We're all gonna die

Yup. Just like Iggy says. It's inevitable and it's inescapable. It just sucks more when it happens to the young. Which brings us to another needless teenage death: Homebake is goneski. Aged fifteen. Not even old enough to vote, root or buy a warm can of Uncle Ted from a festival beer tent. Sure, the Organisers Thereof have put out a florid little press release about how the cancellation for 2010 of Australasia's awesomest home-grown music festy is just a momentary blip and they'll be back shinier and awesomerer than ever after a year's sabbatical, but anyone with goldfish-plus memory banks will recall the same schtick propagated by the Livid organisers after their '03 show - almost word for word. For the record, Livid's year-long sabbatical now stands at six years and counting. It ain't coming back, and given the plethora of festies now smeared across the landscape, it's hard to see the 'Bake avoiding a similar fate; as WoB Rural Correspondent AJ put it on Arsebook, the chances of Homebake making a comeback are about the same as Splendour In The Arse making it back to Byron.

And that sucks balls. Because Homebake wasn't just another cattle-call mass-produced rock festival experience. It had something. More specifically, what it had was the greatest festy venue imaginable - the Domain in the centre of Sydney. Sure, the weather was either drizzling or wreathed in bushfire smoke, and soundbleed between the stages was something fucking horrendous given you could hit a nine-iron from one extremity of the compound to the other - but it was green, it was grassy, it was stupidly easy to get to, it nevaaarrrr sold out (not in those days anyhoo), and it wasn't fucking Gold Coast Parklands on a 38 degree summer day with the westerly blowing dog-track grit into your eyes. And there are still few grander places on earth than on a sunny afternoon in the first Saturday in December, on the C-stage up the back (the Dome) opposite the art gallery, in the shade amongst the fig trees, watching some up-and-coming band rip it up with gusto and aplomb on their first big shot at festival immortality. Which was the other thing about Homebake - it was locals only. You felt somehow a little closer to every one of those up-and-comers, compared to the Latest Next Big Things fresh off the bird from the US or UK at the Big Day Out.


Homebake's parochialism-by-design could well have been its downfall in the end - not just because of the Australian live music industry's well-publicised recent struggles, but also simply because its regular contributors, the Triple J bands of the 90s, progressively grew old and pulled stumps - Powderfinger being the most recent, most obvious example. Looking through the list of lineups, from the very first 'Mudbake' at Belongil Fields, Byron, you see the same names. That first embryonic lineup in 1996: Spiderbait, Tumbleweed, Silverchair, Regurgitator, The Mark Of Cain, You Am I, Sidewinder, Magic Dirt, Fur, Powderfinger, Hardware, Screamfeeder, and hometown heroes, inaugural Triple J Unearthed winners Grinspoon. Most of those acts dominated every Homebake set since, along with contemporaries like Jebediah, Frenzal Rhomb, Something For Kate, Superjesus, Eskimo Joe and later Jet, the Vines and the Hilltop Hoods. As Taco Bell demonstrates, there's only so many times you can produce a distinguishably different end-product from recombining the same constituent parts. That final (apparently) 2009 Homebake lineup: Powderfinger, Jet, Eskimo Joe, Hilltop Hoods, Tumbleweed...

Tumbleweed reformed specially for last year's Homebake, and that was one of the cool recurring features of Homebake - bringing back legendary bands. 2001 saw the Hoodoo Gurus make a return - which at the time was a big deal, they were properly retired at the time, though they've churned out a couple of albums since - and the years hence saw the likes of the Church, Radio Birdman, the Divinyls and Crowded House pulled out of retirement for another go-round. The irony is, most of Homebake's regulars - both the acts and the punters - are now at the stage where another headlining show would be more like a comeback special than a continuation.


As with Livid, official blame has been placed upon the difficulty of signing a strong enough stable of acts given the plethora of other festivals around at the moment - in its final years Livid went up against the big-dollar corporate-rock M1 festival, which pretty much did for it - as outlined in In The Worst Possible Taste. This seems a little ingenuous for Homebake though, considering at least some of those competing festivals are light-on to say the least for Australian talent. Go play a quick round of 'Spot the Australian' in the advertised lineup for the Soundwave festival and get back to me. (While you're at it, try finding anyone who's been even remotely relevant since the mid '90s. Third Eye Blind. Just sayin'.)

For the record, I hope they make it back, because the early-December Saturdays I spent in the Domain watching the best bands in Australia (plus a couple of choice invitees from across the ditch) with some of my best mates in the world were, without exception, fucking awesome. The larger story of me and rock festivals like Big Day Out, Livid and Splendour has played out on these pages before - not to mention their massive role in inspiring the writing of In The Worst Possible Taste - but the Saturdays of Homebake stand above the rest.

These were those Saturdays. Long may they live on.


Saturday, December 8th, 2001
Headliners: Hoodoo Gurus making their (first) big comeback; You Am I, Kate, Joe, Jebus, JBT, MGF, TISM and a cast of acronyms too numerous to mention at this or subsequent junctures.

Crew: Dr Yobbo. The Famous Dawso. Captain Stupidity, recently retired from his crimefighting superhero career and having hung up the Purple Jocks Of Justice for good. Pretty sure Meltos The Gaymaker was there, having joined Yr Correspondent for the madness of Livid 2000. Melting goths. Awesome.

Memorable for: First interstate festy mission, partnered by the Captain aboard the Brown Hornet. For two long-term Gurus fans the sales pitch wasn't a tricky one - being a long-term stoner (and we ain't talking Casey), the Captain was also amped at the prospect of catching Skunkhour's final ever show. Sound bleed between stages was ridiculous; Your Correspondent was rank with flu and it drizzled half the day, but even so it was All Good. Best in show went to the old bastards - TISM, You Am I, and above all the Gurus - but the biggest shout-out went to the organisers for getting Tooheys to do the beer, making it a VB free zone. Give that man a New. Or even an Old, which was novel. After the usual experience of XXXX Gold at the Gabba and shitbox Yatala-brewed CUB product at Livid, it can't be understated what a surprise-and-delight feature it was to have actually drinkable beer at a festival. And have a look at that fucking entry ticket price. FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS. Or about one beer ticket more than Moff and I paid for our half-price festival-eve tickets for Livid in October that year. Bargain. More money for Olds then.


