Crimes of passion

I'm kind of a cheap drunk. I'll qualify that with a bit of context. I get inordinate amounts of satisfaction from buying good beer on special - second possibly only to consuming the stuff. We've been down this path on a few occasions here at the World of Bollocks eg here and here but suffice to say Cheap Beer (esp. Grolsch) = WIN on a multitude of levels. The pursuit of good beer for fewer shekhels, as well as man's instinct for fart-arsing around in experimentation, led myself and the good Dr Craigos into home brewing for quite a few years. And of course one was once much more of an equal-opportunity drunk, enjoying cheap booze of all persuasions - from Kirov vodka to Black Douglas scotch - until overindulgence in all of the above resulted in a steadfast policy of never drinking anything you can run a lawnmower on, which has served me well since then.

There was one lapse, though. One single, solitary, regrettable lapse. One night in 2002, deep into winter, when the beer fridge at Chateau Dodgy Evolution III (downstairs in the garage-slash-kicking-back-area, and comfortably larger than the real fridge upstairs in the kitchen) had run dry and none of our recent brews had matured near enough to drinkability, myself, Dr Craigos and the King of Seed plumbed the depths of despair.

We cracked open the bottle of Passion Pop someone had left in the fridge since our housewarming in January.

OK, some clarification. Passion Pop, for those who came in late, is an icon of the Australian drinking landscape, basically the cheapest of cheap nasty white wine varieties - the tailings from the bottling plant that not even the cask wine makers will touch - mixed with artificial sickly-sweet passionfruit flavouring and carbonated to fuck. The beverage du jour of the underage and the undiscerning, particularly in the days before RTDs were invented, and particularly for those for whom the usual teeny-pisshead combo of Southern Comfort and Coke was too confronting. Passion Pop had the advantage of being able to be purchased with spare change and for the amount of alcohol dispensed per swig was astonishingly cheap. One hoped though that one's recent main meals were similarly inexpensive as they'd inevitably go to waste, in a gutter, in a skip, down the front of one's Cup Day racewear, or down the front of one's date to same.


Despite this, or maybe even because of it, Passion Pop holds a precious place in the cavalcade of regret that constitutes the rites of passage of pre-twenties drinking in Australia. As illustrated by a bit of Gasket (Our Year 12 Formal Was At The Evans Head Bowlo):

Miss the girls from my old school days
Didn't care from where you came
So long as you brought the Passion Pop
And vaguely recalled their name...

I should also clarify that our rogue Passion Popper wasn't just 'someone'. 'Someone' suggests randomness, drunkenness, perhaps an excuse for such abrogation of intellectual competency. It suggests someone momentarily bereft of their faculties, someone not in the best of judgement, perhaps someone too young and silly to know better. Not a 25 year old PhD student from Tasphobia who'd go on to postdoc at Cambridge and have an astonishingly shiny research career on his return to Oz. He was (and remains) a terribly good bloke. Just with a breathtakingly cheap palate.

Anyhoo, by winter the nights had fair drawn in, times were desperate and our magnum of Passion Pop became the last chance for alcoholic sustenance short of actually going out and finding a bottle shop open at 9pm on a Wednesday night. Fuck that. Despite being long-term hard-bitten pissheads, none of us had actually tried the shit before - cheap beer and cheaper spirits were more our go in our younger days - so there was a hint of novelty, maybe even adventure to the prospect. So we cracked the Passion Pop - fake ribbed-plastic champagne 'cork' and all - and had a go at it.

JESUS SUFFERING FUCK WAS IT AWFUL.

A full frontal sensory assault of sulphites, cough medicine and acid-etching fizz, with a lingering soupcon of arse on the back palate. It tasted like Passiona that Oliver Reed had done wees in after a particularly hefty between-gigs session at the Goat & Dirigible. Had a kick on it though, like a mule with Tabasco on its gronnicks. I think the hangover arrived slightly before the second sip. In short, it was patently the worst thing I'd ever consumed in the course of competitive university drinking, and that included the punch at the Hovel that Uber Flatmate Jase made entirely from inferior grade spirits, orange cordial and Wizz Fizz, and the home brew that went brutally feral because Seeds had filled the brew vessel up from the hose which had been sitting in the garden in full sun for three weeks.

