Ten years gone

We begin, uncharacteristically, with gratuitous self-reference:

"Okay, so they’d renovated the function room. Okay, so the décor was markedly less vomitiferous and the carpet didn’t look like it’d been salvaged from the set of Don’s Party. But it was still the Bowlo, dammit. There were still dead things living in the beer lines and the bistro’s vol-au-vaunts were still made from animal entrails and vulcanized rubber. As ten year high school reunions went, it had been pretty run-of-the-mill. Of course, having attended none before or since my own, I’m basing my frame of reference solely on the acclaimed Hollywood documentaries Grosse Point Blank and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, but the fact that McCarthy and I didn’t get to (a) turn up in a thunderous Corvette with Fabulous Hair or (b) blow up a convenience store in a gun battle with a disfigured midget hitman meant that our own reunion was never going to cut it by comparison."

- In The Worst Possible Taste, 'The Parable of Glenn McGrath's Haircut'

The boys from Gasket were one-up on us, though. At least they got a ten year high school reunion. With the signature half-arsedness that characterized our year, noone could be bothered organizing one. There was, I'm told, an eleven year reunion, basically organized by and for the girls who'd hung around and bred with locals (cue Tex Perkins and the Dark Horses' 'You'll Do'). Organization went as far as putting an ad in the local paper. World of Bollocks Rural Correspondent AJ got an invite. I'm led to believe not even he could be arsed with it.

But bollocks to that, because there's only two reasons anyone actually wants to go to their ten year high school reunion. One, to laugh at the crappy lives the wankers you hated ended up making for themselves; and two, to try and cop off with the hot chick(s) from your year who weren't ever having a bar of you whilst In Uniform. And if that sort of miserable, small-minded shite is still motivating you a decade or more after leaving school, for fuck's sake get a hobby.

Like, erm, writing f'rinstance.

Truth is, we didn't really need any high school reunions. We had one, of the impromptu variety at least. Up until about five years ago, every year after we graduated and (mostly) left the area, at the Pacific Hotel in Yamba on Christmas Eve, for some strange reason either to do with the quantum strangeness of the universe or the wish to get out of the house and away from our families, there would be half our year, catching up over a few schooners. Usually the interesting half, at least. The half with the hot chicks. The other traditional school reunion - because most of my best mates are my oldest mates - is the Boxing Day BBQ, where it remains tradition to gather at the Yobbo Beach House to imbibe, talk bollocks, sacrifice burnt offerings to the gods, cast aspersions on the character, cognitive abilities and/or parentage of one Richard Ponting of Mowbray, Launceston, and then once the heat is gone from the day, bust out the prehistoric bat and the scientifically taped-up tennis balls for backyard (actually front-yard-of-neighbours-and-mostly-on-the-road) cricket, as discussed in previous media commitments.

And so this is Christmas. And has been for years. Sadly, not for much longer. The Yobbo Beach House, the only permanent sort of home I've known, will probably be retired from active duty (read 'filled with other people') by next Boxing Day. It's a big, rambling, two story place hidden amongst towering casuarinas, palms, paperbacks and the odd Moreton Bay fig, all of which were seedlings when my folks began building the place 35 years ago. (You can tell our place from aerial photos, it's the only house you can't find.) All of which means it's now getting well beyond their repair-and-maintenance capabilities, as it was always going to be eventually with advancing age and wear and tear. So this is probably the last Christmas here at the YBH, and the last Boxing Day BBQ (which, by our usual organizational logic, will be on the 27th. Don't ask.) But the Boxing Day BBQ will continue. Somewhere. Wherever there is beer to be drank, sausages to be incinerated, and cricket to be eviscerated (by word or by deed), you will find us. For we are the Pissheads of the Boxing Day BBQ. We are legion. And we are legend.

And we're coming to the Gabba on the 28th to shout rude things at Victorians. Be warned. Especially you fucking Victorians.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Dirty tramps get sprung

There are many, many reasons why being a kid today is palpably more shit than it was in my day, or in your day, or in your old man's day, or in pretty much any day you could name that wasn't the Industrial Revolution when being a kid largely involved being sent down t' pit for tuppence a millennia with nowt to eat but a cup of cold sick with a pube in it and when we came home after 25 1/2 hour shift to hole in t' road with wet newspaper over't we had to lick road clean wi' tongue and our Dad would thrash us to death with a broken bottle etc etc etc.