Saturday, December 7th, 2002
Headliners: Alex Lloyd (actually he was also a festy-regular in this era like the others listed above, but gets ignored these days - serves him right for his great one-hit-wonder getting turned into a Ford Territory commercial), Radio Birdman (the second annual Homebake Old Bastard Band Reunion Show), Grinspoon, Kasey Chambers (no, I don't know why either), Jebediah, You Am I and some band listed as 'Pacifier (AKA Shihad)' - thank Christ that little experiment in Seppo-centric naming rights died in the arse soon enough. Regardless of the name, they were and remain a fucking epic live act.

Crew: Comprised of myself, Dawso and the Captain. Meltos definitely joined us for at least one of the early Homebakes but not sure whether it was '01 or '02 - it was definitely one of the 'Captain's Knock' Homebakes though. I have a clear memory of the Captain haggling an E out of her for purely medicinal purposes (he claimed he'd overdone his daily dosage of prescription head-correctors and was merely equilibriating his neurochemistry to appropriate levels).

Memorable for: The support acts, primarily. Being a new and fervent disciple of the Church of D4 (ever since Livid in October) I pestered the lads until they gave in and came to watch their set up at the Dome under the trees; the Captain recommended sticking around to see Rocket Science and I owe the gentleman a debt of gratitude for that, as they were in fine form and at the peak of their powers in that and subsequent years (at least until Roman Tucker banged his head and forgot who he was, let alone how to write decent tunes.) And of course, Homebake is often the festy where young, upcoming bands get their first big show. On cue, first act of the day on the back stage, an unknown Victorian band called Jet. Not that we saw them play of course - we were having a beer in town while the ludicrous entry queues fucked off. As you would.


Saturday, December 6th, 2003
Headliners: Nick Cave, The Vines, Something For Kate (hopefully Prozac as she's a gloomy whinging bitch), John Butler and his Trio, 1200 Techniques, Frenzals, the Notsosuperjesus (having lost two lead songwriter-guitarists in the space of a year) and the Church, sweatin' for the oldies.

Crew: Mr and Mrs Moff co-helmed Elvis along with your correspondent for the road trip down (epic enough in itself), joined on the day by Dawso and Kurt, plus the infamous Grotboy, sibling to your correspondent.

Memorable for: One seriously fucking hilarious road trip there and back from Brisvegas. Best summated by a bumper sticker seen on the back of a truck somewhere on the F3: 'if you can't stop, at least smile as you go under.' That was pretty much the established standard for the tone of conversation aboard Elvis for the duration, anyway. As for the festival itself - let's be charitable and call it Best Fest Ever. Probably as much for the crew as for the bands, but this was great entertainment from the get-go. From the Magna of Spod to the Trail of Heinekens, not to mention Yr Correspondent generously donating free career advice to the bus drivers of Sydney. It's a service we offer here at the World of Bollocks.

Best in show: the Casanovas - another case of Dr Yobbo getting obsessive about a new rock band (having seen them with Dr Craigos and the Challenger at the Waterloo in Brisbane, blowing headliners the Donnas off the stage by a score of 2 to 1 - Group Challen was the dissenting voter because he wanted to pound the drummer, who in a departure from SOP was not actually called Phil) and dragging everyone along to watch them kick arse, which they most kindly did for everyone's entertainment. Getting Actual Glassware from the beer tent adjoining the Dome stage was pretty awesome too. And even later in the night, with drizzle descending and the Vines droning through another hideous trainwreck of a set, and yours truly starting to Ask Serious Questions re the future of Strayan music (if shit like that could be misconstrued as a Good Live Show, as it clearly was being by the squealy girls up the front), one reluctantly wandered over the back to see if Frenzals were going to be as average as they'd been at Livid that year. Their first act was to publically apologise for talking so much bollocks at their Livid shows and not playing any songs; their second act was to promise to shut up and play some fucking punk rock, and their third and subsequent act was to do exactly that. Including but not limited to some of the coolest, obscurest shit that they never, ever play live that only a Rhomb tragic (*cough*) would appreciate. I appreciated, the Rhomb were rehabilitated, and everyone went home happy. To start drinking all over again next day. OHHhhhhh my fucking head.


Saturday, December 4th, 2004
Headliners: Jet, Spiderbait, Grinspoon, Regurgitator, Rocket Science, Missy Higgins, Eskimo Joe, former Reds reserve centre Peter Murray, the D4, End of Fashion, Kasey Chambers (again, still not sure why) and some lot called Wolfmother opening on the back stage, not that I got to see them because the security cunts only had two people on the gate and it took fucking ages to get in, fuck them all with a bent stick

Crew: The Doctors Yobbo, and reprising their roles from Homebake Road Trip 2003, the Moffs. Flew down this time but. Kinda foreshortened the fun, but we had jobs to do. Growing up sucks.

Memorable for: Not being quite as epic as the previous year. Probably because we had far too much to drink the previous night and were carrying it all through the next day - to the point where we couldn't be arsed staying for Jet's show-closing set as (a) we were fucked (b) we'd already seen them twice in the past year and (c) they never really were that good live anyway. Best in show - I'd go for the Gurge, who were out of their self-imposed Bubble and were cranking through the good stuff. The Band In The Bubble was a worthy experiment; pity it sent Jabba mad, but he got his shit together eventually. All the acts you'd expect to fucking rock, did so (the D4 et al); even Roman Tucker managed to figure out the Scientific plans for his Rocket, something of an achievement given he'd fallen down the stairs a few months earlier, banged his head and forgotten every track of the new album they'd just recorded. Just as well he liked the finished article when it was played back to him. And no matter what kind of day you've had at the 'Bake, whether you're firing on all cylinders or limping along Struggle Street, there's still very little that compares with a burnt-orange sunset over the city skyline of Sydney, sitting on the grass of the Domain with a beer in your hand, your ears ringing from an epic live set with the prospect of more to follow.


