Let's all #tweetignorantlyaboutAfrica

Because if three tweets is a blog post, inventing a hashtag to mark the Mandela funeral (and the cringeworthiest of the evening's cultural appropriation and insensitivity on Twitter) is practically an essay.

 

The Doctor is OUT.

Don't listen to the radio

Don't listen to the radio
Hear something you already know
I, I, I got no radio

- The Vines, off their third album which nobody bought because by then they had well and truly transversed the shark, which I picked up in a bargain bin in JB HiFi, the album not the shark I mean

Be gentle. I slept badly. Sleeping badly is something you do as you age, like making old-man noises when you get up from recliners, like taking a disproportionate concern ref. one's lawn and the prophensity of young people to congregate upon it. Not only did I sleep badly, I woke badly. About as badly as you can. I woke to Def Leppard.

Some context though, lest you think I woke to a one-armed drummer in my boudoir (which given old mate's history with domestic violence is not an appealing prospect by any stretch). Like most people who aren't insufferable cunts, I am not a morning person. I require something unpleasant, some form of aural violence to get me out of bed. Like a radio alarm playing commercial breakfast FM radio. Because if there's only one thing more fucking unpleasant than commercial radio, it's radio commercials. Radio ads - fuck-awful, parochial, chintzy, jingly local radio ads - are just The. Fucking. Worst. Throw in a genuinely fucking gormless pack of giggling breakfast hosts on full 'FUCK WE'RE FUNNY' mode and I'm vaulting the bed to fist-pound the 'FUCK OFF' button faster than you can say 'Shit Music, 23FM!'

Shoutout to The Rock Otago for providing all those items in one convenient location, 93.4FM on your radio dial.

Occasionally, being a commercial breakfast show, the Rock's Morning Rumble interrupt their schedule of fuck-awful ads and fuck-awful banter to play an item of music. And here's often where the issue lies. The only problem with The Rock - in terms of their utility as a get-out-of-bed-to-damage-the-radio device - is their playlist isn't quite appalling enough. More often than one would like, they deign to crank something actually listenable like AC/DC or the Fooies or Led Zep which are inclined to make one smile, listen in, drift back off to sleep and reawake sometime around 7.55am, which is suboptimal in extremis deo. However, there's always Nickelback. (There's ALWAYS fucking Nickelback. When will someone buy Choad Kroeger a course of suppositories or sennapods or something because that man sounds like he's gurning through a profoundly unpleasant shit. You're up, Avril.) And this morning, there was fucking Def Leppard's 'Animal'.

I fucking hate Def Leppard. Fairy-floss guitars, helium vocals, enough hairspray to dissolve the ozone layer, years upon years of production wank, and a pair of raised manicured digits to the hard-edged legacy of the NWOBHM which spawned them. From Judas Priest and Iron Maiden to these piss-dismal milquetoast arriviste fucking poodles.

Early evolutionary precursor of Nickelback. Also of the Paddle Pop Lion and the Vileda floor mop

It's also a really good way of having girls immediately lose interest in you as soon as they find their best-of in your music collection. Fuck you, JB HiFi bargain bin. You have betrayed me for the last time.

Waking up to Def Leppard's 'Animal', while about as pleasant as being hit in the face with an aircraft carrier, does allow for the entertainment of a mondegreen. Because, and I expect this may be the fatigue talking, but it totally sounds like this fucking munter is singing 'Enema'.

Not only does it fit the metre and tone of the song perfectly, you can't convince me that ISN'T what old mate's faux-Sunset-Strip-hair-farmer drawl is actually attempting to enunciate. Furthermore, it makes the entire miserable fucking enterprise a lot more entertaining. Sing it buddy:

And ah wawnt...
And ah neeeed...
And ah lurve...
Enema.

Also, I think we might have found a solution for Choad Kroeger's digestive issues. Everybody wins! Avril, get the Karcher.

The Doctor is OUT.

A sledgendary perfomance

Yesterday's play at the 'Gabba proved it wasn't just the government of Queensland who'd gone back in time 30 years. This was an Australian performance from generation(s) ago. Snarling fast bowlers with filthy porn-stashes. England getting fucknihilated by more than a Matty Hayden knock v Zim. The Australian captain scoring big and sledging bigger. You knew it was a day for the ages (or at least from ages ago) when Channel Nein deigned to exhume Billy 'The 12th Man' Birmingham at the tea interval for his first ever appearance in the central commentary position - largely because the living legend he's made his living at the expense of was too badly injured to object in person - despite his Brown People Have Funny Sounding Names schtick last being even vaguely amusing way back into the dim distant reign of King A.B. The Grumpy.

Breakhisarminharf? Sunil Havascar

Border, of course, was the last Australian captain given the reins of a genuinely average side, one saddled with the dubious 'talents' of the likes of Mike Whitney and Fat Cat Fucken Ritchie - if you think those useless fucking pricks were shithouse in the media, you should have seen them play - and one where the only option left for the best bat in the side was to put the entire fucking omni-shambles on his back and carry it, seething and snarling, all the way to the fifth day. Twas the making of Captain Grumpy and the team moulded in his image. So it seems for Clarke, who through a similar personal growth opportunity as A.B. (that being being the only decent player in a shit side, hence having to lead said shit side through a sea of shit), seems to have transmogrified from Brand Spokesmodel-In-Chief for Cricket Australia And Selected Corporate Partners to the fucken captain of the fucken Austrayan fucken cricket team, and don't you fucken forget it or we'll rip yer bloody arms off.

Come to think of it, maybe Clarke's sledging role model wasn't A.B. after all...

Never been seen in the same room together. Just saying.
We knew she'd be back.

Yet ridiculously, there's been a lot of angst from limp-spirited oxygen wastrels about Clarke's 'vicious foul mouthed sledge'. To those people it can only be said, fuck the fuck off. Fuck the fuck right the fuck off to fuck, then fuck off some more. If you have a problem with the Australian cricket captain correctly placing a gobby English wanksock back in his box, YOU are the problem with Australian cricket. Sledging's tops. Go away.

Furthermore, you can't have a runner if you're a fat, overweight cunt.

As for the 'OMG WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF POOR JIMMY' bleeding hearts, saints fucking preserve us. Fella has a bat for a reason. It ain't for decoration. He's won and drawn tests with it. They make arm guards these days too. It's Clarke who will pay personally for that sledge, in the form of more chin music from Anderson and the Combined England and Wales Cricket Board Fast Bowlers' Union. Which, as Martin Crowe neatly dissected on Cricinfo over the weekend, might be problematic for him, given the issues he's beginning to develop with short-pitched bowling. But that's captaincy. You're (usually) the best player in the side, that's why you have the armband; take on the worst the opposition can throw at you. Follow me lads. Lead by example, by words and by deeds. And occasionally by offering mouthy Pom tailenders the odd complementary visit to the RBH fracture clinic.

The Doctor is OUT.

