History is written by the winners. Of history-writing awards, mostly

So, getting old is a bag of poo. Things get wobbly, hair departs, music becomes shit and the kids won't get off your lawn. Also, you find yourself Turning Into One Of Those People. One of Those People who stay in on Friday nights, instead of more exciting alternatives. One of Those People who considers buying a Volvo, instead of more exciting alternatives. One of Those People who read in bed, instead of more exciting alternatives.

I have become a person who reads in bed. I don't like it. I suspect I will soon start watching One News, voting National and fearing the darkies. But it's a convenient flat surface where people will leave me the fuck alone. Right now I'm reading Michael King's The Penguin History of New Zealand. I say 'right now', which is not strictly accurate; it would make it hard to type. Michael King was a prominent NZ historian who died in 2004 courtesy a dodgy section of State Highway 2 through the Waikato. This occurred right at the height of his fame like some sort of beardy historian rock-star of sorts, as the Penguin History of NZ had been released the year before to massive acclaim and unprecedented sales figures. NZ has an interesting history - the last country in the world to be discovered and settled, in which the preceding few thousand years of human civilization were recapitulated on fast-forward over the course of a couple of hundred - and King's account is supposed to be one of the best. We'll see. A tad hard to make definitive judgements on page 29 of 570.

Yep. Not only reading in bed, reading HISTORY in bed. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

Why read a history of a country you don't belong to? To understand it. As an acknowledgement that this couple-of-years-at-most OE is becoming a one-way trip. I am not a New Zealander, but I've helped make two. Since moving here I've bought three houses, held four jobs, been married, become a father, fought cancer, discovered pinot noir and figured out how to make brussel sprouts so that they don't taste of arse. This is starting to feel like home. Which, to an Australian, is supposed to feel like blasphemy, treachery and/or lunacy. Says more about Australian culture than NZ, of course.

The idea of national identity, and the idea (pushed particularly hard by MSM muppets during the Olympics) that you should only have one and it should be defended at all costs, has always grated on me. National identity is a very personal thing, but IMHFO it's got fuck all to do with flags and anthems and how loudly you can bray and brag about your nation's perceived awesomeness. The Olympics, and most media coverage thereof, is exhibit A for How To Do It Wrong, with the media and the lowest-common-denomunter punters pitched into a headlong arms race to see who can be the most cravenly cuntiferous. It's all a bit piss-dismal and ridiculous really, and is a fairly good reason to give the Olympics the swerve, in the most part. That, and the fact most of the 'sport' involved is Michael Mouse In Extremis, or gelded variants of proper contests. If you're going to get flag-wavingly, foreigner-baitingly frothy about sport, it might as well be one which isn't something inherently shit like dressage, ping pong or synchronised drowning.

Disclaimer: Burger Rings are not an official sponsor of the games of the XXXth Olympiad

This Olympics, I am mostly a New Zealander. There's something kinda refreshing about a nation that doesn't expect by right to win, and doesn't throw its toys out of the cot like a two-year-old when it doesn't. About coverage that celebrates participation, the efforts of other nations, and the making of finals over medal-fetish fappage. Admittedly, it's by necessity rather than design... but it's refreshing, just the same.

Not to mention the best thing about pretending to be a New Zealander at Olympics time: no longer having to pretend to give any kind of fuck about swimming.

The Doctor is OUT.

Tictacal misjudgement

Hello there. I made a mistake this week. It's known to happen, mostly in weeks with an E in the week. This particular mistake was made in the checkout of Pak N' Save South D (aka The Land Which Time Forgot But Munterdom Definitely Recalls Very Well Thanks V. Much). Many mistakes have been made in Pak N' Save South D, usually sartorial or hygiene related to the shoppers therein, but this was related to a regrettable impulse-purchase. To wit, my impulse-purchase of New Strawberry Fields Tic Tacs.

Do not impulse-purchase New Strawberry Fields Tic Tacs.
They are not very nice.

Now, all taste is subjective (particularly bad taste) and there may be some of you who will like and enjoy the taste of New Strawberry Fields Tic Tacs. I am not among your number. I am among the number of those who feel they taste of arse frosted with low-calorie non-dairy gluten-free extract of arse. Actually, scratch that. They taste worse than arse frosted with low-calorie non-dairy gluten-free extract of arse. They taste exactly like that sickly strawberry fluoride paste the dentist smears all over your molars last thing before reluctantly letting you out of the seat to dry-retch most of it back out again. That sickly strawberry fluoride shite is BY FAR the worst thing about going to the dentist. Apart from everything else that happens there.