The end, and afterwards
We kinda knew 2004 would be the last Homebake for us, because we knew we were offski. By December 2005, I was in New Zealand, pretending to be a grownup. Ironically, having formed the backbone of our Homebake missions throughout the years, most of Delta Team from that epic '03 Homebake were at my wedding, as my best man and groomsmen. Actually, not ironically. Unsurprisingly. My last festival: Big Day Out, January 2005. My last live show: Shihad, Carisbrook, March 2009. Though Dr Mrs Dr Yobbo has been to a bunch of Wiggles shows since then. Actually I'm wondering, given the ageing of Homebake's lineup and fanbase, whether a Toddlers Homebake would be in order. The Wiggles, Hi-5, the Hooley Dooleys, that Jurassic Joe dude who sings about dinosaurs, the Bananas in Pyjamas doing a DJ set in the doof tent, and the 1980s cast of Play School as the elderly-reunion special. Or Don Spencer doing 'Bob the Kelpie'...

Truth is, Homebake is the one festival I'd have come home for. Even looked at cheap (i.e. airpoints-fuelled) flights for the first Saturday in December this year, before the announcement of shitcannery came along. But shitcanneried (?) it is, for 2010 if not for all of time. Perhaps, like Livid - which grew out of the anti-establishment movement of late-80s Joh-era Queensland, and lasted the same 15 years Homebake has before losing its identity trying to become a BDO-style travelling supercircus - it's just outgrown its usefulness, had nothing more to say, nothing further to contribute. Maybe, But somehow, given the fairly grim state of live music in Australia, I don't think so. It seems to me like there's still a place for Homebake in the crowded festy schedule of 2011. And a job for it to do.

The Doctor is OUT.

Chunky chunky air guitar

The marker of a society's maturity is its acceptance of alternative lifestyle choices, how comfortable members of oft-oppressed minority groups feel about de-closeting and unfurling the banners proclaiming their status to the world. Whereas in decades past, persons of certain predispositions were viewed with ridicule and bigotry, in modern society such groups are celebrated, or at least tolerated.

So it is with practitioners of the air guitar. Whereas once they were marginalized and laughed at, now world championships and bestselling video games glorify their art on an international stage. The admission 'I am an airguitarist' is no longer necessarily followed by smug tittering, or even tit smuggering, whatever that is. One suspects that whether it existed before it was made up just now, there is probably already a porn site dedicated to it.

But what of air guitar's neglected cousin, the air drums?

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to admit it: I am an air drummer. True, occasionally I've been known to bust out the air guitar, but I feel my air-musical talents are better suited to the air-drumming oeuvre, particularly as my usual performance space is the driver's seat of a Ford Mondeo and this, given the right-shoulder-to-left-hip positioning of the seatbelt sash in Australasian-market RHD motor vehicles, mitigates against proper usage of said prop in the deployment of air guitar shreddage, unless one busts out the backward leftie skills in the style of Hendrix or Cobain. Passenger seat travel, of course, is more permissive vis a vis your typical right-handed air guitarist re the positioning of the seatbelt. But the air drums need no such assistance from props. All one needs is timing, tenacity, wrists like a subcontinental middle-order batsman, and the willingness to change one's name to Phil, as it is a scientific musical fact that all drummers are named Phil - eg Phil Rudd (AC/DC), Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor (Motorhead), Phil Selway (Radiohead), Phil Collins (Mediocrity), Phil Duff (Flange Gasket) etc etc etc - and all that aren't called Phil are actually Unmarked Phils.


With that we present Drum Phil: The World of Bollocks' Five Bestest Air Drum Anthems. In no particular order, because the universe hates order. Second law of thermodybollocks.

Knights of Cydonia, Muse (2006)
Crank the loud bit and try to stop your hands spontaneously flailing about. Go on. Around 4m30 in this live vid from Wembley '07.




In The Morning, Wolfmother (2009)
Given that Wolfmother is, in essence, a Led Zep/Deep Purple/Black Sabbath tribute act - three bands with mesmerically effective drummers - no surprise re the Getting Of An Guernsey here. Could pick any number of tracks - the album version of Woman would have gone well - but went for something off their Difficult Second Album (difficult in that it was probably just as good as their debut, but most of the world had stopped caring by then).




The Right Time, Hoodoo Gurus (1994)
Proof that any truly great Gurus song needed a B. Shepherd songwriting credit alongside that of D. Faulkner. Megolithic hairy arsed riff. Enormous drums. Play it loud.




Moby Dick, Led Zeppelin (1971)
No, not Bonzo's endless fucking solo in the middle, the bit that contained actual music at the start. Bonzo's drum sound was and remains legendary, and as Captain Stupidity (owner of a great deal of the IP behind Phil Duff) once remarked, 'Cowbells are where it's at.'




Noone Loves Me & Neither Do I, Them Crooked Vultures (2009)
Two words: Dave Grohl.




Or... any five songs at random off Motorhead's Ace of Spades album. Either-or.




The Doctor is OUT to see a physiotherapist about his air-drum elbow. Arsebiscuits.

Copywrong infringement

In the modern industrialized world we've become accustomed to dodgy knock-offs over the years. From the scale of the dude with a uteload of pirated DVDs at the local car-boot market, to entire governments turning a blind eye to their industries' endemic IP theft from overseas pharma patents or car designs, knocking out cheap, shitty, inferior grade imitations based loosely on a premium, aspirational template is a productive, if ethically challenged, way to turn a buck.

It's at its most distasteful, though, when the companies themselves are rorting the copyright - and it's the customers who are being sold a dummy, legally.


