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.