I'm on a horse

The above animated confection has bounced its way around the interwebs - sighted by Your Correspondent courtesy of Mrs Beeso - and apparently got a MSM run on the ABC's Q&A. My initial reaction to it isn't 'We done with the Old Spice ad parodies yet? This is getting to be like fucking Downfall' or even 'That animation couldn't be more dodgy if they hired the blokes who did the clip for Russell Crowe's Band Is A Fucking Pile Of Shit.' No, my reaction to it is, bewilderingly, a bunch of mindworm-recanted dialogue from somewhere else altogether:

"You're very tall," I told him.
"There's a reason for that," he said.
"What's that?"
"I'm on a horse," he said. "What are you on?"
"I'm on Valium."

You may recognise that as one of the opening exchanges between the narrator and the character of Heathcliff, from the novel Wuthering Heights. As recorded in what most scholars regard as the definitive version, the 1994 edition. That (re)written by Spike Milligan.

Wuthering Heights was a set text for our HSC (final year of high school, for those safe outside the blast area). As romantic comedies go, it was neither funny nor romantic in anything other than a creepy-stalker-we die-together sort of way. Our girl Em Bronte seemed to be struck by the affliction of desperately wanting to write a bodice-ripping bonkfest but being somewhat hamstrung by not actually having any understanding or experience of sex whatsoever, resulting in her female characters having passionate hankerings for their brothers, or stand-ins therefor. There was much tanty-throwing and Harry Holting over stormy moors and a fair whack of emo self-harm. Basically, it was just a bit silly. Still, at least it wasn't Jane fucking Austen.

Which was why Spike Milligan's rewrite, which treated the subject matter with the disrespect it deserved, absolutely saved my fucking life. In fact, to be fair, Spike Milligan saved my fucking life. From the old man introducing me to his Goon Show LPs as a kid, to total self-immersion in the heavily Spike-influenced works of Python as a teen, to his desperately funny war diaries as a uni student, raiding 2nd hand bookstores to find copies, to the best-of Q Series TV show VHS tape which wore itself out on the heads of my VCR. He was a legend. He was also completely mad, wracked with depression and PTSD, and reportedly impossible to live with. So goes genius.

Some of his best work - though, in truth, he was just recycling Goon Show gags, as he'd been doing since 1958 - was those According To Spike rewritten versions of great tomes of literature: Wuthering Heights, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Hound Of The Baskervilles... and perhaps the funniest of all, the Old Testament of the Bible. An easy target, maybe, but there's just so much madness, violence, lunacy and stupidity in the Old Testament (never more clearly underlined than by the fundamentalist munters who interpret it literally) it's practically a Spike Milligan happening just waiting to happen, asking for its inherent ridiculousness to be brought to light. But that was his humour: absurdist and anarchist. Basically, Spike Milligan invented modern comedy. Before him, people just told jokes.

I thought I'd finish by reading one of Spike's poems. But then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.

Viva Spike.

The Doctor is OUT.

Can you tell we've stopped bothering to write stuff people might want to read and instead are just amusing ourselves

We're all about the helpful hints here at the World of Bollocks, so leading on from yesterday's suggestion to the Kings of Being Shat On By Pigeons that, you know, pigeons have the same antipathy to 105dB of Big Muff Shreddage as anything else with eustachian tubes, so turn the fuck up and harden the fuck up, we're now turning our attention to the massed ranks of Formula One team managers and their woe-is-us bleating about Ferrari using frowned-upon team orders to put Nando Alonso into Position Win at the German F1GP, ahead of teammate Massa Attack. Won't somebody think of the children... erm the fans... do we still have fans?


Here's a suggestion. If you don't like Ferrari stage-managing the finish of F1 races, why not DRIVE YOUR FUCKING CARS FASTER SO THEY CAN'T. It's pretty difficult to enact team orders to decide who wins the race when you're running 7th and 8th. And as to some of the hypocrisy on this... such as Red Bull muppet Christian Horner bleating about it being naughty and he's going to tell his mum and everything... what the fuck do you call taking new parts off one driver worth a tenth a second a lap at least and giving them to another, on the morning of qualifying, if it's not team fucking orders, sunshine?