Yes I'm fucked off about Euro beers being produced badly under licence again.

Serious though. It's fraud. It's fraud to brew a piss-ordinary facsimile of Becks and put it in a green bottle with a bit of authentic looking silver foil on the top with a small-print insignia reading 'GERMAN PRECISION' on it. Instead of the slightly more truthful 'WE ACTUALLY BREWED THIS SHIT IN FUCKING LIDCOMBE.' Only a desperate bogan fucktard could drink that shit and actually consider themselves ahead of the curve, as persuasively outlined here.

The above rantage ain't brand wank or culture cringe, it's the result of extensive back-to-back testing. (Extensive.) Fact is, Australian-brewed Becks, like Australian-brewed Heineken, Stella and Carlsberg, is grievous fucking crap. There is no legitimate case to make that these are even close to the genuine article. Visit your local Unky Dan's, buy a slab of the imported cans and a six pack (wouldn't trouble your wallet to waste any more than that) of the locally brewed bots, have a taste comparo in your two least grody schooner glasses, and be underwhelmed by the impact of shit-quality Australian water, B-grade hops and crappy malt. The same dubious bait-and-switch is carried out in NZ, with the same dubious results. If being sold an inferior product under the aegis of a superior products branding isn't fraud, what the fuck is?

The inherent craven cretinality of this is that Australia (and NZ, of course) make fucking fantastic beers of their own volition, without needing to slavishly Xerox a bunch of pre-made foreign templates. Monteiths, Mac's, Emersons, Coopers, Boags, Cascade, Jimmy Squires, Matilda Bay, Little Creatures - stack them up against anyone you got, anyone in the world, they hold their own. The advent and rise of craft beer in the Nineties and Noughties was meant to signify the maturation of the Australasian beer consumption market, the rejection of the six-o'-clock-swill mentality and the blind stupefying allegiance to brands like VB and XXXX, no matter the dismal undrinkable quality of the output. But all we seem to have done is swap generic local swill for generic local swill under a foreign label, with the pleasure of paying an extra ten bucks a carton for the privilege.

Fuck 'em. Spend an extra couple of bucks and buy the proper shit direct from the importer. Parallel-imported Becks and Stella at one of the bigger indie bottle-o's this week for $20 a dozen... all over it like Tiger on a cocktail waitress.

Beer me.

The Doctor is OUT.

Hey Charger! Get us a beer

All that glitters is not gold, as Gary Glitter demonstrated. Nor is all that sparkles, particularly with the current spate of pasty emo teen vampires in need of a picket fence paling up the jacksie. If anything, the very adjectival concept of 'sparkling' needs to be reclaimed from the bucket of arse that is the Twilight franchise, which is and remains an insult to all that sparkles.



However, there still remains that which sparkles which is indeed gold, both in the metaphorical and the spectroscopic sense. That being the wonder and glory that is Coopers Sparkling Ale.


Weirdest. Beer. Review. Intro. Ever.

Coopers Spark has a special place in the hearts and beer fridges of drinkers worldwide, not just in Australia. The late great English beer writer Michael Jackson (yeah, I know - to be fair, he was using the name before that other singing bloke kicked off) called it Australia's one outstanding contribution to international beer, possibly because the national origin of the beer bong is still under disputation, pavlova-styles, and also because he thought all other Australian beers were untrammelled shite, mainly because he'd tried them. Except, he insisted, for the Spark. The magical, wonderful Spark. And he's absolutely right. That such a brilliant beer - strong, delicate, powerful and zesty all at once - can come from Adelaide, a city as bereft of vibrancy as it is of drinkable tap water, remains a mystery worthy of Warwick Moss coming out of retirement to host a special ep of The Extraordinary. Though the latter quality of its hometown may explain why the finished article is usually cloudier than the first morning of a Lords test match.

Yet to a certain degree the Spark is the forgotten cousin of the Coopers range. Being a hepatically ruinous 5.8% alc/vol straight off the shelf at Unky Dan's, it gets taxed well out of the budgetary range for regular drinking considerations. Its more mainstream green-hued brethren, the Pale, gets more of Coopers' promotional budget - for instance here emblazoned across the flanks of ex-Roosters leaguie Jack Elsegood's championship winning V8 Ute - and turns up on more pub taps than its kin. The focus of the marketeers and the drinkers alike appears to be on the Pale. Which is a shame. The Pale's a good beer, but it's not the Spark.

Now Coopers aficionados can be a punishing lot - as you'd expect for beardy Real Ale enthusiast types, or as close to it as the Australian drinker gets - and there's a whole slew of do's and don'ts meant to follow the Correct Consumption of Coopers, particularly ex-bottle. Temperature of serving around 8-10 Celsius, has to be in a glass, and HAS to be 'rolled' - literally, rolled across the table from side to side prior to pouring in order to agitate the yeasty sludge in the bottom of the bottle, because apparently this is a good thing. This is where the old homebrewer in me comes out, draws a line in the sand, and advises the punishers to fuck the fuck off back the fuck over there fuck ay. Beer is many things. Wonderful, delicious, complex, liberating, wet. One thing it is not meant to be is lumpy. Let the bloody thing stand before you pour it, and decant that shit off. You'll thank me.

There must be something in the water in Adelaide though, apart from sewage, industrial effluent and runoff from the Snowtown bank vault (what too soon?) Another Adelaide brewer, Brewboys have matched the Spark's impressive 5.8% output with an effort of their own - though the percenterage figure is entirely on purpose. GT Lager - 5.8% alc/vol, 35.1 bittering units, and a bunch of other not-quite-legally-actionable presentation cues harking back to the GTHO Falcons of the '60s and '70s, follows on from Charger Lager, their previous heavily oversubscribed tribute to the much cooler Hemi Chargers of the same era. They mightn't have ever won Bathurst but they were ORANGE. ORANGE IS COOL. PARTICULARLY WITH BIG FUCK OFF BLACK STRIPES. YEAH. SORRY I'LL STOP SHOUTING. Granted, this is the epitome of form over function and pretense over contents but IT'S BEER THAT COMES IN A BOX THAT LOOKS LIKE A FUCKING CHARGER. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT. What's it taste like? Fucked if I know. Beer, probably. It's from Adelaide, and it's not Coopers, so it's probably fucking rank.


