Men behaving badly, part one

Right, enough bleating about Stuff What Is Rooted. Back to what we do best here at WoB: bringing the stupid. And because we love a good roadtrip story here at WoB - or even a shit one - that's the stupid we choose to bring at this particular juncture. This is somewhere between In The Worst Possible Taste and Therbs' fknawsm ratsacking travel series; maybe a similar feel to the misadventures of Flange Gasket, but the following is grounded in something a touch closer to Actual Events. As we say in ITWPT, only the names (and faces) have been changed - and not particularly effectively - to protect the guilty. I give you part one of Men Behaving Badly: Dr Yobbo's Drunken and Pointless T20 Cricket Mission, December 2009.

__________________

I woke in pain. An arc of pain that corkscrewed from my right arm around my torso into my back and down my left side. It hurt to get up. It hurt to lie down. It hurt to think about how much it hurt, because it was all my own fucking fault. And I knew I’d do it again if I had the chance. Boxing Day Cricket comes but once a year, of course. The chance to settle some scores.

Jonty and I had been mates since we were three and a half, which coincidentally had been the age at which he’d first said he hated being called Jonty. We grew up in the same town, went to the same primary school and played together on the same busted-arse junior indoor cricket team who got our arses handed to us each and every week by the team from Norwood Island, a proper summer team who used us as cannon fodder to practice on during the winter. I think we won one game against the bastards in two or three years. We hated those smug, preening gits with their proper bats and their proper batting technique. Hated ‘em. Until we got to high school and they became some of our best mates.

That had been almost twenty years ago. Yesterday, we’d spent the day after Boxing Day the same way we’d spent Boxing Day: drinking beers at my folks’ place at the beach, making burnt offerings to the gods on the gas barbie, and sledging the fuck out of the Pakistanis, the Aussies, the commentary team and each other. Only change to program vs yesterday being we’d actually been sober enough while there was still light in the day to trundle out the wheelie bin, tape up the tennis balls and have a crack at Boxing Day backyard cricket. Which, as the name suggests, took place on Dec 27 in the street out the front of the olds’ place.

The taped-up tennis balls were the key. Scuffing up one side of a tennis ball will make it swing. Wrapping insulating tape tightly around one side of a tennis ball won’t just make it swing, it’ll make it hoop like a fucking bastard. Two or three lateral feet of movement over eighteen yards might seem excessive when you’re aiming at a wheelie bin, but when you’re playing against ex-grade cricketers like Aidan (or Jonty for that matter), former junior tennis aces like Nat or arsey fluke merchants like Smurf, when you’re playing in $5 Sydney FC thongs from the bargain bin at Rebel Sport, and when you’re quite monstrously pissed courtesy several days on the mineral turpentine over the Xmas period, you need all the help you can get.

“Right,” I said, “this won’t need the 'keeper.”

I said that for two reasons. Three, if you count me being a mouthy git. The primary reason I said it was because the last one had needed the keeper, and the keeper had been Found Wanting. Nat had edged one – a dolly, really – off a loopy outswinger and Aidan (or Big Ads, as we called him – largely because calling him Big Aids didn’t quite seem PC), at keeper, conspicuously failed to take the catch. It wasn’t because he had a beer in his hand – we were playing one-hand one-bounce for that, as per agreed ICC rules – it was because he was having an attack of Being A Bit Shit. The ball nutmegged him at pace, leaving him knock-kneed, toppling over and in danger of spilling his Uncle Ted as he turned to watch it shit off down the street to end up in the drain bordering the neighbours. I also said it because the last time I’d said it, I’d trundled in and bowled one two feet outside off which had scythed in, pitched nice and full, and cannoned off the right-hand corner of the wheelie bin, which was how Big Ads came to be impersonating a wicketkeeper instead of annoying us with his arsey leg-side stance and full array of shot. So yeah, let’s take the keeper out of the equation shall we? Nat had been in for a bit, he was getting annoying too, and we were all due for a refill. I turned at the top of my mark and began my run-up.

I have an unnecessarily long run-up for two reasons: one, Merv Hughes did, and he’s at least as ugly and ineffective as I am, and two, I need the exercise. However, this leaves one vulnerable to the perfectly-timed sledge. As demonstrated by Smurf, who sidled next to me as I jogged into my delivery stride and directed into my ear at the precise moment of release:

‘Cuntvag.’

The ball ended up at deep backward third slip, where Smurf’s new car was parked. Some form of justice. I ended up on the grass at silly mid off, giggling like an idiot.

Ah, good times. Which result in times like these, the regretful mornings after, when underused thirty-plus muscle groups get their chance to bleat and whinge about the abuses put to them in the name of fun, craic, settling old scores (in a very, very silly way) and working up a thirst. Which was put to good use across the rest of the afternoon, followed by the evening, when Greg turned up.

Greg was the reason we were having two Boxing Day BBQs. He was part of the original team – he and Ads were two of those Norwood bastards from back in the day, and we’d spent four drunken years as flatmates at UQ in the early Noughties – but he was stuck in the Hunter with his family for Christmas. Never fear, he said, he was going to jump a 6am flight out of Newcastle, get up to Brisbane and drive down (just the 4 hrs in holiday traffic) in time for Day 2 of festivities. Except DeathStar cancelled his flight, the pack of cuntvags (vadges?). Plan B. He got the bus to Sydney, flew to Brisbane and drove down. Arriving in record time, 3hrs 20 mins. And half an hour after everyone had gone home. Never mind, Jonty had left a six of Coopers Pale behind and those four Uncle Teds of Uncle Ads’ weren’t going to drink themselves after all…

So, yeah. Slightly second hand come the morning of December 28th. Which wasn’t a great thing, considering in two hours we were heading off on the highlight of the entire Xmas-New Year festival of stupidity – the Drunken and Pointless T20 Cricket Mission. Up to Brisbane for the domestic Twenty20 match between the Quoinslaaandaaaas and the Sphinctorians, hitting as many bars as possible before and after, crashing in all the luxury a dodgy Oaks apartment could provide, then road-tripping it back home next day.