Effin' P

New Zealand is not a chest-beating, flag-waving sort of place. Overt displays of nationalistic pride are, if not frowned upon, then quietly mumbled-about under the breath in that talking-without-your-lips-moving way beloved of Kiwis and championed spectacularly by the current coach of the All Blacks. They, of course, are one of the few exceptions to that rule. Slagging off the All Blacks - unless you're a card-carrying member of the sports media, whose job it is to do so - is tantamount to treason. Along with calling jandals thongs, not knowing the words to Dave Dobbyn's 'Loyal' or being in any way adequate at cricket.

Add one more to the list: disparaging Fisher & Paykel whitegoods. Or 'whiteware', as the locals quaintly call it. F&P are a homegrown Kiwi success story, led by innovative Kiwi design and number-8-wire Kiwi ingenuity to make great Kiwi products for real Kiwi Kiwis, and also foreign types who are not Kiwis, on account of being foreign. So what if they're owned by the Chinese now; most models can still be persuaded to play God Save New Zealand if you hack the service modes. Slagging off F&P product in New Zealand - and even more so in Dunedin, where the ingenious DishDrawer dishwasher was first conceived, designed, engineered and manufactured - is akin to wiping your fetid ringpiece on the silver fern after taking a dump on Sir Ed's grave.

F&P 'whiteware' fucks me off no end.

It wasn't always the case. In my yoof, we had a F&P fridge which lasted some 15 or more years. This was long before F&P was a 'thing' - the turn of the 90s, from memory - but the thing was bristling with clever, underplayed design features. It was an upside-down model, which meant you had a larger usable freezer space, but all the fridgey stuff you actually wanted access to on a regular basis, like the milk in the doors, was at a sensible adult height. It never broke down, it didn't make a lot of noise, and it survived two teenage boys opening it every five minutes to see if a plate of cold sausages had magically appeared in the middle shelf. Sadly, the ability to magic-up cold sausages was one skillset that was beyond it. But it was a good device.

Fast-forward to today, where I have spent half the morning swearing at the bleeping washing machine, and the other half swearing at the bleeping Dishdrawer. That's not self-censorship, the pricks of things bleep all the fucking time. The washing machine is a clusterfuck of buttons and lights which alarms pathetically if the load gets out of balance by so much as three socks' worth. All anyone wants in a washing machine is a big fuck-off vat with a big fuck-off dial and an On button, not the control panel off a fucking A380. Same goes for dishes. Dial, switch, ability to wash things. Nup. The Dishdrawer is the quintessence of design-led tossery, of pretence over substance; a clever idea which would be much fucking cleverer if it DID A DECENT FUCKING JOB OF WASHING THE DISHES. Instead, it films your wine glasses with detritus, leaves plates caked in meal runoff, floods itself, drowns its own electronics and goes fucking apeshit at you at 2am. I have spent more hours of my life decoding the service mode of that fucking dishwasher than I have servicing any of the last four cars I have owned.

Which leads to unpatriotic responses such as this:

All the Fisher & Paykel things are giving me the screaming shits today. JUST FUCKING WORK, YOU OVERCOMPLICATED PISS-BRITTLE WANKSOCKS
— Dr Yobbo (@DrYobbo) November 22, 2013

And so say all of me.

The Doctor is OUT.

Parenting, the Dr Yobbo way

I got sunburned on the weekend. Or sunburnt, depending on your view. These things happen when you spend most of a day standing on the side of a road in Central Otago. Admittedly it wasn't just any old road, but part of the salaciously sinuous serpentinious hotmix (sorry, came over all Troy Queef there for a moment) that makes up the new Highlands Motorsport Park outside Cromwell.

Guess I can see the appeal of the location

So I got sunburned (or sunburnt) and yeah, I'm not happy about it. Partly because the sun was only out for about two hours. Partly because that was about the only spot on the entire South Island that wasn't slumbering under chilly cloud. But mostly because this wasn't your common or (working in the) garden variety sunburn. This was falling-asleep-under-a-Saturn-V-launch stuff. It's now Wednesday and I finally no longer look like a Klingon. On a scale of one to Klingon I probably rate about a Niki Lauda. Now I'm just waiting for Ron Howard to make an award-winning moofie from MY gripping origin story ref. being BBQ'd to a crisp on the side of a race track.

Nobody likes a quitter, Niki

But at least it amused my children. And provided a Teachable Moment, as insufferable Septic wanktards might phrase it. There are many different ways to go about parenting - most of them wrong and ineffectual, judging by the entitled little shits making up pretty much the entire under-30s population of the Western world - but my preferred method, one which I've refined over many years, is the Berenstain Bears School of Parenting.

The Berenstain Bears School of Parenting can best be summated in this diptych from The Bike Lesson:

Or to paraphrase: when you fuck up, as you inevitably will, because you're a man - claim that shit. What's going to compel a kid to slip, slop and slap in the summer sun - empty cajoling from mum, or a clinical demonstration of what happens if you don't, from your used-to-have-a-face-but-it-fell-off father?

Exactly. And the same goes for why you shouldn't turn your back on the waves when you're in the surf. Or kick rugby balls near the goldfish tank. Or wear bare feet on the kitchen tiles after Mum has mopped the floor. Or why you should always keep your eye on the ball at a T20 game in case it comes at you with intent to cause grievous bodily harm to your cup of chips.

That is what you should not do. Now let that be a lesson to you.

You've had your 15 minutes in the spotlight, Supernanny, but I think I'll take over from here.

Soon as I get out of triage.

The Doctor is OUT.

A wee problem

How's your day going? My morning was going great until I stood in a puddle of someone else's piss. Again. As both Mr 6 and Mr 4 disclaimed responsibility I am forced to presume that my wife is the causative agent for the dampness of my socks. Now I'm all for equality of the sexes but it needs to be understood that the 'Girls Can Do Anything' bumper sticker mantra does not apply to 'standing up to piss'. Sorry, feminism.

In truth, despite their protestations of innocence, it's not hard to track down the culprits. Getting them to correct their recidivist ways is more of an issue. I've tried ranting, cajoling, encouraging, more ranting (I do a lot of ranting), even suggesting that their teddy bears might be repurposed as bathroom mops, but my socks are still suddenly and stinkily wet as of tooth-brushing-o'clock every morning. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's pissing me off. Particularly considering I'm getting not a lot of key senior-leadership-group support for my admittedly hardline solution to the problem: everyone under the age of 7 can bloody well sit down to piss. Because if you can't take control of your dick and use it in a responsible and respectful way, you vacate your rights to use it at all. However, in the end, it's probably my fault; as Bomani Jones would call it, insufficient daddying. I didn't give them enough guidance. Literally. So we mop up, and we carry on, and we try to do a better job tomorrow morning. All of us.

Advice unheeded

Which brings us to these little shitcunts. And these. And these. Not just the little boys responsible, but the societal and legal fucktardery which allows it to (a) happen (b) be swept under various ADF/police-issue rugs (c) be mansplained and victim-blamed into the realms of minor misdemeanours. Rape is rape. It is never the fault of the victim. If you think it is, you are not part of the problem; you are the fucking problem.