Yeah mate, you're a fuckin' winner you are. A career in proctology awaits.

(EDIT: This deserves to be turned into a photo caption competition - entries below.)

The Doctor is OUT.

When in doubt, play louder

Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue. It was the latter for inbred MOR rockists Kings of Leon recently, canning a gig three songs in due to on-site pigeons crapping from the rafters into the gob of lead warbler Jared Followill. Everyone's a critic. Personally that summates my opinion of everything KOL have done since Youth And Young Manhood, but I'm aware this is a minority view.

Here's an idea though. You're a rock band. Armed with electrified instruments, some modicum of talent and the odd couple millions watts of PA. If pigeons in the lighting gantries start crapping on you, why not just TURN THE FUCK UP. Tip the stack on its arse, aim it at the flying vermin and shred their tiny brains with excess volume. It's no surprise the first and only reportage of this having happened is to the milquetoast likes of the Kings of Leon, and not, f'rinstance, Airbourne. Or Shihad. Or, for argument's sake, Flange Gasket. There'd have been decibel-barbequed birds plummetting from the rafters quicker than you can say 'Eleven: it's one louder.'

Actually Airbourne would have just sent Joel O'Keeffe up there to fuck them up in person.



Rock and roll ain't noise pollution. Rock and roll, it appears, is just rock and roll.

The Doctor is OUT.

Going the growl

'I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the GROWLER'

Erm, good. Because there's nothing more disappointing than substandard growler. Really puts you off your lunch.

The above is by way of introduction to GROWLER Magazine which, it seems, is not a publication along the lines of SWANK, HUSTLER or WET PINK BITS (if it doesn't exist, it should), but is in fact the in-house magazine of the Jaguar XK Enthusiasts Club of Once Great Britain. Probably a fitting name for the owners club magazine given that most XK owners are cunts. If ever there was a car designed from the tyres up to be able to comfortably compensate for even the most miniscule of micropenii, it was the preposterously phallic original XK. There's one which ponces around town near here. Midnight blue. Big rims. Numberplate 'MEYOW'. Draw your own conclusions about the defining characteristics of the owner-operator. I know I have.

This is not to say all Jag owners per se are comparable to genitalia. XK owners aside, they're usually more comparable to antique furniture. Certainly a penchant for highly polished walnut burr and leather is a given; travelling about the manor in a Jag has up until very recently closely resembled the experience of reposing in a mobile sitting room. The tweed jacket and pipe image has done for Jaguar for many years - in more than one way. However, today's Jaguar sees it pushing the envelope with more polished aluminium and smoked glass than a gentrified Surry Hills pub, more improbably rakish angles than the arsey pool maestro IN said pub, and shame upon shame, INDIAN ownership and governance.

So will Jaguar's new direction and governance result in owners less of the Inspector Morse or Arthur Daley profile?

No idea. Probably not. But it's still got to be better than gluing half-arsed retro fronts on Mondeos and calling it an X-Type.

Right, over to you - what cars do you reckon say more about their owners than about themselves? The twattiness of Saab owners we've already covered off in previous media commitments, of course.

The Doctor is OUT.

#hashtag

Twitter is the home of pointless shite, but not all shite is created equally pointless. Take, for instance, this evening's hashtag du jour, #firstdraftporn, kicked off by US comic @pattonoswalt (best known in certain circles for his self-sacrificing review of KFC's Famous Bowl - or as he described it in preceding media commitments 'a failure pile in a sadness bowl'). Some of the gold brought forth by #firstdraftporn this eve includes:

• Well, now that you mention it, I do know how you can bring your grades up. You could study. #firstdraftporn
• INT: HOSPICE CARE CENTER. EARLY MORNING. #firstdraftporn
• I like my women like I like my coffee: manhandled by a Colombian and his donkey then shipped internationally in a burlap bag #firstdraftporn