Greg still had the same beat-up mid ‘90s Hyundai I’d told him not to buy at the start of his PhD, mainly because I’d been trying to get him to buy my old Subaru instead so I could fuck off to New Zealand with more than just my super-hot Kiwi girlfriend to hand, i.e. some hard currency. The Hundy had seen better days, and lots of ‘em, but it still worked. Much like its owner. Greg was three months from the end of his PhD, as he’d been for the past six, and his plans for the Hundy to last him the duration were just (if only just) going to make it. He coaxed the Hundy along the 25 kays from my folks place at the beach into town, through national park, cattle farms and canefields. We talked PhD crap. His project was fucked, his boss was being a cunt, he reckoned he had just about enough to write up but he kept having to deal with everyone else’s shit instead of his own stuff, and as for postdocs jobs he had no fucking idea. All as per schedule for that point in a PhD project.

Ads lived in a shiny new house on the outskirts of town with his wife and their year-old bub. It had more rooms than Windsor Castle and a larger TV than Kennedy Space Center. The creaky old AU Falcon wagon on the driveway brought the tone down a little, but you can’t have everything. Mr and Mrs Ads had been hosting the Smurfs over the post-Christmas period, who’d come down from the Goldie to catch up with the crew. Smurf hadn’t gone to school with us, but his wife Kris had. Greg and I had been culpable in them hooking up in the first place, it’d been at one of our legendarily dodgy house parties in St Lucia. Smurf, who for the record looked quite unlike a Smurf but had a surname that lent itself to phonetic bastardization along those lines, was a mate of Greg’s from first year, who became a mate of mine when I moved up there for postgrad; we’d had many, many weekends on the turps in his company on the Gold Coast, including several Big Days Out at Parklands Dog Track and a good few corporately-rorted mission to the Indy. He was a web developer by trade, a pisshead by profession, and a fucking champion. He greeted us at the door with a hug and a cold Uncle Ted. It was ten in the fucking morning. Then again that wasn’t an opening-wicket record for Smurf. Greg and I both remembered the Indy trip when the first cold bottle Heineken had been pressed against our still-sleeping faces at half-six. “You’re only getting fucking green can of evil [VB] on track,” he’d reminded us. Which was good enough logic for government work.

The wives regarded us carefully. It’d been many weeks in the planning, this particular ‘boys trip’ (as they insisted on calling it.) Not that it took weeks of planning. It was basically me saying on Arsebook ‘I’m going to the fucking cricket. Who’s coming with?’ Ads wasn’t drinking as he’d volunteered to do wheelwork for the mission. Despite being six foot thirteen and a man mountain, he reckoned he wasn’t up to the pace of the group when it came to beers – certainly not if the beer was the XXXX Gold we would be obliged to drink as of 6.45pm Queensland time. He was a late starter when it came to beer. We remembered having to teach him how to drink. When drinking from a bottle, don’t fellate the bottle so the air can’t escape and it foams over the top. When pouring from a keg, hold your glass at an angle, not on the vertical, unless you want to pour a beer with more head than Bert Newton. Then again, if it was scotch we were on, fuhgeddaboudit. He thrived on the stuff, powering on like a slightly recalcitrant two-stroke lawnmower. A fair big of belching and farting involved, but he’d keep going indefinitely. The XXL fluoro yellow high-vis vest from his day job – news cameraman for the local TV station – was sitting on the back seat, asking to be misappropriated. As the mission’s OH&S Operations Manager I thought it best to misappropriate it, at least for the mission of heading into town to pick up Jonty.

Jonty was staying with his folks, who were and seemingly had always been loaded. They had a superflash multi-level house on the riverfront which was, like south-east Queensland, permanently being renovated. Construction fencing lined the perimeter, necessitating Aidan having to do a 47 point turn to navigate the big white AU wagon around 180 degrees to enable escape. He ignored our suggestions of employing the handbrake and/or a shitload of throttle to get the tail around. To his credit, Jonty didn’t bat an eyelid when he answered the door to a bogan in a high-vis jacket, boardshorts, a Speights ‘Duck Season 2009’ camo cap and a mostly empty Tooheys Extra Dry in his paw. Jonty had known me for a very, very long time, and knew the established standards. He earned buckets of cash in IT in Sydney these days, and spent most of it clubbing and socializing. He lived in a trendy suburb, had artfully downbeat hipster friends and even more conceptual T-shirts than I did. Even so, deep down, he was still one of us. He was still Rural. Whether he wanted to be or not.





So that was the team: Aidan, Jonty, Smurf, Greg and Your Correspondent. Nat wasn't a starter, he had family commitments down the NSW coast (translation: he was sensible enough to scare up an alibi) but that still made an impressive raiding party. Five thirty-something men in a beat-up AU wagon for two days. Ambitious? Yes. Inadvisable? Probably. Immature? Well DUHHH. And fun? As sure as Jack Newton swims in circles…

________________

Part Two to follow. The Doctor is OUT.

The rant we had to have

World of Bollocks is usually lightweight crap, and rightly so. It's funnier that way. So I've been dancing around the idea of doing this particular post for a while, but kept opting out of it because, frankly, it's a rant, a bleat and a whinge. And it's funnier going off about the inherent shiteness of low-carb beers or poking Lily Allen fans with a stick.

The rant in question is the career, or lack thereof, that science provides. And the catalyst, finally, was Lindsay Tanner's recent PR-flack-penned op-ed piece on Failfax Digital, soliloquising about the joy and the beauty of science and how we need to get more kids into science, so to have more sciency postgrads for the employment market Going Forward.

To which I say: Fuck off we do. We need more postgrads in science like we need additional apertures in the face.

Let's do a thought experiment. (On second thoughts let's find a social scientist and punch them in the teeth for being part of the group of nimrods and fucktards that came up with the term 'thought experiment'.) Let's say there were, for instance, ten times as many electrical or plumbing apprenticeships than there were trade jobs for graduated apprentices to take up. Funded by the government, or industry-government partnerships, of course. Training ten times too many people, wasting years of their lives and millions of dollars in taxpayers money. You'd see outrage in the media, ministers being grilled on current affairs shows, public service mandarins being fired, the fucking works. You'd see apocalyptic fucking shitfire descend on any and all training institutes, technical colleges and government departments responsible for such a palpable waste of resources and of human capital.