That minor discomfort aside, being a kid now sucks more than at any stage in the past fifty years. Because people are always THINKING about you. 'Oh won't somebody think of the children?' will howl a veritable battalion of pious screeching mavens, and yet that's all people - punishing, straightening, gimlet-eyed anti-fun people - seem to be able to do. Kids these days might get iPods and designer smack but they also have to put up with milquetoast bullshit the likes of which had never even been heard of ten years ago. Time out. Naughty steps. Peanut allergies. Jesus Christ, whatever happened to sorting out your differences behind the bike shed and still having time to get in a quick game of backyard tackle footy before Mum saw the state of your school gear and kicked your arse from here to Christmas.

Eventually, though, things reach a tipping point. Eventually, society reaches a Rubicon, a point beyond which there can be no turning back.

People of the World (of Bollocks), we have reached that sorry, sick day. We have reached that point of no return. And it is called Springfree™.


Designed by gimlet-eyed God-bothering Cantab fun police, Springfree claims to be the world's first springless trampoline, and as such, the world's first completely safe trampoline. No rusty springs, no rotting eyelet hooks, no exposed bare steel frame. Netting to catch the offspring before they spring off. Padding on every available surface. In short, no possible way for your darling little angels to hurt themselves in any way, lest they take in the Nerf bats and try to go each other UFC styles.

I think you can see where I'm going here.

WHAT

THE FUCK

IS THE

FUCKING

POINT

OF THAT.

This thing absolutely fucking horrifies me on multiple levels, two of which I'd like to shout at you about here. The first is the most obvious, to me at least. And it's a serious point. If kids can't hurt themselves, how the hell are they meant to learn what's safe and what's not?

Busted, rusted, verging-on-collapse trampolines - of which there was one in every Australian backyard by some form of legislative writ possibly dating back to Hawkey's first term, or maybe even No Pants Fraser - taught the nation's youngsters a lot of very valuable lessons. Primarily about risk assessment, hazard mitigation and accident avoidance. Just as sure as you knew not to ride your bike off stormwater drains because it'd cause you significant injury, or into the surf at the beach because your dad would, you knew, because you learned pretty quickly, what not to do on a trampoline. You KNEW not to bounce on the sides because you'd fly off into the paperbark trees. You KNEW to stay away from the springs, because down that path lay significant groinal trauma, and detaching one's prepubescent scrotum from a partially distended trampoline spring is not an experience that one should need to take into adolescence with them. You KNEW to stop doing drop-in bombs off the overhanging tree-branch after reaching your teens because touching down on the bricks underneath is not the kind of surprise your kidneys like to have. You KNEW not to look up the dress of your older cousin's cute best friend when she came over for a bounce during Xmas hols, because you'd get slapped, regardless of whether it was totally worth it or not, which it was. And you KNEW not to double-bounce your little brother into the stratosphere such that on his return to Earth he plummetted into the frame head-first, because claret would ensue, and you'd inevitably get unfairly blamed for his lack of spatial awareness, and/or consciousness.

In short, you knew how to identify hazards in your environment - like your parents, after pitching your bro into the undergrowth - and mitigate them - by running the fuck away and hiding at your mate's place. How the hell are kids going to get that sort of real-life training with this confection of unmitigated arse? Make no mistake, people, Springfree is child abuse. It's sending your children out into the world without the proper training, instruction or experience to deal with it. The real world isn't fucking 'Springfree', people. If it was a trampoline, it'd be a rotted old piece of shite with no pads, a collapsing frame, and rusty springs laced with tetanus, scrapie and TEH AIDS. That's right, parents. Buying this unmitigated pile of driftnet-lined arse is akin to INJECTING YOUR CHILDREN DIRECTLY WITH THE HIV-1 VIRUS.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like responsible parenting to me.

But secondly, and far more importantly... I don't see how the fuck anyone is supposed to use this bastardized whitebait net for the most important role the backyard trampoline is pressed into, later in its life, as the kids start growing into teens and the grass starts growing around the long-abandoned frame-base of the tramp. That is, as backstop and automatic wickie for the all important World Series of Backyard Cricket. Every backyard cricketer knows that if personnel are limiting, you don't waste fielders on wicket-keeping. It's a shit gig anyway, standing at the back and collecting all the crap other people miss. You're telling me the goalkeepers in football get all the roots? Caddies in golf? No. Any gig where you can be replaced by a wall, a garage door, your Mum's camellias or, as world's best practice, an old rectangular trampoline tipped on its side and offset slightly from the stumps to account for right-handers batting on off stump (which, being a wheelie bin, was technically also middle and leg), is a pointless and thankless gig not worth doing by anyone. Even Gilly. Even Havock.

