How much is enough

This is not a post about Phillip Joel Hughes, Australian test cricketer, felled by a bouncer, killed by an astonishingly unlikely and unfortunate sequence of physiological events.

Vertebral artery ruptures are almost uniformly fatal. Only the superb care that was rendered to Phil Hughes allowed him to survive at all.
— Gary Hartstein (@former_f1doc) November 27, 2014

This is a post about cognitive dissonance.

The individual is me, and the discomfort is mine. The contradictory beliefs, ideas or values are that I am part of the enormous, overwhelming tsunami of grief which has followed Hughes' passing; and yet part of me finds it confusing, and yes, even discomforting. Why this massive international outpouring? Is this all a bit too much, postponing or cancelling test matches? Is it even reasonable to question grief rationally? Let me dig into this and see if I can make sense of it. I can't guarantee I will.

First of all, and above all, I am part of this.

Still struggling to believe this. RT @TheAdelaideOval: RIP Phillip Hughes #AdelaideOval #Adelaide pic.twitter.com/P7h51Gbcmd
— Dr Yobbo (@DrYobbo) November 27, 2014

Hughes' passing hurt viscerally. I'd always pulled for Hughes; loved watching him bat, precisely because he batted like he had a hinge in the middle. Furiously, gloriously flawed; flipping the bird to Proper Technique, slicing ranty quicks over the heads of the approximately eleventy-six fielders strategically positioned between gully and deep third man entirely for his aerial off-side swipes behind square. It's true that as we age, we lose our heroes; those older than us die off or find disgrace, those younger than us can never really be heroes. We don't watch sport the same way we did as kids. The swashbuckling, one-handed-six-hitting Dean Jones of our youth becomes the Prof Deano of shilling for Julie Bishop and 'The terrorist gets another wicket' of our middle age. We don't look up to twenty-somethings. A lot of the opproprium levelled at Michael Clarke, effectively for not being AB, by Men Of A Certain Age probably has its roots in that. But I pulled for Hughes, wanted him to succeed, felt the pain of his multiple failures and repeated droppings.

By the scale of the response, I'm guessing I wasn't alone in that. We wanted him to succeed, felt he'd had a raw deal. As Martin Crowe observed, he'd never been given a fair shake; Steve Waugh was given 26 tests to score a hundred, Hughes had a ton in both innings of a test by age 20. Perhaps this is revisionist, but we're allowed to be revisionist through the prism of grief. Rationality goes on bereavement leave. We thrash and wail and we remember the best of the departed and we put out our bats for Phil - even though the family didn't like him being called Phil, which raises the question of how much our grief is allowed to take precedence over theirs.

The correct answer, of course, is 'not at all'. The funeral is Wednesday afternoon in Hughes' old school in Macksville, on NSW's mid north coast. Qantas have put on a couple of extra 737s to nearby-ish Coffs Harbour to ferry mourners from the capitals. They'll include a large Cricket Australia contingent, of course; with the injury scratching of captain Pup, Hughes was a fair chance of getting a test recall for the Gabba test scheduled to start this coming Thursday. It won't start this Thursday, as much for reasons of crushing logistical feasibility as anything; you can't send your entire team to a 2pm funeral halfway to Sydney and have them back next morning for the first session. It needs to be noted that with a crowded World-Cup-hosting Australian summer, short of moving both the Gabba and Adelaide Oval tests back by a few days, the Gabba test can't actually be rescheduled; under current ICC rules, tests require an eleven day window, with three clear days flanking the five scheduled days of play, for reasons of player welfare.

So a rational person (or just someone who doesn't like sport) might note we're moving two or cancelling one Test match against the most important cricket side in the world - or at least that which represents the largest cricketing nation and the most powerful board - for one guy's funeral. And think about how much bereavement leave *they* were given when close friends or family members passed. And note the flags at half mast, the statements from politicians, the tributes from right across human civilization, and ask - is this too much? Is it enough? How much is enough?

I don't know. I'm part of it, and yet I feel like it's over the top. Then again, like a lot of white males uncomfortable with public emotion, I feel like most public outpourings of grief are over the top and have been so, from Senna to Princess Di to Michael Hutchence to Steve Irwin to Gough Whitlam. We're mourning not the person or their achievements but what they meant *to us* in our stylised airbrushed perceptions thereof, which is often nothing to do with the person themselves. Social media tends to amplify human reactions in a feedback loop, and grief doesn't appear to be left out of the equation.