Actually, dentists get a bad rap. I've had a pretty good run with dentists. For years I went to the same dentist, an old flatmate of my uncle's from his uni days. He had a laugh like an unmuffled two-stroke motocross bike, and he laughed a lot. He was good at his job, great with people, and seemed much happier than any dentist would seem to have a right to be, given the perception of dentists as the most miserable and unhappy of all the medical professionals - borne out by the stat that they do themselves in at a higher rate than any of their colleagues. For most routine dentists - the ones who haven't gone specialist and coined it in - the heavy workload, the pressures of keeping afloat (for most are effectively running small businesses with high capital equipment costs), the mindnumbing repetitive tedium of the work, the unpleasantness of hurting people on a daily basis, and the fact that unless you DO specialise you're left in a situation where you'll never have the potential to earn more than you do on day 1 of the job, and probably less as your fine motor skills degenerate with age - it's not that hard to see why it could turn you miserable, if you weren't already.

Hey, I just demonstrated a link between dental and mental health. Where's my research grant HRC yafargencunce.

It's entirely possible that seemingly cheery blokes like my old dentist were and are faking it, of course. Few people wear their mental health status on their sleeve, particularly in professional environments where ego and image are key, like medicine, politics or sport. Former All Black Sir John Kirwan was knighted as much for his frank public admissions about his own depression, and fronting a rather-bloody-excellent campaign directed at people who were suffering in silence with their own mental issues, as for playing wing in the 1987 World Cup side. Still, there's got to be many more people hiding their battles than there are people admitting them.  Not to be flippant with the current tragedy of the moment just to link an idea in, but it's pretty fucking obvious old mate from the Aurora mass shooting was harbouring some deep and troubling mental issues which he wasn't declaring to friends and family, judging by the cascade of commentary from former contacts re how nice, pleasant, charming and well-adjusted he was. Now, admittedly in cases like this where we're all asking 'Why??' and the answers are obscure and obtuse, humans have a tendency to want to interpret what data there is to fit their preconceptions - which is why a lot of us suck at science - and I'm probably as guilty of that as anyone. In the maelstrom of confused messages which was spilling out of the ether in the immediate aftermath of the shooting what I picked up on was 'failed PhD student'. And knowing that doing a PhD under the American system (far, far more vicious, intensive and competitive than in Australasia or the UK) is probably the most psychologically fraught process anyone can go through, short of SAS torture-resistance training and organising a wedding, and that anyone who was used to going through life being a A-grade winner (as per his academic history to that point) wasn't going to take well to hideous failure, I joined the dots I wanted to join, and blamed the stress and shame of beginning and failing a PhD for making his brain go 'ping'.

Others, of course, joined other dots to place the blame on America's ludicrous availability of assault weapons, the violent fantasy world of Batman movies themselves, or some inherent 'evil', whatever that actually means in a neurological sense. I have a problem with the last one, and my old mate Mel has written a highly valid thinkpiece on't which saves me from doing the heavy lifting here - but it is never someone's choice or someone's fault to suffer from a mental illness. It's difficult to keep that front of mind when the act involved is one of the deepest, 'evillest' bastardry imaginable - and you could definitely say that about Aurora. But we have to.

And what it reminds us is that one's sanity and grasp on reality, or whatever impersonation you are doing of same at the moment, is the most precious thing you have, and you have to protect it at all costs. I know this. I went slightly mad about 18 months ago. Well, I was always slightly mad, as anyone who's known me would admit. But the pressure of the job I was in, coupled with the mortal fear of death which comes with cancer treatment, raised my background levels of slightly mad to actually-in-need-of-help. Some people are visited by the black dog. I've had run-ins with it myself. I don't like dogs much. Personally, I wasn't visited by the black dog as much as the despair squid. (Hat-tip to Red Dwarf for that one). I had anxiety. Chest-bursting, brain-clamming anxiety which would manifest itself as a fear of as much as putting on my shoes and walking out the door. Days spent sitting on the couch staring vacantly at ESPN. Months of oncology counselling. Zombie drugs of various stripes. Till the epiphony came that what I was terrified of was going to happen anyway - eventually - and I needed to make the very fucking most of the days between then and now. And furthermore that working at a high-pressure gig which was not-very-slowly killing me was about the worst use of those days imaginable. Cancer and work didn't make me mentally ill - I've always carried a background level of anxiety around with me, and it wouldn't be unfair to retrospectively chalk up my own PhD- and postdoc-level difficulties to anxiety and depression masked largely by beer and swearing - but all you need is a trigger event to tip the balance from getting-by to limp-home-mode.