And yes OK that's not a Charger it's a Pacer. The one that got mostly ruined in ITWPT in the process of being roadtripped up the NZ coast by Angus and the remaining three-quarters of Hayabusa.

What was I on about?

Yeah. So while both are awesome tributes to Strayan muscle car history - about time for that Monaro Bitter, lads - neither GT nor Charger Lager is likely to actually be drinkable, for the following reasons.
(1) Brewing comps frequented by microbreweries are usually easier to rort than an IPL game.
(2) As such, any microbrew without a string of questionably-awarded medals after its name is likely to be genuinely grievous crap. FFS, even Uncle Ted's won a couple of baubles.
(3) The only awards Brewboys have ever won have been for Charger Lager. A bronze. For coolest packaging.
QED, both Charger Lager and the apparently obtainable GT sequel are almost definitely arse frosted with arse. Buy some, pour it down the sink and put the bottles in a display case.

So here's to Coopers Sparkling. The great Australian beer. Particularly when dodgy bargain-basement Enzed supermarket Pak N'Slave have it on spesh for $26 a fifteen.


Now if you'll excuse me I have scientific research to do.

The Doctor is OUT.

Dr Strangeblog

or how I learned to stop worrying and love the fact noone comments on blogs anymore

The World of Bollocks, in all its prior myriad forms, passed five years old a month or two back, and I'd like to say that it's never been more popular. I'd like to, but it would be something called 'An Fib'. Blogging seems, if not a dying art, then a coughing and spluttering one, based on a simple comparative count page comments versus previous years, which is the only way short of the towering vanity of page traffic analysis of assessing whether people read this stuff. This kinda bothered me for a while, but then I remembered why I don't give a shit.

There's three types of blogs in the world. The diarists, the op-ed-istas and the funnies. Diarists - the ones who catalogue the whos, whys and wherefores of the minutiae of their existence - have the potential to be the dullest. Flinty's blog is a stellar example of why that doesn't have to be the case. News and opinion is probably what most of the better known blogs are about and for, from tech journalism to political commentary to cretinous celebrity shite. World of Bollocks, though, was never going to be an online diary, nor was it ever likely to contain either facts or well-argued opinion, as pointed out in the first online blogpost in early 2006 - which, in effect, sets out the terms of reference for what was then called The Weak In Sport. The only major change since then has been in name and in focus, broadening the agenda from sporting stupidity to other issues frosted with awesome such as bacon, girls on trampolines, bogan-spotting in Yamba, and cretinous celebrity shite, all dealt with in the World of Bollocks' usual subtle style - think HG Nelson kicking down the doors at Failfax Brisvegas and taking over Blunt Instrument by sheer force of shouting. So WoB lives in that third category - along with a bunch of people who should be paid for the free comedic awesome they provide like Nat and Nat. Though Girlclumsy has been known to have Actual Journalistic Content rather than Complete Made-Up Rubbish as per SOP for WoB.

But, as both Nats and various others have mused in various forums recently, what's the frickin' point if no bastard is reading it?

This is starting to read like a farewell-and-thanks-for-reading. And it is, but probably not the way you're thinking of. I'm not giving up WoB. I was writing this when only a handful of people were reading the thing, and as soon as you start writing for page hits and comments, that is to appeal to the audience rather than to your own amusement, you're on Struggle Street. I do this for fun. That anyone is interested in reading it is a complimentary bonus. I ain't getting famous or rich from this - not even the odd free slab of Grolsch. Just not being fired for writing it would be the main positive I'd be looking towards.

There is a problem though. Over the years WoB has developed itself a sort of subconscious minimum standard, certainly in terms of length and structure. That bacon post is a good example. Effectively a mini-essay, 3-4 paras, each developing the exposition and introducing a different idea for the Taking of Piss Therefrom. It's actually fucking hard to write stuff like that consistently, which is why people like John Birmingham get paid to do it by large media corporations. That, along with the content-leaching effect of other forums like Twitter means that there's a large activation energy inhibiting the writing of columns/episodes/posts. It's almost entirely self-inflicted. Which is good, because it can be almost entirely self-uninflicted.

A week or two ago I bashed out a post about the hypocrisy of F1 teams complaining about Ferrari team orders dictating the result of the German F1GP (including a silly photo of amateur proctologist Seb Vettel) which was titled Can you tell we've stopped bothering to write stuff people might want to read and instead are just amusing ourselves. This, effectively, is the World of Bollocks' Revised Editorial Direction. Basically, there isn't one. Stuff gets thought, written, and posted. Sounds obvious, because it is. But kicking down that self-imposed barrier to posting because of dumb preconceptions about what people want to read, or how many jokes per unit volume are necessary, is actually more difficult than it looks - as a few of the regulars listed at right would probably admit.

The other thing that has to change might also seem a surprise to you, because it was to me. Twitter's got to go. For a myriad of reasons - it's a monumental time-suck which I can no longer afford, it's an exercise in vanity which is a poor indictment on one's character, and to be blunt, it's simply not as much fun any more as it was when I started - but more than anything, 140 characters is just too few to have any fun with. Currently, what funny ideas I have get blurted out into the Twuntosphere without any chance to get developed or extrapolated, unless they get a second-hand regurgitation after they've already been prechewed for a while in 140 character bites. I write for fun, and Twitter's not as much fun as blogging. Fair to say both the quality and quantity of the latter has dipped since the former came along, too. Not to mention the fact that the last part of In The Worst Possible Taste ain't gonna write itself. It'll get written, but it'll appear in its own time, when it's done, not when it's due. I realise there's an irony in reversing the established directionality of social media at the moment, which is to blow up your blog and your Arsebook in favour of Twuntering away to your heart's content, but fuck that, I'm not here to be a trendite. And if this all ends up back with only a handful of old drunken mates and Arsebook acquaintances reading this stuff, so be it. You get that on the big jobs, as my old mate Moff would say. Or was that Bear Sorensen from Hayabusa. Life is cyclical, we end up back where we started - dribbling, incoherent and soiling ourselves - so why shouldn't online life be the same.