A lot has been said, and needs to be said, about this, and there's clearly a fucking shitstack of insufficient daddying going on in the world which is far more egregious than mine. But my conclusion is this: If these little Roastbusters pricks were my offspring, they'd be sitting down to piss for the rest of their days. Because if you can't take control of your dick and use it in a responsible and respectful way, you vacate your rights to use it at all.

*cough*

The Doctor is OUT.

The best a man can get

Today I want to share something with you that has troubled me for nearly 25 years. It has periodically plucked at my conscious since 1989, and no matter how I've chewed the issue over, I've never been able to come to a reasonable explanation of how what came to be, came to be.

I refer, of course, to the happenings outlined in the third verse of Young MC's 'Bust A Move':

Your best friend Harry, has a brother Larry
In five days from now he's gonna marry
He's hoping you can make it there if you can
Cos in the ceremony you'll be the best man.

Mr MC goes on to detail:

You say neat-o, check your libido
And roll to the church in your new tuxedo.

I cannot fathom now as I found bewildering then, that this 'Larry' would take such a casual and profligate attitude to selecting the second most critical skill position of the entire wedding. OK, third behind the caterer. The bride kinda self-selects as first name on the team sheet. But the identity of your best man is crucial to the success of your wedding, and leaving it in the hands of some half-arsed rapper mate of your brother's who can't even be arsed confirming his attendance until the Monday before seems incredibly short-sighted.

The bust man

For the best man has indispensable roles to play in many key elements of a wedding. It's his job to sort the buck's event. Which, we have to assume, Young MC conspicuously failed to do, given he's only rocking up to the church on the day, in whatever tux he pulls off the rack, rather than the matching shiny penguin suits the bridal couple (i.e. the bride) will deign to have the groom's party clad in. It's his job to remember the ring, upon which point Mr MC is notably silent. And it's his job, once the groom is safely and securely squired away with his betrothed, to lead the festivities at the reception, make a suitably off-colour speech, and most importantly of all, cop off with one of the bridesmaids. Which, at least, Mr MC does manage to achieve, to his small credit. My brother, who was my best man (eight years ago yesterday, in fact) successfully ticked each of the boxes on that checklist. Particularly the last. About which, the less said the better, but stellar effort anyway mate.

I should note that the one and only time I have served as best man, I skipped the last KPI - largely because I'd BYO'd and was already under exclusive contract for service provision - but I'd like to think I served my duties out to the fullest extent otherwise. Under fairly fucking extenuating circumstances. I couldn't possibly share the detail of my best man adventures, but heavily fictionalised reconstructions found their way into In The Worst Possible Taste, as well as The Highway North, the NaNoWriMo novel I scratched out in 2010, where the following excerpt is taken from. Disclaimer: Though inspired by real events this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or drunk is (a) on purpose or (b) me being lazy with characterization. Content warning, our narrator (the eponymous Ben North) thinks swearing is big and clever. 

...In truth, JC would have made a better brother-in-law than most. Like the one our man Munter was about to end up with at the end of this coming weekend. Chris and I knew the story, because we’d been there; we’d recounted it enough times in the interim, including on this trip, that JC and Jules knew it too. Basically it involved Munter’s bucks do up in Brisbane a month or two back - myself, Chris, a couple of Munter’s mates from UNE and work, the future BIL, and the future BIL’s bestie, the fucking retard. I say he was a fucking retard - he didn’t look the sharpest tool in the farmshed (he was the farmhand on the parents’ farm back home), been dropped on his head a few too many times at birth, but he was mainly known as ‘the fucking retard’ because that’s what BIL called him. Constantly. Like it was funny. If anyone was a fucking retard it was him, a braying Quoinslaaaaand cunt in a checked shirt tucked into his jeans, looking more belligerently out-of-place than a freshly-laid turd in a pair of Julius Marlows, drinking XXXX Gold and actually liking it. If he was a marker of what the rest of the family were like - and he was, then as now, the only member of said family any of us had met, even with me as intended best man and Chris as BIL’s fellow groomsman - you could understand my doubts re the likely potential for long-term win for the Munter.

Anyway. BIL made it very clear that he was your typical bigoted, homophobic, racist fuck from the arse end of nowhere. And that was well before we’d actually started drinking properly. We kicked off at the Doomben races, kicked on into the Valley - where BIL and his dozy offsider were kind enough to bellow their way through a very loud game of ‘Spotto’ awarding each other points for identifying fags, lezzos, dirty chinks and boat people who needed sending the fuck home - then on a train to Suncorp for the evening’s Main Event, the Reds vs Waratahs Super 15 rugger game. Where BIL decided it was time to start regaling us with stories of his sister’s younger days, in particular those she’d spent being anyone’s and everyone’s after two Stolis. “Fucken hell, even this fucken retarded cunt’s had a crack at her. Three fucken times!”

Anyway, the inevitable happened and Suncorp security tossed us for language - probably shouldn’t have got us the expensive seats up with the shiny people there Munter - which was just as well as I’d had a fucking gutful.

“We’re off into town,” Munter reported, as we filed out through the concrete canyon of the concourse. “Strip club o’clock.”

I shook my head. “Nah mate. Sorry. We’re done.”

“Too much piss?”

“Nah, too much cunt. That cunt.”

Munter nodded solemnly. He was disappointed, you could see, but he’d figured as much. Probably predicted it in advance.

“Where you off to?”

Chris shrugged. “We’re staying on Coro, so maybe the Regatta, or the RE… yeah probably the RE,” he said, on second thoughts. The ‘Gatta wasn’t what it’d once been. Shiny, superficial and obnoxious. And that was just the clientele.

“You fucken faggots joining us or what?” bellowed BIL, draping an arm around Munter. “Get a faceful of some dripping cunt…”

“Been staring at one of them all fucking day,” I observed.

“Sorry pal?” he said, close-talking all of a sudden. “I didn’t quite hear that.”

“I said, you’re a cunt,” I replied, with the sort of steel only a lot of piss can provide. “And you’ve singlehandedly manage to fuck up my oldest mate’s buck’s night. Fucken kudos to you champ. Now fuck off to your wank palace, we’re off to the pub.”

Needs to be said here and now that I can’t fight. I don’t fight. I talk a much better fight than I ever engage in. Munter knew that, Chris knew that. BIL didn’t. Yet.

“You are a fucking faggot,” he declared.

“I’m a fucking faggot?” I queried. “From the cunt who’s done nothing but spout scared homophobic bullshit all night. You are what you hate, bitch. Transparent as fuck. Your husband know what you think of your secret life together?”

There was a hand in my chest, but it was Munter’s, and his other was pressing against BIL’s. He was trying to keep us apart. Probably saw what was coming next. Me getting my arse kicked.

“What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“Jesus fuck... I’m saying YOU'RE GAY. And you’re doing a SHIT job of covering it up. Go deal with it. Fuck off down the Wickham, get yer fucken shirt off and make some friends. And get the FUCK out of my face.”

