Dat's all folks

Just when you thought the '80s revival was spluttering to a fluoro-clad halt, comes the big news: Datsun are back. 

Yes kids, thirty years after shitcanning it as an ongoing branding concern, the Nissan Motor Company are bringing back the mighty Datto. And I for one am thrilled to bits. Because like most of the known first world, old busted-arse Dattos are iconic of all Aussie and Kiwi motoring adolescence. Whether it's the memory of a shitbox 120Y in the wanted baby-poo green-brown-whatthefuckISthatcolour, or rat-arsed 1200s and 1600s howling and gargling gravel down some long-forgotten 70s rally stage, or Farmer George Fury whistling the factory Bluebird around Mount Panorama... by which stage they were officially called Nissan, but by fuck it was still a fucken DATTO. Even Allan Grice, one hell of a great racer at Bathurst before he became one hell of a shit Nats MP for Broadwater, put it well back in 1991 when having scored a hard-fought podium behind the all-conquering Nissan GT-R, quipped 'the Datsuns were too strong for us today'.

Datsun Saves... long ball to Valiant, crosses to Torana XU1... GOOOOOAAAALLLL

Dattos were ALWAYS shit. It started with the names - Cedrics and Fairladys and Sunnys and Stanzas (neatly echoed by the Nissan Tiidas, Qashqais and Jukes of today, indicating the parent company still picks its names on the basis of a thousand monkeys vomiting on a thousand typewriters - but it seemed a Datto was never actually new, but always suspended in a particular kind of mid-70s crapitude, characterised by being desperately fucking gutless, handling like a binliner of warm livers and having all the poon-pulling power of a freshly polished goitre.

So it was for my first car, a powder-blue 1976 Datsun 180B with a vinyl rooflining resplendent in Benaud Beige, metal sunshade, wind deflectors and no-speed auto. It's hard to deny the fact that it was a real nanna's car. I know this because I inherited it off my real nanna. She went to a better place... a 1995 Suzuki Baleno. Only marginally better, granted. I went on to better things myself, an '88 six-cylinder Skyline. Still keeping within the Nissan family, though.

My theory is that a large proportion of the Western world's formative motoring experiences were had in Dattos, or their immediate descendents. The most terrified I have ever been in a motor vehicle was on the narrow, twisty, undulating back road between Faulconbridge and Springwood in a mate's urinary-tract-infection-yellow 1981 Bluebird with stale Cruskits for brake pads and overtensioned pogo sticks for shocks.

Apart from the other mate with a Pintara and a deathwish.

It's sure - and almost somewhat sad - that the new Datsuns won't be anywhere near as shit as those dusty '70s relics of memory. They'll be basic, reliable and frugal, and as far away from the 120Y (or even the Nissan Juke-R) as feasibly imaginable. And worst of all, they won't be coming here. Nissan has earmarked the Datsun brand for developing markets, like India, Indonesia and Russia.

So looks like the only new Datsuns you're getting hold of anytime soon is this.



Play it loud.

The Doctor is OUT.

Pack it in

So Big Tobacco has lost its appeal. Well, we knew that 25 years ago - smoking's been totes uncool since Bag The Fag.



...anyhow* Overly Large Tobacco have been shitcanned in their attempts to prevent the Strayan Gummint from enacting legislation which would force all cigarettes to be sold in plain olive- or khaki-green packaging. As the NT News pointed out, this should dramatically reduce rates of smoking in their readership catchment: PUTTING CIGS IN KHAKI PACK LIKELY TO HELP CUT DOWN NT SMOKERS. HARD TO FIND KHAKI PACK IN KHAKI SHORTS, SHIRT, BAG, HOUSE.

Putting everyone's durries in matching phlegmy-coloured cardboard of course makes all of Dimensionally Extraneous Tobacco's attempts at brand differentiation worthless and pointless. Noone will know that you fancy yourself as a Marlboro man, riding roughshod through the untamed wilderness of Montana, despite being a bespectacled 43 year old tax accountant from Burwood with a 1998 Camry and erectile dysfunction.