I'm now in the process of rebuilding myself - my mental health, my physiological health (being now several pies-and-sauce over par from what would be acceptable in polite company, thanks to a variety of factors) and my sense of what it is I'm actually going to do with the next 30 or so years before my true calling as a grey nomad in a campervan comes around. So far, house husbandry is agreeing with me very well. Perhaps the job I'm best cut out for is the job I should have been focusing on all along, ie dad and hubby. Doesn't pay well, but employee satisfaction is awesomely high.

This isn't a post about me, and it's not a post about old mate from Aurora. It's about you. If you are one of those people struggling in silence, pretending you're OK, just fucking stop it. Go get help. It's a bit humiliating; suck it in. You have people who care for you and depend on you, even if you don't think so. JK's programme is a good, anonymous start. Go from there to whatever works for you. The world is a beautiful, amazing place, and you and yours deserve to enjoy it. Get better. Have fun.

So, in conclusion: Strawberry Fields Tictacs - no.

The Doctor is OUT.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, unless it's Manly

Ah yes, it's NRL Rivalry Round again and you can just smell it in the air. No, sorry, that's Dunedin International Airstrip where you can smell it in the air, particularly when the dairy farm upwind is milking. Poooooo. Anyhoo, rivalry round. Where traditional emnities are stirred, grudges are inflamed, and Books of Feuds are dusted off. Mate against mate. Hate against hate. Souths against Easts. Parra against the Dogs. Canberra against... the Gold Coast.

Hmmm. There's a grudge match for the ages. Taking that one to the grave. What is it about Raiders v Titans that so stirs the soul? What is it about those two mighty teams, unified by a burning hatred that goes back GENERATIONS*, that captivates the attention of the entire rugby league world, NAY UNIVERSE?

*Mayfly generations. Fuck off, it counts

The answer, of course, is 'Absolutely Fucking Nowt'. The Book of Feuds for those two clubs would amount to a four-page pamphlet, most of which would be taken up by glossy ads for Gold Coast timeshares. Which illustrates the issue with NRL Rivalry Round. Some of the rivalries are, let's say, ever so slightly piss-ant. One would be forgiven for thinking Rivalry Round is just a way of disguising the fact the fixtures-calculating Amstrad had a RAM crash and spat out more than the usual number of all-Sydney matchups this week.

Look, NRL. If you're going to do Rivalry Round, do it properly. Set up some quality matchups which will provoke some proper hate. Even if it involves upgrading the fixtures computer to a Vic-20. Or even if it means cheating like a seven-times Tour de France champion and just making shit up that works for you. In Rivalry Round, teams should play their most hated rivals, the teams they hate and fear the most. The Dragons would play the Sharks. The Cowboys would play their bitter in-state rivals the Broncos. Wests would play the GWS Giants, at tackle netball, and would still beat them by 100 plus. Easts would battle apathy and indifference (no change there then). Melbourne would play the NRL salary cap auditors. Finally, Manly would play everyone in the competition, either via a selection of a composite 'All Stars' style selection or just Manly's 13 players vs all 195 starters of the other NRL sides at once. The latter alternative would of course be grossly unfair and would likely result in serious injury to many or all of Manly's players, which is why I personally favour it.

What do you think? Oy'm Dr Yobbo wi' a Y.

The Doctor is OUT.

That's entertainment

Mick Rogers is none-too-happy, and he wants to tell you why. Mick is a professional bicyclist, and a remarkably good one. Former time-trial champion of the world, recently fallen on hard times, he's now back and like the rest of the Sky Procycling team, including fellow Australian mountaineer Richie Porte, has never ridden better than in the current edition Tour de France. Indeed, he and Porte have been crucial in blazing a trail up the high alps for their team leader Wiggo The Unshaven and his crimefighting sidekick Froomedog to blouse through 1-2, at the expense of the rest of the Crowned Heads of the Peleton (thanks v. much Sherliggett.) Which, inevitably, includes Our Cadel. Which, inevitably, means Rogers and Porte have been copping the raspberry from Strayan fans on course. On the Magical Twunterbox, Mr Rogers and others have taken exception to this and (paraphrasing for shit grammar and punctuation) has requested that those booing he and Porte kindly submit to paying his salary in future.

Only one problem, as some half-cut smartarse @replied last night: they already are.