You can see where I'm going with this, but let's go there anyway:

There are at any one time, at a rough count, ten times more PhD scholarships advertised than jobs for those PhD graduates - i.e. postdoctoral researchers - to go into. Every one of those PhD students has completed a 4 year undergraduate degree - usually BSc with first class honours - and have spent usually 4 years (plus or minus a year or two) in the lab, on government scholarship. So that's eight years of training, the last half of which have usually been funded by the government (or if you're in a more applied space, maybe industry) at $20-25K a year. Plus consumables for the actual project, of course. And what happens to the overwhelming majority of those PhD students? They leave science, because there's no jobs for them. They go off to become HR managers or sales reps or teach little kids how to read. Which is all lovely and noble of them, and most of them fall on their feet somehow, somewhere - but what was the fucking point in wasting years of their life and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer money training them to be scientists?

The reason, of course, is that PhD students are fucking cheap labour. A PhD student costs $25K a year, a grant-funded postdoctoral fellowship will cost a grant (depending on the country, the uni and the grant fund) $65Kish - plus overheads, which for most govt research grants are costed as a multiplier of salary, so you can effectively double the cost to the grant of having a postdoc. So who cares that you might need 4 PhD students to match the output of one properly trained postdoc, or that the fuel the research machine is burning is actually intelligent, analytical, highly-skilled, highly-trained humans? Certainly not the government, and certainly not the universities, for whom postgraduate student 'output' is rated as a KPI under their government funding. Basically, they get paid for churning out postgrads. It is the stated aim of the school to which my department belongs to have 10% of its students as postgrads, primarily PhDs, and most equivalent research-active organizational units at most universities in Australasia will state similar targets. I sincerely hope they fall short. It is never made clear to this hapless pack of cannon fodder that there is about as much chance of them making a long-term career out of research, or even academia, as there is of your average club cricketer doing a Dougie Bollinger and playing for Australia. And if they do make it, they'll be paid fuck all, will have no career stability to speak of and will generally have to work hours far in excess of those stated on their contract. In research, running is standing still, and standing still is plummetting backwards.

The market-driven capitalist response to that is that the needs of the market define whether there's jobs for these people. If there was a need for more R&D jobs we'd have more R&D jobs, if we needed more uni lecturers we'd have more uni lecturers. There's no unmet need for more research positions beyond postdoc level, says the model. Yeah, OK. I'm pragmatic enough to accept that. Science isn't the most important thing in the world to some people - like the two thirds of Australians who believe in angels for instance - and not everyone sees the truth, beauty and innate wonder of scientific research. The market might not need any more scientists - academic or research - than we already have.

Fine. So stop training people for jobs that don't fucking exist then.

The Doctor is OUT.

Help the aged

Since I moved to NZ, my Australia Day ritual has been pretty well established. Find an excuse to skive off work (annual leave being the tactic of last resort), track down some well-chilled Australian beer, don the green and gold, flick the TV to whichever sports channel is taking the one-day cricket from Adelaide, fire up the hand-cranked interweb, dial up Triple J's Hottest 100 and proceed to pour scorn on and vent invective at the demonstrably poor musical tastes of the Yoof of Austraya. This tradition goes back fifteen consecutive years to when I was actually a card-carrying member of the Yoof of Austraya, and yet still couldn't fathom why the fuck so many fellow Austrayan yoofs thought Zombie by the Cranberries was anything more than a funereal dirge howled by an amateur yodeller. The Hundred, in short, has always been less a barometer of alternative musical credence and popularity and more a fucking good giggle. Any music poll which features in its archives number ones of the calibre of 'Pretty Fly For A White Guy', 'Asshole' and 'That Song Fat Arse Lloydie Did For That Ford Territory Commercial' has all the credibility of Tony Abbott at a 'Girls Can Do Anything' campaign launch.

Still, there's troubling findings from the most recent countdown, and they have to do with this endlessly self-promoting merchandising multimedia powerhouse called Triple J. Whose mission, as a Government broadcaster, used to be to promote Australian music for the furtherment of Australian youth culture. If that's the case what are all these fucking Pommy acts doing in the countdown? Half the top ten was taken up by acts who were pasty and had bad teeth and complained about the weather constantly. And that was just the never-ending train-wreck interview with Lily Allen. And sure, while hanging shit on Pommy Gaga is entertaining, as well as on those who seem to think the Cockney Britney is some sort of lyrical genius rather than just being Mike Skinner from the Streets in a floral frock, that doesn't solve the Issue at Hand. That being, Triple J has killed Australian music.

Okay, okay. Slightly leading statement. Australian music is doing a'ight, taking the minor cheese on offer ref. the podium. The Hilltop Hoods stood the fuck up for Aussie hip hop (thanks v. much Scribe) in third place, with possibly their worst single on record; and some Unearthed dance act took second, with possibly the worst single ever recorded. So the club acts and the yo-bro-peace-out-2-mah-homiez contingent are reprazentin'. Only one problem. Where are the bands? Rock, punk, garage, metal, fucking rockabilly skank for all I care. People with guitars and the intent to use them, in concordance with causing a disturbance of the piece. Where the fuck are they? Other than Bluejuice at #5 - who appear to be a Huey Lewis And The News covers band, based on 'Broken Leg' - nowhere. None. Not a fucking sausage.

Now at this point you might argue that Triple J aren't responsible for their audience's voting habits, which I would argue would make you an ignorant, hapless moron, as there is near-endless opportunity for the final makeup of the countdown to be finessed by Triple J, from the initial selection and rotation of the playlist to even choosing which songs make the list of 'most popular' tracks they make available to voters, as akin to a how-to-vote card as anything I've seen outside an election day polling booth. The inevitable conclusion is that Triple J aren't playing guitar bands anymore, and furthermore, aren't interested in doing so. And you could try and argue that music has moved on from guitar bands and that rock dinosaurs are reaching extinction. Which again would make you a congenital retard; the biggest live acts in the world are still guitar bands, and the overwhelming majority of Triple J Hottest 100 winners, including the last two before this year (Muse and Kings of Leon) were guitar bands. The biggest buzz out of the Big Day Out was a guitar band, Muse (OK they faff about with a bunch of electronic production, but they're still a guitar band) borrowing the lead singer of another guitar band, Nic Cester from Jet, to bash through a deafening show-stopper cover of 'Back In Black', the signature tune of the greatest guitar band in history, AC/DC. Meanwhile, in the countdown proper, Jet and Wolfmother both found themselves well out of the running and mired deep in the 70s. Where, you might argue, they are well suited. To which I would reply, fuck off smart arse I do the jokes around here. Powderfinger, perennial pointy-end-scarers, finished in mid-table obscurity with the lead single off their latest album, Fifty-Fifty Vulture Street And Odyssey No.5.

This all sounds like the incoherent disentitled rantings of a bitter middle-aged man who can see the writing on the wall ref. the remorseless march of time, namely his, in the direction of Away, and yet refuses to give the kids their radio station back. And yeah, it is. But there is a point here. There was a time when Triple J nurtured Australian bands, put them on heavy rotation, supported their tours, got them on festival lineups. It was called the 1990s. Count them off - you may need to take off your shoes and socks to do so - Powderfinger, You Am I, Regurgitator, Silverchair, Grinspoon, Spiderbait, The Living End, Magic Dirt, Eskimo Joe, Custard, Killing Heidi, Frenzal Rhomb (even though they got banned from the Jays until they 'grew up'), Skunkhour, The Cruel Sea, Machine Gun Fellatio, the Superjesus, TISM... and into the Noughties, the Vines, Jet, Faker and Wolfmother. Most of the '90s generation are now old and at retirement age; you can't rock out for the kids when yours are old enough to be listening to the Jays themselves. Unless you're Shihad of course, who will die and be cremated on stage. And this isn't a lament for how music was better in 'my day' - though it was, of course - but simply to point out the replacements for these guys aren't coming through. Beeso, arch-apologist for Pommy Gaga that he is, had a pertinent analogy - that of Sheffield Shield cricket, where aging pros seek to keep young hungry tyros out of the state sides in order to maintain their career and their earning opportunities well into their late 30s. And a glance down the lineup of this year's BDO seems on face value to confirm that - Powderfinger (first played on Triple J in 1994), Grinspoon (JJJ Unearthed winners 1995), Eskimo Joe (since 1999), Jet (since 2001), Magic Dirt (since forever) and a reformed Tumbleweed (since even longer than that). But the Bluejuices, Kisschasys, The Scares etc are still getting festival gigs, and it's not as though the JJJ playlist is swamped with tracks off any recent album from any of the above elder statesbands. In reality, the Jays are stacking 'em deep and selling 'em cheap; by filling their Australian content quota with unsigned, often unsignable acts through their various Unearthed initiatives, they score the same political points with their gummint masters for considerably less effort. No wonder the kids prefer the shine of Muse or Kasabian when the local alternative is a bunch of bogans from Lismore hacking away on their axes with nary a clue. And setting aside the new Grinspoon album, the Unearthed acts are usually pretty Amateur Hour as well.

So can the creeping death of the Australian alternative rock band (or punk band, or metal for that matter, since fuck all of either got played yesterday either) be pinned on Robbie Buck-style aging hipster tosspot music programmers deep in the bowels of Triple J's Ultimo HQ? Probably not. The creeping death of live music in Melbourne, thanks to fucking ridiculous liquor licensing laws which demand multiple seccies on duty any time someone plugs in a tatty old Les Paul copy or Stratocastoff, has a lot to do with it. Most of the above acts were either from the Melbourne scene or cut their teeth playing there. Sydney's scene might be making noise about opening more intimate venues for young performers to get a start, but the loss of landmarks like the Hopetoun and the Annandale (currently marking time) will take more to overcome than opening a few bijou hipster bars with a stool and a low wattage PA.

And that sucks. Because listening through to the sharp end of Hottest 100 and finding yourself actually saying the words 'Thank Christ, something decent and Australian. Hilltop Hoods' is a desperately grim experience.

The Doctor is OUT.

Youse all sound the same to me, ay

There are some God-awful accents in the world. Grating, braying offenses to the ear. They're generally regionally-specified, and you know them when you hear them. New Jersey. Birmingham. Victoria. None of these amount to the absolute worst accent in the world, of course; the worst accent in the world is the Hyundai Accent, as explained here by that nice Mr Clarkson. Closely followed by everyone in Invictus. Even the guy who was trying to do an Australian accent at the end of Point Break did a better South African accent than most of the Hollywood contingent in that.

The existence and emergence of new and different accents is an interesting model for how cultural evolution (and indeed any form of evolution) works. For many years, as recently as the mid 20th Century linguistics scholars - almost always tried to argue there was no regional differentiation of accents within Australasia, that is there is no definable Australian or NZ accent, or any sub-regional accents. This is clearly a confection of arse and a farrago of bullshit. As Alex Buzo demonstrated in several books on Australian and Australasian dialects, there's obvious differences even between the states of Australia, and we have a Southlander in the lab who speaks with the distinctive rolled 'R' reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, a marker of their particular accent (developed and maintained within the South Island of NZ. So much for no regional differentiation.) For reasons that escape me the NZ accent perennially wins awards for being the most 'pure' version of spoken English in the world. It's certainly been purified free of vowels. At last count they had one and a half.

Generally, when you come from this part of the world (i.e. what our beloved former PM Paul Keating once described as 'the arse end of'), if you make it BIG, people feel like you're one of us. A sense of ownership. Like you're representing them on the world stage, whether it's sporting, arts, politics or competitive eating. And that accent is part of the equation, to the point where newly-minted Hollywood stars of Antipodean extraction, who suddenly start turning up in media junkets for their latest fillums chatting in fluent SoCal rather than their true blue accent, get stuff thrown at them when they next step off the plane at Kingsford Smith. Even the likes of Nicole Kidman was parodied, pilloried and piss-taken for the stories of her employing a language coach specifically to reteach her Australian accent before coming back Down Under to visit. Anyone who loses their Australian accent while overseas is a sellout, a fraud, and (wait for it) everyone's favourite double-edged sword, un-Australian.

And it's not just we parochial Antipodeans that suspect and disrespect those with easily lost (or gained) accentual affectations. Former Middlesbrough FC manager Steve McClaren, after being given the arse as England coach following their disasterous Euro2008 qualifying (or lack thereof, in the process earning the nickname 'The Wally With The Brolly') campaign, toddled off to the Dutch leagues to coach FC Twente. Not five weeks later he was interviewed on Dutch TV prior to the club's Champions League outings with the most ridiculous comedy Dutch accent in history. And proceeded to have the absolute piss ripped out of him, again, by the Fleet Street red-tops. Because who the fuck loses the accent they've had all their life in five weeks, right? Sellout. Fraud. Un, erm, Yorkshirian.

Yeah, well I'd have agreed with all that. Till I went to a conference in Ghent, in darkest Belgium, in mid-to-late 2008, where everyone speaks Flemish Dutch, even when they're speaking English. One week later I was in London being asked why the fuck I was trying to sound like Goldmember all the fucking time. Was goede, yessh? Quite how it happened I have NFI because I think I spent most of the conference hanging out with chicks from Queensland but a heavy excess of Jupiler probably made some causative contribution.

It can happen, people. It can happen to the best of us.

Except in New Zealand. Not a fucking chance I'm picking up that load of shite. I've hung onto my Australian accent through thuck 'n' thun, and there's no way thet'll change.

Sweet as.

The Doctor is OUT, eh bro.

Monster Garage

Some people read Playboy for the articles. (Liars.) I watch Discovery Channel for the muscle car shows. Anything that involves ripping open an old-and-sagging '70s highway hero, gouging out the crap and broken bits and stuffing it full of race-engineered WIN is my kind of infotainment-oriented reality TV experience.

This appears to be genetic. For Xmas my eldest, world-renown as Monster v1.0, got a bunch of Bob the Builder Mega Bloks (what I'd have called Duplo as a kid) machines - Scoop, Muck and Dizzy, and Roley too, Lofty and Wendy, join the crew... erm sorry about that. Persistent earworm infection. He got a Scoop, a Roley, a Lofty and some sort of minor forklift character who noone can remember the name of. TradeMe.co.nz FTW. He also got a bunch of Pixar Cars Mega Bloks stuff, after staying with friends whose eldest had the whole set of characters (bastards.) And, once they'd all been played with, dismantled, remantled in much the same order, and crashed into each other at speed, there remained only one thing left to do.

Make MONSTER TRUCKS out of em.

I give you the Summer Collection from the Monster Truck Lab, Yobbo Skunkworks Custom Engineering Ltd. (Special Projects Manager: Chief Development Engineer Monster v1.0)



Starting materials: Doc Hudson, Tow Mater and the Lightning McQueen twins, in dire need of being OPTIMISED, if not FULLY SICKED.



The Lightning McQueen brothers, converted to all-terrain spec courtesy a pair of junked Caterpillar earthmoving trucks, looking schmick and looking for chicks. If not Chick Hicks. Heh heh. A little Cars humour for you there. That whistling sound is it sailing over your head. We'll just pretend that never happened and move on.



Doc Hudson, pimped to the max and rollin' on blingin' colour-matched dubs. I AM THE LAW.



Tow Mater, Top Fuel Dragster spec. Standing quarter mile in ten seconds flat. Unless he has to answer a roadside callout on the way. In which case he's next to useless as the rear wing gets in the way, but you get that on the big jobs.



The Yobbo Skunkworks Monster Truck Collection, Summer 2010.
See them at your local dealer...



... Hang on, the Chief Development Engineer doesn't like the shot. It's the lighting, and the sightlines, and the mood, and the vibe, and the ambience. Not the ambulance, that's out of shot (rolling on 22" dubs with a SUBWOOFAAA the size of an asteroid crater where the patients usually repose - from sick to FULLEH SIIIICK, one might say). No, no, this just doesn't work for him. And the revised towing-compliant package for Tow Mater isn't part of his 'vision'. Not at all. And he can't possibly work under these conditions, how can anyone creative be expected to endure this kind of...

Cue American Chopper style familial dummy-spit - stand up, point fingers, be shouty, throw chair, storm off, pause for editing. (And look out for our new reality show coming to Discovery Channel in April.)


The Doctor (and the Chief Development Engineer) are OUT.

No fidelity

NFI why the autoblogfeedthing didn't pick up this morning's craptastic rant about Marcos Ambrose and his barbequing habits. Possibly because it was controversial, even libellious. Possibly because it was shit. Anyhoo here it is.

Did something out of the ordinary the other day. I went into a shop and bought some music CDs. At this point I'd usually spiral off into one of our once-regular New Music Reviews but suffice to say all three albums - Wolfmother's Cosmic Egg, Jet's Shaka Rock and the self-titled debut album (feeling very Triple M back-announce all of a sudden) from stellar rock bastard supergroup Them Crooked Vultures - are decent. Cosmic Egg takes one look at Sophomore Album Theory (i.e. second albums are always rubbish) and does a big poo on it, as it's the equal if not better than Wolfmother's debut, broadening their Zep-Purple-Sabbath influences to stuff like Muse and the White Stripes. Them Crooked Vultures is as FUCKING AWESOME as you'd expect a group made up of JPJ, Super Dave Grohl and the ranga from Queens of the Stone Age to be, and then some - there's stuff in there that sounds like Cream doing Disraeli Gears (eg Scumbag Blues), other stuff sounds like the WORLD IS COMING TO AN END. Often in the same song (to wit, Noone Loves Me & Neither Do I). And Shaka Rock... is a'ight. Undercover Music News were banging on about this album being the death of Jet because it took so long to come out. It's probably more because it's not as good as their last two. That said, it's comfortably in the top three albums I've bought this year. And that's saying a lot. About my music buying habits mostly.

However, going into a shop and buying some CDs is not only a bit out of the ordinary for me, it seems, but for everyone in the entire world, judging by the last two music stores I've set foot in - a Sanity in Australia and a Marbecks (pretty much the same except they do books too) in NZ. Each had The Most Pathetic Range of new music CDs you could possibly imagine - basically one wall - outnumbered at least three to one by their DVD shelving. For some bands there were more T-shirts on sale than CDs. Point of sale advertising was non-existent. This, children, is the post-iTunes music store: all the range of an Austereo playlist, with equally as much listening pleasure.

