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.

Alarms, sirens, fire trucks, car crashes, drizzle... a typical Wednesday afternoon on the mean streets of D-town

It wasn't a fire drill. That much you could tell by two factoids: one, it was 4.10pm in the afternoon, not exactly prime scheduling for OH&S brainfarts; and two, we had one of them last week. That and the burning smell from the stairwell. We bailed, following the instructions of our fire warden to a tee and LEAVING EVERYTHING BEHIND. Well I went back for my iPod, keys and wallet, and subsequently wished I'd grabbed my laptop. And an umbrella. And a sandwich.

It wasn't a fire drill, it was a real fire. Which meant it was probably workmen fucking something up, and was. We weren't likely to get back in any time soon, said the fire warden from the third floor. He didn't look like he was bluffing. Fire trucks, sirens, alarms, the whole deal. So I decided to fuck off home and come back to collect my stuff later, when I headed out to pick up Monster v1.0 aka Dr No from his grandma's around half five.

Never made it.

State Highway 1 runs north-south through Dunedin on parallel multi-lane one-way streets. South of the CBD and the railway station, a flyover bridge peels off on the perpendicular, crossing the railyards to link up with Portsmouth Drive, which leads around the harbour basin. Keep on it and you'll end up (eventually) at the very tip of Otago Peninsula with albatrosses crapping on your rental car. Albatross crap from 100 yards up can make a decent mess of a rental car.
I wasn't headed to the peninsula, but Portsmouth Drive avoids a lot of traffic lights on Andersons Bay Road. (Yes they have them in Dunedin.) In persistent Spring drizzle I rolled up the on-ramp towards the give-way onto the bridge, glanced at the traffic on the bridge to my right - registering the complete lack thereof - and proceeded.

To find a 2004 Holden Vectra CD Hatch giving way to ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING filling my View Ahead.

There isn't much to do in situations like that. As the cars roll to a halt like cue balls in a high school physics demonstration and the world goes very quiet, the realisation hits. You fucked up. Yes, Captain Muppet was giving way to nothing, and no, you can't assume that just because you're capable of manoeuvering a motor vehicle through traffic in a reasonable and timely fashion that all other licence holders can. And yes, you'd better hope that it's an old grandma and not the loose forward trio from the Otago Highlanders that you've just punted halfway to Portsmouth Drive.

Nup. It was... a little bloke from a smash repair place. Youngish, acne'd, apologetic. He signalled for me to wind down the window.

"Erm... we only just fixed this one, too!"

The impact ripped the entire front clip off the Astra, the towbar on the Vectra neatly centre-punching through it into the radiator mounts. It fitted neatly into the back of the wagon. I wondered if GM Europe product planners had ever envisaged designing that functionality into the thing in the first place.
Some fairly hideous noises started grinding out of the engine as we rolled over the bridge and down the off-ramp - the smash repair place was only a few hundred metres from the bridge, wonder how often their jobs duplicate themselves - so I killed the engine on the final approach.

So as it turned out, the giving-way-to-nobody specialist at the wheel of the Vectra had been a middle-aged Chinese lady test-driving her car after having been repaired after the LAST rear-ender she'd been in. Hmmm. Details were exchanged, insurance agencies were called, and budget brand bourbon-and-cokes were broken out - it was knock off time by now for the boys out the back. At which point I finally concluded my phone wasn't in my pocket, hadn't been flung around the cabin in the impact, and hadn't dematerialized spontaneously for want of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon.

Nope. It'd probably fallen out on the road when I'd been hauling bits of Astra around the place.

One soggy jog onto the bridge, there was my phone. Neatly deposited in the right-hand wheeltrack of the on-ramp, and considerably more second-hand than it'd been the last I'd seen it. Its fate couldn't have been more obvious even if it'd had Warner Brothers cartoon wheelprints across it. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. Which might explain why there are no informative and yet ironic pictures of munted Astra wagons in this account.

That left just one more call to make on the smash repairer's phone, as the staff cracked Diesels ($18 a dozen from the local bottle-o) and chewed over the day's work. Dr Y phone home.

"Hey babe... do you reckon you could do me a favour? Could you pick up Dr No from grandma's?"

"Yeah, I can probably..."

"...And while you're at it can you come pick me up too?"

Meanwhile, back at the department, they'd let everyone back in.
Barely five minutes after I'd left.

The Doctor is OUT. Of the doghouse. At last.