Gold. And how much would you expect to pay for such comedic wonder? Well, don't ask. Because a day or so ago we enjoyed the company of #changelovetoknobsongs and that was just as amusementastic, if incredibly puerile. The pretence, incredibly complex as it appears: change songs with 'love' in them to 'knob'. As in, 'Knob Me Tender', 'You've Lost That Knobbing Feeling' and 'Can You Feel The Knob Tonight'. All smeared with copious amounts of win. To say nothing of 'Bizarre Knob Triangle'. However, one must admit a certain admiration for the directness of Transvision Vamp's late-80s pop-punk classic, 'I Want Your Knob'. Mainly because Wendy James did. Or gave a very accurate impression thereof, at the very least.

Wendy James couldn't sing, but somehow that didn't really matter. She brought the hotness and that, in alliance with the Vamp's fuzzy guitars and poppy hooks, was enough for 1989's hormonal teens and prototypes thereof. Be assured, I would have. I'm not sure I'd have had the remotest fucking clue how to, but I'd have been willing to learn. Yet Ms James' Page 3 fame lasted not much longer than the Vamp's chart career; they were gone by the '90s, jumping before the grunge-laden tide pushed them. Ironically, the Vamp's bassplayer ended up joining post-grungists Bush and sold many millions, indicating how comfortable he was with playing alongside girly vocalists.

Of course, the Vamp's work looks ridiculous today - as does much of the '80s, particularly to anyone who lived through them and watched music get turned upside down and shaken hard by Cobain, Vedder et al circa 1991 and thereafter. For anyone who lived through it, or anyone who was paying attention at the time, it seems like overnight, some huge switch was thrown - or even a massive fuck-off lever from an old-school railway signal-box. Overnight, the poodle metallists - or the 'Sunset Strip hair farmers' as ol' Headless Kurt liked to call them - were goneski. Where had swaggered Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Poison and the Gunners now sulked Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Offspring and Green Day. It's kinda bizarre, astonishing and yet amusing to watch vids of the former - like this bit of Van Halen from '91 - just before the balloon went up and the dinosaurs became extinct. Like the dinosaurs, the amazing thing isn't that they died out, more that they ever existed in the first place.

Viva la evolución.

The Doctor is OUT.

GTFO while the GTFOing's good

There's a lot to be said for retiring with your legacy intact. Making your exit while people are still asking why you're leaving, not why you haven't left. Pearl Jam just might have managed it, pulling stumps (for that's effectively what they've done) on the back of Backspacer, their least ordinary release in several moons. U2 haven't. And as for musos, you can read for sportshumans (and the similarities betwixt were a theme one really meant to make more of in ITWPT, but never really got around to. Time enough if good enough.) L'Equipe notwithstanding, Lance Armstrong will probably get away from his ill-advised comeback with his seven-time-champion legacy largely preserved. Michael Schumacher probably won't. No matter what arm of the entertaining arts you're part of - be it the performing arts or bread and circuses - it's critical to remember to fuck off before you get told to.

*cough* Yer up, Punter.

That's not actually the point we wanted to get to this evening, however. The theme we're exploring in our very pretentious third person style (thanks v. much Michael Clarke) is - what happens when you manage to fuck your legacy while you're still a long, LONG way from retiring?

I managed to fuck my Legacy recently. Fucking shitbox.

Back to those who've taken the PR Sword of Damocles and used it to cut their own balls off. I'm here to suggest this evening that Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel is the LeBron James of Formula 1, and vice versa. Not because either are the most talented starlets in their chosen internationally-relevant sporting fields. More because they've managed to take all of the unerringly positive publicity slathered upon them, all of the good-guy puff pieces and cheerleader press coverage, and piss all over it such that somehow, through mechanics known only to the culpably insane, they've managed to make themselves Chief Villain #1 of their sport.