“Or what?” he sneered. “I’ll have you, faggot. You’ll be laid out with one hit.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “You might. But then the thirty-five security guards within a twenty yard radius will be dragging you off to lockup to get arse-fucked by some six-eight Tongan bouncer. You’ll like that. Or they’ll just save you the trouble and cave your pretty face in out the back. Your Thai rentboy won’t hardly fucking recognise you any more…”

At which point security finally intervened, again, and we were sent on our separate ways. Munter grim-facedly dragged the two yokels, still slurring insults and abuse after us, towards the Caxton St cab rank in search of a Maxi-Taxi, glumly followed by most of the walking wounded from the Tour de Munter. Chris and I, plus a few other rebels from the Farmadale contingent of Munter’s mates, headed for the Milton train station. The RE it was. After which point the night improved dramatically. For one thing, we caught the end of the Super 15. BIL’s Reds got fucking annihilated.

So yeah, we were most surprised when not only was it confirmed by Munter that Chris and I were still invited to the wedding, but we were starting front-row selections as best man and groomsman respectively, along with Luke, one of his other UNE mates who’d fucked off to the pub with us, and the inevitable BIL. Got the impression that there’d been fearsome diplomatic (and possibly undiplomatic) pressure, sanctions and threats from Bridezilla trying to have our candidacies rescinded and her brother installed as puppet best-man for life, but Munter had held firm. God bless the stubborn bastard. For his part, BIL had sheepishly claimed to anyone who’d listen next day that he’d remembered nothing of any of anything, up to the point of ending up in the watchhouse at the Valley cop shop for groping a transvestite at a club then assaulting them for not being what it said on the tin, as far as he could read - which at 3.40am wasn’t very far.

Yeah, good times. And interesting times to come on the weekend, when we were to be reunited with BIL - and introduced to Munter’s betrothed - at the wedding.

Doubts, I had a few.

Show us your ring

The story continues via In The Worst Possible Taste, from the wedding of notorious bogan engineer Super Dave to... well, let's let Angus tell it. Disclaimer: The following is a true story, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty:

The worst wedding I ever heard of I didn’t actually get to go to, but McCarthy did; it was Super Dave’s first wedding, to a lawyer from an allegedly aristocratic horse-breeding family from south-western NSW. She was a former president of the Young Nats which should have warned him; if not, the fact that his future father in law was (a) the sitting Nats member and (b) a total, utter, irrevocable cunting arse of a cockburglar should have done likewise. 

Anyway, for his sins, McCarthy was made Best Man, in a hefty wedding entourage that included the bride’s cunting arse of a cockburglar brother in the groom’s party, by order of the family; the gent himself was kind enough to regale the bucks’ night celebrations, of which I was a part, with tales of how his Super Dave’s future bride used to, and probably still would, fuck anything rigid which would stand still long enough to buy her more than one drink, including the astonishingly inbred farm help. At which point I kindly suggested that if he wanted to continue his observations, he could consider the probability that we might be forced to beat the living cunting-arsed cockburgling shite out of him. McCarthy held similar views (as did the remainder of the room), but I was louder in expressing them, apparently. Equally apparently, I wasn’t going to the wedding.

Anyway McCarthy put some considerable effort into being charming and debonair on the night, taking his Best Man responsibilities seriously, and penning a thoughtful and elegant speech about how David had once been slightly rough about the edges, but how Beatrice (even the name sounded nasty) had changed him for the better and how they had so much to look forward to together. It was intended as a hands-across-the-water exercise, a conciliatory gesture on behalf of the grooms’ side of the room (heavily outnumbered, given that her side was paying) given the undercurrents of unrest between the two families. Immediately after McCarthy’s speech had played out, her father got up, cleared his throat and declared he’d never liked Dave, probably never would, but since his daughter apparently saw something in him, he and the rest of the family would just have to put up with it and learn to tolerate him.

“You’re fucking joking,” I said.

“Nup,” McCarthy had reported. “The cunt had given pretty much the same speech at their engagement party too…”

And yet, despite all that, seven and a half years later, the couple whose wedding 'inspired' most of the above are still together, with two beautiful kids, a house, careers, everything. Love was the winner on the day, and for most of the years that followed. And for that, there is only one person who can claim absolute credit: the best man. Job done. You're welcome.

The Doctor is OUT.

The ex factor

Saw one of my exes in the street this morning. It's funny how we react to that. Some people, I'm sure, get angry; some get a chill; some, like me, find a slow nostalgic smile spreading across their face at the memory of good times shared in the dim and distant past. It's just good to know they're still out there, still doing alright. That they found someone else to care for them, even if you and they had to go their separate ways.

The ex in question was a '97 Subaru Impreza wagon. Grey import, green paint, two litre boxer four, no turbo but all-wheel-drive. Cost me about four grand on TradeMe, back when I was a postdoc. We had some good times. Snow, mud, flood, highways, byways, dirt tracks and firetrails. One night long ago, 3am, Colin McRae-ing up a steep farm track rendered near-impassable by a torrential thunderstorm, more sideways than forwards. Long story why and how we came to be there, which I won't go into, but we all got out and made it home to sleep in our own beds. Sold it, in the end, for three-something to a fella who was going to do it up (you what? There's nowt wrong with that thing lad) for a friend who was moving to town.

I WANT TO GO PLAY IN THE SNOW

It still lives. This makes me happy. As it does whenever I see my old Audi kicking around town. Or when we spotted our old Legacy 250T - which we'd traded in for disposal money basically - on a trailer being towed behind some grey nomads' camper-bus. Off to be part of someone else's adventures.

Near mist

And yes, it's juvenile and immature to buy shitty second hand Subarus and rag the shit out of them up muddy forestry trails and drive them too fast through water splashes. So now I've stopped doing that, and am doing it in a brand new X-Trail instead.

No, it's definitely a Nissan

Yes, I am a child.

Carn, you can ford that. It's barely ankle deep. Carn.

I blame the old man. When I was a kid, about the same age as my youngest, he had a 253 V8 Holden ute, and the road to the local national park beach went through a very large mud puddle. Which, apparently, could only be traversed (a) at speed and (b) while going WAAAHHOOOO.


Genetics, eh.

Always use Nissan Genuine Parts. Or, when their crappy little retaining tabs break after trying to cross too many alpine-fed watercourses, use Nissan Genuine Pink Pegs

The Doctor is OUT to Karcher the mud off the 4WD before the missus finds out.

Cancer? Bollocks to that

Cancer. As Andrew Denton observed, it's the big C. Followed by a small 'ancer', of which there is none. Yes that works better phonetically than written down thanks I realise that. It's killed people you and I like, and it even had a crack at Your Correspondent. It's a fucker of a thing, readers. Cancer is no laughing matter.
This, however, very much fucking IS.

Yes folks, it's Brazilian testicular cancer mascot 'Senhor Testiculo', a.k.a. Mr Balls. No relation of Ed. Mr Balls' reason for being is to bounce around warning the youth of Brazil of the dangers of cancer of the man-spuds, while simultaneously serving as a terrifying reminder of the dangers of elephantitis of said organs. Encouraging young men and the women who love them to have a good old rummage around in one's Y-Fronts looking for stealth walnuts masquerading as man-orchids is, it appears, very much Mr Balls' bag. Needless to say this campaign is bollocks and whoever came up with this should get the sack. Still, at least it's something different on the cancer awareness front from the ubiquitous Pink Steamroller.