Not literally, of course, as some of the desperately slow-on-the-uptake kiddies might think. Noone is stuffing fivers down the peleton's collective Lycra dacks as they scoot through rural France. But - and this is the core truth of professional sport which everyone within the house of cards seeks to quietly but actively ignore - everyone who pays their money to stand and watch, buys this year's ever-more-hideous version of the team jersey, argues about the proceedings on the Intergoogle, or even just lends a set of eyeballs to 90 seconds of highlights on the nightly news, pays the bills of the participants. They alone are the reason anyone is paid a living to play a sport. In the barest sense the skills involved in riding a bicycle really fast up a hill, or hitting a ball a long way, or kicking a ball through a set of big sticks, are not ones which society finds valuable enough to reward with a salary. The only reason anyone gets paid is because somebody out there has taken an interest in the result, and somebody else has seen an opportunity amongst those interested somebodies to market their product or service. In Rogers, Porte, Wiggins and Froome's case, the income to their team which pays their salary comes from sponsors (in their case British Sky Broadcasting Ltd) and from coinage which comes their way through being a member team of the UCI ProTour - whose own income comes largely from selling TV rights. The broadcasters aren't doing it for charity either, given they're driven by a need to attract eyeballs and an assessment that this particular product is going to do it for their stakeholders and advertisers. This is blindingly fucking obvious, yes, but somehow it needs to be restated: without people taking an interest, professional sport DOES NOT EXIST. It is simply another form of entertainment, nothing more or less.

Yet, in an amusing collective Nude Emperor meme, all professional sport through its participants (and moreover the media who cover it) seeks to distance itself from this reality by repeating to itself and to anyone who will listen just how IMPORTANT AND SERIOUS IT IS, instead of basically being a rival for watching TV or playing XBOX - which, to be honest, is probably in professional sport's best interest. At no point during John Coates' histrionic bleat about how Australia will only get 40 medals in London did he admit that the whole contrivance is in essence just a bunch of twats you've never heard of faffing about quadrannually in a superannuated school sport carnival, which amounts to two-fifths of fuck-all in the grand scheme of things. NO. IT'S FUCKING SERIOUS THAT AUSTRALIA WILL ONLY GET 40 MEDALS AND FUCKING HELL WE BETTER SPEND MORE MONEY ON THE AOC NEXT TIME, OR WE'LL GET EVEN LESS. AUSTRALIA MAY END UP WITH NEGATIVE MEDALS BY 2024. AND EVEN WORSE JOHN COATES MAY HAVE TO FLY CATTLE CLASS. FUCKEN.

So the punters and munters on the course, who've presumably paid some considerable sum to get their backsides trackside (thanks v. much Mike Raymond) and watch, are completely entitled to express their opinion - that is, that Rogers and Porte are sellout pricks for helping the dirty Poms at the expense of Our Cadel - just as Mick Rogers is entitled to be snotty about it, just as any sportsman who gets booed is. Question is, is their opinion actually valid? This is is a trickier point, and most of the commentary on the subject, both on the interwomble and from Sherliggett on the box, has been of casual fans (or just flag-waving bogans) who don't 'understand' cycling. Setting aside the inherent patronising tone of this argument, and the point that a casual fan would appear fucking unlikely to travel halfway round the world (or at least halfway across Europe from their grotty bedsit in Earls Court) to stand halfway up a steep hill and wave the Southern Cross at bicyclists, this illustrates an interesting dichotomy in the pro sport environment: the people who pay the bills for pro sport aren't, on the whole, the dedicated, rusted-on, hard-out aficionados of the sport, because there simply aren't as many of them as there are the casual observers. This is why every professional sport created by humanity is on a desperate drive to find new eyeballs to convert, and this drives the evolution of each sport - why Formula One cars have stupid moveable rear wings to enable more overtaking, why ANZ Championship netball outfits are as short and tight as possible, why T20 cricket merely exists. By and large, this fucks off the purists, but if there were enough of them to grow the sport sustainably (or even tread water) none of this would be deemed necessary by each sport's overlords.

What's interesting (to me at least) is where what is understood as 'part of the game' by the purists and rusted-ons seems to strike against the casual fan's sense of what is reasonable. Examples of this are endless - how long have you got? - but for a simple case, take scrums in rugby: to the casual observer (like Your Correspondent's old man), a pointless, obscure waste of time which just endangers the participants' spinal health; to rugby fans, an essential element of what makes rugby union rugby union and not rugby league. Those of us who believe the obscurity and drudge of union is the best explanation for why league was invented sit somewhere in between.