So thanks Twitter - it's been swell, but the swelling's gone down. (That was an AJ-ism. Ripping off everyone else's content here.) Thanks to all the very awesome people I've met through Twitter that I hadn't encountered through blogs or whatever else, and I do hope you'll stick around and offer unsolicited sledging on here once in a while. While I'm not closing the door completely on the Twunterverse - haven't blown the account up or anything, keeping it for direct messages and for occasional observational usage around sporting events etc - but as a contributor I'm disinclined to linger longer. Currently the Twitcounter stands at 38,750, and there's a nice kind of symmetry to that, a certain poetry. Primarily because $38,750 was how much your mum paid for her sex change operation before she met your Dad.

The Doctor is OUT, because there's no better ending than leaving on a Mum joke.

How to watch rugby

Your Correspondent was at the habitually excellent Otago Farmers Market by the railway station this morning, getting the habitually excellent bacon buttie and large flat white which constitutes Saturday brunch - as well as further salacious extract of oink to see me through the day, today being Eat Only Pig Day by imperial decree of me, just then. On the ridiculously long railway station platform stood one of the Taieri Gorge tourist excursion trains doing its prelaunch checks. However, the crowd milling on the platform didn't look like a tourist crowd. Middle aged, male, paunchy, uniformly dressed in Otago jerseys and All Blacks jackets, the odd sly durry or can of Speights in hand, they gathered in clumps like Central Otago tussock on the plains of the station platform. Didn't look like the usual catering arrangements either, judging by the slab after slab of Speights and the tray after tray of Marlows Pies that were being shovelled into the buffet car like the action of a demented coal-train stoker. Meanwhile, a brass band murdered songs you didn't like anyway, while a small stall flogged overpriced blue-and-gold bunting and trinketry to staunch Southern men attempting to wear cobalt-and-saffron coloured jesters' hats with some form of stoicism.

Ranfurly Shield challenge, I remembered. Awesome.

The Ranfurly Shield is one of those misty-eyed old traditions of NZ provincial rugby that you'd hate to see go by the wayside with the march of progress, in the same way there was a little inward cheer when the Sheffield Shield was reinstated in Australian state cricket. The Ranfurly Shield an old-fashioned challenge trophy which runs alongside the regular-season provincial competition games - whoever holds it, defends it whenever they play at home. For much of the past ten years the Log of Wood has effectively been the Auckland-Canterbury Perpetual Shield, but in recent years some of the smaller unions have managed to nick the Log off the big boys, starting with North Harbour a few seasons back. They had a street parade, a civic reception from the Mayor of North Shore City, and got so ludicrously off-chops that they lost their next game (a semi-final, so not counting for Shield challenge honours) by a week and a half. Currently Otago's Highlander mates from down the road, Southland, have the Log in their pool room having kicked Canterbury's teeth in at the half-finished AMI stadium in Chch last year, on their way to an excellent season for the Stags.

My adopted province of Otago, who haven't held the shield since 1957 (and who were cheated out of it by a dodgy last-minute penalty vs Canty in '94, the nearest they've come since) play Southland tonight in Invercargill. It's more than just a Shield challenge; in the past year or two Southland have taken the ascendancy over Otago in terms of the strength of the Highlanders provinces, and while it sucks less than losing to fucking Canterbury, it still sucks to lose to your little brother at backyard footy. Otago are rebuilding under ex-Reds coach Phil Mooney, who blooded most of the kids who've made Ewen McKenzie look good this year in the Super Umpteen (can't remember what number we're up to now), are coming off a loss in the first round of the provincial ITM Cup, Southland off a win... there's more than just the Log riding on this. But, in a sort of heartwarming, old-fashioned sort of way, it's the Log that matters. Certainly does to the middle-aged blokes on the platform at the Dunedin railway station. Even if it's just an excuse to get a leave pass from the missus and get away with the boys for the day. Most of the carriages looked to have been booked by supporters clubs or by local companies - something of a corporate box on rails - and as far as I can tell, if you can come up with a more elegant way to organise an away trip to a game of footy, you'd be onto something. That, my friends, is the way to watch rugby.

The ABs-jacket-and-durry brigade are one half of the usual rugby crowd at Carisbrook, and presumably will be at the new, shiny, roofed and better-bloody-get-finished-before-RWC2011 harbourside stadium which will replace the old concrete box at the Brook. The other half - not that it's a half any more, given the dwindling numbers involved - are of course the students, the scarfies, the lifeblood of the town, insert further cliches here and pause for editing. Except these days the students don't go to the rugby, for a whole smorgasboard of reasons, all of which related to Gen Y and Z being overentitled little brats who see university as a fee-for-service degree factory and not an enriching cultural experience for the betterment of their personal development. Last time Southland played at the Brook, Stags kids outnumbered Otago scarfies two to one. They won, too.

Which brings back into question the point behind building a $200M plastic-lidded stadium (it's not $200M as-budgeted but probably will be once all gets tallied up), which despite noises made by the council and the developers about concerts and events, will be a rugby venue first and foremost. It's a brilliant, beautiful thing. Awe-inspiring. Will be a wonderful place to watch the game. BUT NOONE'S WATCHING ANY MORE. Interest in the perennially choking All Blacks has never been at a lower ebb in NZ, and all levels below that are practically flatlining. Even if just for a few weeks at the height of the FIFA World Cup, football was the number one sport in the country. Didn't last - though the Phoenix haven't kicked off in the A-League yet, that will give a better long-term barometer of whether football's made a leap forward - but even to be in the position where rugby's hegemony is being questioned is an indicator of just how far it's fallen.