I wonder too if there's a generational thing at play here - that we're becoming crap at death, because we're several generations distant from having to deal with it as part of our reality. We don't lose large fractions of our population to war and disaster and disease any more. (Disclaimer: this is clearly a White Person Deal.) We expect to live to a ripe old age. We're in a society that is incredibly uncomfortable with death, that is fully prepared to stick its fingers in its ears and go LALALALALA if you bring up the fact that yes, we *are* all going to die one day. So when a young, fit, future-unlimited sports hero meets his, we are horrified, not just because it's cruel and unfair and a waste, but because it reminds us we're *all* fucken fucked.

I follow a sport, motorsport, which has a reputation of killing and eating its own. Not as much as it used to; the death roll through the '60s and '70s in Formula One was genuinely horrific, and must have been even for generations who lived through world wars. Any era in which you are obliged to use the term 'posthumous World Champion' in reporting that year's title winner is not one to be repeated. But even so, 20 years since the deaths of Senna and Ratzenberger at Imola, we still lose people. Both MotoGP's Marco Simoncelli and Indycar's Dan Wheldon in a horrendous week in November 2011. I was at Brands Hatch in 2008 when young British Supersport rider was involved in the crash which ended his life. More recently, V8 Supercars lost Jason Richards - not through accident but through cancer, but it doesn't hurt any less. Brocky's ghost still lingers. And while Jules Bianchi and Michael Schumacher aren't dead, they're just resting, they're never coming back as the people we knew; this is a different grieving process, chronic rather than acute.

Cricket isn't meant to kill people, and this is part of what underpins the shock and horror. Batsmen get hit in the scone all the time. Whether this is good or bad isn't factored into the discussion; it just is. The same way, perhaps, that concussions just 'were' in the NFL. Whether this remains an acceptable risk, or whether a Senna-esque regulatory overreach will follow from the ICC, with the result of sending the head-hunting bouncer the way of rugby's spear tackle and helmet-to-helmet clashes in the NFL, remains to be seen.

Whatever response there is will be too much, viewed rationally, and not enough, because nothing is enough. Nothing is bringing Phillip Joel Hughes back, as nothing will bring any of us back to the people who care about us.

Back in his spot. #putoutyourbats pic.twitter.com/l8ZhcM2DuI
— Hampshire Cricket (@hantscricket) November 28, 2014

Argh this one got me right in the feels.

The Doctor is OUT.

Head cases

First, a content warning:

Back in the day, when I were a lad getting into motorsports, drivers and riders had race helmets that were their signature, that were immediately and irrevocably linked to them.

Whether nationally-themed like Senna's Brazilian stripe (ahem), Mansell's Union arrow or Dario Franchitti's saltire-tricolore mashup, or just characteristic visual branding like Mika Hakkinen's three-colours-blue, Mick Doohan's torn stripes, the Andrettis' familial silver-and-red or
Jacques Villeneuve's explosion-in-a-Crayola-factory, a driver or rider's helmet was his trademark, Nigel Tufnel style.

Alas, no more; in this me-first age of self-promotion and disposable integrity, where we have a four-time F1 world champion who changes his helmet more often than his social media avatar. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the youth are to blame.

Bar one. That being Dan Ricciardo, Westrayan hero. Who's chosen to rock up at the upcoming F1 Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi - once a Garfield punchline, now apparently somewhere we need to pretend to give a fuck about - sporting this on his head:

Tremendous effort. Almost as much so as the obvious thematic forebear, this fragment of unutterable genius, this azimuth of human achievement by the great Valentino Rossi, Mugello 2008:

While Ricco's attempt could thence be considered spmewhat derivative, credit must be given for facing the gurning buck-toothed caricature not forwards, but backwards, into the eye of the onboard camera. Imagine how much better this footage of Dan duffing up his hapless team number two at Monza would have been with old mate leering at the lens throughout:



So, at least we can say that one member of today's generation of racers gets it.

The rest, unfortunately, are just polishing their helmets.

The Doctor is OUT.

1968: the rebuttal

It's been argued on these pages before that the late 1960s were a better time, a time of great music, awesome muscle cars, and Australian cricketers you didn't want to punch. If, albeit, fucking terrible beer. In the defence of modern times, however, some of the worldviews exhibited by polite society in 1968 are, shall we say, endearingly archaic. Some are lost to progress. Some remain as conservative government policy. And others live on in childrens' books, reprinted in unmodified form since their first edition...

You probably had this book as a five year old. You probably scrawled all over it like my five year old. The amazing thing is, it's EXACTLY AS IT WAS WHEN YOU WERE A KID. And, seemingly, since its first publication in 1968.

Which is a little, erm, Scarry. And here's why:

The broader economic and societal message is, by modern US standards, almost communist...

...while the gender politics are, shall we say, a bit fucken 1968.