And perhaps if it catches on we can look forward to seeing Mr Balls' message augmenting, if not replacing, that of other cancer awareness campaigns. Rather than football teams sheepishly adopting pink-tinged uniforms in a hamfisted grab for female demographic attention and affection (sorry, in the pursuit of Creating Awareness™), target your own players and fans with jerseys with the look and feel of excess elbow skin. Yes, it's Ball Cancer Awareness Month, coming to a footy team away-strip near you. It's Scrote-Tastic! And it'll still look better than most AFL clash jerseys.

...No?

Yeah, fair enough. Still, could be worse...

Awareness successfully created. Congratulations.

The Doctor is OUT.

Klopped out

Jurgen Klopp is a German football manager with a beard, a university degree and a pair of black-framed spectacles apparently nicked from Michael Caine sometime in the late 1960s. He's 'for' good things like team unity, tactical intelligence and individual expression and 'against' bad things like spending stupid money on flouncing FIFO fuckwits and sending the club busted-arse-broke and back to Division Fuck-Off-Nowhere inside three seasons. He also wins a bunch of stuff - notably taking Borussia Dortmund to two German league titles, a German cup and the finals of the Champions League, up against the dreaded might of the Bayern Munich evil empire - so naturally he's become a big favourite amongst Dortmund fans, as well as a teachers' pet amongst Guardian football writers and SBS pundits for being a right-on uber-hipster zen-master cool-und-groovy-dude. Sort-of the Arsene Wenger of the Bundesliga as this piece in (where else) the Guardian discusses.

The success of the Klopp approach seems to flow on from his policy of creating an environment in which his players can grow, develop their own playing identity and express themselves within the Dortmund ethos. Sort of like a Montessori kindergarten. Which explains why they have to wear hi-vis shirts whenever they're allowed to go down to the park to play.

However, all this high-falutin' touchy-feely humanities-major Klopp-trap is clearly just a front. He is not the Messiah. He is just a very naughty boy. For, as this bit of footage indicates, Klopp's zenmaster facade lasts only as long as it takes (f'rinstance) Napoli to score in an important Champions League tie, when he transforms from Uber-Hipster Football Guru to....

THE ANGRIEST GEOGRAPHY TEACHER IN THE WORLD.

For attempting to shout the fourth official's face off, Klopp copped a two-match sideline ban, which made him fairly cross.

However, in the most recent of those matches, this morning's game against Wenger's philosophy grads, Dortmund waltzed into the Emirates and kicked Arse. Which, as you'd expect, made him much happier.

I think something was lost in translation.

Der Doktor ist heraus.

If the cap Fitz, don't wear a fucking bandanna

Peter Fitzsimons is a former Australian rugby lock known best for being punched repeatedly in the head by Frenchmen, who has somehow managed to parlay this specious fame into a persistently shouty media career in sports and social commentary. In latter years he has become a self-caricaturing troll in a dreadfully affected bandanna who rails against the youth of today, other football codes, and fans of other football codes, in his various media commitments. His most recent column was a series of unconnected thoughts lambasting Generation Y (nominally the national-level sportsmen of Gen Y, but basically Gen Y as a whole) for being lazy, disinterested, unpatriotic and generally on his lawn at times when he was not prepared or willing to receive them on his lawn. Paul McCartney once said the Sex Pistols were another band playing Chuck Berry, etc etc etc.

Buried amidst the trololol and the young-people-what-even-are-they of Fitzsimons' piece is, it must be reluctantly conceded, a point struggling to make itself heard. That point was made best by the quoted diatribe of ARU boss John O'Neill, directed at non-performing Wallabies players following yet another All Blacks shellacking:

'Twenty per cent of you are letting down the other 80 per cent,'' O'Neill roared in the dressing room. ''That 20 per cent are the same 20 per cent who have their mobile phone in their hands right now. The same 20 per cent are the ones on the grog midweek instead of complying with the rules. So put your f---ing mobiles away. In fact, don't even bring them with you on match day. I'm your employer. I'm not your mate. You're getting paid for the privilege of wearing the gold jersey and representing your country. And you are letting us down.''

Thing is, they could get paid more for not wearing it, and they know that. Professionalism and patriotism are, if not mutually exclusive, then problematic bedfellows. Fitzy finally flirts with this point after many, many paras of sputum-flected faff:

One thought I have is that way back when the culture of playing for Australia was set, honour was pretty much the only thing you got out of it … so you honoured that. The jersey, the cap, the Australian blazer was everything, the stuff of dreams, so for whatever time you had to wear it, of course you gave it absolutely everything you had in you.
These days, a more important consideration is the immense riches on offer in sport, and given that those riches will flow anyway, is it really that important, to bleed to win?

The problem is generational, but not quite the way old man Fitz would observe it. The problem is not only is playing for your country no longer the only way to get ahead in your chosen sport (setting aside the point that you can now actually make a career in your chosen sport instead of fitting it in around work), the undying flag-waving nationalism which underpins the sort of motivation Fitz is talking about is an old-person thing. That simplistic idea of national identity - that you are one people under one flag who will live, breathe, fight, kill and die for said flag - is hardly relevant to The Kids Of Today. Fitzy's generation were brought up by the survivors of multiple world wars who did exactly that. This generation were brought up by Fitzy's generation, who have tried very hard to make today's Australia a fucking embarrassing place to be from, ruled by bigots and shitcunts for the benefit of idiots and arsehats. Generalising is always fraught, and kiss-the-flag-or-fuck-off fuckwittery still lives on amongst the stupid and inbred, but broadly, the monochrome view of national identity was dying amongst Gen X and seems largely gone in Y. (The X-Y boundary has been a moving target over the years but as a late-70s kid I know which camp I belong to.)

What also needs to be considered is the increased mobility and migration of populations. You can't be as dedicated to one nation and one flag to the exclusion of all others if you aren't solely of that nation. The much-maligned James O'Bieber's parents are South African and Kiwi. Do you really think he was brought up with any obsessive drive to fight, kill and die for Australia's version of the Union Flag Plus Additional Southern Cross? His situation is hardly unique, even if his hairdo fucking should be.

As for me, I still have edible marsupials on my passport, but I've lived in NZ for most of a decade and my kids will grow up to be Kiwis with a trans-Tasman mindset. The Wallabies are playing the All Blacks in my (and yes as a DCC ratepayer it's fucking MINE) stadium this weekend and my only real interest is that a lot of Australian currency gets channelled through the bars and hotels of the region. I'd never say I've toured the world and elsewhere, but the more you interact with the world, the more you realise a myopic nationalistic view is completely anachronistic, from a black-and-white newsreel era. And while we cling to that in sports, because it provides a frame of reference and a context for viewers to care about international contests, you can't tell me the twenty-somethings who play today are as invested in their personal sense of national identity as the thirty-somethings who played a decade ago, let alone the fifty-somethings who talk endless bollocks about it in the MSM. This is neither good, nor bad; it just is. And all the young-people-don't-get-it columns in the world ain't gonna change it.