Still, the Corporate Name Stadium Underwritten By University Coin will be a bloody good way to watch rugby. Even if it's not quite as awesome as booking out a train carriage with pies, Speights and mates, and talking complete rubbish over a few cans while the rolling green hills of Southland rush past the windows. Because when it comes to sports-watching missions, there's nothing like a roadtrip. Except, perhaps, a railtrip.

Hope it makes up for Otago getting smashed in the Shield challenge later on though, cos they will.

The Doctor is OUT.

Signs O' The Times

I woke with half a hangover, knowing I'd find the other half as soon as I got out of bed and stood upright. Stood to reason. I was a third-year PhD student, majoring in home brewing and lab avoidance. I woke to another clonally perfect Brisbane winter's morning. And to a sign. Probably not a sign from God, but a sign nonetheless.

The sign was taped to the door of the room I shared with my girlfriend, with the insulation tape usually used for ball-tampering in frontyard cricket. It was bright yellow and read 'NAILING TOOL IN USE'.

Flatmate to the stars Dr Craigos emerged in Homer Simpson boxers and a white wifebeater, all elbows and afro, scratching himself in concerning places. "Coffee?" he suggested. Then LOLed and ROFLed in one elegant motion. "That's fucking gold," he opined.

"Yes, yes it is," I said, scribing him off my mental list of suspects. It was a short list. Any shorter and it wouldn't have required a list, as it doesn't really matter in what order you write one name down. "Seeds must have made it home after all."

We'd lost Other Flatmate King Of Seed at the RE. He'd fucked off to get money out of the ATM. Given he never ever had any, perhaps he decided to go and rob the Reserve Bank's gold reserves with a bulldozer instead. But at least he'd kept up Chateau Dodgy Evo III's most honourable tradition. Stealing signs while drunk. In his case, he'd had to break into a construction site on his ramble home to pilfer the desired trophy - but it was a gesture from the heart. He never ended up actually getting us a wedding present, but in a way, that was it. About three years early.

The Zen of Drunken Stupidity, as discussed previously, is a broad church, taking in everything from raiding traffic cones from roadworks to hanging trolleys off traffic lights and shoes off power lines. Our speciality was signs. Usually real estate signs, because screwing over real estate agents and cashed-up vendors is, after all, a victimless crime. The property adjoining outs on our usual drunken stagger back from the RE seemed to be permanently For Sale with a local realo we'll call Doug Dickhead. It's possible it remained permanently For Sale because we made a point of ripping out the For Sale signs and tossing them into a nearby drainage channel. Two years before, Doug Dickhead had sold much-loved Chateau Dodgy I out from under us, then encouraged the new owners to jack the rent by 50%. We held grudges.

Still, it didn't necessarily have to be revenge that motivated our drunken larceny. Once, a huge and wordy PRD Realty sign outside a tower block on the St Lucia riverfront got half-inched purely because in our inebriated genius we'd figured out how to fuck about with the letters to make the whole verbose pontification into a tribute to the absent King of Seed, who'd stayed home rather than join us at the RE as he was labouring under the effects of living in a cashless society, as well as a touch of black dog. He was chuffed to bits when we presented it to him. Last I heard, he still had the thing.

We also tried bringing all the detachable roadsigns on campus back with us one night en route home from the uni bar, because they needed friends and we had heaps (our infamous brown couch, long since without a useful spring to its name apart from the few which tried to give unsolicited proctology exams, was bolstered in the base with a No Standing sign and a bus stop rescued from outside my uni college from undergrad in Sydney after a 395 bus had cleaned it up), but uni security took a dim view of our efforts. "Scuse me mate can we ask you a few questions?" "Erm, no." *steps gingerly around seccy van handbrake-parked across driveway in front of him and continues home*

A mate of ours, who I'll call Chris, as that's his name, never limited himself to anything so narrow-focus and derivative as signs. Off chops, he'd nick anything. Not through any sense of vandalism, or kleptomania, or social destructiveness. Just for the challenge.

"Chris, see that park bench?"

"Yup?"

"I reckon that'd look awesome on the deck, eh."

"Shit yeah, it would..."

And Chris, who by this stage of the night would probably have his shirt off and/or had managed to injure himself in some sort of ridiculous and implausible fashion, would be devising a means by which he could get a concrete-and-steel BCC bus stop bench back across a suburb and a half and up a narrow staircase to fit on his balcony. Fittingly, he became a project consultant.

All of this brings us to the Pressing News of the Day. Or as close to it as the Otago Daily Times, the Parochial Voice of the South, is ever likely to get: STEAL A ROAD CONE DAY WILL END WITH CHARGES: POLICE. Yes, the humourless NZ rozzers have given the royal thumbs down to the idea of National Steal A Road Cone Day, and will fine people up to three big hairy gorillas to make their point, or have them thrown in the lockup to be buggered for three months by Big Sione the former boxer, strip joint bouncer and drag performer.

Locking people up for stealing road cones. That's just un-Australian.

The Doctor is OUT.

How to read the news

I did Ancient History at high school. Not for any reason related to it making me more employable (perish the thought), just because I was OK at it. Ironically, it was my best subject - ironically because I've done absolutely fuck all with the knowledge thus gained, most of which has since been shunted out of floorspace in the Millers Self Storage of the mind in favour of more critical points of fact such as how to pour a beer off tap and who won Bathurst in 1976. All of Ancient History just seems to melange into some stuff about Peloponnesian Wars, dudes riding elephants over Alpe D'Huez like prehistoric combatants in le Tour, Spartans eating babies and Caligula wanting to bang his sister.