Still, while the depictions of indigenous peoples are fairly average, at least they're less offensive than the fucking NFL.

And Sergeant Murphy has clearly never been on deployment with the Ferguson PD, which is a good thing.

However, there's one last panel which confirms, once and for all, that this is a book from, and of, a distant, archaic time in human history:

The Doctor is OUT.

Fricken pod people man

I don't write as much as I want to these days. Twitter's fault, of course. The instant punchline gratification, combined with the endless links to other people's writing which is usually much better than my handcrafted-from-stale-dogturds stylings, kinda takes the air out of my blogging balloon. I should write more. I'm generally happier when I write more, or at least when I'm working on some sort of overarching creative project (eg ITWPT). But lack of time and inspiration conspire, not to mention the fact all this fucken sport and beer ain't gonna consume itself.

Not to mention all the podcasts I listen to. It's hard to write when you're listening to podcasts. So many podcasts. All the Grantland sports stuff, at least until ESPN suspended the proprietor for pointing out correctly that Roger Goodell is a fucking arsetrumpet. (Back tomorrow, supposedly). Men in Blazers. Wil Anderson and his three pods a week, not to mention all the other comedy pods I've picked up from guests on his show - Walking the Room (RIP), the Dollop, Probably Science, Can You Take This Photo Please, Sklarbro Country, half the acts from the LA Podfest. Google that shit and save me a bunch of linking. It's all good.

And of course long time internet buddy and argumentalist @beeso, late of Mother Foccacia, with his foodie podcast Cheeeeeeeeeesy (plus or minus a few e's). Which, as we finally get around to the point of this discussion, I guested on a couple of times while in Oz a few weeks ago.

We met up in the outdoor bar of the Fox (near where I was staying in South Brisbane) for a few pale ales and some food and drink chat:

“@cheeeeesypod: Cheeeeesy Pubcast.02 Subbing in a listener http://t.co/RlTzLuzEcb” Special guest star @dryobbo filling in for @tastetrekker
— beeso (@beeso) October 1, 2014

Then we went a bit rogue and argued about sport over a bottle of Central Otago pinot. As you do

Featuring @dryobbo “@cheeeeesypod: Not Cheeeeesy.01 NBA and penises http://t.co/OOiO0I6Osi”
— beeso (@beeso) October 7, 2014

It was both fun and educational and we figure out a way to do it over Skype, or maybe just if we happen to be in the same country again with a microphone handy, we'll do more.

Consider yourselves warned.

By the way, what I said for Karmichael Hunt and AFL (gone in 60 months) goes fucking double for Jarryd Hayne and NFL. Or half. Whatever. He's got no fucking show.

The Doctor is OUT.

Free me from free U2

Like many peoples of the internot, I awoke earlier this week to find that someone had laid a turd in my iTunes. Lightweight and beige, it taunted me. Naturally, I was aghast. I railed against those responsible. 'U2, Brute??' I railed. Actually I didn't, because that would presuppose a level of wit and composure which I failed to retain on learning Bono had laid a cable in my music collection, one so foetidly heinous it needed special equipment to remove it. It was more akin to a furious declaration of 'YOU FUCKING WANK-SUNGLASSED PONTIFICATING SHIT-MUSIC-WRITING PROFESSIONAL IRISH CUNT' as I selected-all and deleted-all.

 

The most interesting response to U2's originally-shelved new album Songs of Indifference (wait, that was that other professional Irish cunt wasn't it) being force-fed to millions of iTunes users worldwide has been that of diehard U2 fans, and old people, many of whom are diehard U2 fans, because U2 are old and so are they. Truly, there is nowt more punishing than a diehard U2 fan. You know them. They are in your life. They are not in your life because they are diehard U2 fans, but in spite of that. The position of the U2 lifers, almost exclusively old white guys like Bill Simmons, is that in 1991 they had to line up outside fucking Brashs for an hour to buy the CD of Achtung Baby so everyone should just be grateful to have this manna from heaven bestowed upon them gratis. Indeed, the concept of complaining about something given for free seems to be a recurring theme in the old-white-guy backlash-to-the-backlash.

That's not the point. Even old white guys who listen to U2 are precious about their music collections. You wouldn't have been received politely had you wandered into their lounge room and crammed Bros or Milli Vanilli in between their first-press LPs of War and The Joshua Tree. Or even their albums, which admittedly would be easier to organise. People's music is personal as fuck, and that's no less the case now that said music is archived electronically. It is still how people see themselves, how they think of themselves, how they judge each other, how they catalogue their memories, mark milestones in their lives. They don't embrace the invasion of finding the forty odd minutes of offcuts and shite that is Songs of Inconsequence bobbing in the bowl first thing in the morning. Noone under 30 wants that. Not that many over 30 want that either. If this has taught Apple anything, it is surely this: Do not fuck with people's shit. Do not.