And yet these child abusers from the University of C*nterbury want to take that experience away from kids, and force them to crouch ad nauseum over a stinking wheelie bin in the middle of summer, miserably watching and waiting as their ex-grade cricketer mate tonks their other ex-grade mate's appalling excuse for leg spin over cow corner and into the neighbours' veggie patch.

To which there are only two rational responses.

One, set fire to the Springfree factory. The address is on their website. Better burn down UCanty as well, just to be certain.

and

Two. Go buy a proper (i.e. properly broken) old trampoline.

And a bag of $2 shop tennis balls.

And a multi-pack of insulating tape from Bunnings.

Apply (c) carefully to one side of (b).

Bring self on to bowl from the Southern or Garden Shed End.

Bowl fast, seam upright.

Wipe smile off face of ex-grade cricketer mate by swinging one in from three feet outside off and castling leg.

Then go raid the old man's beer fridge, because you can, because you're all old enough. If not quite old enough to know better.

I love Christmas.


The Doctor is OUT.

Random fragments

I have a pretty shit phone. It's not an iPhone, so at least I'm not one of you weird sick Pod People who think it's entirely appropriate to drop a grand on something which will probably just get run over by some fkn muppet the next time you have a minor traffic incident. It has Bluetooth, but only version 1 which is less use than the Liberal Party of Australia. It has a camera, but that's even more desperately shit than the aforementioned. However, even a shit camera is better than none. And with that by way of setting the scene (thanks v. much HG Nelson) here are a bunch of Random Fragments of Yobbo Life as captured by a crappy old Panasonic X70 bought off the interweb and subtitled by a man drinking a beer.


Te Reo Maori is the official second language of New Zealand. You can answer questions in University exams in it if you want. Personally I have to admit to being cynical about the practical utility of a language developed by a seafaring island warrior people for modern, technologically confronting Western life.

I now stand corrected. Te Reo Maori's fucken tops.


Beer. It's good. Particularly random, obscure, delicious, crystal-clear German pilsners deposited on a pallet in the middle of a local supermarket for $45 a case. That's the kind of bargain-hunting win we like to celebrate here at the World of Bollocks.

Bit of a tribute to German precision, this, with the Tucher Pils reclining on the nearest available flat surface - that being the boot of our Audi A4 2.6, which was the best four grand I've spent on a car in the history of spending four grand on cars. It's fucken tops too.


Was markedly less so last month when some muppet reversed into it at an intersection, for reasons known only to herself, however.

Still, all good now.








Got the Audi the week after Bathurst. I know this because it was in a post-Bathurst hungover stupor I received the news our Astra had been written off in our last traffic bingle, two weeks before the Sunday of the Great Race. This, more happily, was one of the 'Before' shots from that monstrous day of competitive drinking and bingeing on low budget barbequed animal extract. I still involuntarily shiver when anyone mentions safety cars.

This was the view from the lads' place we watched the race at, up on the ridge overlooking St Clair Beach in Dunedin. I can see my house from here. Not very well but. I did say it was a shit phone.


Tried one of these for Beeso, since he rates them so. In the process forgetting (a) I'd already tried them several summer seasons ago and (b) they were and remain sickly-sweet confections of arse; a heady confection of ginger, bush honey, cloves and something which crawled up the arse of the head brewer and died. Recommended for cough medicine aficionados and people who don't like beer. See also Radler, Monteiths.


Movember, which has just been completed by our AWSM TEAM OF AWSM AWSMNESS the Magnum PI All Stars, saw the first occasion upon which I've actually had to purchase shaving cream in approximately five years.








It wasn't the worst of looks in the end. Though the Speights 'Duck Shooting Season 2009' camo cap (which I choose to wear ironically) perhaps doesn't go spectacularly well with the NSW Country Origin jumper.







Still, you gotta dress up right for the big occasions on the social calendar. Like test cricket at the University Oval. Best sustained five days of test cricket since the Aussies and the Saffers at the SCG last Jan, IMO. And a nail-biting finish to boot.




















Five dollar plastic bots of Speights I could have done without though. Bastards.











Went to Moeraki last week for our work Xmas lunch. It's a little fishing village about an hour north of D-town, not too dissimilar to the sort of town I grew up in. Nice spot. We went there for Fleur's Place, a famous seafooderie renown by foodies, cuisiniers, critics and punishing food-porn addicts alike. Food was excellent, view was likewise. A laptop and mobile broadband, and you could even call it your office, should you be so lucky as to call the South Island your office...

Which is another topic entirely, but we'll leave that discussion until after tomorrow's job interview.


Lastly... is it just me, or is there some, erm, ambiguity to the interpretation of this headline?

...No?

Just me then?


Hmmm.




The Doctor is OUT.