Vettel's PR issue is easy to ID. He's your typical snotty Gen Y brat with entitlement issues who hasn't had to wipe his own arse since he was a preschooler in go-karts, and wouldn't know struggling-for-a-break if it bit him on the arse and called him Deirdre. His misfortune, other than the fact he looks like a childrens TV host, is that his teammate is a leathery, cranky, nuggety former Canberra Raiders ballboy and freelance bastard called Mark Webber who has spent 10 years driving fucking gormless shitboxes in order to get a gig driving the fastest car in F1, and some precious little team managers' pet ain't gonna get between him and the most altitudinally advantageous position on the podium. So when the major sponsors' preference for the Krauty kid getting all the breaks results in Red Bull giving Webber wings, then taking them away and giving them to the work experience kid, it's not that surprising the whole thing goes to PR hell in a handbasket and the former darling of the press box (Google some of the cringing interviews about his Monty Python fetish etc etc etc) turns out to be a spoilt brat in need of a stellar arse-kicking. Despite the best frothings of the Red Bull marketing machine, most of F1's fanbase is now convinced (a) Wunderkind Vettel is being favoured by Red Bull (b) Vettel has asked to be favoured by Red Bull and (c) Vettel may actually NEED to be favoured by Red Bull in order to avoid having his arse kicked by a former Raiders ballboy. You see his problem. He's a little twat.

LeBron James, likewise, appears to have taken careful aim and blown both feet off. The NBA's poster child, unimbued by the usual PR shitfights associated with the sport (Kobe, it's generally accepted that asking first is polite), the hometown hero of the Cleveland team he plays for, managed to fuck up seven years of Nike-supported PR fluffery by holding a very public auction for his free-agent services, then starring in an hour-long live TV special to announce he was stiffing his hometown club and was fucking off to Miami to play for Pat Riley and the Heat. You could argue, and many have, that he was actually being brave and selfless, taking less money and less limelight to join Dwyane Wade (no he really does spell his fucking name like that) and something called a Chris Bosh (no idea) to form the NBA's scariest three-man superstar offence since the last one, but the prevailing sentiment in the endlessly self-referential and masterbatorial Seppo sportsmedia appears to be LBJ = CNT.

Anyway, there was some great incisive point to be made here, but it appears to have disappeared into the bottom of this bottle of Hunter Valley cab sauv. Never mind. The moral of the story is: good PR is much, much easier to piss away than your media advisors are telling you. Fire them, and stop being a fucking tool. Message ends.

The Doctor is OUT.

#worstWCever... unless you're in South Africa on expenses

What nationality is Les Murray?
Wherefore hails his ancestry?
Whom does he call the mother country
When he phones home through OTC?
- TISM, 'Machiavelli and the Four Seasons', 1995

Magyarország. Which leaves the other prevailing question about the Special Broadcasting Service's primary football talking head - what the fuck is Les Murray on, and can we have some?

Les - who, let's be unequivocal, is a fucking legend of Australian football - has unutterably detached himself from the plot in the last little while. His Twitter rants have become more and more the rantings of a crazy old man you'd give the swerve to on street corners - a recent one comes to mind which, lightly paraphrased, stated that anyone who didn't enjoy watching Spain's oft-tedious possession-focused short passing game should fuck off and watch rugby instead (riposted elegantly by Lantanaland's Beeso who made the point in response that some of us are actually capable of following and enjoying more than one sport). It's almost as if, sadly, that the loss of Johnny Warren as his compadre and offsider has meant that old mate Laszlo's tendencies towards arrogance and pompousity are no longer reigned in by Captain Socceroo's no-bullshit ways.

Anyhoo, to Les' latest imperial pronouncement: that FIFA World Cup 2010 is the best World Cup ever. Yup, one right out of the Juan Antonio Samaranch Big Book of Abject Fucking Nonsense. Les cites in his case the passion of the home fans, New Zealand not losing a game, and... not much else, really. There's not much to be said for this argument but that the media room caretakers clearly need to change the combo lock on the scotch cabinet. Most of the lame arguments put forward by Les probably pertain very well to highly-paid TV hosts on a four-week junket on expenses in a foreign land. But for those of us who had to watch the fucker on TV - which would be the remaining 99.9repeater percent of us - not so fucking much.