Though it's not as though it's the first time U2 have been involved in these sorts of shenanigans.

The saddest part, even as a non-diehard, is to see how far U2 have fallen. U2 once were warriors. There was a period there when they were the biggest band in the world. Aside from releasing genuinely great albums in the late 80s and early 90s, the ZooTV and PopMart world tours and concert videos defined live stadium acts through their decade. U2 built a reputation, and still trade on, the force and fury of their live show. Which is good, because they ain't releasing another studio album. Ironically, given the cyclical nature of music, in an era where bands like Foals are coining it in based on a sound lightly lifted from early-doors U2, the band themselves will never be able to release a new, original-release album again with any expectation of people being willing to pay real actual money for it. Apart from those old-white-guy diehards - who probably would have been willing to pay real actual money for Songs of Incontinence anyway.

So RIP in peas, U2. 36 years, and this is what does them in. Not The Unforgettable Fire, but The Unflushable Floater.

The Doctor is OUT.

Things I wonder

FZ: ‘Don’t they pay you good, for the stuff that you do?’
Devil: ‘Well, I can’t complain when the cheques come through.’

- Frank Zappa in conversation with the Devil, ‘Titties ’N’ Beer’

I have a nice job that pays me adequately and doesn’t trouble me between the hours of 5pm and 9am weekdays, or even in the long dark hours of Sunday evening precluding Mondayitis. This means when I drive to work I have spare capacity in my think box which might have otherwise been taken up with fretting about the Day To Come. And with that spare capacity I wonder things. Things I wonder include:

• What sort of person buys personalised plates for a Hyundai Elantra?
• Are they the same sort of person who rolls 18” rims on a white Toyota Camry GL?
• Has the guy in the Cleaning Co van ever watched This Is Spinal Tap?

• What unutterly miserable and destitute station in life must you have sunk to in order to consider reasonable the fitting of number plate holders emblazoned with ‘MUM’S TAXI SERVICE’, or ‘HELP! DAD FARTED AND WE’RE TRAPPED!’
• Related: can we retrospectively withdraw your right to breed?
• If you were driving a bus with grinning National Party smugwits smeared across its enormous backside, surely you'd choose to deliberately drive like a weapons-grade cunt?

The answer to the latter is yes, obvs. And yes, some bus drivers might be of a mindset to drive like weapons-grade cunts if the red side of politics had bought the ad space… or even if they hadn’t, just on spec.

I fucking hate election advertising. Even when it’s my side of politics. Sometimes I’m not even sure I have a side of politics, but then I remember I live in NZ, where Labour isn’t as irrevocably fucking compromised as its Australian counterpart. You can still have hope for NZ Labour. At least because they can actually fucking spell.

The run-in to the Sept 20 election has taken a turn with evidence presented in a new book by NZ investigative journalist and inveterate shitstirrer Nicky Hager that the Dirty Nats have been engaging in Dirty Politics, secretly collaborating with right-wing shitcunt attack bloggers like WhaleOil (cos calling yourself that isn’t a flat-out giveaway ref Your Guarantee Of Shitcuntery) to crush NZ Labour in the newspolls and reduce them to irrelevance. Which is disgraceful and unfair. NZ Labour are perfectly capable of doing that themselves. Anyone lining up to hear leadership advice from Ball Sharten is not in a comfortable space ref. concept and clue.

Still, the red side of politics will probably run the blue side closer than two-party-preferred polling might indicate - partially because, regardless of the wet-dream fantasies of MSM political hacks, NZ doesn’t run a two-party system. None of the major parties have governed in their own right - with an absolute majority - since the introduction of MMP in the late 90s. To paraphrase Don Chipp, the Bastards are Kept Honest. The Greens are polling well and backing themselves to win 20 seats - the swingeing majority of which will be Party seats not Electorate seats, but they all count for the same. Which isn’t entirely unequivocally fantastic news for NZ science, a priori; we’re not that many years removed from their demonstrable Corngate-era Luddism on genetic engineering (Also, ironically enough, instigated by a Hager book).

Which was why I was interested to read in one of their flyers they’ll be pushing to plough resources into research and innovation, with a focus on massively upskilling NZ in STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths. This sounds bloody tremendous, particularly given their history with SCIENTS. They plan to fund an additional thousand uni places in physics, maths, engineering, computer sci…

Wait, no biology?

Ahhh. No we can’t have that. Cos biology has genetic engineering in it. MAKE THE BAD SCIENTS GO AWAY.

Dammit NZ Greens, you were so close.

The Doctor is OUT.

Brown eyed girl

Royal Watcher. Still, apparently, a valid job description for certain cretinous dropouts of the Fourth Estate. What I've learned from Royal Watchers, particularly those who've stalked the Windsors over the years is that in matters of Royal etiquette, it is at all times critical to remain decorous, staid and reserved. To choose one's words carefully. To observe protocol. And with that, I ask:

Pray tell, has one seen the Royal Ringpiece?

Yes those dastardly Chermans have been at it again, leering motordrives akimbo to snap a split-secont helicopter-mediated bare-bottied upskirt of the Duchess of Cambridge. Can we Bild it? Yes we can Fuck off and Google it yourself you pervs. This of course is a gross violation of the woman's privacy and in any reasonable world those responsible for capturing and publishing would be up on charges of being grotty fucking sex pests. But... celebrity. So apparently it's All Cool.

And you looked, anyway. Of course you looked. So the system works. The market wins. Supply and demand. If the punters didn't care about the Royals, like any other celebs, they wouldn't be kept around to make a living off their fame. Problem is, some of those punters want more than a Royal wave and a 'May husband and aye so loved visiting your countray' out the back window of a flag-bonneted Roller. And it's not as though the Royals are willing signatories to that part of the deal, the pap-snaps, the upskirts. This was not consensual. If Kate had photocopied her arse at the Palace Xmas Party, that might be a different prospect.

There's plenty of scope for focused, surgical dissection of this debate, analysing how and why society allows certain human females to be exploited in such a way. There is a place for discussion of how the patriarchy classifies females somewhere between quasi-human subspecies and tradeable chattels.

This is not that place, because there are cheap bum jokes to be made, and I'm a cheap bum. For as Sir Robert Menzies said, 'I did but see her arsing by, but I will love her till I die.'

Just as well it was Bob Menzies and not Bob Ass-kin.

OK, I'm done.

The Doctor is OUT.

Play some D

Happy New Year! Sorry, I overslept.



So, much as you'd successfully forgotten Brassy ever existed, let alone had a second single after Work It Out, I'm trying to pretend Round 2 of the NBA Playoffs isn't happening. Not just because of the inevitable miserable comedown from the awesome-beyond-awesomeness of the first round, with fifty games of comebacks, buzzer-beaters, top seeds being dragged to elimination game 7s by bullish underdogs, Big Game Dame's series-winning three, The Joey Crawford Show, heroes, villains, engineers foist on their own petard, and Donald Sterling being told to GTFO. OK, mainly because of that. But also because my Blazers are getting torched by the Evil Empire, those inglorious bastards in monochrome, the San Antonio Spurs. And that's just a bummer. It's a bummer on the scale of the ending of The Empire Strikes Back, like watching Vader hack bits off Luke over a first-to-four series. With resident evil genius Pop, of course, playing the role of the Jedi Formerly Known As Anakin. Or possibly some sort of heavily meteorite-impacted moon.

He may have been a total bastard, but he was handy on the blues harmonica pic.twitter.com/691gHMpcEd
— Dr Yobbo (@DrYobbo) May 4, 2014

Wonderful as it was to watch the overmatched underdog Mavs take them to seven games, the Empire was never not going to Strike the Fuck Back. As OK Go observed: the house wins. The house always wins. And even with Straya's very own Torres Strait Towelwaver on board, it's still impossible to cheer for the Spurs, unless you're a dick, or a 'basketball purist', which means you're a dick with pretentions.

Still, the one bright spot of round 2 - besides Roy Hibbert taking a tip from Black Sabbath's Iron Man, somehow reanimating his ancient gigantic frame and lumbering Godzilla-like after all the h8rs who'd de-bandwagoned on him for being gahhhbage for months - has been the Clippers-Thunder series. It's got everything. Even things you don't want, like Donald Sterling not wanting to GTFO. It's got Blake and KD and Mad Russ and CP3 and DeAndre Jordan bricking freethrows and Steven Adams' elbow-proof face and Caron Butler taking your calls now and Doc being a gentleman and a scholar and Scott Brooks wearing glasses in order to appear intelligent and then making astonishingly fucking dumb moves in the final minutes to undermine that completely. And BIG BABY DAVIS IN THE MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE. GET HIM A ROOM OR PREPARE TO FACE THE FLYING KEYBOARD OF JUSTICE. It's tremendous. It's 2-2. It's going seven games. And the winner gets to get beaten by the FUCKING SPURS.

Unless they can learn how to play some D.

The Doctor is OUT.