For that, Mr Jobs, fuck ya. For iTunes has killed the music store stone fucking dead. Not the torrent sites, because the majority of people pay for music, and didn't move their music purchasing online until iTunes did it for them. And I, for one, loved the music store. Even the crap, commercial ones. They usually had more listening posts, for starters. I suspect - and I bloody well hope - that the specialist places, the Rocking Horses and Red Eyes and Utopias of the world which took from me much of my late teens' and early twenties' disposable income and exchanged it for hundreds of CDs full of untrammelled win - will still have a market, even if it comes to be in second-hand discs and vinyl. And iTunes is most certainly convenient. But to paraphrase the Dead Kennedys, while we have been given convenience, the record store has been given death.

The other great victim of iTunes has been the radio station, as discussed in previous media commitments here and elsewhere around the Hottest 100 Of All Time - which brings us to Triple J. Although Triple J has more of a cultural development element to their corporate mission - as set by their governmental paylords - than the commercial networks (eg Austereo's which, mostly deservedly, are haemorrhaging) and can sidestep some of the need for out-and-out ratings, if noone's listening, questions still get asked. Add to that the degree to which the tail is wagging the dog at Triple J in terms of playlist selection, or even minor stuff like which out of the thousands of tracks they play each year get shortlisted onto their list of 'all the major tracks we've played this year' (potential for subjective rortage much?) around Hottest 100 time. Or maybe it's just me cracking the shits with the muppets who drive the bus at the Jays because this '80s electropop revival should have started and ended in about 2004 with the Dandy Warhols' We Used To Be Friends off that shit album with the banana on it. It was shit in the '80s, it's shit now. What next? Bringing back '80s poodle metal with drummers in rotating cages and more powder than a northern hemisphere ski season? Nothing about the '80s was worth keeping, retaining, or revisiting. Not the fashions, not the movies, not the cars, and definitely not the music. It. Was. Shit. I know. Unlike most of these tweenie fucks who are buying the stuff, I Was There.

Anyway, fuck 'em. Voted for a bunch of Wolfmother and Them Crooked Vultures tracks. The '80s were shit. The '70s, though...

The Doctor is OUT.

Corporate whore of the week

...Goes to former V8 Supercar pedaller Marcos Ambrose, who these days drives a Toyota Camry. No, not as a cab driver. Well sorta. He's in NASCAR. The balding, chippy Taswegian, best remembered in NZ as that little wanker Their Murph almost punched out at Bathurst that time, has made these pages previously on account of his desperate attempts to crank up his Australian accent to Croc Dundee proportions in order to seem more interesting and marketable in the US. And also because he's a fucktard. Nothing seems to have changed since he moved to Toyota and JTG Daugherty Racing, owned by former NBA 'star' (i.e. you've never heard of the bastard and neither have I) and ESPN analyst (i.e. person who sits behind desk in studio performing no analysis whatsover) Brad Daugherty: he's still a fucking embarrassment to his nation. Thankfully his nation is Tasmania and we can disclaim all responsibility for the little floater.

Anyhoo, Mar-Cose (as the Septics insist on pronouncing him) has a new sponsorship gig. Which is where he really excels. He might be a bit shit at the go-fast turn-left caper, dribbling home 18th in last year's title chase, but he's world's-best-practice at the corporate whoring. As demonstrated by the following barely-retouched press release offered as news by crash.net (to be fair, it's a slow news day/week/month in motorsport):

New backing announced for Marcos Ambrose's NASCAR Sprint Cup programme

JTG Daugherty Racing has announced Bush Brothers and Company's Bush's Baked Beans® brand as a primary sponsor of Marcos Ambrose and the #47 Toyota team for five primary races in the 2010 NASCAR season.

The company will also serve as an associate sponsor during the upcoming campaign.

“We are proud to enter our ninth season as partners with JTG Daugherty Racing and thrilled to have Marcos as our driver,” said Ray Kielarowski, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Bush Brothers and Company. “We look forward to kicking off the new season at the track and sharing the Winner's Circle with him in 2010.”

Bush's Baked Beans® will be positioned on Ambrose's #47 Toyota's hood for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series events at Talladega Superspeedway on April 25, Richmond International Raceway on May 1, Bristol Motor Speedway on August 21, New Hampshire Motor Speedway on September 19 and Dover International Speedway on September 26.

Ambrose, who finished 18th in the championship standings, was pleased to hear the news.

“This is really great news,” Ambrose said. “I've always been a big fan of Bush's Baked Beans®. Because I love the outdoors, I really enjoying firing up the grill with my family and we always include Bush's Baked Beans® as a side item after we finish up grilling with Kingsford® Charcoal. It doesn't matter if we are at home or at the track, grilling is a great experience all season long.”


Oh. For. Fuck's. Sake.

Now, I know the USAnians have a rep for being, let's be charitable, a bit on the gullible side. Easily led. Marketing-compliant. Thick as two short planks. But Jesus suffering fuck, surely nobody in the great United States actually believes this smug little midget actually IS 'a big fan of Bush's Baked Beans®'? Or takes it fucking BBQing with his family? Along with his Designated Sponsor's Brand of Grilling Charcoal®? Let me tell you what Mar-Cose Ambrose does when he goes BBQing. He does what every other bastard does. He takes all his mates, an Esky full of piss - Boag's, because he's from Launceston, for his sins - and half a cow down to the park, where the animal extract goes on the council hotplates, the beers go in his mates, and the ICC's laws regarding one-hand-one-bounce are enforced rigorously (possibly even to Daryl Harper standards of officiating.) He doesn't 'grill', he doesn't use charcoal, he doesn't use baked beans as a 'side', and he certainly doesn't tell the media all about it in professionally crafted press releases with all the sponsors' names emphasized. Because if he did, as pointed out by all non-cretinous non-un-Australian commenters here, he'd have to hand his passport back because he would be the most UN-AUSTRALIAN SELLOUT IN THE HISTORY OF COMPLETE FUCKING UN-AUSTRALIAN SELLOUTS. Yes, even counting those cricketers who played for England. And Clive James.

And furthermore, 'press release' is an oxymoron.

The Doctor is OUT.

Ain't got no body

Your Correspondent is on record somewhere (possibly everywhere) as saying low-carb beers are a bucket of toss. Style over substance. Real beer isn't actually that high in carbs, apart from peat-dense stouts like Guinness, so low-carb beers are really just a synonym for Marketing Wank. Subtract the carbs and you basically subtract the malty, estery residues of brewing that are everything to do with flavour, body and mouthfeel. Hence why most low-carb beers (in particular the US 'Lights', named for dietary considerations not alcohol content) are thinner than Amy Winehouse and taste equally as dried-up and skanky.

That said, I've been trying a new low-carb ale. As agreed, this is usually a recipe for fail frosted with arse. The brew is Speights Traverse from NZ's leading brewer Speights (having their headquarters here in Dunedin has nothing do to with that statement), sibling to their Summit golden lager which came out a year or so ago and saw the Lion Nathan owned concern moving away from their traditional of making old-man beers like Old Dark and Distinction Ale (aside from their flagship Gold Medal Ale, NZ's number one selling beer) to aiming for the Yoof Market. Lots of advertising leveraging the synergy of Speights' Otago base and the adventure playgrounds of central Otago and the Southern Alps; Summit's tag line being 'Don't mess with nature', clearly parking the marketing bus smack bang in that sort of territory. (Like all beer ads it's a good one, because they've spent money on thinking it up.)

Same again with their new low-carb effort Traverse, aiming for the body-conscious gent with their tag line 'Only carry what you need' (see what they did there? Cos it's half the carbs. And it's called Traverse, leveraging all that X-treme mountainy shit. MARKETING GENIARSE.) Now WoB isn't TOBP - not that nearly enough decent Kiwi beers make it to Steve's page, which isn't that surprising given some bastard parked the Pacific Ocean in the way - so our beer reviews extend as far as saying the following: It's decent. Not as sweet as Summit - so Beeso will be disappointed - and no body to speak of but it's pretty to look at, like Miranda Kerr. Nice mouthfeel. Ditto. Possibly.

But what's the point? As with last time, this is style over substance, pretense over contents. Traverse - and the other 'value added premium branded' low-carb beers like Pure Blonde or Hahn Super Dry - are more expensive than their usual label stablemates. Traverse, on the day I bought it at $19 a dozen, stacked against $17 for Summit and $15 for Speights (as the Gold Medal Ale is usually known.) A perfect example of what a branding guru once described to me (and a bunch of other peeps in a seminar, I wasn't that special) as the intent and the ideal of all branding exercises: getting people to pay more for less. In this case, less carbs, less body, and less flavour. Less beer, in short.

And, to be fair, the Kiwis (or at least the NZ arm of Lion Nathan) usually do this sort of thing better than most. The best midstrength around at the moment is Steinlager Edge - not yet in Australia - but it's 3.5% alcohol, lower(ish) carbs, and actually has taste. Compare that to something like Peroni Leggera, which is aimed at the same market but instead tastes almost exactly as though someone's poured Nastro Azzurro into a stubbie to two-thirds full and topped the bastard off with water. Given the carb and alcohol count it may well be the case. Bloody Italians. The rest of them are equally nasty. All the Blondes are skanky. Pure, Platinum, Bondi, Jackie O. There hasn't been a good low carb beer brewed anywhere, ever. And there never will be, because it's like trying to make fat-free chocolate, or friction-free sex. You can't take out the key ingredient and expect to make the thing appealing.

So in summary. Low carb beers: they don't taste very nice and they make two fifths of fuck all difference to the size of your gut. Buy them if you are stupid. The end.

The Doctor is OUT to grab the last Summit before DMDY does.

While my architect gently weeps

SAAB are out of the car business. General Motors, now majority-owned by the US Government and looking to either maximize or divulge themselves of their non-performing Euro investments (to wit the long-running and eventually-binned attempt to sell Vauxhall-Opel) have decided to wind up the Other Swedish Carmaker, after trying to flog the brand for the past year and having fielded sales interest from the likes of Koenigseggsegg (makers of incredibly rare and ferociously powerful bespoke supercars, like this one what tried to kill Top Gear's Stig), Dutchie sportscar makers Spyker, various Swedish industrialists and even geriatric F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone. Despite the quality of the bids, or probably because of them, GM have pulled the pin. So SAAB are no more.

That sound you can hear is every architect, dentist and marketing 'creative' you know (and I do hope you know very few) sobbing into their short blacks.

SAAB are no more because they deserve as much. They were always cars for tossers. People who should be driving Volvos, given their disinterest in actual driving - why else buy a car purely on safety credentials unless you're no good at driving and expecting to crash - but, being cretinously obsessed with image, are desperately keen to show how out-there, cutting-edge and tangential-to-the-mainstream they are. People who, in a previous generation, would have bought Citroens - and probably will have to again. Designers. Creatives. Public relations types. People who wear black skivvies and square-rimmed glasses. People for whom appearing to 'think different' (to nick an old Apple tag-line) is much more important than actually having any novel ideas. Marketing-led. Style over substance. Sell the sizzle not the steak. Leverage the synergy and pick the low hanging fruit, going forward.

Wankers, basically.

All of this is compounded by the fact that they're actually not very good cars. Sure, they're idiosyncratic, like a lot of European cars. Some Euro cars are idiosyncratic in a cool way, like the way Alfa Romeo prioritizes going around corners over connecting the electrics up properly. Volvos, these days, are almost cool, in a distressed Baltic pine bookshelf from Ikea sort of way. They're still bought by the same lot of miserable gits who can't drive, but at least the company is trying. SAAB never tried. They plugged a bunch of pointless 'innovations' - like having the ignition switch in the centre console - into a basic platform that was, in performance applications, inherently flawed: a nose-heavy front wheel drive car with a fucking great turbocharger on it. The problem with which being the laws of physics, whether Newtonian, relativistic or quantum, relating to the inability for two wheels to do both the steering and the delivering of fucking ludicrous levels of POWERRRR through. As demonstrated below in a cloud of smoke and a pretzel of torque steer by the reserved and even-handed Mr Clarkson. (If nothing else, check out the vid just for the impossibly toss-laden '80s TV ad for the SAAB 900 in the opening.)



