started picking the team just from blokes eligible to play for NSW, either by birth or current employment. Your new national first XI:

SR Watson
PJ Hughes
PA Jaques
MJ Clarke
SM Katich
DA Warner
BJ Haddin (so that's just the seven former Australian openers then)
B Lee
NW Bracken
SR Clark
JJ Krejza

12th Man: to be selected from
NM Hauritz
DE Bollinger
RT Ponting

...well he lives in Sydney, it's enough to consider him for selection, even if he's unlikely to get a run.

And finally, a song of hope, a song of joy. A song for Ms Caster Semenya, of no fixed underpants, South Africa.



The Doctor is OUT.

I hate stupid people

Was a song by Insurge, or rather iNsurGe, a 'political industrial rock band' of the '90s. Ironically they were stupid and I hated them. I hated them because they were clueless hypocrites. Claiming everyone who'd ever committed crimes against property were in fact Political Prisoners, f'rinstance, because all property was an invention of The Man meant to keep us all down. I sincerely someone broke into their van and stole their instruments after that, just to see what their reaction woulda been. I see no criminals; I see before me Political Prisoners.

Anyhoo, the stupid are many and the stupid are legion. The ranting, foaming Cletuses interpreting Obama's speech of 'Stay in school, kids' to some sort of Nazi-Socialist decree of 'All your children are belong to us' - they're fucking stupid. Kyle Sandilands, he's fucking stupid. Anyone who still listens to him is fucking stupid. The coach of South Sydney, Jason Taylor, who wants to press charges against the player who decked him but can't remember the couple of slaps to the chops on his part which might have instigated it - fuck me, mate, you're stupid AND you're embarrassing the club emblem. Steve Fielding, he's a fucking inbred mentally deficient fucktard who makes me fiskally sick. AND he's fucking stupid. The list goes on. And on.

A few longer worked examples. A Good Friend Of The World Of Bollocks is one of those superhuman overachiever chicks - you've met her before - and was last seen emigrating to the US and taking up citizenship in order to vote for Obama (well not really but it makes a good story). For the recent Philadelphia Fringe Festival she wrote, directed, produced, funded, conducted, and every-bloody-other-thing-'d an operatic cantata based on the train-wreck-hideous mess that was Alberto Gonzales' tenure at the Department of Justice, i.e. firing all the people who didn't agree with Unca Dubya's politicule views. Evidently it was a Very Clever Thing and brilliantly done, even if it was a touch on the overly intellectual liberal side (then again I choose to get all my US political news from Jon Stewart so WTF do I know). But according to Middle America - to wit most of the batshit arseclowns posting on AOL News - like all arts it was all a waste of taxpayers money pushed by Obama and his Agenda, and our Mel should "move on miss damn free, don't yo uhave any better things to do, grow upand have a better life better than your garbage contrata......." And clearly Mel wants the country run by lesbians and communists. If only they knew she was a half-Greek, half-Chinese girl from Mt Gravatt the game would REALLY be up. Fuck she's awesome, fuck I'm proud of her, and fuck people are stupid.

And on a completely unrelated tack: V8 Supercars, and the hundreds of munters who've written into the letters pages of organs such as Motorsport News to wail, bitch and moan about TeamVodafone aka Triple 8 Race Engineering And Online Casino taking a couple of lazy mill' off the hands of General Motors-Holden's for the honour of becoming a factory supported race team from next year on. Apparently this is THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Triple 8 are TRAITOROUS DOGS who should have to forfeit all their championship winnings; fans are organising mass boycotts of V8 events and merchandising sales; even driving past Triple 8 HQ and throwing eggs at them for all I know. Even Ford themselves are getting in on the act, deliberately targeting Triple 8 - the only team who can possibly deliver them a championship this year - as 'TR888ERS' in a highly ingenuous marketing campaign at the recent Ipswich (where else?) V8s.

Now, lets say you run a race team. As it happens, you used to run the GM factory team in UK touring cars, but then you came down here and started running a team of Fords in the V8 Supercars. For a while Ford slung you some cash for the privilege, but were constantly pissing and moaning about you not painting the cars blue (on account of your very very red sponsors) and eventually pulled all the funding two years ago for that reason. Then the only other manufacturer in the closed shop, a little bored with getting its arse handed to it by your de-logoed Falcons, offers to make you a factory supported race team again, which is pretty much the reason for your existence. What do you do?

Apparently, if you're the Cletuses who read Motorsport News, you say no and go broke instead. Because Triple 8 should be LOYAL TO FORD!!!! Despite the fact Ford currently support them to the tune of slightly discounted prices for headlights and other Falcon bits used on the cars. (There's only about thirty-odd parts interchangeable between a roadgoing Falcon and a Bathurst one.) That's it. Nup, Triple 8 should give up financial security, new customer opportunities with teams like Paul Morris Motorsport, and huge sponsorship opportunities as well, because a bunch of snaggle-toothed bogans bought TeamVodafone jackets with 'Lowndes' and 'Ford' on them and they might cry if the smiley faced arseclown starts winning races in a taxi with a Holden badge on it instead. Like he did for the first half of his career.

Stupid, stupid, stupid people. Hate 'em. Fucking hate 'em.

I've just been told I'm only angry because I'm an Aries and I can't get away from anger. Unfortunately this also makes me angry because my default position on astrologers is standing, usually on their throats. And this doesn't do much to disprove the girl in question's theory.

Aaaaarrrrghhhh.

The Doctor is OUT.