...IN MY PANTS

Unless.

You know where this is going to go, people: the same way it always does. Humans can't handle the inability to differentiate their status by the shiny shit they carry around. From laptop skins to Xmas reindeer antlers on family wagons, people be taking their standard-issue identikit units of consumption and personalising the very merry fuck thereoutof. Expect the humble cigarette tin to make one grand motherfucker of a comeback, from its fringe populations in the hipsterland communities of Newtown and North Fitzroy. Think of them as iPhone cases for the cancerous-elect.

More to the point, there's probably a huge opportunity for the peeps who do good business out of recreating ciggy logos for models of race cars (now legally required to be sold without the insignias of the brands which sponsored the teams in question back in the day) to run off reams of stickers to be sold at newsagents along side the khaki-clad FATAL DEATH BRINGING CANCER STICKS OF FATAL CANCER BRINGING DEATH. You want to show the world you're on a Holiday to Freeport with your old mate Peter Stuyvesant? Peel the stickers, slap 'em on, slot the pack into a prominent shirt pocket, and as a prominent brand of the '80s would have it, You're Laughing.

Or, for the tight-arses (or the fashionably obtuse), there's always the option of a B&H-gold Sharpie from the stationary counter.

Extra hipster points for neat colouring in.

The Doctor is OUT.

Cheap thrills

...Was an album by Frank Zappa, but that's not important right now. Casa del Yobbo has undergone regime change recently with Your Correspondent being installed as Puppet El Presidente (or at least stay-at-home-Dad and house husband by appointment), which has resulted in a lot of changes round these parts. Mostly money-related. Mostly lack-of-money-related, in point of fact. But that's all good, because as it turns out, Your Correspondent is secretly a cheap bastard, and has quite enjoyed busting out his secret squirrel cheap bastard skillset.

There is an art intringent to being a cheap bastard. The art is in being able to find quality products, particularly in the realm of non-core indulgences, which you can live with, in lieu of (a) going broke-ass broke buying your Usual Preferred Brands or (b) actually having to give up coffee or beer, because FUCK THAT SHIT.

The engaging challenge in this process is finding stuff which isn't abject fucking slop. F'rinstance, drinkable beer around the $30 a carton mark. As discussed previously in these pages, in the previous millennium where this critical pricepoint was nearer $20 a case, Your Correspondent's old man used to fill his fridge with the likes of Tooheys Red and Reschs Real, presumably to prevent Your Correspondent from pilfering it. This congenital cheapness is presumably Y-linked; I object to having to pay more than ten bucks for a bottle of wine, which in the current wine-glut NZ market involves no particular hardship.

The commodity price for beer is more immune to supply-and-demand fluctuations, sadly. Not to the point of justifying Real or Red, of course. Unless you absolutely, positively, need to clean the barbeque. My weekend go-to has become Haagen, a NZ-brewed Eurolager ripoff which manages to squeeze a remarkable amount of flavour into a $15-a-dozen product. The NZ beer market being what it is (ie cheap), you can often pick up genuine imported Eurolagers like Heineken around the $40-a-case mark. For special occasions, like. Months with a vowel in the month.

Coffee's another indispensible expenditure, for sanity at least. Found out this week that the Caffe Aurora stuff I'd always been fairly sniffy about was actually Vittoria's 'second label'. At half the price, it's not half the quality, and it's still better than Blend fucking 43 or those nasty pod-based extractions of arse.

Food costs money, which is an unfortunate state of affairs. However as discussed at Mother Focaccia today, the cold climate chef's secret weapon, the slow cooker, has an inordinate ability to turn dirt-cheap cuts of meat into glorious flavour-infused WIN. Buy one. Now.

All these incremental adjustments mean your family can continue to maintain a high standard of living on a single income, while still being able to afford the important things which make a difference to your life. Like Sky Sports.

The Doctor is OUT.