Besides, rugby's for obnoxious cunts anyway.

Trololol.

The Doctor is OUT.

We're all here, drinking beer, drinking beer without a care

So this was a thing that happened yesterday, in the large plastic shed that constitutes our $200M football stadium.

 

There was quite a lot of this going on.

And a not unreasonable amount of this too.

There were a lot of beers to drink. Like, a LOT. Many of which were not terrible. Here are the ones Your Correspondent put his hard-earned OUSA-branded casino tokens (don't ask) down upon:

ON WITH THE BODYCOUNT
Golden Eagle South Island Pale Ale - this was good.
Queenstown Brewers 25oz Pilsner - this wasn't. Supposedly won the Lake Hayes A&P Show homebrew comp.
Stoke Bomber Biscuit Lager - biscuity.
Herne Brewery The Hunter ESB
Valkyrie Brynhild Golden Ale - quite a mouthful.
Harringtons Brewer's Selection Strong Pilsner
Emerson's Brewers Reserve Bald Eagle IPA - broke own rule of not getting anything I'd tried before, because the queue for the Emersons/Whittaker's Chocolate Stout (already sampled in all its dark oily glory) was ridic. Pouring staff knew me, so a half-glass taster miraculously became a full one. Excellent
Birch St Brewery Hollister Ale - these guys are in the laundry at Plato. Doing good work
Green Man Festival Ale - less said the better
Velvet Worm Brewery Dune Dweller Pilsner - pretty sure they got this confused with their wheat. Either that or the batch had something growing in it. Still quite pleasant.
Velvet Worm Brewery Peripatus Pale Ale
Velvet Worm Brewery Eye of Jupiter Red Ale
Tuatara Helles - a palate cleanser after the raw but enthusiastic Velvet Worm efforts
Twisted Hop Pacifikolsch - gud
Golden Eagle Don't Be Bitter
Valkyrie Freyja California Common
Emerson's Pilsner - had time and tokens to kill at the end
Harringtons Doppelbock - pint thereof at Eureka while thawing out after a frosty walk back

A fair sentiment.


The Doctor is OUT.

Review to a kill

Last night social media (OK, Twitter) exploded with a fury and angst I've personally not seen in a very, very long time. Outrage, shock, anger, grief, bitterness, wild fantastic threats of retribution... it was as though someone had violently shaken a Kubler-Ross Model magnetic word game all over the fridge door of the internet. It'd be hyperbole to call it unprecedented, but it was remarkable that in this case the Twitterverse screamed with one voice - differently accented, but same intent - that this was wrong, that this was appalling, that there was no way this could continue, that there was no way this could be allowed to happen in a fair and just world.

And, above all else, that Shane Watson is a fucking twat.

That an allegedly professional cricketer who appears to be in the side for his batting cannot figure out when he is and is not plumb leg-before-wicket and therefore determine the occasions on which he should henceforth not requet a review but remove himself from the premises is an issue beyond me - best check out @ajarrodkimber's take on it at Cricinfo instead - but the whys and wherefors are beside the point. We want solutions. How to stop this from ever happening again. And luckily for the universe, Your Correspondent is a Solutions-Driven Enterprise. Much like a Star Trek model which runs on Gatorade.

Plenty of fixes for the Decision Review System have been mooted - taking the right of appeal out of the players' hands and putting them in the umpires', for instance, which sounds great until you see what Super Dooper Rugby refs have been doing in a similar situation, with Steve Walsh asking for the TMO to check whether his hair was obstructed five phases previous to the play in question. Every other finessing or nuancing of the system will give you an equally borkenated result as we currently have. As a result, the most obvious fix for this is the most extreme, and the one I have grown to favour despite it being a position maintained by cricket's evil empire, the BCCI: bin the fucking lot of it. Cricket is a game played by humans in real-time, and should be umpired by humans in real-time. DRS has added nothing to the game apart from large volumes of wank and bollocks. Give it the arse and live with Aleem Dar's inevitable arsehatted fuckups the way we live with Phil Hughes'.

Of course, that won't happen, because reasons. So I'm offering an alternative solution. One of these.

Yes, it's a shock collar for dogs. My solution is as simple as it is elegant: wrap it around Twatto's neck and set it to zap the fuck out of him any time he tries to form a T-shape with his forearms. Problem solved. What I particularly like about this solution is that it's perfectly targeted to solve the issue at hand, without affecting anything else. A Specific Solution, if you will. That's an idea everyone can get behind, surely?

The Doctor is OUT.

Once, twice, three times a twat

Three-time Formula One World Champions don't grow on trees. Because that would be beyond be-leaf. To be a living three (or more) time world champion was and is pretty much the azimuth of world motorsport achievement. Even in retirement, the role requires dignity and gravitas, as per Sir Jack Brabham. Or gritty death-defying stoicism in the face of odds, as per Niki Lauda. Or tartan trousers and ready rent-a-quote availability, as per Sir Jackie Stewart. The role requires you to carry yourself with the statesmanship of a living legend and an ambassador for the sport.

Not all three-time world champions got that memo, however.

Sebastian Vettel won three Formula One World Championships consecutively between 2010 and 2012. Yet, if this photograph is all that remains as THE lasting image of his career, more the better. Sebieber has partaken in some deeply cretinous wacky-und-craaazy-guy stunts on behalf of his paymasters at Red Bull over the years, but this would have to rank amidst the deepliest cretinousest of them all. Of course, the takeaway we're meant to take away is that Sebieber IS a wacky-und-craaazy-guy and all that being-a-precious-twat in his day job is not relevant to the discussion. Problem is, his precious twattiness appears to be ramping up faster than Red Bull's stunt directors can invent wacky-und-crazy-guy things for him to do. Starring in your own crappy kung fu film only buys you so much PR gloss when your followup is to precious-twat-it-up by 'beating' your teammate with one hand tied behind his back by his team.

It's a fact that Sebieber will retire a three-or-more-times world champion. It's also a fact that the overwhelming majority of Anglophonic F1 fans will consider him a precious twat, and no matter of increasingly desperate wacky-und-craaazy Red Bull photo ops will change that.

The Doctor is OUT.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree (not without cracking the glass anyway)

Occasionally, on the Twunterbox, a hashtag will bubble up which confuses Your Correspondent. Like yesterday. #WWDC? WTF? What Would Dickheads Choose? Worldwide Derp Convention? Where's Wally DeBacker's Cock? Or perhaps an elegant description of the Crusaders' Super Rugby form, Wankered Without Dan Carter?