So after we finished off the rest of the Passion Pop, we dug out the two-week-old homebrew and stuffed a sixer in the freezer...

The Doctor is OUT.

On the Gear

Top Gear Australia was the first ever international spinoff from the insanely popular British motoring show. Probably the last, too. It wasn't a success. Even on SBS, to whom ratings are a minor distraction; and even on NZ television, which usually laps up the dregs of Australian TV with glee (or possibly even Big Bang Theory) but which gave the Australian translation of TG all of four weeks on air before kicking it to the kerb and replacing it with yet more repeats of 'The Best Of/What's Left Of Top Gear.' The problem, simply, was the presenters. Steve Pizzati is a tremendous driver and a nice bloke but is dressed by his mother, who is blind, and sounds like a jockey with a peg on his nose. Warren Smith is a News Ltd cartoonist with stupid facial hair, and Charlie Cox is nominative determinism. While the actual recorded segments of the show were reasonable, the in-studio parts of the show were almost painful to watch. What chemistry the hosts had - and judging from the post-mortem tweets from @StevePizzati there certainly was, if the regularity of the axed hosts catching up for beers is any measure - just didn't translate to the stilted bits-to-camera in the big shed at Bankstown Airport. Compared to TG UK - even compared to the early, shuffling, awkward episodes of 'new' Top Gear when it relaunched with Clarkson in 2002 - it was pretty grim. The success of Top Gear is entirely down to the camaraderie between the hosts - and the odd bit of explodey goodness of course - and that's the measure by which TG Australia failed.

That said, asked Nat the other day, given Nine are going to have another crack at a locally-hosted Top Gear, if you had the choice of potential hosts for TG Australia, who would they be? And not fucking Eddie Everywhere or Warnie. They would suck.

Anyway I came up with three: Michael Stahl, Jeff Cockburn and David Morley. All three are motoring journalists who've done a bit of Other Media work, like Clarkson, May et al. You haven't heard of them, but who'd heard of any of the existing TG UK hosts before they were hosting TG?

Michael Stahl and Jeff Cockburn were writing for Wheels magazine when I first started reading it in the late 80s, writing articles and sharing a column titled 'Cock and Bull'. Stahl's old man was a racer and motoring journo in his own right; for as long as I've been reading him, Stahl Jr's been short, bald and funny. He was the perfect foil for Cockburn, an industrial designer with a greying Frank Zappa beard who started at Wheels by designing their Car Of The Year award and continued by writing some of the most brilliantly deranged motoring articles I've ever read - the 1989 test of the then-new Mazda MX5 vs the then-very-old original Lotus Elan, the MX5's obvious inspiration, was absolute gold. Cockburn has a Very Distinctive Writing Style, in which the use of capitalization for comic effect is brilliantly achieved. And he's a man of very clear and decisive opinions, so he's a shoe-in for the Tall Shouty Bloke gig, if we're predicating this on TG UK as a model.

These days Cockburn is at Wheels' ACP stablemate Motor, where David Morley's been for many years. Morley is ragged and hairy and into old motorbikes - resembling a Melbournian James May as much as anything - and like the other two is a very adept, very funny writer. He's done TV as well, having presented for George Negus' lightweight current affairs show that used to be on ABC evenings. Stahl and his old boss Phil Scott (ex Wheels editor) used to present a show called DriveTime on Ten about 12 years ago which was one of the few Australian motoring shows since Peter Wherrett's Torque which didn't profoundly suck.

So that's my shortlist - Morley, Stahl and Cockburn. We'll keep Pizzati for Stig duties. And with that came the realisation that of all the writers that have inspired me or impacted upon my writing style - from Spike Milligan to HG Nelson - motoring journos have probably done as much as any to do so. I grew up reading those blokes, and grumpy old Bill Tuckey who contributed for a bunch of different mags as well as writing the brilliantly evocative Bathurst yearbooks, a bunch of which I still have kicking around the place at home. A hell of a storyteller, Tuckey. He's still kicking on, has a column in Motor which I suspect gets largely ignored.