Looking for clear analogues of the Rogers-Porte situation in other sports is a bit imprecise though. Team orders in Formula One, as teams have used down the years to decide the results of Grands Prix in favour of their nominal number one drivers - most notoriously by Ferrari - is more an analogue of Sky's decision not to allow Froome to challenge Wiggins. Cycling aficionados understand Rogers and Porte are there to Do A Job, and view anyone giving them grief with the same offended bewilderment as if Valentino Rossi's predominantly Australian pit crew were getting booed at Phillip Island for not working for the Our Great Aussie Hope Casey Stoner. These are professional outfits after all, they might argue, not national teams. However, professional cycling itself has muddied the water with the advent of pseudo-national teams such as Astana, Katusha and GreenEDGE, not to mention the heavily promoted British Britishness of Sky Procycling themselves, in part to capture the interest of casual fans who wouldn't normally see any reason to cheer for one team over another, or even care about the event. In which light it's hardly unreasonable for those fans to view Aussies working for Brits at the expense of other Aussies in a similar light to South African cricket fans sledging Kevin Pietersen et al for choosing to play for England. Casual fans might not 'understand' your sport, but they have an inherent sense of sporting justice, and if the goings-on in your sport conflict with that, they'll walk (and the sponsor/broadcaster cash will walk with them). Ferrari instructing Rubens Barrichello to defer to Michael Schumacher on the last lap of the Austrian F1GP ten years ago may have made explicable sense to hard-core F1 fans, but to the casual sporting observer - not to mention the sponsors, broadcasters and bookies - it was considered heinous, and resulted in team orders being banned for most of the last decade.

Now, obviously, this is not going to happen in cycling; team orders ARE the sport, and the astute tactical deployment of riders by sporting directors is as much part of the intrigue as mano e mano duels up hills. But there needs to be an understanding within the pro cycling world - a world whose broader credibility and sustainability exists on a knife edge after the last 20+ years of drug cheating, where now everyone in the peleton is either on the gear, was on the gear or is suspected of being on the gear - that their bills are paid by their ability to make people care about the result. They're in the entertainment business as much as Simon Cowell or the Rolling Stones. Getting booed by punters and munters is as much what professional sportsmen get paid for as celebrity bullshit like the TomKat divorce being splashed all over TMZ is what keeps Mr Cruise in anti-ageing cream and platform shoes. It might not be the core skillset you thought you were being paid for when you signed up for the gig, but that's the basis under which people took an interest in your work.

Easy for me to say of course, I'm just another anonymous cunt on the internet. Eh Wiggo?

The Doctor is OUT.

Drugs, and money. (But there's nothing I'm gonna do about it.)

We apologise for that brief break in transmission. Normal service will be resumed.... nnnnnnnnow.

The Tour De Lycra Pants (thanks v. much Big Bad Al) hasn't even left the Alps and is already a shot duck as regards the highest step of the podium, courtesy Our Cadel blowing the fuck up on the slopes of the Col de Somethingorothere and Unky Rupert's blokes on spokes having predetermined that hereto-piss-average British sideburn enthusiast Bradley Wiggins shall win the event over African import Christopher Frooooome, on the basis of... well... fuck knows, really. Same logic by which they denied Froome a shot at the Vuelta last year. Same story as when Armstrong was nominal domestique to C*ntador in 2009, although Armstrong never looked like he was in shape to actually finish over the top of his nominal team leader that year. Probably needed to eat more red meat.

So that's pretty much fucked TDF 2012 in terms of a spectacle - even the enjoyment of watching Froome and Wiggins' missus scragfight on Twitter has been taken away from us now that Mrs Wiggo has taken her bat and ball and gone home - but hey, we'll watch anyway. It's a big event, it demands its own respect, and even if the result is boxed, bagged and buried, we'll hang in for the ride.

Unless our intelligence is insulted by something deeply fucking cretinous uttered by the winner-elect, of course. But that'd seem monumentally unlikely, surely.

Bradley Wiggins, overnight in a Guardian op-ed:
"There is a different culture in British cycling. Britain is a country where doping is not morally acceptable..."

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE YOU BLITHERING TWAT. ON THE SAME DAY DAVID MILLAR* WON A FUCKING STAGE YOU COME OUT WITH THIS BUCKET OF SANCTIMONIOUS BOLLOCKS. FOR FUCKING SHAME SON.

*It was the Scotsman's first individual victory since his return in 2006 from a two-year suspension imposed after he had admitted using EPO under interrogation by the French police.

"I think Dave is one of the exceptions to the rule because of the things he's said since he came back," backpedalled Wiggo. Cough, splutter. And OK, Millar is militantly anti-the-gear now, but it wasn't on a fucking Pakistani passport where he doped in the first place. In the current climate of doping clouds hanging over everyone (yes, EVERYONE), in a world where Armstrong's ten years of denials are looking increasingly bogus and shabby, and in an environment where members of your medical staff have significant form in the art of making people ride better than nature would permit, you don't come out with intelligence-insulting arsesnot like this. You. Just. Don't.

Just shut up and ride the bike, son. And have a fucking shave while you're at it.


The Doctor is OUT.