No, as it turned out, #WWDC is Apple's big release party for developers. So Worldwide Derp Convention wasn't too far from the truth, judging by the outpourings of froth and jizz from every fruity fanboi on the interwank, interspersed with torrents of snark and bleat from teh h8ers, primarily Windoze, Linux and 'Droid freak-out types. For anyone who doesn't have a horse in this race, the whole experience was just as shatteringly tedious as you'd imagine. Where a generation ago, snotty ragged eight-year-olds would dust up behind the bike sheds over Holden versus Ford, now outwardly sane and respectable thirty- and forty-something men (and it is almost always men) duel bitterly in internet hatewarz over which brand of 'puter they like the most. It's entirely possible it's just the same eight year olds grown up a bit. And to an outsider it's just as fucking ridiculous as Holden v Ford, largely because the products in question appear effectively and increasingly identical.

However, I'm not *quite* an outsider in this. I use Macs. I don't pay for them, by and large, but when given the option, I choose to use Macs. This relates less to the 'They just work' mantra of the dedicated Macophile and more to the fact that each and all of my experiences with PCs in the last 10-15 years have left me wishing to implement violent death on both the designers of the operating system and the guardians of the institutional IT arrangements under which I was obliged to it. I do not enjoy using PCs. I am no longer a tinkering enthusiast, in terms of software or hardware. A postdoc laden with heavy duty Linux bioinformatics has permanently cured me of that. I like things to 'just work'. I'm not going to war over it, but if given the option I will never use another PC in my life, and their designers, advocates and fanbois can generally and individually go and fuck themselves.

Actually, all fanbois can go fuck themselves. Fundamentalism is bollocks.

PCs are cheaper per unit performance, of course. You can build a box with better numbers, or order one from your friendly neighbourhood clone dealer, for considerably less bucks than you can a Mac - particularly in the high-end space where Apple's new Mac Pro sits in all its overdesigned, overpriced glory (mildly paraphrasing the launch perceptions of an old Amiga-kid buddy.) I'm not sure if any of that is the point though. I've never purchased anything on the basis of numbers on a sheet of paper, and I'd be frankly fucking astonished if you have either. If you were sufficiently talented, you could build a car in your shed which will go faster than a Bugatti Veyron. You would not particularly enjoy driving it to work every day, as it would be a heinous agricultural piece of shit with the refinement of a box of nails and the ease-of-use of a plutonium fuel rod. The whole experience would be deeply unpleasant and you would grow to despise it like an infected goitre on the side of your neck. BUT you'd have the best set of numbers in the whole of your internet forum. Which is nice, I guess. Personally, I gave up wanting to pull my car apart and put it back together years ago. We moved on from this in the automotive space years ago. The PC fanboi argument that PCs are better because everything can be dismantled and remantled by a nerd in a basement doesn't appeal to me. It's your dad railing against modern cars because they can't be fixed with a hammer and swearing like the points on his 1973 Kingswood. Old man yells at cloud.

What PC vs Mac comes down to, in the end, is personal judgements of perceived value. Going back to cars, because I get them, people buy Audis even though many understand that they're effectively Volkswagens with deeper carpets and nicer plastics and larger pricetags. But as someone who's owned and driven both Audis and VWs, all that stuff - and as much of it is between their ears of the potential owner as it is on the spec sheet in the brochure - adds up to a more pleasant operating experience. It is nicer to drive and own an Audi than a VW. (Particularly today.) You can make the same perceived value argument - and it's more than just a brand perception or status projection argument, as there are genuine differences in user experience involved whether you personally value them or not - to any range of products. Why buy a frosted aluminium Fisher & Paykel fridge-freezer when Haier own them and make fridges much cheaper? Why buy Kraft peanut butter rather than Home Brand? Why Canon over Nikon? Why anything premium over anything cheaper which 'does the same job'? Each of us makes these value judgements daily, and in many cases, each of us chooses the more expensive option on the basis of perceived value over and above the baseline cost.

Personally, I buy Sorbent toilet tissue. I know that supermarket home brands are cheaper - by a long way. The cost argument is a no-brainer on paper. (See what I did there? It was quite clever.) But the user experience, to put it mildly, is much more unpleasant. So it is for me with computers. And so, if you have shit to do, get a Mac.

The Doctor is OUT.

State of disinterest

Origin 1 was on last night. The most hyped match of handegg football this side of the Superbowl: state against state, mate against mate, date against date, as the great HG Nelson once put it. An unmatched spectacle. An unmissable contest.

Didn't watch. Couldn't be arsed.

 

Apparently NSW won, which is a surprise, and Paul Gallen punched someone, which isn't. All very lovely and presumably reason to keep the Origin franchise alive for further sequels. As a Souths fan my chief concern was the return of the players we'd reluctantly lent to the Maroons intact and in full working order. Souths are leading the comp. LEADING THE COMP, FUCKERS. And yet... I haven't watched any of their games this year either. I tend not to watch them live, calling it a superstition, but the reality is... I just don't enjoy watching rugby league any more.

As with all things in league, it started with Origin.

For much of the '90s I was a casual fan of league. At club level, Souths were shite and my backup team (Parra, given the legal obligation of every kid who grew up in the '80s to back either Parra or Canterbury) were even more shite. Ironically, it was the Super League War which got me interested in club-level league again, through the intense conviction that what Murdoch and his mercenaries were up to was nothing short of abject rancid cuntery. But I still watched Origin every year. Hung on every play as Back Door Benny and the Unmade Bed and About To Cut Loose and the King of the Kids led the NSW charge against the unwashed Maroon hordes.


But then, around the middle of the '00s, I lost interest. Partly because I moved to NZ, although never underestimate how 'into' Origin the Kiwis are, even for a 10pm kickoff on a school night. But mostly because Roy and HG stopped calling the games.
And watching Channel 9's ludicrous and cretinous coverage made me realise something: This is actually really, really stupid. Not just the coverage, the concept. It's obnoxious, and pointless, and counterproductive for the code (to have the 'highest level' of the game a provincial dustup rather than international competition), and actually... quite unpleasant to be part of. I don't enjoy watching Origin games. It brings out the absolute worst in people on both sides of the Tweed, unearths all the chippiest and snottiest grudges and grievances Queensland has about NSW. And for what? It's a concept that only works if Queensland wins. Three series wins in a row for NSW, as per the early Noughties, and ratings dive, crowds wane and plaintive media bleating ensues re the death of Origin.

Not only did I realise I don't enjoy watching Origin games, I realised I don't enjoy hating Queenslanders. It's like picking on the special needs kid who's good at sports. It's all they have, let the poor fuckers be. They've got cyclones and floods and Campbell Fucking Newman firing everyone and giving jobs to his mates and beer is too expensive and it's hot and sticky as Satan's own ballbag nine months a year. It's a fucking horrible place and you have to be mentally bereft to live there. All they have is Origin. Just declare them eternal Origin champions, mint them a perpetual trophy from a cast of Wally Lewis' cock and let them be happy. Sure, Can-Do will probably try and sell the fucking trophy, but that's their concern since they voted for the arch-cunt.