How to fix the Olympics

(NO, not like THAT, badminton teams)

The Olympics, as has been well established by the proceedings of the last five days, are shit. No getting around it. It's a piss-dismal shambles, a farrago of masturbatory irrelevance, a bucket of arse. Shit sports, shit weather, shit hosts, shit coverage, shit uniforms. Shit, really. It needs sorting.

And Your Correspondent, it may not surprise you terribly much to learn, is just the man to sort it. The World of Bollocks presents a seven point plan in ten point font entitled:

How To Unfuck The Olympics

by Dr B.A. Yobbo age 34 ⅓

1. It's a scientific fact that the Olympics are overrun by a bloated shit-porridge of massively irrelevant sports. Dressage. Ping-pong. Things Britain are good at. All has to go. Of course, it's not always necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater, unless it's baby recycling this week. Some 'events', those contrived beyond recognition from actual sports, could be revitalised simply by introducing some much needed REALISM. For the pigeon shooting, use real pigeons. For the Laser sailing, use real Lasers. And for the trampoline, use real tramps.

Protest lodged: tree failed to give way to starboard

2. In order to bring efficiency and on-time delivery of sportainment to the attention-deficient masses, the bloated fixtures list of several core sports will need to be pruned. This can be done by streamlining all the myriad variants of each sport into the one race. In the case of swimming, any half-sober sports scientist will admit that breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly are all just flawed, sub-standard ways of getting from one end of a pool to another. Swimming races will henceforth be held as 'whoever can get their arse down the other end and back the fastest, short of strapping a Mercury outboard to your ringpiece'. If you can do the entire length underwater, good fucking luck to you. If you can run along the bottom like Fred Flintstone driving down the shops, more power to you son. This should reduce the swimming programme down to a reasonably manageable size from its current length of half the cuntbadgering Olympics, and should free Ray Hadley up to do what he does best, ruining rugby league on TV and being a racist cunt on radio. Athletics events will be held under similar rules, which should bring a merciful end to the practice of 'walking' events, in which participants are required to lurch about as though incredibly angry about having a dislocated arse.

3. Given recent unpleasant events, in order to ablate certain clear and present confusion about the nature and object of the sport, and in particular that the aim of the exercise is to play well and win, the sport will be renamed GOODminton.

Bunch of cocks

4. Synchronised anything will be banned immediately and its practitioners sent away for re-education.

5. TV coverage of the Olympics will be drastically revised. In order to the endemic parochialism, condescention, borderline racism, froth and bullshit of pretty much all Olympic coverage, commentators will be wired up to Twitter, such that they receive a short, sharp electric shock to the rude bits whenever they say anything fucking stupid. For OH&S reasons, a mercy rule will be applied at a point to be determined by IOC medical staff, which is good news for dribbling arsehats like Rebecca Wilson. For certain sports where it is clear that only a handful of commentators can effectively explain the nuances of the events, commentary will be outsourced to experts in the field. All cycling commentary will be contracted out to Sherliggett, mainly for the lulz and the drinking for Big Fuck Off Chateaux, with the IOC genital electrodes primed for any gushing mention of British cycling awesomeness more than five times a minute. Finally, all gymnastics commentators will be immediately fired and replaced by Roy and HG.

DRINK

6. Following on from point #5, as a result of heavy criticism of US Olympic broadcaster NBC over showing Olympic events on delay in order to fill preferred programming timeslots, NBC will now be covering all Team USA competitors and teams live. However, in order for NBC to meet its commitments to its sponsors, all American competitors will now be required to compete on delay. It shall be interesting to see whether the 2012 Dream Team can monster the basketball competition while having to turn up to play four hours after everyone else has fucked off and the arena has been locked up.

7. Two words: Monster trucks. 

I don't care how, just find a fucking way to get them in there.

The Dark Knight Rises

Any questions? Make the invoice out to the usual shell company in the Caymans there Jacques.

The Doctor is OUT.