That said Ancient History did give me two bits of very useful information to take away with me. The first being about assessing the credibility of sources. One of the key things about history - ancient even more critical than modern, due to the tyrannical distance of time - is that who's telling the history is as important as what the history actually is, because every source, whether primary or secondary, brings their own view to bear on their version of events. Factor in translators, editors and so on, and it becomes impossible to credibly take anyone's word as gospel (which leads into another discussion on another ancient text or two which gets interpreted literally far too fucking often to be sensible, but we'll set that aside for today.) Take the historians of Ancient Rome - Suetonius was utterly tabloid, like a 70AD version of Famous or NW. Herodotus was dry and conservative. Cary, a Pom who collated a lot of the Histories of Rome (that was his big seller as I recall), did the Thomas the Tank Engine trick of spinning a whole weave about English class structure and imposing that into the narrative. Upshot being, what is being said needs to be taken on board along side an assessment of who is saying it and what their underlying agenda is.

It hardly even needs to be said, but this is clearly as much an issue today reading mainstream media as it is any budding students of history trudging their way through dusty textbooks. Every media outlet, every source of information we get about the world, has a slant, a prism through which the account of events is presented. From MSM television news bulletins to polished press releases to the Twunterances of celebs, there is no real truth, only versions thereof. This is neither good nor bad, it is merely so. It's left up to the individual to weight those versions of the truth according to their value of the truth-teller. Because I was a scientist, understanding and respecting how science is done and what underpins it, I'll always respect science over belief, which in the end is unverified opinion. This is a rational position. On a more micro scale I don't tend to believe a fucking word News Limited have to say, because they're venal pricks who tried to kill the South Sydney Rabbitohs. This is not a rational position. So there's another layer of interpretation over the top of the biases of the story-teller; those of the story-reader.

Now most of the news I get from the (Not Really That) Old Country comes in the form of emailed newsletters with headlines from Fairfax newspapers - Fairfax being the least dodgy of the various Australian MSM organisations, in my assessment and most others' who aren't John Hartigan. This magnifies that double-sided distortion effect profoundly. In the modern MSM, headlines are designed to grab attention above and beyond their original role as transmitters of information. In fact, headlines are often more of a 'tell' about the angle the media outlet is taking - and wants you to take away as your interpretation of the piece - than the rest of the story.

Which is a very long winded way of explaining why I'd be happy to be sexually harassed for $37 million dollars.

My introduction to this bizarre and tawdry David Jones story was a SMH.com.au headline stating 'DJs boss in $37M sexual harassment case'. To which my immediate reaction - bereft of context - was pretty much as above. Broken down into the microsecond-duration logic which led to that conclusion:

- $37M is a lot of money. More than you get for losing limbs or life in industrial accidents caused by corporate negligence. More than CSR paid any of the workers from Wittenoom.
- Sexual harassment is bad.
- Sexual harassment is not $37M bad.
- Sexwale harassment is when you get your arse slapped by South African Minister for Housing Tokyo Sexwale. I'm sorry, that's not funny.
- $37M looks less like fair restitution and more like pointscoring, mediamongering and cashraking.
- This looks like one of those ridiculous American lawsuits where someone sues McDonalds for a hundred mill over coffee that's too hot.
- Any legal system whereby this is considered a credible opening gambit is utterly fucked.
- I've worked in systemically unpleasant workplaces, with closed-off promotion prospects, under bullying bosses who were later sacked for behaviour issues. It's not sexual harassment but it's as close as most males will ever get to it. Wouldn't do it again by choice. Then again $37M would look after the grandkids of my two little boys, and every generation of my family between.


Now that is, as I've said, entirely bereft of context. It's not inclusive of ANY of the actual story content, it is merely a reaction to the headline. It doesn't take into consideration that there appears (APPEARS, contempt-of-court types) to have been a concerted effort by the board, conscious or otherwise, to hush this up. And the DJs boss APPEARS to be a serial pantsman, narcissist and fucktard. And Alannah Hill APPEARS to be a blithering old soak that you would seek to avoid sans-undergarment interaction with at all costs. And yes the double-barrelled complainant is not getting the $37M and yes it's all (mostly? partly?) going to charity and no she's not invading Poland for spina bifida so it really IS all right. This isn't a discussion about the rights and wrongs of the case. This is about how subtle tweaks on how information is presented can coax certain responses out of media consumers. And how the soundbite age (which is perhaps morphing in to the e-headline age, as more and more people switch off the TV and get their news from online sources) makes us ever more susceptible to gut reactions over measured analysis of the facts of the day - or as close to facts as the MSM will ever provide - on everything from the BP oil spill to the LeBron James trade.

Which brings me back to the second thing I learned from Ancient History. I learned what sexual harassment was. There was a girl in my class, called... it doesn't matter what she was called. She was a surfie chick. Alpha femme. Very, very pretty. Might have been a part-time model for ads in surf mags. I never had much to do with her as our cliques never intersected (and there's nothing more debilitating than intersecting cliques) but what I remember was she used to get a lot of attention from the teacher. Spent more time up the back of the room with her than out the front. Constantly offering - or just providing, unsolicited - shoulder massages, because 'you're so tense!' (jeez I fucking wonder why, pal?) And basically harassing the Jesus suffering fuck out of this girl. Never gave it much thought at the time, other than the idle thought 'I don't think she's into that. That's pretty fucking wrong. Someone should do something about that.' And yes, the other idle thought 'I wish someone would give me a shoulder massage. Not him but.' Now this guy, like your DJs boss-type-dude, was good at his job, performed to and exceeded the parameters set by his employer - in one case being a good teacher, in the other, keeping the shareprice up to keep the shareholders happy. I don't know how or even if it affected her long-term; like I say, we weren't close. But there's a certain bitter irony that in that case, the people who knew what was happening (i.e. us) weren't really in a position to do anything about it, and those who might have been, didn't know, or didn't act.

Well that's all a bit fucking serious. Look, Sebastian Vettel wants to be a proctologist. Again.


The Doctor is OUT.