Then, this year, I realised I didn't actually enjoy watching league at all. Whether it was Tom Wankerface or Ray Hadley on the internationally-syndicated Nine coverage, or Cronulla's drug cheats, or Melbourne's salary cheats, or Manly's sheer existence, or various players' inability to keep it trousered en masse in the presence of ladies, somehow the rugby league is just a cocking bag of rancid arsedags. Last night, I realised I was more interested in the looming Lions tour than Origin. Or the NBA finals. Or the NHL finals. Or le Tour. Or le Dauphine. Or the Ashes. Or even the Champions Trophy cricket that no bastard alive gives a fuck about, least of all the Australian top order. In fact, there's barely another sporting event scheduled for June-July of 2013 which I'm not more interested in than the 2013 Holden State Of Origin. And that, somehow, is a relief to admit.

So, yeah. Origin 1 was on last night, and I didn't watch. The opening game of the Lions tour was on at the same time, the Western Force hosting the pride (geddit) of the Home Nations in the first match of their twelve-yearly visit to Australia. You don't get a Lions tour every year, and you don't get Phil Gould foaming and fapping over them in the prematch, both of which are reason enough to savour. In betrayal of my rural public school roots, I'd rather watch union (at least union played by NZ teams who throw it and run) than league these days. And given Roy and HG are planning to call the Lions tests rather than Origin this year, it seems the feeling is shared.

I didn't watch the Lions game either.

I watched highlights from the Isle of Man TT, the first Superbike and Supersport races of TT week. Amazing, compelling, thrilling stuff. Dancing on the very limit of adhesion, the very edge of physics, the very precipice of what is possible to attempt on a motorcycle. At 180mph while threading between rockwalls and lampposts. None of your acres-of-painted-runoff from your identikit Tilke autodromes here. Some motorsports - even if you're a racing nerd like me from childhood - you watch hoping, just a little, for crashes. 'Real roads' racing, you watch with your heart in your mouth hoping for anything but. You watch to see what someone can try and get away with on a bike. And, amazingly, they almost always do.

Long live the TT.

The Doctor is OUT.

The evolution of bollocks

Decided to reblog this lump of sci-comm I scribed for our RealScientists blog, as here and there have different audientses and fuck it, it's cool and what could be more World of Bollocks than the Evolution Thereof. Enjoy.

Why sex is bizarre 

No, we haven't gone all Carrie Bradshaw on all of y'all. Last evening's enthralling discussions with this week's fantastic @RealScientists curator @turtlesatJCU about temperature-dependent sex determination in turtles - how the temperature of the sand they are surrounded by dictates the sex of the developing turtle embryo - reminded this particular RS admin just how wonderfully bizarre sex determination is in an evolutionary sense.

It's generally the case that if something's important, it's important to make sure that the instructions for making it aren't easy to lose. Anyone who's tried to assemble a flat pack Ikea wardwobe without the cartoon diagrams or the Allen key would attest to this. So it is with vertebrate development. The developmental pathways - the basic blueprints, floorplan, instructions, Lego pieces, however you want to think of them - which underpin key developmental structures are, in general, strongly conserved (that is, they've not changed much through evolution.) The genes which are expressed and the cell types which are involved in directing the making of a limb - in particular its outgrowth and its 'patterning' (a developmental biology term for how future adult structures are laid out in the developing embryo) - are the same between all vertebrates. All there is, really, is a little tweaking in terms of expression domains (i.e. the precise timing of when key developmental regulators are switched on and off, and in what cells of the developing limb) to produce a whale flipper from the same basic genetic 'blueprints' as the bat wing. This idea that if it's important, it's conserved, runs right through evolution (and particularly 'evo devo', the research field at the intersection of evolution and development). One of the most important genes in human heart development is the analogue of one which directs development of the heart in the fruit fly Drosophila, called Tinman.*

Except you can chuck all that out the window with sex determination. You'd think that since sex was such an important evolutionary construct - the ability to reshuffle the genes of your offspring to create the potential for evolutionary advantage is clearly crucial to the success of the majority of animal species, since so many have it - that the instructions for how to create different genders which can make with the bunga-bunga in order to recombine chromosomes and create new genotypes would go right back in the evolutionary lineage.

Nup.

Mammals like us (assuming you are a human, which I feel is a reasonable leap of confidence) have a system based on the inheritance of the sex chromosomes X and Y, where embryos with two Xs develop as females and those who inherit an X and a Y develop as males. This was pinned down in the late 80s/early 90s to a particular gene on the Y chromosome called SRY (sex determining region on the Y chromosome - mouse and human researchers aren't as interesting with their gene names as Drossie peeps) which acts as a 'switch' midway through gestation. If it's there, its expression is switched on briefly in the embryonic precursor tissue of the gonad (which, uniquely in development, is a developmental structure that can go on to form two completely different organs from the same origin tissue) and the testis development pathway is kicked off - if it's not, i.e. if you're XX, SRY isn't expressed, and the pathway 'defaults' to female (and yes this is a slightly patriarchal view which has been challenged but we'll set that aside for the moment). But SRY and XX/XY is by-and-large a mammalian deal. Reptiles, as discussed on @RealScientists last night, have temperature-dependent sex determination; it's thought a reptile with TSD may have been the evolutionary precursor of vertebrate species with chromosomal sex determination. Birds such as chickens have chromosomal sex determination, a bit like XX/XY (it's ZZ/ZW) but there's no analogous sex determining gene driving the development of one sex or the other. Some fish have sex determining chromosomes or genes a bit like an SRY in broad function, but nothing like it in terms of molecular or genetic similarity; other fish have TSD. Drosophila have an inheritable sex chromosome (XX/X0) but again the molecular 'bits of Lego' involved are nothing alike other species. Nematode worms (C. elegans, another invertebrate 'model organism') have an unrelated XX/XO system which directs development of males, females and hermaphrodites. What we have here then is a critical developmental process, central to the survival of the majority of successful animal species on Earth, which has bugger-all in common at the level of how that process is switched on between those species. It looks like case after case of evolutionary novelty - that is, nearly each species has evolved a completely different way of determining sex, and has run with it.

What's interesting though is the 'downstream' stuff often IS conserved, even in species with very different means of reproduction, or gonad structures. Hormones like aromatase, and key regulatory genes such as DAX1, DMRT1 and SOX9 which are critical in mammalian sex determination and gonad development keep turning up in the pathways of other species, even those without 'genetic' sex determination like reptiles with TSD. In an evo-devo sense, pretty much the same genetic players and partners are deployed in the process of making boy and girl bits - they've just been co-opted into the process by completely different switch mechanisms, which are evolved and selected for with no apparent commonality.

For further reading on this, have a search for 'evolution of sex determination' on Google Scholar. Or look it up on Wikipedia, which is generally pretty good for SCIENTS stuff.

And to finish, BABBY TURTLES.

*Drosophila researchers have always been big on the quasi-amusing gene names, usually named for some characteristic of a 'mutant' strain generated with that gene 'knocked out'. They go a bit weird cooped up in fly rooms counting and classifying wing variants on tiny fruit flies. Many of which have a habit of flying up the noses of the investigators, if not anaesthatised correctly. Apparently they taste like sesame seeds. Don't ask.

The Doctor is OUT.