And if you don't have a turbo version, you're just wasting your time. A few years back a mate of mine - a postdoc out from the UK - was looking for a car, and I was giving him a hand with the search. We test-drove an early-90s SAAB 900 S, the old-school, very upright looking shape that had been around since the late '70s. It was in good nick, well looked after, well priced, decent economy, hatchback rear end meant it was practical enough - but it felt more dated than your old man's tie rack, was cramped as hell inside, seemed allergic to corners and the 2.3L four cylinder would not have pulled a sailor off your sister. My mate bought it. It was perfect for him. He didn't actually like driving much.

That bloke didn't fit the mould of SAAB drivers that well, because he was a good bloke, rather than a smug self-involved git who you wanted to slap. Another owner I knew was much more as per programme. This other guy had a mid-90s, second-gen 900S, the model which eventually became the 9-3 when GM took it over, which despite being an underpowered, front-drive shopping trolley, he appeared to think was half a degree of separation from a WRC-spec tarmac rally car. He seemed to be under the misapprehension that (a) SAAB = European = good handling = good at driving fast, and (b) he was good at driving fast. Torque-steering violently across the centreline at 25km/h over the posted limit through the twists of Swann Road in Taringa (with Your Correspondent and colleagues white-knucking the doorhandles and looking for the emergency exits) clearly indicated neither (a) nor (b) was strictly true. Nor was it strictly the case that he fitted the mould of SAAB owners in that he didn't own it because he wanted to impress other 'creatives' in the carpark of his architecture firm, his industrial design consultancy or his marketing agency. He owned it because his daddy bought it for him. Still, he was clearly a tosser, so he was 'brand-compliant' in that respect.

The end for SAAB was being bought by GM. Unlike Ford with Volvo, GM didn't really seem to know what to do with SAAB. The most recent 9-3 was basically a reskinned Opel Vectra. And like other entry-level luxury cars based on more povvo underpinnings - for instance the Jaguar X-Type, which was largely Ford Mondeo bits in a retro-looking skin - it got roundly ignored by the buying populous, because the majority of the car-buying populous are, surprisingly, not complete fucking muppets. If they were, Hummer wouldn't have lost money like 50 Cent at a strip club. Even the Americans - who are apparently now the world's moral police, to whom every sovereign nation must submit their cultural memes for approval, lest they get offended by ads for chicken featuring West Indies fans (but that's an off-topic rant for elsewhere) - saw through the most egregious badge-engineered SAABs, the awful 9-2X and 9-7X SUVs, which were based on Subaru Imprezas (the infamous 'Saabaru') and Chevy Tahoe 4WDs respectively with dodgy SAABish noses grafted on the front. Basically, GM couldn't have been more clear on their value of the brand had the CEO taken a dump on the logo and put it on YouTube.

Still, SAAB won't be mourned, because they never actually produced anything worthy of mourning. Even their best credentialled efforts, their famed turbos of the 80s - as iconic of stock-market-fuelled wank as square-shouldered pastel jackets, brick-like cellphones and freshly chopped lines of coke - were inherently flawed, somewhat like the other vehicle of choice for the Gordon Geckos of the '80s, the 911 Porsche. The former had too much power for the front wheels to manage, and too much turbo lag to make it remotely useable. The latter had its engine in the arse like a big fuck-off pendulum, and rotated at high speed, usually into roadside furniture. Porsche acknowledged this, but rather than fixing the problem by moving the weight of the engine somewhere sensible, with typical stubbornness just kept refining the handling, suspension and weight distribution over the years until the 911 became, as it is now, no longer a significant danger to motorists or the general public, in particular those standing on the outside of wet roundabouts. SAAB, faced with the shortcomings of the 900 Turbo, just kept turning up the boost and making the 'Turbo' logo bigger. Marketing over substance. Just like the muppets who bought the things.

Goodbye, SAAB. In the words of the D4, you were too stupid to live.

The Doctor is OUT.

All my friends are getting iPhones

Seasons Gruntings. In keeping with various fitness-related resolutions, we begin the New Year with exercises. In particular grubby cross-promotional exercises:

Your Correspondent @ Mother Focaccia talking farmers' markets and fresh produce

And the triumphant return of Flange Gasket, In The Worst Possible Taste of course. Remember, in hell, it's always Schoolies Week.


There. That was nice and gratuitous. Hoping for a job on Nine's cricket coverage scripting the seamless integration of Betfair odds updates into the commentary.

And speaking of cricket, I went on a drunken roadtrip mission (not driving thxverymuch) and a cricket game broke out. Rain and Victorian cheating (fuck you Miscellaneous Nannes) put paid to any hopes of a legitimate result, but a good time was had by all. 'Twas fucking awsm and no mistake. Except for one, lingering, malingering resentment.

We missioned up (and back) to Brisvegas from the glorious north coast of NSW in AJ's old warhorse of an AU Falcon wagon. Five blokes, one driving, four offering constructive advice on said driving, complaining about the music and agitating for bottle-o stops, visits to the slashers and pub lunches. And every bastard among them - apart from Your Correspondent - had an iPhone. Even my old mate Craigos who's in the final year of his PhD (which is usually year four of three, as demonstrated by Your Correspondent) and who, you might reasonably expect, be by this stage in proceedings less solvent than an Icelandic bank. Nope. iPenises for all. And they're fucking BRILLIANT. They're shiny, they do stuff, they work well, they play music, have lots of cool apps and, in a novel development, you can talk in one end and people will talk back to you at the other. WTF next people?? Web 2.0 FTW!!!1!

In short, they're cool, and they do everything it says on the tin, and I WANTS IT.

At least, I did. But now...

Now, as it is, I talk a lot of bollocks. An oar in four blogs, Arsebook, Twunter, email, whatever. My opinions do not suffer from lack of exposure to oxygen. But, God's bollocks, can you imagine how unutterly clusterfuckingly exponentially worser (yes, WORSER) it'd be if I had an iPhone?

Yeah, about that. Maybe more.

Anyway, I've had an epiphone (or even an ep-iPhone. Hur hur. I made a funny.) I don't actually NEED an iPhone, that I knew. But I don't actually WANT an iPhone either. Because the truth is, I'd never get anything fucking done.

That, and the words 'cellphone service' in the deep south are an oxymoron.


The Doctor is OUT.