Which is better than the alternative. The other day I read of the passing of one of my favourite writers of all time, Mr Smith of Two Wheels. Ironically I read about it in their major competitor, Australian Motorcycle News. AMCN has fortnightly publication dates, shorter lead times, more accurate news, better race reports, and is in every way a better source of information about motorcycles... but it doesn't have Smith, Groff and Rooth, Two Wheels' triumvirate of beardy old men with lifetimes of stories to tell. And Mr Smith above all was an amazing storyteller. Incredible dexterity with the English language (famously once writing a 1000 word column which consisted of a single sentence), a Milliganesque sense of the ridiculous, an ability to create words to describe things that didn't exist but did as soon as he invented them, and enough subject matter to fill 25 years worth of columns - which was the anniversary he was celebrating when a lifetime of health issues (mostly brought about by a series of serious bike crashes as a young bloke) finally laid him out. I've been reading Two Wheels (or 2wheels as it's been relaunched, probably unwisely) for over 20 years now and Smith's was always the first page I'd read.

Next issue of 2wheels, out in late Feb, will be something of a Smith-O-Rama (as he might have said himself.) Buy it. Even if you don't have any interest in bikes, find it and buy it, on the off chance that a decent swag of his writing will find its way into the issue. They could quite easily and profitably put together a compendium of the man's columns as they were invariably timeless - in that they were not of-the-moment in the way they were written - and I'd sure as hell buy it if they did. His writing is worth more than being lost into the mists of monthly periodical time.

Fair bits though, Smith would have been rubbish on Top Gear.

The Doctor is OUT.

Men behaving badly, part two

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Animal husbandry

From one of Your Correspondent's fellow Twunterers, who shall remain nameless *coughhavock21cough*:

"coffee, furry & gazing at young nubile wenches at DFO outlet coffee shop.fk me"

Now, the Major claims he was befuddled by auto-correct on his Jesus Phone and meant 'durry' rather than 'furry', but this is patent nonsense, as to my mind noone better fits the build of a furry than him, because he's bony-arsed enough to fit in the suit. A furry, it seems, is an individual, presumably of sound mind, who chooses to dress up in fake animal costumes in order to... erm... meet similar like-minded individuals in similar animal suits with similar suspiciously-placed velcro zips. As first described, I believe, in a Monty Python sketch many many years ago.



See, you knew those Wilderness Society Koala dudes were weird fuckers. Literally, as it turns out.

A furry is not to be confused with a plushy, which is very different; that's someone with a fetish for performing sexual acts with stuffed animals. FAO gents on the dating circuit - those girls who grew up with the oversized teddy bears in their bedrooms, keep an eye on them. Particularly if they don't immediately suggest Big Ted turns to face the wall while you and she are gettin' it ORHNNN.

All of this leaves unanswered the question of what do you call someone who dresses in an animal suit in order to interfere with a stuffed animal? A Flushie? A Plurry? A McSlurry? I don't know but sure as shit PETA wouldn't approve. Then again their latest nuded-up spokesbimbette is porn actress Sasha Grey, who's quite familiar with being stuffed by animals I dare say. (In the abstract sense, of course. Being unfamiliar with her body of work - see what I did there? - I am unaware whether she's done any 'Amsterdam' gear.) Ms Grey's utilization in a pro-neutering ad does seem somewhat hypocritical and misguided - as well as the fact that, as Squire Bedak points out, PETA were grievously negligent in missing the opportunity for taglines such as 'Neuter your pussy' or 'Put an end to doggy style' - though clearly, there are limits to her credible employment in PETA's other campaigns. Promoting veganism, f'rinstance, might seem hypocritical for someone who spends a lot of time swallowing red meat. (OK, that's a cheap shot. I'm sure she now wishes to be considered as a 'serious' actress and isn't interested in being cornholed. Erm, pigeonholed.)

Obviously, as a wide-eyed kid from the country, I was and remain shocked and horrified by the entire concept of furries, plushies, fluffies and sloppies. As you can imagine, the conversation where the difference between furries and plushies was explained to me was among the more disturbing experiences in my current workplace. Suffice to say we in the lab have learned NEVER to Google Image Search names of potential students to find out what they look like before coming to chat about projects.

O. M. F. G.

The Doctor is OUT.

Take another little pizza my heart

New post at Mother Focaccia. It's about pizza. It's good. Go.

The Doctor is OUT.