Let's look at the roll call. A comedy stunt football with all the predictability of Courtney Love and just as much appeal. Four weeks of teams playing 6-4-0 on pitches resembling the Somme. Lowest group-stage goal average ever, making Italia '90 look watchable by comparison. Those fucking vuvuzelas. More diving than the 10m tower final. Pim Ver Fucking Beek. Those fucking vuvuzelas. Psychic octopi. Septic Bladder refusing to FOAD. Refereeing decisions so poor they make Tim Donaghy look legit. Did I mention the fucking vuvuzelas? And as for the Undefeated NZ All Whites - yeah, it was fun, but they've already been forgotten faster than Winston Reid's Premier League playing hopes, disappeared into an All Black hole of media disinterest by this weekend's opening Tri-Nations rugger clash. Short memories.


Apart from some stubborn misguided pricks.

On the plus side: Brazil didn't win, and neither will the Krauts. Wooo. Spain or the Dutch will make a popular winner. But a good winner, or even a watchable final (far from guaranteed at this point) does not save a shit tournament, bollocksed by dull football, appalling refereeing, and those fucking vuvuzelas. Still #worstWCever.

You can explain why not in the space provided below.

The Doctor is OUT.

Oranje crush

Wahey the Dutchies. Not only a victory for the Oranje, but a victory for football. For it is a scientific fact that anyone who loves football should hate Brazil.

Yeah, yeah. I can hear the spluttering and bleating of lazy, cliche-spewing football writers from here to Belo Horizonte. What about the Samba Kings, the beautiful game played at its finest, the artisans of football? Yeah, what about them? The fuckers haven't been seen in a World Cup since 1970, so what the fuck does that have to do with Brazil? The Samba Kings died with Pele. Dunga wouldn't have had him in his side. He wouldn't have been much chop in a 6-4-0.

My beef with Brazil is about pretence over contents. The acres of wank-stained fluff printed about them as the guardians of football as it should be played, not to mention endless masterbatorial Nike-swooshed advertorial content (which, it could be argued, cost them the 1998 final re the stress-related munting of Fat Ronaldo) is directly and inversely proportional to the quality of football they've played in the last 40 years.

In the tournaments they've won, they've been just as dull, pragmatic and soulless as Italy or Germany, but at least they aren't lying to people about it. Brazil in 1994 were hideous to watch, they made a Bobby Baggio-led Italy look like 11 Cristiano Ronaldos. Brazil in 2002 were nothing more than the last men standing, only having to see off a munted, Ballack-less Krauty enterprise to take the cheese. In South Africa, the only teams to bust out anything remotely reminiscent of 'samba football' have been the Argies in the group stages, and maybe the Uruguayans, who only seem to turn up and play at world cups every 20 years (1990 was the last time they went alright, 1970 they made the semis, won 1950, won 1930.) Certainly not a dour, defensive Dunga-led Brazil. Even reclusive, media shy former great Pele broke his decades of media silence to comment on the traitorously negative tactics employed by the soon-to-be-former Brazil coach and dullard-in-chief of the 1994 lineup.

The other fucking annoying thing about Brazil is that they're invariably the team of bandwagon-jumping fuckwits who know arse all about football, apart from what they've read about the Samba Kings Of Football etc etc etc. Forty years ago, that was the case. Maybe even 30 years ago, with the showy-but-eventually-shite '82 side of Socrates, Garrincha and various other improbably named cavaliers. But these days the definining memory of Brazilian football, for me at least, is Rivaldo in '98, responding to an innocuous ball kicked at his ankles by grabbing his face and throwing himself to the ground. Diving, cheating, showboating, overfluffed arsehats.

Get the fuck out of my tournament.

Right that's my flimsy justification for laughing like a bastard at the Dutch stuffing the Selecao. We all have teams, sides, individuals who we'd rather see faceplant off a bungy tower than see the finish line first. The World of Bollocks asks today: who do you hate, and more to the point, why do you hate 'em? Interested in the justification here. "Just because they're fuckin' Manly," while accurate, isn't really what we're looking for.

The Doctor is OUT. Like Brazil. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA.