The Shoddy Blog

A Gambles we will go

2011-05-07T22:54:00.003+09:30

Remember my long standing NFL bet (the one where I picked the winner of the SuperBowl)? My skills of gambling on sports I know fuck all about continue. Here’s the NHL (Ice Hockey, motherfuckaz) Playoffs – and the five teams I chose to win the Stanley Cup (that I picked halfway through the season) highlighted in green.

Click to enlarge, or I will break into your house and rape your pot plants.

It’s looking good. If I win, I’ll use the prize money to buy me some mechanical cat paws.

Dear god, how have I been surviving without these?

Grinded By the Light

2011-04-20T13:13:00.004+09:30

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez decided to get together and make a double feature film celebrating Grindhouse cinema and named it, well, Grindhouse. The film had a series of fake trailers that played before the film, and during the intermission.

To promote the 2007 release of the film, a competition was held where amateur film makers could enter their own fake trailers. The winning entry was Hobo With a Shotgun.

This idea proved to be so popular, that it became a feature length film released earlier this year (with no less than Rutger Hauer taking on the role of the Hobo):

Now, to promote the release of Hobo With a Shotgun on DVD and Blu Ray, another fake trailer contest was held. The winning entry is Van Gore:

This has proven to be a popular concept as well. If this trailer becomes a real film, holds a trailer contest, and sparks another fake trailer – well, then we might have found ourselves a perpetual loop of trash cinema. An Ouroboros of sick shit, if you will.

And yes, he does launch a baby into a blender.

Band Aid on a Broken Leg

2011-03-26T14:15:00.002+10:30

Earth Hour is kicking off tonight at 8:30pm. I’m going to celebrate it by sitting under the biggest fuck you lights in Adelaide at AAMI Stadium, watching the Crows play Hawthorn.

But in a conscious effort to hide my laziness under the blanket of saving electricity, I will now switch off my computer and stop typing, and direct you instead to my Earth Hour Rant post from 2009.

I’ll leave you on this article from ABC News:

The Chairman of Western Australia's largest sustainability program says Earth Hour is tokenistic and a waste of time.

John Carlson, from the not-for-profit initiative Days of Change, says the event gives people a false sense of achievement.

"In one hour you can't save enough energy to make a significant impact on the country or the world," Mr Carlson said.

Photoshop Tennis 3: AlphaBeat Down

2011-03-08T17:08:00.003+10:30

I’ve just finished another bout of Photoshop Tennis with Ozi (he of the jinggez blog fame), and I think you’ll like this one.

This time we based the additions around the alphabet (I added a character starting with the letter “A”, Ozi did “B”, I did “C”...etc), until we had 26 new customers infiltrating the shopping mall you see below (click to enlarge).

Can you find all 26, plus a bonus 27th addition (Ozi has added a mannequin to a less than usual location)?

Email me if you want clues, or to gloat at your prowess.

beefabeef@yahoo.com

win

2011-01-24T18:47:00.002+10:30

Today marked the second to last round of the NFL playoffs, now a two week gap and then the Super Bowl.

I put a bit of cash on four teams to win the Super Bowl at the start of the season (in a “fuck it, why not?” capacity). Click to enlarge the picture below, the four teams made the finals, and I have marked their progress in green (Pittsburgh automatically went through to the Divisional Play Offs).

Basically, I win $100 no matter who wins the Super Bowl.

My four months late World Cup Wrap Up (Including the Ten Shittiest Things about the Tournament).

2011-01-19T23:21:00.002+10:30

*As mentioned on this site before, running a blog is like going to the gym. It’s a rewarding experience, but miss a few sessions and it can take months to find the motivation to get back into the routine.

I’ve had a hectic few months both at work and socially.

But mostly, it was my own shitty procrastination that held up proceedings. I finished the final World Cup post four months ago and uploaded it to the blogger web site. But then I had to resize the pictures I had saved (blogger shrinks my uploaded pics into a kinda blurry screen capture if I don’t) – which is a quick and relatively painless process in Photoshop, yet for some reason I well and truly could not be arsed doing this. I finally got around to doing it today, and posted the World Cup conclusion to the site.

Yeah, I know. The World Cup was over fucking months ago. But this post kinda encompasses my views on every World Cup, and Soccer as a whole, so it is still semi-relevant reading. I also felt it a shame if this didn’t see the light of day after the work put into it.

As always kids, it’s up to you. Read the post. Don’t read the post. Switch the computer off and smash the local orphanage’s windows with your bleeding fists.

Your choice.

"Soccer has, and always will be, the most popular Sport in the world. Yet I don’t think this tournament won over too many new fans."

This was a quote in an article written by a Sports Writer during the tournament, I remember the gist but fucked if I remember the reporter’s name so I can’t credit him here. I understand the mentality though. I had a heap of colleagues unfamiliar with the sport who were looking forward to the tournament, who all lost interest early in the piece somewhere during the deluge of red cards.

On a personal note: though I have to admit that I had a lot of fun with this tournament, the overall adventure kinda left a sour aftertaste in my mouth. I enjoyed following numerous teams and players, but was also sternly reminded of all that frustrates me with this damn sport.

At the end of the day, I got involved with the World Cup because I love the whole global feel of it, but there were also nostalgic reasons too. My introduction to the tournament was in a series of pubs in London in 2006 (an era in which the novelty of living in the city was still strong for me), surrounded by excited spectators supporting both teams in each match.

I think I took a lot of those fond memories with me into the 2010 World Cup, and was kind of disappointed to find that most people round these parts didn’t give a shit about the tournament. Of course, there’s also a difference between watching a game in a full pub just after work – and watching a game in a half empty pub at 11pm on a weeknight. There’s also a pretty big difference between watching the game in a full pub on your lunch break, and watching the game at 4am on a Tuesday morning by yourself on the couch (in the middle of Winter too).

The 2014 World Cup will be held in Brazil, which means another dose of 4am games for us Australian viewers. I will get involved, I will place a few bets – but I’m not going to dive into the 2014 tournament with the same enthusiasm I dived into this year’s Cup.

Thus ends our extensive shoddy coverage of the 2010 World Cup. Shall we end on a high note? Nah fuck it. Here are the ten shittiest things about the World Cup. In order from least shittiest, to fuck you.

10. The Time Difference

Rest assured, I was well and truly over the late nights/early rises once the World Cup was over. This one couldn’t really be helped, what with Australia being on the other side of the world and all. But we Australians do share a similar time zone with New Zealand, and pretty much all of Asia – so how about spreading the cups out time-zone wise? The last reasonable time slot for Asia and Oceania was the Japan/Korea World Cup in 2002. The 2006, 2010, 2014, 1018 and 2022 are all in opposing time zones resulting in games hitting our airwaves at about half past fucking hell . By “our” I mean those sharing a time zone within a couple of hours of Australia, roughly a third of the World’s population. Christ, how about sharing the love?

9. The Netherlands turn nasty

They were supposed to be the Shoddy Dozen Team to bring home the bacon, but resorted to playing like a bunch of thugs in the final.

8. That Effin’ Ball

ADIDAS’ Jubilani Ball was created specifically for the 2010 World Cup, and was declared their “roundest ball ever” (what with the regular balls being cubes and all). Neither the Strikers, nor the Goal keepers were happy with it. Viewers got to spend four weeks watching the best players in the world send the ball soaring metres over the cross bar.

An idea for the 2014 World Cup: how bout using a regular fucking soccer ball?

7. Vuvuzelas

Equally parts irritating and pointless.

6. Brazilian Hypocrisy

Luis Fabiano admitted to handling the ball in a goal against the Ivory Coast. He was quoted along the lines of “cheating and getting away with it made the goal all the more sweeter”. Brazil were knocked out of the finals a week later by the Netherlands. Brazil angrily labelled the Dutch team “cheats”.

There’s calling the Kettle black, and then there’s calling the fuck you kettle seriously Brazil go fuck yourselves.

5. John Terry’s imaginary Coup

He goosed another player’s wife and it cost him the captaincy. Maybe it wasn’t another player’s wife, might have been an ex wife, or ex girlfriend – I can’t be arsed looking it up because I really don’t care about that shit (in all honesty, I can’t be fucked looking it up to the point where I’ve already reported on this once and can’t be fucked re-reading my own blog). The players hook up with vapid pop stars and idiot models, and the relationships are a joke so it really doesn’t matter to me if they cheat on each other.

It was Terry’s “Press Conference” that earns him a place on this shit list. You know, the one where he panicked after England’s poor display in the first game, and held a media get together to let the World know the England players were organising a coup against their coach Capello in an effort to win their next game. Except the rest of the team named in this so called “coup” didn’t know what the fuck Terry was talking about.

The rules are pretty simple in Sportsmanship: stand by your coach, especially after a loss. That goes double for World Tournaments, Terry, you Ass Blood.

4. France’s fall from grace

2008: They were World Cup Finalists.

2010: They cheated with a handled goal to gain entry to the World Cup. Then a player got the sulks up with their Coach after the first game. Then the Coach got the sulks with said player and sent him home. Then the players got the sulks up about the sulky player being sent home, so they all got on the team bus and shut the curtains and refused to get out in protest, in an epic dummy spit. When they played their last game of the cup, the sulky Coach decided to outsulk an already sulky regime, and refused to shake hands with the opposing team’s manager.

3. The refs

Complaining about the on field Policing is probably the most prolific, and let’s not deny boring, conversation topic of any sport. That being said, the harshness and inconsistency of the World Cup refs were the biggest sticking point of the World Cup.

Handling the ball in front of goal could get you a red card, a yellow card, a penalty...it could even get you no reprimand at all – all depending on which fucking ref you have on the day.

Tim Cahill was red carded for a tackle. He thought the decision was too harsh, as did the spectators, as did the commentators, as did the German player he actually fucking tackled. When he faced the tribunal to find out if his one match ban would become two(!?), the powers that be let him know that it shouldn’t have been a red card in the first place. The tribunal found Cahill was going for the ball, and had bent his leg while doing so. Not a foul.

Yeah great, commiserations all round. Meanwhile, Australia loses it’s best player for a game and a half. Fuck me, we’ve waited four years for this tournament.

And that is where most of the frustration of the World Cup lies – in the referees.

Soccer referees have the ability to yellow card a player, and hand out the even more serious red card in extraneous circumstances. In theory: it allows the referee to reprimand those players not upholding the gentlemanly ideals and conduct of the game. In reality: we have hot headed refs handing out spur of the moment judgments that can cripple a team’s chances of winning. It also appears to be getting worse, the figures leading up to this World Cup (Yellow/ Red Cards):

1982 98/5
1986 133/8
1990 162/16
1994 235/15
1998 258/22
2002 272/17
2006 307/28

All of this Nazi reprimanding to uphold the “Gentleman” aspect of the game.

Yeah right, the Gentleman aspect of Soccer. Meanwhile Italians riot to the point cops die and games are postponed, and South Americans burn their own stadiums down. And if you want to acquaint yourself with English hooligans, go down to Blockbuster and rent yourself a copy of The Firm. Or grab a copy of I.D.. Or The Football Factory. Or Green Street (or it’s sequel), or Rise of the Footsoldier, or Cass, or Awaydays, or fuck it I’ve made my point already.

No less than four refs were sent home from the World Cup due to shitty umpiring. But what consolidation is that to a country that may not make the tournament again for another 20 years?

Meh.

2. The FIFA President: Sepp Fuckin’ Blatter

Sepp Blatter. Sounds like a character from Futurama, but is in fact the president of FIFA. He’s from Switzerland, which is kinda cool. He’s also 74, which is really not cool at all. This old stick in the mud has been turning a deaf ear to the vocal majority complaining about the shitty-yet-easily-fixable problems of an otherwise glorious sport.

The biggest call is for video technology on those hard to spot occasions, such as, I don’t know – that England goal that was not allowed, because none of the fucking officials spotted it.

Blatter has turned his nose to such technology, declaring it unfair as lower leagues do not have access to it. This is why amateur tennis and cricket leagues have been disbanded, because they do not have access to the Hawk-Eye system or the third umpire....except these leagues HAVEN’T been disbanded, because Blatter is an archaic lump of shit.

Check out “Sepp Blatter” on Wikipedia, to see an old fuddy duddy elected to president in a fog of controversy and back door dealings, and the stink that has followed him since.

Or not. Fuck it, he should be dead soon anyway. Let me leave you with this change Blatter has made since being president:

National associations must now enforce immediate suspensions of all players sent off during a game, even if television replays offer compelling evidence of a player's innocence. In particular, Blatter insists that a referee's judgement must be seen as final and that mistakes are part of the game. The FA, however, has refused to follow this directive, and allows appeals against straight red cards (though not those resulting from two yellows).

UPDATE: a link to ten crazy Blatter moments. The man is insane.

1. Iran President: Mahmoud Fuckin’ Ahmadinejad

The coveted Number One spot of my shit list belongs to a guy who had nothing to do with the World Cup, until after it had finished. Though they didn’t make it to the World Cup, Iran is in the top third of the World’s Soccer teams, which isn’t too bad – but that’s not the problem Mahmoud (fuck typing his last name again) had with the tournament. Nah. He had a problem with this guy:

While the rest of the world enjoyed the randomness, the excitement, and heaven fuckin’ forbid, the fun of having an aquatic psychic join in on the tipping, Mahmoud apparently did not.

The Iranian leader called Paul a symbol of decadence and decay in the Western world. Mr. Ahmadinejad also said those who believe in a psychic octopus cannot be leaders of nations like Iran "that aspire to human perfection."

Thanks to VOA News.com for the quote. How about another headline from Iran circa World Cup time?

Iran mother facing stoning pleads to see children

This country’s aspiration to “human perfection” includes the ritual stoning of poor lasses like Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, for such perversions of justice as (gasp) adultery.

It’s nice of Mahmoud to remind us all during the fun and glamour of an international sport’s tournament, that the world is a shitty place after all.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the World Cup. Over for another four years. Sorry for the lateness of this article, hopefully the next update doesn’t take me as long.

Ya Know

2010-12-25T02:49:00.001+10:30

Haven’t posted for a while due to....well....no real decent reason. But I’m not dead. Post coming soon.

Cam Pain

2010-08-22T18:35:00.005+09:30

Australia is looking at it’s first hung Government since World War II.

Whatever the fuck that means.

I voted before work on Saturday. I got to the RSL club polling booth that I had voted at last election (a few months ago) to find it was closed with directions to another one at a school further up. This substitute polling place was only two streets away, but I decided to do the gentlemanly thing and help an elderly woman who was completely bamboozled by the simple map left on the door of the Hall. She walked at such an infuriatingly slow pace that at one point I almost pile drived her into the gutter out of pure frustration.

There’s a red squiggly line telling me the past tense of pile drive is pile drove, but that doesn’t sound quite right.

There was the usual gaggle of promoters handing out voting suggestions at the entrance to the school. I got handed a flyer for the Liberal Party, one for the Green Party, but for some reason the guy with the Labor Information stared at me like I wasn’t worth the paper and didn’t give me anything. The louse.

I joined the queue for my district, only to find my name missing from the roll and the knowledge that my suburb of Norwood had changed districts (huh!?), and so I had to join another queue. I got to the front of this line and started having a blood nose as my name was signed off and my voting slips were handed to me. This isn’t a colourful metaphor, I was literally bleeding from the nose for some strange reason – and none of the volunteers had a tissue on them, so I decided to vote as quickly as possible and hit the bathroom.

In my nasal haemorrhage haste I fucked up the local ballot and didn’t even vote for who I was planning too – I couldn’t tell you now who got my vote. A mischievous idea flickered across my brain for the national vote – I was going to dip my finger in the blood covering my upper lip and scrawl “I VOTE FOR SATAN” across the page, but thought that might ruin some poor volunteer’s day, so decided to vote properly.

Well, as properly as a guy like me votes anyway.

There had been a bit of pre election banter at my work: three guys had told me not to vote for Liberal as they would waste water and money, and three other people told me not to vote for Labor as they would waste water and money, so naturally I was apathetic about the whole thing. And apparently Australia is running out of water and we are all going to fucking die.

My plan of attack was the same as a few months ago, vote for the coolest sounding party. This year, the Australian Sex Party got my vote.

Not to be confused with “Sexy Party”

I looked up their policies a few days later (I really should stop doing that, voting for a party and then researching them afterwards), and found some pretty modern ideas so I’m glad they got my vote. They seem to have a pro choice campaign (Abortion, Euthanasia, Same Sex Marriage) that gels well with my life philosophy (people should be able to do whatever they want) – it’s the kind of polar opposite to what Osama Bin Laden would vote for. Which is good, because that guy sucks.

And yeah, that’s about all I have to say about the Election. I’ve been seeing a few articles pop up on Yahoo news regarding what happens now, but I get lost in a sea of words like “Coalition” and “Backbenchers” and my nose starts to bleed again.

I’m also quite hungover. I went to a Sangria bar last night and got shit carted on wine based fuckery, and a Colombian chick taught me how to say ”A Unicorn vomited in my time machine” in Spanish, but I have since forgotten the words. Except “vomito”.

My mother rang me ten minutes ago and asked me to name the seven dwarfs, she’s at a sailing regatta in Hamilton Island with my old man, and everybody sounds quite tipsy. The dwarf name they were missing was “Doc”. I knew this, but don’t know who I voted for in the local ballot. No idea how a sailing regatta turns into a memory contest of cartoon midgets, but life can take unexpected turns.

This was supposed to be a final post on the World Cup, but I’ll put that up later, even though it’s hardly relevant. When I do, you can read it, or skip it entirely, or turn your computer off and go jerk off a stray cat into a saucepan – whatever floats your boat, like I said I’m all about the right to choose your future.

Let’s round off this post with a few photos from the Election. Stay out of trouble, kids.

Second to Last World Cup Post

2010-07-30T17:19:00.006+09:30

Been busy as fuck, but two last posts on the World Cup to scrape out of the pipeline and then we are done.

There were more than a few countries who found the British supporters’ attitude to their own team a little confusing. The media named them “the boo boys”, a chorus of agitated fans quite happy to let loose with the jeers when their home side failed to perform.

It seemed especially bizarre to the Australians – we were happy when the Socceroos won, and disappointed when they lost. Anger really didn’t seem to come into the equation.

But speaking to a British fan the reasoning becomes clear – they had spent all year hearing about the million pound contracts, the mansion homes and the model girlfriends. Mostly, they had been hearing how this was the most talented English team to grace the finals. When they underperformed, it was beyond frustrating.

That’s a luxury the Australian team had that the British didn’t; at the end of the day, the Socceroos weren’t expected to go too far. If anything, we were just happy to be there. For the British though, anything less than making the semi finals was deemed a disaster.

That’s the whole problem with the weight of expectation, and it differs wildly per team. There is no point in comparing a soccer mad country like Brazil’s accomplishments with that of say, New Zealand.

So just how well did the teams of the World Cup perform as per expected? I’ve devised a handicap system to rate each team, and the equation is quite simple:

(Where they were expected to finish) – (Where they finished) = score

For instance, the Netherlands were given the seventh best odds of winning the Cup, and finished second. (7) – (2) = 5. They have a score of plus five. Get it?

Here is how the teams performed:

JAPAN (25 – 9) = 16
URUGUAY (19 – 4) = 15
SOUTH KOREA (28 – 15) = 13
SLOVAKIA (26 – 16) = 10
NEW ZEALAND (31 – 22) = 9
SLOVENIA (26 – 18) = 8

Japan exceeded all expectations to make it through to the round of 16. I was watching a pre match commentary at some ungodly hour, and vaguely remember hearing that the Japan Manager rewarded the team’s ascent into the round of 16 by telling them they didn’t have to wash their own uniforms after that match. Christ, don’t quote me on that – I was drunk or half asleep for most of the World Cup. But the Japanese are a little kooky – sounds like something they would do.

Uruguay also did better than expected, finishing fourth overall. We know a guy (through about three degrees of separation) from Uruguay living here in Adelaide, who put $500 on the team to win the World Cup before the start of the tournament.

Had they made it through, he would have won $50,500. Just a little more exciting than the bet I made.

God bless the Kiwis – only undefeated team in the entire tournament (Three draws).

PARAGUAY (13 – 7) = 6
GHANA (14 – 8) = 6
NETHERLANDS (7 – 2) = 5
SWITZERLAND (24 – 19) = 5
MEXICO (13 – 10) = 3
GERMANY (5 – 3) = 2
SOUTH AFRICA (22 – 20) = 2
AUSTRALIA (23 – 21) = 2
CHILE (11 – 10) = 1
ALGERIA (29 – 28) = 1

Had a lot of high hopes for Germany, for a while there I thought they could win the whole thing. The Socceroos did a little better than expected.

SPAIN (1 – 1) = 0
USA (12 – 12) = 0
HONDURAS (30 - 30) = 0
NORTH KOREA (32 – 32) = 0

Spain was expected to win, and they did. North Korea was expected to come last, and they did. The USA was expected to come 12th....and, um, they did.

ARGENTINA (4 – 5) = -1
PORTUGAL (10 – 11) = -1
BRAZIL (2 – 6) = - 4
DENMARK (20 – 24) = -4
NIGERIA (21 – 27) = -6
IVORY COAST (9 – 17) = -8
SERBIA (15 – 23) = -8

Much was expected of superstars Messi, Ronaldo and Ronaldhino. They didn't deliver.

GREECE (16 – 25) = -9
ENGLAND (3 – 13) = -10
CAMEROON = (18 – 31) = -13
ITALY (6 – 26) = -20
FRANCE (8 – 29) = -21

England made a real pig’s dinner of this cup – people continue to overlook the fact that the 11 amazing players don’t necessarily make an amazing team. Spain, Argentina, Brazil – these teams look and act like families, England looks like 11 reluctant co-workers.

Still, they didn’t fuck it up anywhere nearly as bad as the previous final players France and Italy. France in particular, who not only threw the baby out with the bath water, but managed to back their car over the baby’s head too.

One more post to come on the World Cup, then we will put this beast to rest.

I'm swapping my clogs for flamenco shoes

2010-07-12T01:24:00.001+09:30

It’s been a ferociously busy week, and a few posts fell by the wayside. Here is a picture leftover from a post where I was creating match up images for the semi finals. I imagined the teams as characters in Street Fighter II, but instead of humans they were Squid – so kind of a Squid Fighter II mash up, and yeah, I’m not really sure where I was going with this:

Sat on the couch like a Zombie this morning from 4am until just before 7am watching the Netherlands lose 0-1 to a superior Spain. I was disappointed that the Shoddy Dozen didn’t pull through with the goods in the end, but part of me was quite happy with the result for three reasons:

1. Spain were the better side – Netherlands played like a bunch of hoodlums in the first half. They ended up scoring nine yellow cards for the match – two of which should have been red cards. This is what shits me about the inconsistency of the refs, how can a flying karate kick to the chest not be a fucking red card?

2. The Shoddy Dozen wager lasted the entire tournament. In fact, the last three matches I sat down and watched could have won me the $220. It’s rare to have a bet carry through for so long. In hindsight, I should have put a bit of cash on Spain to win the tournament when they were the remaining favourite and still had two games to go. I think they were at about 4 to 1 odds then. If I had put $50 on Spain before the quarter finals were over, then I would have gone into the Final with this wager: a Netherlands win would make me a 65 dollar profit, a loss would have made me...a 65 dollar profit. Oh well, lesson learnt – and a sure win wasn’t quite as exciting as the one big winner takes all bet.

3. If the Netherlands had won, then Paul the Psychic Octopus would have been wrong with his final prediction. He has been my favourite personality of the World Cup. I love the fact that somebody in a German Aquarium decided to let one of the sea life pick the winners of the matches, and his co-workers and the media thought ”fuck it, why not?”

Speaking of Paul the Octovoiyant, his first winning pick was pretty much decided a fluke, as that was a 50/50 chance of choosing that bad boy. But eight predictions in a row is another feat altogether. He had a one in 256 chance of pulling that off. If you had chucked 20 bucks on his first prediction, and decided to rollover the winnings through to the finish – Paul would have netted you over eight thousand dollars. Jesus.

The Germans loved their eight legged friend of course, up until he predicted their loss to Spain. Then they wanted to fry the fucker into calamari rings, and sent multiple death threats to his aquarium. Then, to add insult to injury, they sang mid game chants declaring Paul’s mother a slut. Harsh.

Typing "slut octopus" into Google Image search revealed this picture. Plus several hundred Japanese porn site photos that will haunt me for weeks.

Anyway, the 2010 World Cup is now over, and I thank you non Soccer fans for baring with me through this.

I’ve got a handful of posts to wrap this week up (awards I have created for various WC antics, a list of Cup villains, and final thoughts on the whole shebang) – and then we will return to our regular viewing.

Estaba desnudo cuando me escribió este

2010-07-04T02:24:00.001+09:30

Click-click.

Boom.

There is one last obstacle that stands between me and my $220 windfall, and that’s Spain, who were the favourite to win the cup at the start of the tournament, and are still around come semi final time.

Who knows, maybe Germany will hate-fuck Spain with a 4 nil drumming like they did to Argentina, and, er, the Socceroos a few games before that.

Worst case scenario, Spain beats Germany and then Netherlands or Uruguay in the final and win the World Cup – but even then that means my wager has lasted the entire tournament, which was kinda the point anyway. A financial carrot to keep me interested through all of the red cards and buzzing horns.

Non Soccer fans rejoice in the fact that the World Cup will end soon, and we’ll be back to our usual programming.

Now with less fav

2010-07-03T02:49:00.001+09:30

I watched the Netherlands vs Brazil game at the Alma last night. Sorta.

I missed the Brazil goal when I was buying beers, and then missed the Holland goal while I was in the toilet, and missed the second Holland goal while I was, well, buying beers again.

Talk about bad timing. Still, the result was more than desirable, as another Favourite is knocked out of the running.

More than that, the Netherlands win has guaranteed that my World Cup bet will last until the Final game (and may even pay off sooner than that), as a final berths will have to go to either Netherlands or the other quarter final winner, Uruguay (both being Shoddy Dozen teams).

Germany play Argentina in a few hours, and hopefully knock out another favourite.

In other news, this little batch of writing constitutes the Shoddy Blog’s 250th post.

Let’s celebrate the occasion with an oxymoron; it’s a new Old Spice commercial:

UPDATE: Germany have taken apart Argentina with a 4 nil victory. Spain is the sole Favourite remaining.

Cheeky Half

2010-06-30T21:24:00.001+09:30

I had get up early for work this morning, so gave last night’s games a miss. Looks like I missed the first penalty shoot out of the tournament with Paraguay beating Japan 5:3.

I wasn’t so fussed about missing that game, but was sorry I couldn’t catch Spain vs Portugal, one of the better World Cup match ups. I had high hopes for Portugal, who were one of the big guns in the Shoddy Dozen . Unfortunately they lost 0:1, so now I have my eye on Germany and possibly the Netherlands as my greatest weapon against the favourites.

Speaking of favourites, I still have yet to see Argentina or Brazil play a match. That’s typical of this World Cup and it’s lousy time difference . You can catch Botswana vs Narnia after dinner, but will have to either do a gram of Crystal meth and stay up, or go to bed and rise with the fucking Dairy Farmers to catch a decent match up.

Quarter Finals start in two days, anyway. Hoping for a few upsets, else the Shoddy Dozen will be down to the Shoddy One.

The current odds for outright winner of the World Cup:

Brazil 3.50

Spain 3.75

Argentina 5.00

Germany 8.00

Holland 8.50

Uruguay 17.00

Ghana 41.00

Paraguay 51.00

Limeys out too

2010-06-28T16:48:00.001+09:30

As the old adage goes: a team of champions will never beat a champion team.

This has been a very shaky World Cup for the England side, it started with Beckham’s injury, then Terry sticking his willy where he shouldn’t losing the captaincy in the process, then Ferdinand injuring himself and losing his captaincy – and all of this happening before a single minute of World Club football had been played.

Things didn’t go much better once the Cup started, with Rooney not climbing the mountain of expectation that had been laid out in front of him. English fans were irate at the poor performances, causing them to boo their team off the field, which caused a frustrated Rooney to complain about the fan’s lack of support – an act that he later apologised for (!?).

In between the matches Terry called a press conference and tried to organise a coup against Capello which was not backed up by his team mates. This conference was bested by a second English media outing, in which the coach and captain only asked five minutes of questions, and refused to answer any questions from non-British reporters.

As for Fabio Capello, I’d be very surprised if they renew his 6 million pound a year contract – I’ve seen Soccer managers booted out for far lesser indiscretions than this World Cup debacle. For those living in London, expect the tabloids to hunt down the official that didn’t allow Lampard’s goal, and post his picture under clever play on word headlines as they enjoy their new villain of the hour.

Anyway, we see one of the favourites drop out of the race, tipping the scales ever so slightly into my favour.

Now if only Argentina weren’t playing so well...

The Shoddy Dozen

2010-06-26T20:04:00.002+09:30

The group Stage has finished, and the World Cup line up has now been halved. There were a few shock exits (last tournament's finalists France and Italy have not gone through), and a few long shots came agonizingly close (host South Africa, and fuck me New Zealand had a decent run), but we now have our “Shoddy Dozen”.

I’ve created a diagram of teams, complete with sentient flags coloured in a childlike scribble, and put them in the shoddy blog header above so that you can follow my progress.

As mentioned, if any of the Shoddy Dozen win the World Cup – I’ll win $220. Any of the favourites (on the right) win, I do not win $220.

Even if you have no interest in the World Cup at all, you can support my bid to win money. I’ll put the cash to good use. If I win, I’ll buy myself a new multi purpose hat that can be worn to weddings, funerals, basically any social gathering.

Betty Boo

2010-06-25T17:57:00.003+09:30

So I lost $10 on the wager that Australia would finish their group second, and another $10 that they would be eliminated in the Quarter finals.

Amusingly, the $5 wager that Australia would win the tournament was not lost. Here is an email I received from Sportsbet verbatim:

Dear Simon,

Australia was robbed! Two dodgy red card decisions cost the Aussies a fair chance of qualifying. We'd have been more competitive against Germany and probably beaten Ghana, and we put up a traditional Aussie fight to defeat Serbia.
So close. Only if those whistle blowing clowns had been consistent....

Doing things the Australian Way means giving people a fair go. We'd like you to have a fair go with your money wagered on Australia, so we have refunded all bets on Australia in the Outright Winner and To Qualify (Group D) bet markets.

Your cash is now in your account. At least it's some comfort and a refund helps be rid of the nasty bitter red card pill we've all had to swallow in 2010. Enjoy the rest of the Tournament.

God bless those crazy cats at Sportsbet. So now I am 20 bucks down on my bets, the $100 wager on the field still stands of course.

Looks like all four favourites (Brazil, Spain, Argentina and England) have made it through, and I have 12 other teams (what I like to call my Shoddy Dozen) to support.

If one of those 12 win, I win $220. Zing.

Good Ruddance

2010-06-24T17:19:00.004+09:30

Did you like my clever play on words in the title?

I guess not.

Anyway, woke up today to find that we had a new Prime Minister, our first female one at that. K Rudd is out and Julia Gillard is in. Crazy times.

Rudd’s popularity had been on a downward spiral, and support within his own team had dropped to the point where they said “Fuck it, let’s dump this Shit-Elf and give the reigns to that fiery haired vixen”.

I’m not that big on Politics – when I voted in the State Election in March, it was the first time I had voted in 12 years. I voted for these guys, purely because I liked their logo:

That being said, I wasn’t a fan of Kevin Rudd – and I’m glad to see him go.

A family friend worked in Rudd’s office, and told us tales of an angry man with a violent temper. One rage fuelled day, he ripped his desk phone out of it’s plug and smashed it against the wall screaming at his aides. This isn’t Russel Crowe we are talking about here, this is supposed to be the leader of our fine country.

The dummy spits were often followed by apologies and begs for his staff not to quit, but it didn’t work as 260 staff walked out on Rudd in just two years.

One day he reduced an RAAF flight attendant to tears because she couldn’t get him a “special” meal. Christ, what a momentous dick. A bully with poor anger management skills, Rudd is the Gordon Ramsey of politicians. That is certainly not a compliment, those who’ve been reading the Shoddy Blog for a few years know how much I detest that wrinkly fuck head Ramsey.

Oh well, Rudd is gone now. Time for a new PM. So what do we know of this Julia Gillard?

Gillard was born in Wales in 1961....wait, what? You don’t have to be born in Australia to become a Prime Minister? I’m pretty sure you have to be born in the USA to be President, don’t you? Does this mean anybody can become our Prime Minister? Can we vote for guy? I like his style:

To be painfully honest with you kids, unless they reduce the tax on alcohol and movie tickets, I’m really not all that fussed with politics. Still, it’s good to see Rudd chucked out. I’ve tried my hand at political cartooning to commemorate this momentous occasion:

Gillard is hard to illustrate, so I drew Grimace instead. Hope you don’t mind.

I also just found out Gillard was raised and schooled here in Adelaide. Rock on.

Limeys through, Convicts out.

2010-06-23T15:05:00.000+09:30

I finally got to see an England match – England winning 1 nil against Slovenia in last night’s game. Although it was a win, England still aren’t showing the form everybody has been expecting of them, and star striker Wayne Rooney was actually subbed off at the 70 minute mark. Props to Jermaine Defoe for the goal, and geez that guy is a short ass. Five foot seven, but that’s the great thing about Soccer, you don’t need height to dominate the game. Argentinean star Lionel Messi, Fifa’s player of the year, is also five foot seven.

If one of these guys stood in front of me, their head line would reach somewhere between my second and third nipples.

The Australia vs Serbia match was on at 4am (of course), which was a little inconvenient for a Thursday morning. I set my alarm to go off at half time so I could check the match scores, not just the Australia game but also the Germany vs Ghana game (whose outcome would decide our fate). The third round matches of the Group Stage are played simultaneously in modern World Cups to ensure all teams play to their best ability. In 1982, Germany and Austria went into their third game knowing the score of the other match (Algeria vs Chile) who had played a day earlier, and therefore knowing that a German 1 Austria 0 score line would see both Germany and Austria go through. After Germany scored, the game lost all meaning and both teams pretty much kicked the ball about lazily for the remainder of the game - Why risk an injury or a red card if you know you are through? The FIFA has stopped such vaginal antics though, and simultaneous play means everybody has to go their hardest (or as hard as Soccer players can get).

I got up at 4:45am to check the scores, if Germany were losing and Australia were winning – I would stay up to watch the last half. At half time the scores for both games were nil all, so I went back to bed.

I checked the scores a few hours later before leaving for work, Australia had won 2 – 1, but unfortunately Germany’s 1 nil win over Ghana put us off out of the competition. England and Ghana are now through to the round of 16, Australia will have to wait until 2014 to try again.

The Socceroos did alright in this tournament, a draw against Ghana and a win against Serbia is very respectable – but that 4 nil drumming by Germany pretty much left us Goosed on percentage.

Round Two Completo

2010-06-22T14:49:00.005+09:30

Round two of the World Cup has been completed. Already, a few teams have qualified for the round of 16 (Netherlands, Brazil).

Australia really needed a win against Ghana in their second game, but their draw doesn’t necessarily mean they are out. If Ghana beat Germany, and we beat Serbia, then we will go through. That’s a pretty slim chance, but better than the alternative – if Germany beat Ghana, then we will need to beat Serbia by four goals.

Let’s get an update on my Sportsbet odds:

Outright Winner:
My odds: 101 to 1
After Round one: 401 to 1
Current odds: 751 to 1

Group Exacta (Germany finishes group first, Australia second):
My odds: 7 to 1
After Round one: 10 to 1
Current odds: 23 to 1
Out of interest, there are slightly better odds for Ghana to go top, Australia second : 21 to 1

Australia is eliminated in the Quarter finals:
My odds: 12 to 1
After Round one: 41 to 1
Current odds: ?

They’ve suspended bets on Australia’s stage of elimination, they’ll probably crank those again if we make it through to the round of 16.

It’s not looking great, and I think that $25 I outlay on Australia might have gone down the drain. Could the money have been better spent elsewhere? I just put “25 bucks” into Google image source, and found out I could have purchased any one of these replica pellet guns:

Imagine pulling one of these out in a strip club. Fun!

The end of Round Two means that we should check out our tipping competition again:

Oh wait, that's an old shopping receipt. here's the tipping table:

Most of these scores haven’t changed since last round, leading me to believe many of the punters have forgotten to update their tips (also – I was having quite a few headaches getting the tipping site to work a week ago, so if you’ve given up on the bastard I can hardly blame you). As I was checking this, I scratched my head and thought ”hang on...have I updated my tips..?”, as it turns out I missed five matches:

A shame, as I would have picked the winner in three of those matches.

I’m doing AFL footy tips at the moment, plus a half hearted attempt at an AFL Dream Team. I joined the shoddy jinggez tipping comp, then for some reason I joined the World Cup tipping comp on the AFL site, and then I saw Sportsbet had a tipping comp too.

Five tipping competitions I’m in kids. I don’t know why I did that, as I don’t have anywhere near the time management skills to warrant such a decision. It doesn’t help that the AFL site allocates the tips by group, Sportsbet by date, and the shoddy jinggez has split the whole first two weeks into three rounds. Naturally, I’ve missed the cut off point for tips in all three competitions. Cursing the Sportsbet one, as I wasn’t doing too bad in that comp (I was in the top 10% of tippers), and they have prizes for the top 40 tippers. Cash, or a car, or a hand job from Justin Bieber or some shit.

As always, I’ve stretched myself too thin. I think there might be a lesson to learn here. Is it this?:

Yeah, I think that might be the lesson.

The hype balloon deflates

2010-06-20T17:14:00.003+09:30

After all those months of hype, Harry Kewell played one game of Football – and was red carded 25 minutes in. It looks like that will be it for Kewell, it’s doubtful Australia will make it to the Round of 16, and even more doubtful injury prone Kewell will be around for the 2014 World Cup (if Australia even qualifies for that one).

That’s the anti climatic nature of global sport’s tournaments, we spend the lead up months reading and watching commercials about the “Super Stars” of the game, only to reach the matches and find those stars...missing from the big action moments.

The Australian media was saturated with Cahill and Kewell (instrumental in the previous Cup), who have both been red carded.

I read lengthy interviews with Michael Ballack and Rio Ferdinand – only to see those gun players injured a few weeks before first kick off.

I must have seen that NIKE ”Write the Future” commercial a dozen times now. It stars Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, Franck Ribery, Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas, Theo Walcott, Ronaldinho, Landon Donovan – a veritable who’s who of players underperforming, and even benched for this World Cup tournament.

But fuck, it’s still early days and those “champions” still have time to make an impact. If anything, this tournament will make a few household names out of lesser known players, as they step out of the shadows and make a proper go of it. I read of Messi, Veron, Mascherano, and Tevez going into the Argentina Korea game – but it was a 22 year old Gonzalo Higuain and his hat trick of goals that stole the show.

It all makes me a little nervous about Australia's future - we have the oldest team in the cup, and not a single player under 25 played last night.

Time will tell.

Slov

2010-06-19T00:50:00.003+09:30

12:35am at my end, quick post before I hit the sack (gotta get up for work in six hours), but it looks like Slovenia are doing well currently leading 2:1 at the 53 minute mark of their match against USA. If they win this game they will be one of the first countries to make it through to the round of 16. They started this tournament at 601 to 1, so one of many surprises at this year’s World Cup.

Prior to that match, Serbia caused a bit of an upset with a 1:0 win over Germany. This doesn't actually change much of the outcome for Australia. We still need to win our next two games (and not concede a draw in either) to progress.

Only difference now, is that if we win our next two, Ghana beating Germany would knock them out of the running.

Tip and Gamble Update

2010-06-18T17:52:00.003+09:30

Every team has played at least once now, so let’s check out the Shoddy Jinggez Tipping Comp:

Christ almighty, I’m winning. One thing I realised after a couple of games was that I hadn’t picked enough draws (I only chose who I thought would win, and no draws), though this might be the reason I’m winning the comp so far. I’ve gone with a few draws for the next round however.

As for the Australia bets, here is how the odds have changed now that Australia has lost their first game 0-4. If you’re unfamiliar with gambling, my initial bets still stand at the odds I backed them at. The comparison of odds is to show that my choices have become even more unlikely of succeeding.

Outright Winner:
My odds: 101 to 1
Current odds: 401 to 1

Group Exacta (Germany finishes group first, Australia second):
My odds: 7 to 1
Current odds: 10 to 1

Australia is eliminated in the Quarter finals:
My odds: 12 to 1
Current odds: 41 to 1

The three Australia bets are looking shaky. But the big 100 dollar bet is actually looking slightly better, thanks to Spain losing their first game, and England proving what many of us feared (11 awesome players doesn’t necessarily make for an awesome team).

Field against the Top Four:

My odds: 2.2 to 1
Current odds: 2.1 to 1

England isn’t actually considered a “Top Four” team at this present time, dropping into sixth place behind Germany and Holland. Argentina has taken top spot on the list of favourites (it was Spain initially). Their first game wasn’t great, but then they killed South Korea 4:1. Brazil is sitting in second place. Spain is looking quite good, they had the majority of the ball in the Switzerland match, and a tonne of attempts at goal and so they are still holding third place. Their loss to Switzerland was quite a shock (but seriously, well done to the Swiss). One dilemma for Spain though, is that historically no team has ever won the World Cup after losing their first match.

Current top ten odds for the outright winner as of this afternoon (prior to the next round of games starting with Germany vs Serbia):

Argentina 5.50

Brazil 6.00

Spain 6.00

Germany 8.00

Holland 9.00

England 9.00

Italy 15.00

Portugal 31.00

Ivory Coast 41.00

Mexico 41.00

Of course, these odds will all change over the next few games. I’ll keep you posted. One thing is for sure, my Soccer bets and tips are looking better than my AFL Dream team.

Jesus Christ.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

2010-06-17T15:56:00.001+09:30

Vuvuzelas, hey?

Fuuuuuck.

I was unaware of these bastards before watching the World Cup. I tuned in for the first match last week, and initially thought my TV was fucked – there was no way that incessant drone could be coming from the stadium. My old lady was in the kitchen, and she thought I was watching a car race.

We were both wrong.

The Vuvuzela has been the subject of much debate over the course of the tournament, with everybody from the casual observer up to the players themselves (Cristiano Ronaldo has been pretty vocal) complaining about the annoying buzz. TV channels are now offering a service that allows viewers to filter out the noise, and it has come to light that the horns can actually give you hearing damage. The demand for earplugs actually outstripped supply in South Africa.

The South Africans have been getting stroppy about the complaints. The South African Goalie complained that the Vuvuzelas wern’t loud enough (!). The President of FIFA Sepp Blatter commented:

"I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound. I don't see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?”

But for most, it isn’t the quality of the sound – but the pure and utter pointlessness of it. It isn’t used to inspire a lagging team, or celebrate a goal, but a constant annoying buzz that lasts from before the game until after the conclusion. It has been said that if Australia gets the World Cup for 2022, we’ll hand out Eucalyptus leaves that people can whistle through, non stop, for each and every game.

Strangely, I’ve gotten kind of used to the sound. I even showed off my own Vuvuzela skills when I sat down for dinner with my parents, blowing a buzz sound through a watering can. Mind you, this was after a couple of bottles of red.

As always, a picture is worth a thousand words, and naturally the Vuvuzela has become a popular internet meme. Here is a few favourites I’ve seen. You probably have been emailed a few of these already in a “FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: OMG LOLZ!!” email string, but fuck it – you can look at them again.

The Vuvuzela Manual:

And finally,turn up your speakers and click here for the Shoddy Vuvuzela experience.

Baiowolf

2010-06-15T15:42:00.004+09:30

I watched two Euro Cups and a World Cup while living in London, and it’s a pretty fantastic city to watch sporting events like those. I was keen on getting back to London for the World Cup this year, to spend the period drinking in the pubs and watching the games. There is no doubt a great atmosphere in the London bars right now. Australia, South Africa, England and New Zealand are all in the World Cup at the same time – you can’t tell me that happens too often.

Sadly, I couldn’t make it over - partly due to work reasons, but mostly because I am broke. I invested a fair bit of savings into my Baby Portrait Studio, which hasn’t been returning the dividends I had hoped it would.

Besides from catching up with the London crowd, there were two reasons I wanted to watch the Cup in London: better times for the games (London is only an hour behind Cape Town), and people are generally more interested in the tournament.

I’m lucky to have a few Soccer fan peers here in Adelaide (mostly workmates) that I can chat about the World Cup with, but they are certainly outnumbered by those who clearly don’t give a fuck. The problem for the average Adelaidean is threefold:

1. Apathy for Soccer in general: We love Aussie Rules in the winter, and Cricket and Tennis in the Summer. For most of the population, Soccer never really enters the equation.

2. Soccerwhos?: Some locals find it kinda hard to get enthused about a tournament Australia is not usually associated with. True, Australia qualified and performed better than expected last World Cup. But from a year before I was born, up until a few months before my 29th birthday, the Socceroos did not qualify for a World Cup. The tournament just doesn’t have the same green and gold tinge as, say, the Cricket or Rugby World Cups.

3. The time difference: wasn’t too bad when the 2002 World Cup was played in Japan and Korea (half an hour behind us), the other 17 World Cups were played in South America, USA and mostly Europe. Those polar opposite time zones really didn’t help the tournaments following around these parts.

At the end of the day – fuck it. The World Cup isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, and I probably wouldn’t be that interested if I hadn’t had half a decade of Soccer saturation in London. If anything, if you have no interest in the Cup you’re saving yourself a lot of late nights. Also, not having to listen to the mosquito drone of those fucking Vuvuzelas must be pleasant.

The time difference is definitely a pain in the ass at this tournament. There are heaps of matches being played at the reasonable Australian time of 9pm – but Australia has been dumped with two 4ams and a midnighter, and the UK also has two 4ams and a midnight game. When I ask mates if they want to wait up until 4am to watch a game, they usually stare at me like I’ve asked them to drink a pint of Scott Baio.

There’s a grim irony to the schedule – I’ve watched four of the 9pm games, and a handful of midnight ones which usually consist of clashes between minor ranked teams, but then had to miss the first England game which was on at 4am on Sunday morning.

I couldn’t wait up for that one, because I had to be at the Old Lion pub at 9am to head off on the Sea and Vines Tour, a yearly Adelaide Wine Tour to McClarenvale. The day made me a little nervous, as my first beer was at 9am...and I had the Australia vs Germany game at 4am the following morning (luckily a public holiday here in Australia). I was sitting on the edge of a Volcano, staring deep into the lava of a 21 hour session. Not impossible, but throw in a six hour wine tour, and it was looking pretty fucking improbable.

The wine tour consisted of three wineries and six hours of solid red and white indulgence, followed by a bus ride back to the city (I’ll post stories and photos on that later). Our crew of about a dozen wine stained inebriants got to the Alma (who had a late licence for the game) and I was feeling nore than a little worn. I spotted Jimmy (who works at the Alma Friday and Saturdays), and we had this conversation:

Me: How much longer until the game?
Jimmy: about nine hours.
Me: ...fuck.

I instructed my crew to pace their drinking, in order to better our chances of staying up until kick off. For some reason, most of my wine soldiers took this to mean ”buy as many shots as possible”. A rambunctious South African who was with us (and whose name escapes me) bought a round of a dozen Sambucas, a dozen Tequilas, and then a dozen Jager Bombs in the space of about 20 minutes. Kate went him one better and bought a round of Flat Liners (half shot of tequila, three dashes of Tabasco, topped up with Sambuca) – it’s the kind of drink they make you have in Guantanamo Bay.

With tears in my eyes and a throat that felt like I had been blowing the Human Torch I got another time check. Eight hours until kick off.

Twas indeed a long night. I spent most of the evening berating my unpatriotic cohorts for not wanting to stay up until 4am to watch Australia play... and then I ended up leaving the pub at 3:55am, completely and utterly hammered.

After the intense surgical procedure of trying to unlock my front door, I waited for my lounge to stop spinning around the room and leapt onto it. I lay on the couch and managed to catch six minutes of the game, before passing out with the wondrous melodies of those plastic horns ringing in my ears causing me to have feverish dreams of Wasp attacks.

As it turns out, I entered my booze coma two minutes before Germany scored a goal, the first of four in a pummelling of the Australian side that even saw our star player Tim Cahill red carded (that even the German player who was fouled against had to agree shouldn’t have been a red card). After three months of gracing the covers of just about every magazine and Newspaper Australia has the ink to print, Harry Kewell didn’t even play – a fact that didn’t surprise me all that much.

Nobody was expecting us to win, but we were all kind of hoping we wouldn’t lose by that fucking much. Australia has to win their next two games (no draws) now to progress to the round of 16.

It’s looking a little shaky.

Gam Bling

2010-06-11T22:05:00.002+09:30

We’ll take a half-time break from my Group Guide to chuck in an article on gambling. I wont have the group guide finished before the first match as originally planned, but will post Groups E,F,G,H within the next week. I hope you have found them educational, especially the information on random porn stars (did you also know that Stephen Clancy Hill played Barrack Obama in a “Nailin’ Palin” porno?).

Last World Cup I placed a heap of small bets on the games I watched – about 14 bets in total ranging from first goal scorer to final score. None of these bets were actually winners, but the final 5 quid bet I placed on the final game came agonizingly close to giving me a 250 pound win. You can relive that exciting post by clicking here, and holy shit, the shoddy blog has been running for so long now that I can reference posts from last World Cup.

I decided to take a different route this year, and outlay $125 right at the start and leave it at that. The bets are as follows:

The Patriotic Bets:

These bets are unlikely, but bare large dividends and give me that soothing feeling of having put some cash on the home side:

Outright Winner: $5 for Australia to win (fuck it, why not): pays $505 (I did this a few weeks ago so got 101 to 1, odds have since dropped to 81 to 1)

Group Exacta: $10 Germany to finish the group stage first, and Australia second: pays $70

Stage of Elimination: $10 Australia to be eliminated in the Quarter Final (and thus go one round further than their last World Cup effort): pays $120. Unlikely, but once again: fuck it, why not?

The Big Bet:

I wanted to place a larger bet that would run for most of the World Cup, one that had multiple options and would keep me involved once Australia have dropped out (which could happen as early as the first round) and England have fucked up the penalty shoot out (which could happen early in the piece as well). I heard you could bet on a past winner winning again and was interested in that bet, as that would give me seven teams (including three of the top four favourites) – but that was only paying 1.67 to 1.

Instead, I’ve gone practically the opposite route – and put $100 on “the field” against the top four favourites at 2.2 to 1.

So if Spain, Brazil, Argentina or England don’t win the World Cup, I’ll win $220. I now have 28 teams to follow, and what I would like to happen is a top four team to face one of “the field” in the final, giving me a financial interest in the entire run of the World Cup tournament.

That’s me chatting with an Eskimo made out of Calamari rings. The Eskimo has a point though, it seems a little redundant to follow a team, but then bet against them. But I’m always doing shit like that, I’m more into gambling for the new slant it puts on situations rather than financial windfalls. It’s been a useful hobby considering the lousy year the Crows have been having, you can still pay attention to the game due to your bets on margins and goal kickers, even when the Crows are getting their arses kicked. Fuck it, I’d be happy to see England win even if it means the 100 buck wager fails anyway.

That’s enough chatting about the subject anyway. There’s probably more than a few of you who have no interest in sports or gambling, so here’s a picture I found of the Futurama characters turned into The X-Men. Click to enlarge.

Gottabecarl is responsible for this, Zoidberg-Wolverine FTW

GROUP D

2010-06-08T15:23:00.000+09:30

Germany

Australia’s chances of beating them improved slightly, when captain and star player Michael Ballack pulled out due to injury. I’m kind of disappointed he’s not playing, I’ll miss getting loaded, and screaming “Balalalalalack” in a turkey like gobble every time he got the ball like I did last World Cup.

Still, nobody is really rating our chances in that first match – and the Germans have made it pretty clear in the last few interviews and press statements that they don’t even consider a loss to Australia a possible outcome at all. Kinda makes me hope we beat the arrogant turds.

Population: 82 million
Last few World Cup efforts: Semi final 2006, 2nd round 2002, Quarter final 1998. Won the World Cup in 1954, 1974, 1990
Odds to win the Cup: 13 to 1

This guy was born in Germany:

Bruce Willis.
He spent the Die Hard films (well, two of them) hunting down those pesky German terrorists, when in fact, he himself was born in Deutschland.
More delicious irony.

These guys play for Germany:

Philipp Lahm (Bayern Munich)
Miroslav Klose (Bayern Munich)
Bastian Schweinsteiger (Bayern Munich)

This girl doesn't play for Germany. The dog might though:

Australia

Even though Australia breezed through the qualifiers (finishing first in Asia Group 1) and have a decent line up of players (Schwarzer is considered one of the top four goalkeepers in the tournament), nobody is really expecting too much of Australia this year and the bookies have ranked them equal 14th to win the cup. Landing in one of the toughest groups certainly didn’t help our chances, and hopefully golden boy Harry Kewell can last longer than ten minutes without an injury. I’m hoping Australia last long enough to make the Cup interesting (repeating their 2006 performance would be decent), as I know from experience having a few beers in a pub watching the home side is a damn site more engaging than watching a couple of random countries go at it.

Population: 22 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 2nd round 2006, 1st round 1974
Odds to win the Cup: 81 to 1

This guy was born in Australia:

Flea

These guys play for Australia:

Mark Schwarzer (Fulham)
Tim Cahill (Everton)
Harry Kewell (Galatasaray)

This guy doesn’t play for Australia:

Thoroughly confused injured third world guy. He sure does have some good looking visitors though.

Serbia
Population: 7.6 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st round 2006, 2nd round 1998, Quarter final 1990
Odds to win the Cup: 61 to 1

This chick was born in Serbia:

Milla Jovovich.
Leeloo Dallas mul-ti-pass.

These guys play for Serbia:

Milan Jovanovic (Joins Liverpool in July)
Nemanja Vidic (Manchester United)
Dejan Stankovic (Inter Milan)

This guy doesn't play for Serbia:

Ghana

Population: 24 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 2nd round 2006
Odds to win the Cup: 101 to 1

This guy was born in Ghana:

Kofi Annan.

These guys play for Ghana:

Michael Essien (Chelsea)
Stephen Appiah (Bologna)
Sulley Muntari (Inter Milan)

This guy doesn’t play for Ghana:

That’s Evil Ed, a character from the 1985 Horror film Fright Night (if you haven’t seen it, then shame on you). Evil Ed was played by an actor named Stephen Geoffreys, whose manic energy landed him a heap of Horror roles and off-Broadway stage shows in the 80’s. He had a promising career in front of him, but gave it all away to do gay hardcore porno under the pseudonym Sam Ritter in the early 90’s. Yowzer!

GROUP C

2010-06-05T15:59:00.001+09:30

ENGLAND

England are my second team after Australia, and are in the top four favourites for the World Cup. I’ll follow these guys once Australia have been knocked out (which could happen quite early in the piece), though England have had their fair share of problems in the last few months. David Beckham was injured earlier this year, then John Terry goosed somebody he wasn’t suppose to – losing the captaincy in the process. Rio Ferdinand took over the role of captain, only to get injured himself a week ago. Now England are on their third captain in four months, Steven Gerrard.

Population: 51 million
Last few World Cup efforts: Quarter Final 2006, 2002, Second round 1998. Won the World Cup in 1966.
Odds to win the Cup: Was 6 to 1, but has since dropped to 9 to 1 due to recent events.

This guy was born in England:

William Shakespeare

A playwright whose plays would become part of school curriculum, and go on to bore the shit out of school kids for over four centuries. Shakespeare was a suspected bisexual, and his daughter Judith was illiterate. That’s right, Shakespeare’s daughter couldn’t read or write. If a pig converted to Judaism and then became a vegetarian, and then tried to eat itself – it wouldn’t even come close to the irony of that last sentence.

These guys play for England:

Wayne Rooney (Manchester United)
Frank Lampard (Chelsea)
John Terry (Chelsea)

This chick doesn’t play for England:

USA

Population: 304 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st Round 2006, Quarter Final 2002, 1st round 1998
Odds to win the Cup: 81 to 1
This guy was born in the USA:

Mel Gibson

These guys play for the USA

Jozy Altidore (Villareal)
Frank Lampard (Chelsea)
John Terry (Chelsea)

This kid doesn’t play for the USA:

ALGERIA

Population: 34 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st Round 1986, 1982
Odds to win the Cup: 601 to 1
This guy was born in Algeria:

Albert Camus

These guys play for Algeria:

Karim Ziani (Wolfsburg)
Majid Bougherra (Glasgow Rangers)
Antar Yahia (VfL Bochum)

Whichever kid drew this doesn’t play for Algeria:

Seriously. What the fuck.

SLOVENIA

Population: 34 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st Round 1986, 1982
Odds to win the Cup: 601 to 1

This chick was born in Slovenia (back when it was Yugoslavia anyway):

Melania Trump. Donald’s wife.

These guys play for Slovenia:

Mililvoje Novskovic (FC Koln)
Samir Handanovic (Udinese)
Robert Koren (West Brompton)

This guy doesn’t play for Slovenia:

That’s porn star Stephen Clancy Hill. He was apprehended by police last week for killing a co-worker and injuring two others with a samurai sword. He eluded capture by jumping off a cliff. And dying. Um, yeah. RIP.

The Adult Entertainment industry has an unusually high suicide rate, almost as high as Dentistry (!?), and you can watch Stephen shuffle off this mortal coil below.

GROUP B

2010-06-04T00:54:00.001+09:30

ARGENTINA

Population: 40 million
Last few World Cup efforts: Quarter final 2006, 1st round 2002, Quarter final 1998. Won the World Cup twice: 1978, 1986
Odds to win the Cup: 7.5 to 1

This chick was born in Argentina:

Adriana Xenides, born in Argentina, raised in Adelaide, and spun the letters on Wheel of Fortune for 18 years. She died this week.
Um, yeah. RIP.

These guys play for Argentina:

Lionel Messi (Barcelona)
Juan Sebastian Veron (Estudiantes)
Javier Mascherano (Liverpool)

This guy doesn’t play for Argentina:

But who needs Soccer skills, when you have a sweet ass Die Hard tat?

NIGERIA

Population: 151 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st round 2002, 2nd round 1998, 1994
Odds to win the Cup: 126 to 1

This guy was born in Nigeria:

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.
Fucked if I can pronounce that name, but he was in Lost.

These guys play for Nigeria:

Yakubu Aiyegbeni (Everton)
Joseph Yobo (Everton)
Dickson Etuhu (Fulham)

This guy doesn’t play for Nigeria:

Michael Cera. What a PIMP.

SOUTH KOREA

Population: 48 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st round 2006, Semi final 2002, 1st round 1998
Odds to win the Cup: 251 to 1

This guy was born in South Korea:

John Cho.
You’ll see him next year in A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas.
No, really.

These guys play for South Korea:

Park Ji-sung (Manchester United)
Lee Woon-jae (Suwon Samsung Bluewings)
Park Chu-young (Monaco)

This guy doesn’t play for South Korea:

GREECE

Population: 11 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st round 1994. That’s it. Their only World Cup appearance, consisting of No wins and 3 losses. Kinda weird, considering they won the Euro in 2004.
Odds to win the Cup: 201 to 1

This chick was born in Greece:

Jennifer Aniston. Stupid bitch.

These guys play for Greece:

Theofanis Gekas (Eintracht Frankfurt)
Giorgos Karagounis (Panathinaikos)
Angelos Charisteas (Bayer Leverkusen)

This guy doesn’t play for Greece:

GROUP A

2010-06-03T22:31:00.000+09:30

So we know a bit about the Australia team, and can name just about the whole line up for England off the top of our heads, but what about the rest of the competition? There are 32 teams in the World Cup, and we should get ourselves a little more familiar in this week before the tournament starts.

(Note, don’t confuse this with the Shoddy Group Sex Guide that I published last year, but pulled from the shelves after a number of readers broke their thumbs trying to perform “the Flying Bitch Waffle”).

All odds are per Sportsbet.com, which I recently created an account with (Woo Hoo!) .

Let us start at the beginning, with the four teams in Group A.

SOUTH AFRICA

Population: 49 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 1st round in 2002, 1998
Odds to win the Cup: 151 to 1

This dude was born in South Africa:

J R R Tolkien

These guys are playing for South Africa:

Aaron Mokoena (Portsmouth)
Benni McCarthy (West Ham)
Steven Pienaar (Everton)

This guy doesn’t play for South Africa:

MEXICO

Population: 111 million
Last few World Cup efforts: 2nd round 2006, 2002, 1998, 1994
Odds to win the Cup: 81 to 1

This dude was born in Mexico:

Ricardo Montalban

These guys play for Mexico:

Cuauhtemoc Blanco (Veracruz)
Rafael Marquez (Barcelona)
Carlos Vela (Arsenal)

This guy doesn’t play for Mexico:

URUGUAY

Population: 3.3 million

Last few World Cup efforts: 2nd round 1990, 1986, semis 1970. But of more interest, they’ve won the World Cup twice – 1930 and 1950.
Odds to win the Cup: 101 to 1

This chick was born in Uruguay:

Noelia Campo. An actress. Apparently.

These guys play for Uruguay:

Diego Forlan (Atlético Madrid)
Diego Lugano (fenerbache)
Christian Rodriguez (Porto)

This guy doesn’t play for Uruguay:

FRANCE

Cheaters never prosper...except when you are Thierry Henry, who handballed a goal assist in a playoff against Ireland, and then was rewarded with a qualification to the easiest group in the tournament.

Population: 62 million
Last few World Cup efforts: Second round 2006, 1st round 2002, won the World Cup in 1998.
Odds to win the Cup: 19 to 1

This chick was born in France:

Emma Watson, you little booze hag

These guys play for France:

Thierry Henry (Barcelona)
Frank Ribery (Bayern Munich)
Patrick Vieria (Manchester City)

This guy doesn’t play for France:

That’s Ghyslain Raza, a Canadian lawyer who is the president of the Patrimoine Trois-Rivières, a conservation society that aims to preserve the cultural heritage of the town of Trois-Rivières.

Though Ghyslain was a little more famous eight years ago:

Born Tippy

2010-06-02T17:04:00.004+09:30

The best thing about Aussie Rules Football is how completely random it is. You don’t know who the final top four teams will comprise of a month before the first match (like in other sports), modern day football dynasties usually last no longer than three years, and teams that were lousy last year could dominate the competition this year (and vice versa).

Last year Freemantle finished 14th, and this season (this weekend marks the halfway point) they are sitting in second spot. Of course, the whole chaos theory of Football doesn’t always work in your favour, and my own team (the Crows) were picked to make the top four in February, and as of June are sitting in 15th place.

Yep, she’s a little chaotic. Which also means that it makes footy tipping a bit of a bitch. I’m in a competition through work and I’ve been choosing the outcome of matches by checking a sports bet site first, and then choosing the favourite for each match. This is producing only moderate results at my end, and I am currently coming 16th out of 35 punters. A young Chinese lass is winning the competition as of writing. I asked her method of attack, and she told me she looks at the team sheets before each round, and picks the team with “the cutest players”. Random indeed. The competition is quite a meaty one – there are cash prizes for those who finish in the top sixth (first place is $480), I’ll update you on my progress on Sunday night.

This year also marks my first attempt at picking a Dream Team (Fantasy Football), which I was decidedly crap at. I hurriedly picked my team in a player buying splurge ten minutes before I headed off to work on the last day before cut off, and managed to pick seven injured players in the process. Luckily, my late entry meant I ended up in a weak league, and at least half of the other punters are as clueless as I am. The Blue Waffles (my team), are currently 9th on the ladder and a chance to make the finals. Running a Dream Team can be hard work (I refuse to spend more than 15 minutes a week on the team sheet, but I have mates who have confessed to upwards of six hours a week), and more than a little frustrating – especially when that player who was fit on Friday morning, is declared injured an hour before the game Friday night. Last round it was down to the wire, with basically a showdown between the Blue Waffles' last player (Adam McPhee) and the opposition’s last player (Mathew Pavlich), and I had a ten point lead. I ended up losing the round by 2 points – a kick in the nuts considering scores are a couple of thousand large, but I’m only really in the Dream team to learn more about the other teams in the AFL, and who their gun players are.

Holy shit, what the fuck has all of this got to do with the World Cup you ask?

Because the topic of tipping is out there on the table, and it has created the perfect opportunity for me to introduce you to:

This is a competition created by Ozi and myself, and the difference between this and the last few tipping leagues mentioned above, is that you, yes YOU, can join in on the fun.

Click here, and follow the simple instructions to sign up. Then pick the teams you think will win the first round (and subsequent rounds as the Cup progresses). Don’t know anything about Soccer? Who cares, join up anyway. Honduras, Slovenia, Cameroon – half of the World Cup is made up of random-ass countries nobody knows anything about, who gives a fuck, it’s all in the name of fun.

Tipping starts with the first round, and then runs until the Cup final. There are prizes for those who finish in the top three of the tips:

THIRD PRIZE: A framed “Meat Rainbow” picture to hang in your bedroom above your bed.

SECOND PRIZE: An authentic 1903 steam powered dildo, signed by Helen Keller.

FIRST PRIZE: Ozi and I will come round to your house and eat a bowl of crabs. You can’t have any of the crabs, but you can sit and watch us eat them.

So get involved kids, and join the Shoddy Jingezz Tipping Competition.

Juuuuune

2010-06-01T15:29:00.000+09:30

Holy shit, I think I fixed my computer – and all by myself too. I feel all growed up.

I was using a combination of virus scans recommended by my peers, and they were successful in getting rid of 75% of the problems, but could not remove the last 25%. Then the computer would randomly restart, and when it came back online all 100% of the problems would return. This happened every day for about a week, but then I tried it on the eighth day – and all of the problems were gone. The computer runs fine now.

I’m not entirely convinced the viruses have left, and instead have burrowed deep into my computer hiding behind a folder full of pictures I drew of Robo-Falcor.

Robo-Falcor, by the way, is what happens when you combine Robocop with Falcor the Luck Dragon. I was going to wash my dishes last night, but instead started drawing pictures of this new beast. I take procrastination to a whole new level.

It’s so late in the piece now that May is over, so there is really no point in starting a “May-hem 3”. Instead, let’s kick this bitch off on June first – it will be a combination of World Cup articles and the posts I had planned for May (basically cleaning out my backlog of old shit, including the last half dozen posts about 2009, and the even more irrelevant posts from 2008, and even a few from 2007 that I can see no conceivable reason why you would want to read, but I will post them anyway).

My life is too unpredictable to promise a post every single day. There are too many random occurrences that could pop up to halt my progress, such as this computer crashing again, or me getting raped by those homeless guys I keep flirting with outside the train station.

So instead I’m going to vouch to post “a shitload of articles” from the start of June to the end of July. I’ll aim for an even forty over that time period. I can’t lose with Robo-Falcor on my side.

False Start

2010-05-03T01:13:00.003+09:30

So yeah, this was going to be the month where I post one article a day, every day, until May ends or my fingers snap off and my brain haemorrhages out my nose. Whichever comes first.

As luck would have it, my computer had another of those viruses that a handful of my friends can circumnavigate, but which leave me in a state of perplexion. Fuck you Microsoft Word and your red squiggly line, perplexion is a word. I’m pretty sure it is.

It was one of those viruses that shutdown your existing virus scan software, disallow any web surfing to find a solution to the problem, and then pretty much hold you to ransom until you purchase the virus scan they want you too.

Luckily Burge dropped out of the blue, and worked his magic. I was up and running again. Sorta. The initial virus seems to have gone, but my computer is still giving me grief through the mischievous acts of digital poltergeists. It keeps giving me false virus alarms, has been playing havoc with my windows security centre, and at one point was making the screen shake up and down. Most annoyingly, the computer has adopted the habit of restarting without any real warning. I learnt this when I was halfway through the photoshopped image banner for “May-hem 3”, and had not yet saved the file and so lost the whole thing.

And before you say “Ha ha Beef!, you were looking up amputee porn or some shit and got a virus! Lolz!” I got the virus while surfing a combination of face book, film sites and updating my Dream Team for the AFL. My Dream team kinda sucks by the way.

So my computer is a little too temperamental at the moment to trust it with handling a barrage of blog posts. Don’t be too disappointed kids, I’ll still deliver 31 posts in a row, just at a later date. The computer should be back to it’s old self by the end of the week, so I think I’ll start the 31 post run on May the 10th, which would give it a finishing date at the start of the World Cup in June. Good times.

Think of this post as our first attempt at infiltrating David Lopan’s lair. We got the kidnapped girls, but not the Pork Chop Express or Miao Yin, and lost Gracie law in the process. Next week, we return to the Wing Kong Exchange with Egg Shen and the Chang Sings to kick this off properly.

Yes mam

2010-04-29T00:21:00.000+09:30

Drop by on Saturday, got a surprise that will dampen your pants with sex wee.

Though if you were around last May, you probably already know what’s coming.

And no, it’s not a can of fish assholes.

tremor

2010-04-17T12:26:00.000+09:30

I’ve been living in my flat for 17 months now, and I finally met my neighbours last night – and all it took was a minor earth quake.

Well, I didn’t meet my next door neighbour, but I did meet the ones from the two houses opposite (I live at the end of a narrow lane). All three of us came wandering out on the street just before midnight after the block of flats shook for a good few seconds. I had no idea what was going on, thinking that maybe it was a low flying jet for some aerial show (Adelaide has a shitload of car races and festivals and bullshit in these first few months of the year, it’s hard to tell what the fuck is going on most of the time), but the old guy in the flat across from me told me that it was a minor earth quake.

The old guy then introduced himself, and the old guy’s neighbour (some Asian chick) introduced herself to the old guy, and then to me. I’ve forgotten their names already. But you could feel the neighbourly love for a good few moments there.

Yahoo news tells me that a “..3.8-magnitude tremor struck the city's northeast at 11:30pm last night..”. What the fuck is going on? We’re already churning our way through bushfires and floods, and now we’re getting earth quakes?

I’m not sure if this is related, but I moved an outside table a few days ago, and a huntsman spider the size of a baseball glove ran across my hand. I hadn’t seen a decent sized spider since returning from London (and I never saw any insects in the UK, so it had been a good six or seven years), and I literally turned and ran squealing like a new born kitten. I didn’t stop shaking for ten minutes afterwards.

Mother Nature dislikes each and every one of us.

Robot Quiz

2010-03-26T01:55:00.004+10:30

Okay kids, time now for the robot quiz. Click to enlarge.

We scored 75% on the car quiz, so let’s see if we can top that. Crack open your sexy skulls and let your grey matter drip over these metal bastards like a treacle of truth serum. I have no idea what I just wrote then, but what I want you to do is guess the robots in the comments section (chuck a number up, then your attempt at naming said robot).

Here’s a couple of pictures starring myself and Ozi to help you out. They be clues, kids.

I’ll wait a week or so (no point in giving an exact date, because I never stick to it), then try to guess any vacant spots you guys might have left (there’s a few graphic novel robots I think you won’t get), then give the final score.

Spicy

2010-03-22T23:55:00.001+10:30

I was going to put up the Robot Quiz tonight, but it’s quite late in the piece and I just realised I still need to number the silhouettes in Photoshop – so I’ll put it up tomorrow night instead.

If you’re looking to kill 30 seconds, here’s an Old Spice commercial that aired during the Super Bowl. Cheers to Campbell for the link.

Vroom

2010-03-17T01:03:00.003+10:30

I’ve had a few guesses sent in for the Car Quiz – Aspen and Lachie gave a few answers, Dowling had an unsettling knowledge of animated TV shows while Ozi had an unnerving knowledge of animated films. Greg chimed in late in the piece, I already had most of his answers, but he gets accolades for providing the solution to number 40 – that fucker was haunting a few of us (and the car wasn’t from Grease, Cobra or Tucker like we first thought). A bunch of people wrote to say they liked the quiz and would send their answers when they had time, but I haven’t heard back. I think this was because a list of 55 cars was a bit of a long haul, so next time I put one of these silhouette quizzes up (and I have about half a dozen more) I will leave the comments open, so that the more enthusiastic readers can have a crack, and the rest can fill in the spaces later.

The Car picture is actually a T-Shirt design from Chop Shop, the creators recommended putting it up on blogs for people to take guesses. I’ll put a few more of these up in the next few weeks (I think we’ll tackle the robots one next). It’s a great t-shirt design, but gets a furrowed brow from me for not including the station wagon from National Lampoon’s Vacation.

I was glad to have you guys send in your answers, because I was stumped on a lot of these. I’m usually good with movie centric quizzes, but I’m a complete dunce when it comes to cars (even though I’m a big fan of movie cars too). If the car had a visual clue I could get it, but I couldn’t spot the cars on shape alone. There was no cheating either, as there are no answers available from the site the design came from.

Visual clues you may, or may not have spotted:

Loud speakers on top of number 6, so that we can tell the neighborhood about the upcoming concert to save the orphanage.

Bull horns on the bonnet of number 10, Confederate flag on the roof of number 12. Both from the same TV Show.

The skis on top of number 37 (though John Cusack only ends up using one of them to win the race).

The jack holding up the back of number 45, so that we can roll back the odometer before Cameron’s dad gets home from work.

Our final score for combined correct answers is 41/55, which gives us a 75% success rate and therefore a “B” rating. That’s not bad, but still not impressive enough to get us high fives from complete strangers on the street. I’ll stick the robot quiz up on Monday.

The car quiz picture is below, and I have set up three sets of remarks in the comments section. The first part is our 41 correct answers, the second part is a further eight I found through extensive net surfing. A combination of sifting through famous car lists, and just plain pure luck (but didn’t include these cars in the grading – we’ll keep that bitch pure using webless memory power alone), and the third part is the remaining five cars I have no idea about. I've given the complete model name of the cars if i could find it, because I know there are a few petrol heads who frequent the site.

Click on the date of this article below to get the picture and comments on the same screen. If you know any of the cars that are still baffling us, please put us out of our fucking misery. Else, just write some random shit if the mood strikes you. This is the first time the comments section has been open in over four months, so go nuts.

Just a touch more film riffing

2010-03-15T17:49:00.003+10:30

At the end of the day, quality plays a limited function in the Hollywood machine. It’s not something I’m bitter about, I actually find it kind of interesting. The last two winners of the best picture award (Hurt Locker, and Slumdog Millioniare) came within a hair’s width of being direct to DVD releases – had this happened they wouldn’t have been eligible for Academy Awards in the first place. Meanwhile, no less than 100 critics (as per rotten tomatoes.com) have chimed in to declare Alice in Wonderland a steaming pile of shit – not that your average viewer cares, the film has raked in $208 million in just ten days (to get a better idea of that figure, Back to the Future made $210 million in it’s entire theatrical run).

In recent years, giant plasma and LCD screens have been infiltrating our homes at a phenomenal rate. Surround sound and the invention of Blu-Ray have made the home viewing experience one to rival the cinema, and the percentage of people happy to wait for films to come out on DVD has been growing as a result.

Those mighty brains at Hollywood are aware of this, and so have come up with a way to counteract this: bring back 3D.

3D has not only brought back that “Holy shit, we need to see this on the big screen” mentality, but can also crank up the profits as well. On average, a 3D ticket will cost 50% more than a usual ticket – something that has played a huge part in Avatar’s financial windfall. 3D is not yet a valid part of the home theatre experience (though I’m guessing it will be in only a matter of years, if not months). I was quite excited to find a pair of old red and blue 3D glasses in my hire of My Bloody Valentine from Blockbuster last year, only to find the effect blurry at best. In fact, it gave me a head ache, and reminded me of my 3D boob adventure of 2007.

The reintroduction of 3D is probably Hollywood’s biggest fuck you to the cinema goer. It is often added lazily in post production, and you’re usually guaranteed about half a dozen flinching shots (like when a spear or shotgun comes right out of the screen at you) at best. They have to keep these kind of shots to a minimum, because they look kind of stupid in 2D, and that is how the film will be seen in cinemas who can’t support the 3D experience, and how the film will be seen once it is on DVD.

I saw Mosters vs Aliens in 3D, and could count the number of flinch shots on one hand (they included the classic paddle-bat gag). I’ll admit that the experience was fun, but at the end of the day it was just a gimmick, and I winced at the $21.50 price tag. That’s how much it costs for an adult to see a film in 3D in Adelaide (on average), a child’s ticket is $16.50. So for a family of four to see a 3D film, you’re looking at over $70. Fuck me.

At the end of the day, it is a gambit that is paying off for Hollywood and you can expect a wave of 3D films to be hitting the cinemas over the next few years. We’re not just talking animated adventures, but action and even drama films too. There is a 3D version of the Bible in the works, and I wish I was kidding.

While we are on the topic of cinema, I’ll round off this post with a few random Oscar moments from this year’s ceremony. Feel free to stop the youtube clips once you get the gist, they are of horrible quality but were the best I could find on short notice:

Campbell gets a Guernsey:

Each Oscars ceremony pays tribute to a particular genre, and this year it was Horror. Two of the flavourless hags from Twilight presented the montage: Kirsten Stewart (that chick who looks like a boy) and Taylor Lautner (that boy who looks like a chick).

Stewart points out that “..It’s been 37 long years since Horror has had it’s place on this show when the Exorcist picked up two Academy Awards..” . Yet Silence of the Lambs took home five Oscars, including best picture, at the 1991 Academy Awards. I guess that doesn’t count, what with it being a romantic comedy and all.

The Horror montage (including the “well, duh” moment at 0:34, when Hannibal Lecter makes an appearance), is a little hacky (and why is Edward Scissorhands in there?) but it’s nice to see Bruce Campbell at the Oscars, even if it’s just for an Evil Dead 2 clip:

If Kanye West was a crazy middle aged white chick:

Chud.com tell it best.

And finally, Horse Goblin is now the Sherbet Pony:

Sarah Horseica Parker turned up to the Oscars with the worst fake tan I’ve seen outside of Liverpool. The Australian pointed out that she ”..was so enamoured with the Oscars, she came as a bronze statue..”. Devin Faraci wrote that “Sarah Jessica Parker colour coordinated her dress, her hair and her horrific fake tan.”

Horse Goblin has always been a whipping girl for the Shoddy Blog, but now it just feels like I’m kicking a handicapped kid who has fallen out of their wheelchair. I’m bored with this train wreck.

Integrity 1, Smurf Cats 0

2010-03-13T03:57:00.002+10:30

Traditionally I’ve always followed the results of the Academy Awards. I find you can’t be a film fan without showing at least a passing interest in the Ceremony.

Like pretty much all award institutions, the ceremony is a garish and, well, kind of wanky affair. The actual winners themselves can raise an eyebrow or two, as politics take precedence over quality in the deciding process. For me it has always been about the after effects of the awards, to see the ripple effect it has on those who win. Many unknown directors, producers, animators and sound technicians have gone on to bigger and brighter things because of the accolades. It seems to be a little more random when it comes to actors though, with winners falling into four separate groups:

Big time careers stay big time: eg Denzel Washington

Floundering careers hit the big time: eg Geoffrey Rush

Floundering careers stay floundering: eg Mira Sorvino, Marisa Tomei

Big time careers flounder (aka the Oscar’s curse): eg Cuba Gooding Jr

I sat through Channel Nine’s entire Oscar telecast last year. The time difference meant that the initial showing was on the Monday morning, but they put a repeat on that night which I sat and watched. My favourite film for that year was The Wrestler, so I wanted to see that do well and for Mickey Rourke to pick up the Oscar for best actor. Slumdog Millionaire was also an excellent film, and I was quite happy for that to reap some rewards (which it did), and had a passing interest in Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting Actor nod.

I read up on the Oscar telecast the following day, and realised that I missed a lot of interesting moments (Ben Stiller’s last minute idea to do a mock Joaquin Phoneix presentation, acrobat Philippe Petit accepting his award and then balancing it on his chin to name a few) because of Channel Nine’s truncated approach to the Ceremony. Nine had chucked their Oscars repeat on at the late time slot of 9:30pm, obviously considering Monday night too precious to waste on such frivolous garbage as the Academy Awards, and filled the earlier time slots with Two and a Half Men reruns (as usual). Because of the late airing, it meant they had to ditch at least 90 minutes of the show, and as such lose about half a dozen award presentations in the process.

To be fair, the Academy Awards is a very long haul, and Nine had rightfully decided that your average viewer couldn’t be fucked sitting through four hours of this stuff. I decided to give most of the ceremony a miss this year – one thing I had learnt from the 2009 telecast was that you could sit through two and a half hours of shitty jokes and boring dance numbers, only to miss decent stuff that hit the cutting room floor.

I was actually at a barbecue on the Monday of the Oscars (it was a public holiday here in South Australia), and got my fix of Oscar updates by checking the web site every hour or so, a much simpler form of intel. A lot of my barbecue peers found my interest in the Oscars to be quite amusing, and more than a few declared my interest an obsession. The irony being that my update process consisted of hitting the refresh button on the list of winners page a total of three times for the entire afternoon, while my detractors would soon be clocking up ten hours a week on their fantasy teams once the football season starts at the end of the month (those crazy cats).

I guess it was also the wrong crowd for Oscars interest. This was a meeting of school friends, many of who had been breeding like rabbits in the last few years. I shit you not, there were hundreds of kids and babies crawling around the backyard of this social gathering. (I found a baby chewing on a clothes peg at one point, and yanked it out of it’s mouth before it choked. True Story.) Cinema excursions were few and far between for this crowd, and even then it would be for the latest Ice Age or Madagascar sequel to keep the rug rats happy. Why would they care about this year’s line up of nominees?

The Oscars has always had a bit of a stigma surrounding it. Pretty much everybody has their own story of watching their preferred film of the year lose out at the Oscars, get the sulks up, and have turned their backs on the ceremony ever since.

For me, the Oscars has always trod the tight rope between reputable and complete horseshit. As far as Awards ceremonies go, you have the bullshit at one end (the Blockbuster and MTV awards), the prestige at the other end (Cannes and Sundance), and the Oscars floating somewhere in between.

On a personal note, this Oscars was going to be the decider of whether I continued to follow the awards in future years, or whether I would declare the institution a pile of shit. Like so many others who have turned their backs on the most famous of awards ceremonies, it was down to the best picture award.

The interest in the Academy Awards has been slowly dwindling over the last few years, as the older generation dies out and the younger one takes centre stage, and viewing figures have been on a sliding demise. The I-pod generation can’t be fucked with a four hour ceremony, a fact that doesn’t really surprise anybody, and so the Academy Awards have tried to counter this problem with various measures. One such “measure” they installed last year, and continued this year, is to put the spotlight on popular younger actors, such as the High School Musical and Twilight kids. Actors who should not be within several hundred miles of the Academy Awards (I’m looking at you Miley Fucking Cyrus) are taking to the stage to present awards.

A more extreme measure was to expand on the most popular of the awards: best film. Many of the awards of the night are surrounded by disinterest (Best Costume Design goes to that Victorian Era period piece nobody saw, and there is ALWAYS a Victorian Era film at these awards) or just plain confusion (Best-Sound-Editing-What-Now?). To counteract this, they have taken the number of Best Film Nominees and doubled it to the kind of stupid figure of ten.

The silly thing here, is that they threw ten titles out there, and then declared it a race between just two films: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. This was a marketing strategy to garner interest, as fans were divided in a David and Goliath battle between the most profitable Oscar nominee of all time, and the least profitable. That the two directors were once married to each other only helped fan the flames of interest.

It was a shame that the main drawcard had come to this show down, as a few very good films fell to the way side in the process such asDistrict 9 and Inglourious Basterds (Up is also a fantastic film, but I think we are still a few years off Pixar taking home best picture nod - that got best Animated Feature anyway). However, it was the Avatar vs Hurt Locker affair that made this the deciding Oscars ceremony for me. It was a style vs substance battle, and if style won, I would declare the Oscars a ”load of shit” and not bother with the 2011 ones – my passing interest would devolve into no interest at all.

Before anybody gets shitty with me, I want to point out that I think Avatar is a good film. I saw it during the Christmas holidays with a bunch of relatives, and found it to be an engaging experience. Although it was almost three hours long, I was happy to sit and watch the adventure on screen.

Yes, Avatar is a “good” film, but it is not a “great” one. When I start to point out Avatar’s faults in conversation, everybody stares at me like I broke into a child’s birthday party and took a shit on the cake, but I’m not trying to be a spoilsport on this one. If Avatar is going to be thrown into the ring for the “Best Movie” accolades, then I feel that my hand has been forced and that all cards should be shown.

As I pointed out in my Golden Goose series (a set if posts I one day hope to finish), I’ve never been a fan of films high on budget and low on substance. Avatar sure is a pretty thing, but the story and characters are decidedly lacking.

The overall story feels like something you would find in a notebook, one belonging to a 14 year old girl who has just discovered the joys of recycling and environmental awareness. In between the puffy Unicorn stickers and “I Heart Zac Efron” scrawling, lies the highly unoriginal (South Park best sums it up: Dances with Smurfs) love story set in an alien world. The horribly nasty corporate scum (“Fuck it, let’s blow up that giant tree and kill those pesky aliens”) fight the honourable blue cat people (who can plug their hair into the trees and animals to connect with them spiritually, sorry but that’s fucking dumb), who in turn team up with a few stupidly heroic humans (for absolutely no reason at all, Michelle Rodriguez’s soldier character, who has had next to no contact with the Na’vi, decides to go on a suicide mission against her own unit to help the aliens).

This all happens because the humans want a precious mineral called “unobtainium” (I wish I was kidding, but that’s what’s it called), located under the Na’vi’s home.

Throw in a wooden performance by Sam Worthington (there’s a reason this guy only get’s action film roles), and a host of forgettable paper-thin characters and predictable plot points, and what you have is a colourful, yet ultimately empty experience.

There is the argument that because of the spectacularly ground breaking effects, the film doesn’t need a well thought out plot or character arcs. However, it is possible to have an effects driven film without forsaking story and character development (off the top of my head: The Empire Strikes Back, Starship Troopers, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy...). Besides, Avatar’s effects are a decent step in CGI development, but they are not the huge leap we were promised; the best quote I read on the effects was by the critic Devin Faraci ”I was whelmed by the effects”. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just ‘whelmed”.

I feel like I might have lost a few of you kids, so to reiterate: Avatar is a fun, visually exciting film. But it has an unoriginal plot, with weak characters and phoned in performances. Just because you and your silly-ass friends enjoyed it, doesn’t mean it should win an Oscar for best film. It would be like giving the fourth place runner in the 100 metre sprint the gold medal, because he had the best sneakers.

On the other side of the coin, we have The Hurt Locker. It wasn’t my favourite film of last year (I’ll post my top 15 of 2009 in a few weeks), but it is still an exceptional accomplishment. A tight script, with tense scenes and incredible performances shot on a low budget – it’s everything Avatar is not.

Avatar is like having a birthday at McDonalds with all of your friends, while Hurt Locker is hunting down an incredible restaurant in a back alley to dine with the person you love. I can see why one of these experiences is going to be more popular to your average Joe. You just can’t tell me it’s the more rewarding of the two.

It’s all down to the Substance vs Style question (The Australian was a little kinder with their explanation, calling it a showdown between “the experience” and “the story”). Avatar is certainly an accomplishment, and it deserves to make a shitload of money. It just doesn’t deserve to be named the best film of the year. It would be like a hunk of Styrofoam winning a cake contest, because it had incredible icing and the biggest candles. Had the Academy bought into all of the hype and awarded Avatar the Oscar for best film, then style would have won over substance, and the Oscars would no longer hold any more weight with me.

As it happens, The Hurt Locker won. My Academy Awards interest survives for another year, and I’ll be tuning in come March 2011.

Car Quiz

2010-03-06T22:54:00.004+10:30

Stumbled across this picture while surfing for famous cars on the net (click to enlarge it), and thought it would make a decent quiz for the Shoddy Blog. 55 silhouettes of famous cars from movies, TV and a few computer games. Let’s see if we guess them all, email me if you know some of the answers (beefabeef@yahoo.com). To help you along, here are a few clues starring Dowling and myself, and even Lachie in the last one.

Mum took away Che’s Atari. Viva La Revolution!

Gay marriage legalized in Hazard County

Rolling in our five point Oh, with our rag top down, so our hair can blow

”Get in the car Marty, I’ve got Candy!”

”Uh oh...lost the race...shouldn’t have stopped for that spit roast!”

I’ll post a running update once the answers start coming in.

More Olympics. Sorta.

2010-02-27T19:45:00.004+10:30

Australia has won another medal, this time Gold to Lydia Lassila for the Freestyle Skiing.

This puts Australia in 17th place on the medal tally board:

That's not fantastic, but still, that’s better than 18th place. So in other words:

I still haven’t watched a single minute of events yet, so don’t have much else to report. A guy at work told me that American Snowboarder Shaun White did a triple Arial McFuckburger or some shit, so that sounds pretty cool I guess. Besides that, looks like the Olympics finish on the 28th. The final event is the Men’s Ice Hockey – USA vs Canada. That would actually be pretty good, but I’m not getting up 6am (or whenever) Monday morning to watch it.

This post is light on material, so let me direct you to additional random antics from the interwebs:

Here is a wonderfully serious answer to a stupid question.

Here is a short film by Derrick Comedy called Don’t Jerk Off to This:

And on a final note, don’t fuck with this little girl:

Canangry

2010-02-23T17:20:00.002+10:30

I always thought Canada was a nice country, full of pleasant people. They seemed harmless enough. Which makes their antics at the Olympics all the more confusing.

First up we had the violent protest against capitalism on the opening day (I’m still confused about the motive there. Stop all this ice skating and give money to Ethiopia? Hippies suck no matter which continent they’re on).

Then Dale Begg Smith took to the podium to collect a silver medal amongst jeers and boos (Smith left Canada as a teenager, as they wanted him to give up his business and concentrate on skiing. He moved to Australia, where the training was less constrictive). Followed by a barrage of twitter venom and even Wikipedia hacks.

"Way to be a complete tool Dale Begg-Smith. You got shown up on your home soil....TRAITOR!," allanetmanski tweeted.

Now this story, courtesy of yahoo News:

A Danish curler was brought to tears after a boisterous Canadian crowd intentionally distracted her during crucial shots in her team's match against the home nation. With the crowd stomping and making deafening noise, Denmark skip Madeleine Dupont missed two potentially game-winning shots and tearfully blamed the fans for it afterward. Canada won the match 5-4 in an extra end.

I’m not sure what is going on at the Winter Games. As far as I can tell, it’s a bunch of skiing, sequin covered skating and the odd extreme sport. Why are the Canadians treating it like they’re at a cage fight? I’m sure the Ice Hockey players couldn’t care less, but some of the more genteel participants are getting caught off guard. Are there spectators who have been waiting four years to let loose with their practiced Curling jibes?

Okay Eskimo, on the count of three go attack those filthy foreigners ...

I’ll stop ragging on the Canucks now, just found it all a bit curious was all. No new medals for Australia as of writing. Kazakhstan has joined the Winter Olympics table with a Silver medal. Wait, what?

Winter Olympics Update

2010-02-20T21:03:00.002+10:30

Thought we’d take a break from my 2009 ramblings for a post on the Winter Olympics. In case you were wondering, I have six posts left for the 2009 recap. I should be finished these by Mid March, and if you want an update on this current year of 2010 so far: Haiti is fucked, and JD Salinger is dead.

The 2010 Winter Olympics have been running for about nine days, a fact which I almost forgot. I was reminded today when my workmates were chatting about the poor bastard who died on the luge track, and about our first and second Australian medals. Apparently Channel Nine have been showing a heap of coverage, but I hadn’t seen any of it. My TV is for DVD viewing and the odd bit of GTAIV when I feel like doing a burnout on a stripper’s head with a stolen motorbike. I’ve made the odd journey here and there into terrestrial television to see if it’s as bad as I remember it, and have been rewarded with something like Celebrity Dish Washing for my efforts. It’s that, or Two and a Half Men reruns. No shit, I have watched minimal TV in the last 12 months, and still have managed to see that episode where Charlie gets tricked into buying a car from Jenny McCarthy five times.

But I hate to see a major sporting event come and go without me throwing at least a few words on screen for the shoddy blog, so I switched on the TV when I got home from work. As soon as I saw Eddie McGuire, I switched it off again. I think I caught about 2.4 seconds, which isn’t enough source material for an article, so onto the net I went.

Jesus, the first few days of the Winter Olympics seemed like a never ending shit fight. First the death of the Georgian Slider in training. 100s of vigilantes caused a detour in the torch relay during a violent protest. Then the Opening Ceremony didn’t go to plan when their spectacular torch lighting mechanism suffered from a glitch, and only three of the four pillars rose to the Olympic cauldron. Finally, due to a logistical error a dozen orphans were lowered into a pit full of hungry Polar Bears.

I spent a full week rinsing my eyes with Saline solution after catching only ten minutes of the Beijing Opening ceremony, so decided to give the Vancouver one a miss. Apparently they had such Canadian luminaries as Wayne Gretzky and Steve Nash lighting the torch. Wait, Steve Nash? The Basketballer? Fair enough Gretzky, a champion Ice Hockey player who managed the Gold Medal Winning team in 2002. What the fuck has Basketball got to do with the Winter Olympics? Are they that starved for Winter sport champions they can’t pull a few out of bed to light a friggin’ flame?

Speaking of random Canadians, I was on the Winter Olympics page when I saw an advert promoting Vancouver, using Kim Cattrall as the Spokesperson. I didn't get a screen capture at the time, but I thought it was a peculiar campaign. Come to Vancouver, we have chips with mayonnaise...and 60 year old whores.

The web site also gave me my first glimpse of the Olympic slogan for these games:

I chucked that phrase into google image source, it gave me this:

The website is truly a page of wonders, I sat there staring at the Vancouver mascots for a good ten minutes, trying to work out just what the fuck they were supposed to be:

Sumi is "an animal spirit who wears the hat of the orca whale, flies with the wings of the mighty thunderbird and runs on the furry legs of the black bear."

Quatchi is a hockey-happy sasquatch.

And Miga is a sea bear. Which is an Orca that turns into a bear when on land.

It seems that we have to come up with some kooky combinations to create original mascots these days. Here is my design for the 2036 Adelaide Winter Olympics Mascot:

Mr Chotley: A Squark (half Squirrel half Shark) who wears a bow tie made out of frozen peas.

Still, the biggest event at these Games has been the death of 21-year-old slider Nodar Kumaritashvili, it seemed everybody and their dog were completely shocked at his death. Who knew flying down a metre wide icy slope at 100kmh on a board smaller than a coffee table could be dangerous? The event not only put a shadow over proceedings, but also gave some competitors pause for reflection on their own lives. Eight hours of training a day for four years for an event lasting less than a minute, Jesus – is it really worth it?

My favourite sports quote so far this year has come from this Winter Olympics, and it’s going to be a hard one to top. Usually interviewing Sports personalities is a cliché ridden affair baring tedious fruit, but check out Argentinean Slider Ruben Gonzalez, who just realised at his fourth Olympic games appearance that he is well and truly fucking over it.

”I realised at the Opening Ceremony last night that this wasn’t for me anymore. I didn’t know how to celebrate, so at one point, when I would normally be hanging off every moment, I went outside and got a hotdog. This is my last Olympics. A few weeks ago I wouldn’t have said that. I wanted to keep going. Yesterday it gave me perspective. There are other things to do in life.”

God bless Gonzalez for providing a brutally honest bit of speech amongst the sea of teary eyed saccharine diarrhoea these kind of tournaments usually bring. For some reason it reminded me of a quote from Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

“..with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Anyway, here is Australia’s Medal Count

Gold: 1, Silver: 1, Bronze: 0

Gold was for the women’s Snowboarding half pipe, Silver for the men’s Moguls (which as far as I can tell is “lumpy skiing”). Australia has been competing in the Winter Olympics since 1936, but didn’t win a medal until 1994 (bronze for the short track relay). Our best result between 1936 and 1994 was a 6th place in a 10km speed skating race. Unsurprising we are crap at winter sports, considering our country is essentially a giant frying pan full of sand.

More on the Winter Olympics in a week or so.

Your oxymoron for today is ”Saccharine Diarrhoea”.

S & H

2010-02-17T02:25:00.002+10:30

The next update is very close, I can feel it’s hot musky breath on the back of my neck.

In the mean time, go kill a minute or two at the British Pub Name Generator.

And next time you’re in the UK, make sure to drop into my new pub “The Swan & Hostage”. It’s an authentic British pub experience, complete with unfriendly Polish chicks behind the bar, a wide range of sports on the TV (provided you like Soccer, and by Soccer we mean the top four teams) and original oak floors that stink of vomit and stale beer since the smoking laws came in.

Our pub features a fantastic bar menu including fish and chips, pie and chips, steak and chips, chips and chips, and our unique “Sushi” (chips carved to look like fish).

If you can name Football managers from the 1970s, you will love our Sunday afternoon Pub Quizzes, and if you don’t mind getting glassed in the face, try your hand at our fortnightly pool competitions. For those fearless punters after a truly blood curdling experience, try your hand at our Tuesday night “Murderous Music Challenge” – a series of drunk British Women will get up and sing Karaoke while you are forced to sit and listen, and if you can last longer than a minute without blocking your ears or crying, you win a free pint.

The Swan & Hostage
32 Bumsweetie Road
(Between ASDA and the stray dogs home)
Shroppinghamshirevilleshire

Open every day
Noon until really late (11pm)

2009 part 5: Swine Flu

2010-02-12T13:38:00.002+10:30

Swine Flu rocked the world for a while there. The disease is still infecting people at an accelerated rate (at the time of writing there are 1.4 million cases including 24,000 recorded deaths attributed to the disease worldwide), but you don’t hear about it as much anymore because, well, we all kind of got bored with it.

I was running a leader board of swine flu tallies for a while there including multiple posts mocking the disease, but then I found out about a mate’s mother dying due to complications brought on by the disease, so decided to put that series to rest.

This final take on the subject will include a list of the 10 most afflicted countries (from stats that were updated on the 9th of feb), just to show how swine flu numbers have leapt dramatically in a few countries. Australia was a front-runner for the swine flu epidemic, but now it looks like we will drop out of the top 10 within a month or two. Nice to see China finally stop lying about their numbers. Too bad north Korea doesn’t follow suit – South Korea is reporting over 100,000 cases, while the North is reporting 50. Yeah right. Even Micronesia owned up to 79.

GERMANY: 215,881
PORTUGAL: 166,922
CHINA: 120,940
SOUTH KOREA: 108,234
BELGIUM: 76,973
MEXICO: 69,824
BRAZIL: 58,178
UKRAINE: 57,862
USA: 44,640
AUSTRALIA: 37,642

In the last few months I’ve read of Swine Flu II scares, and how a group of vets caught Horse Flu. No news of Squirrel AIDs as of writing, but I’m quite happy to leave these animal flus to the annals of 2009.

Next post: The 2009 Neck Up Awards part 1.

2009 part 4: Climate Change, the Environment and Green Issues

2010-02-10T19:25:00.004+10:30

Who gives a fuck?

2009 part 3: 10 Celebrity Deaths

2010-02-08T14:40:00.014+10:30

I wanted to peruse a comprehensive list of deaths, so first went to Wikipedia’s “notable deaths of 2009” article, but those clowns are insane. They had over 300 names for January alone, and I don’t really consider a dude who won a Bronze medal for cycling in 1936 as memorable.

I’ve ranked these deaths in order of impact from ”Who gives a fuck?” to “Holy shit, they died? Really? Oh well. Who gives a fuck?”. Of course your own list may look a little different, if you’re a 60 year old American, you might have given two shits that Ted Kennedy carked it for example.

Here be 9 persons and 1 animal who shuffled off our mortal coil last year, join me as I trivialise decades of their lives and achievements into a sentence or two.

Dom Deluise, 75

Actor, Blazing Saddles.

Cause of death: complications from diabetes and high blood pressure

Bea Arthur, 86

Old ~~dude~~ chick from Golden Girls

Cause of death: cancer

Farrah Fawcett, 62

Actress. Possibly batshit insane.

Cause of death: Anal cancer.

John Hughes, 59

Director. If you don’t know his films, then you weren’t alive in the 1980s. (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club , Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off )

His last film was Curly Sue in 1991, and then he disappeared from the public eye entirely in 1994. He was a farmer in his last years in Illinois, that’s random.

Cause of Death: Cardiac Arrest.

Dakota Fanning, 15

Actress.

Cause of death: Died in early December when a semi trailer carrying pitch forks toppled onto her in a freak accident.

Sam the Koala

Icon of hope during the Victorian bushfires.

Cause of death: Koalaymidia

David Carradine, 72

Old school actor, but you’re probably familiar with him from his surge of work in recent years. He’s been in 26 films and 11 TV shows since 2000, most notably as Bill in Kill Bill and trying to steal Jason Statham’s heart (literally) in Crank 2.

Cause of death: Unusual Circumstances (ie burping the worm with a belt round his neck).

Brittany Murphy, 32

Actress. Made famous by roles in Girl Interrupted, 8 Mile and Sin City.

Cause of death: pneumonia, with secondary factors of iron-deficiency anemia and multiple drug intoxication.

Brittany Murphy was 2009’s traditional yearly “Actor fucking around with their medication, to disastrous results”, though her death wasn’t as much of a shock as Heath Ledger’s. Ledger went on to win a posthumous Oscar, while Murphy’s last half dozen films were direct to DVD releases.

Her husband Simon Monjack was completely devastated by her death, and it was no wonder, the dude was punching well above his weight. Murphy often looked like a crack whore that didn’t know what day it was – but could scrub up nicely when she made an effort. Meanwhile, Monjack looked like a spruiker from a Bulgarian Strip Club.

Patrick Swayze, 57

Actor. Fuck you if you don’t know who he is.

Cause of death: Pancreatic Cancer.

Not really a shock death, as Swayze was on his death bed for quite some time. Swayze is one of those dudes nobody gives a fuck about (check out his last 14 films on imdb, you may find them in the bargain bin at Blockbuster if you’re lucky) until he dies, and then we’ll have a nonstop barrage of clips of his work. Well, his work from 20 years ago anyway. I still think every bouncer should watch Roadhouse as the bible for proper bar room security etiquette.

Michael Jackson, 50

Singer.

The guy who everybody considered a joke, up until he died, then everybody missed him immensely. This is the death you’ll still be hearing about a decade from now, as court battles and inquests continue. He’s the Lady Di for the 21st century.

DJs continue to squeeze Jackson songs into their sets to relieve of us of the terrors of modern music. A Jackson song here and there helped me through the pure horror of Ace of Base in my uni days, built up my resistance to Usher in my London days, and now provide me with a vaccine to the gential wart that is Lady Gaga.

Our grandchildren will be getting jiggy to Billie Jean, during breaks from the war against the I-Robots.

Next up: Climate Change, the Environment and Green Issues.

2009 part 2: Those Effin' Pandas

2010-02-01T23:56:00.004+10:30

2009 produced it’s fair share of new celebrities. People who were once unknown but by year’s end had become household names. Adelaide’s two biggest stars for the year weren’t people, but were in fact Giant Pandas: Wang Wang and Funi.

Wang Wang (the male) is on the left, Funi (the female) is on the right. No wait, Funi is on the left and Wang Wang is on the right. No...I was right the first time, Wang Wang on the...Fuck it, I’ll give Wang Wang a Male wig and Funi a Female one so we can tell them apart.

Better.

What follows is a timeline of notable events in the Adelaide Panda Phenomenon.

2007: Chinese President Hu Jintao offers two pandas to Australia as a goodwill gesture during a visit to Australia.

When Hu Jintao offers pandas, you best take them.

It is decided that Adelaide Zoo will house the panda enclosure. This is a Zoo where a 75 year old Flamingo was nearly beaten to death in 2008, and a bored Orangutan simply climbed out of his enclosure and went for a walk in 2009. We also own an epileptic Lion. If the director of the Zoo turns out to be David Lynch, I would not be surprised.

The pandas chosen for the Australian adventure are Wang Wang and Funi. “Funi” means “lucky one” which is kind of nice, I guess. “Wang Wang” means “net net”, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

June 2008: Thailand learns of Australia’s impending panda extravaganza, and tries to steal their thunder by releasing pictures of their own family of pandas. Some notable animal experts doubt the validity of their claim.

January 2009: With news of a late 2009 opening of the panda enclosure, the panda news machine starts to heat up.

April 2009: The panda news hits full swing, as Wang Wang and Funi grace the front covers of South Australian newspapers (the Sunday Mail and the Advertiser) and magazines.

May 2009: The general public starts to tire of panda news.

June 2009: Wang Wang and Funi are declared the most important addition to the Adelaide Zoo, since the extremely rare Whore-Turtle “Francine” of 1993.

July 2009: The reveal date edges closer, as the media ups the ante with even more coverage of the panda story. Front page news gives way to four page spreads and fold outs. Radio stations get on the band wagon with promotions and gimmicks, including triple M’s mind blowingly clever wordplay:

August 2009: The general public starts to choke on the saturation of panda news, and their fatigue gives way to a slowly simmering hatred.

September 2009: Panda merchandising goes into overdrive. Consumers could now get their hands on:

The Wang Wang and Funi Book.

The Wang Wang and Funi dolls.

The Wang Wang and Funi Commemorative stamps.

The Wang Wang and FuniBoard Game.

I’m not sure what this is. Backscratcher maybe?

October 2009: The Wang Wang and Funi Christmas float is revealed to the public.

Early December: Almost every man, woman, and child within the limits of the greater Adelaide area have well and truly had a gutful of “those fucking pandas”.

November 25th: (From the LA Times): According to Zoos SA president Heather Caddick, the pandas are expected to generate more than $600 million (Australian) for the South Australia state economy during their time here, with an anticipated 262,000 foreign visitors and 1.3 million Australians visiting Adelaide to see the animals.

That’s a lot of cash, more than enough to cover the $1 million a year hire of the pandas, and the $8 million it took to build the enclosure. Kind of makes me wonder why there are so many charities and fund raisers set up for the panda cause. It also makes me wonder why foreign visitors would fly all the way to Adelaide just to see the pandas, it’s not something we’re usually synonymous with.

Mexico, France and Germany also have giant pandas in their zoos. I bet you didn‘t know that. And if you did, did you ever sit down and think “I would love to visit Paris. Check out the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the pandas....”?

Probably not.

November 13th: The float is included in the annual christmas pageant, as well as two actors in panda suits seen here with the King and Queen of the pageant. Staring at this picture makes me wish I had some Shrooms.

November 28th 2009: The fucking pandas finally arrive in Adelaide. Their plane lands by a runway lined with giant plastic pandas, and well wishers who stopped snorting glue long enough to put together welcome signs.

December 11th: The pandas are revealed for the first time to a lucky group at a high society fund raising dinner at the zoo. Tickets went for a hefty $1000 a head, and it was unclear whether you actually got to fuck the pandas for that price. Wang Wang and Funi were welcomed to Australia by Governor-General Quentin Bryce (who wikipedia tells me is actually a chick), and Chinese Ambassador Zhang Junsai declared that he already had some great names worked out for the future offspring. This was good news, as usually baby animals in the Adelaide Zoo are named by school kids, in competitions promoted by McDonalds or other fast food establishments. This process can lead to some embarrassments, such as in June last year when a retarded kid by the name of Eric won the opportunity to name the new cheetah cub.

It’s a moot point anyway, as a panda cub may not even eventuate. The mating season window for a giant panda is exceptionally small, with the female having an estrous cycle lasting only 2 – 3 days, which occurs only once a year. Half the time the female produces a cub, only to sit on the fucking thing and kill it anyway. If she has two, she will abandon one and leave it to die. The father plays no role in raising the young. Is there any wonder this fucking species is endangered?

I’ll stop writing for a second, because cutting and pasting from wikipedia is producing far more amusing results:

”Initially the primary method of breeding Giant Pandas in captivity was by artificial insemination, as they seemed to lose their interest in mating once they were captured. This led some scientists to try extreme methods such as showing them videos of giant Pandas mating and giving the males Viagra.”

Indeed.

The Berlin Zoo has a panda named Bao Bao that has not mated in 25 years, despite various attempts at hooking him up. We’ve got Wang Wang and Funi on loan for less than half of that time scale.

I wouldn’t be painting the panda cub nursery anytime soon.

February 1st 2010: Uncle Beef writes a post about Wang Wang and Funi.

FOOTNOTE: Here is a quick guide for the non-South Australians explaining a few entities you may not be familiar with.

The Sunday Mail: Our perennial weekend news paper. As a whole, South Australians generally don’t take a shining to anything exciting, dangerous or controversial. Low key and up beat is the order of the day, and the Sunday Mail represents this ideology.

Front page news will include a picture of school kids celebrating their perfect High School graduation scores, a retired footballer celebrating the birth of his third child, or a photo of a disgruntled pensioner in her front yard leaning against her gate – angry at the local hoons who drive their cars late at night. If you explore the paper deeper, you may find a small article about an earthquake or a presidential assassination somewhere on page 37.

I had to give the Sunday Mail kudos a few months ago though. Usually I scroll through the paper with deepening apathy (I read it because they usually keep a copy in our staff canteen), but they actually got an emotional response out of me. In a late December edition, there was a whole section on top fives for the year (movies, tv shows etc). One writer put together a list of “Top 5 things we are sick of”, and Wang Wang and Funi were included on that list as a pair of overhyped, overrated pandas. This was after a full year of Sunday Mail front pages and two page spreads reporting on the animals. I physically frowned at the hypocrisy on display.

It’s not all bad with the Sunday Mail though. Due to it’s many pages, it is ideal for spreading out on the kitchen floor when you are toilet training your domestic pets. It also makes a decent makeshift club when rolled up tightly, and ideal for hitting homeless people with.

The Advertiser: is pretty much identical to the Sunday mail, but as it is a daily publication, it is less formidable as a weapon. I found a homeless woman going through the cans in my bin today, and it took five swings of my rolled up Advertiser before she ran off crying. It would have only taken one swing with the Sunday mail.

Triple M: is that laborious radio channel you’ve probably caught your parents listening to. Though you may not have Triple M in your city, you would most definitely have a similar beast on your radio dial. It’s that station with the vanilla hosts who often do such “edgy” things as start Battle of the Sexes competitions whereby bored housewives are encouraged to ring up and talk about how badly their husbands snore. The hosts will embark on pointless conversations, until they run out of shit to say and then will literally look up jokes on the internet to tell (have you heard the latest Tiger Woods joke?? LOLZ!!!). The music consists of one cassette tape they bought in the late 80’s consisting of American Pie, Piano Man, Khe San, and half a dozen Crowded House tunes. They leave this album on repeat, breaking it up occasionally with commercials for local bakeries and car dealerships.

It’s piss.

The Christmas Pageant: Is an annual parade held down North terrace, and is the biggest of it’s kind in the world. The pageant has been running since 1933, and last year was led by Pogo the clown:

Because nothing says Christmas like a terrifying 20 foot clown.

The Governor General of Australia: This is more an explanation for the international readers. Australia is part of the Commonwealth, meaning we are under Britain’s wing. This means that we have to go to stupid wars happening thousands of miles away that having nothing to do with us. But to be fair, it also means bastards like me can go live and work in the UK for a few years. The Governor General (who is currently Quentin Bryce, a name that sounds half Reservoir Dogs, half The Power of One, but as I pointed out earlier, is actually a chick) is one of those useless figureheads Australia needs as a Commonwealth. Her responsibilities include hosting Dinners for pandas, playing online poker with the Queen once a week, and getting free Jamie Oliver cook books in the mail.

Thus end my panda post, which honestly turned out to be ten times longer than I was expecting. Next up: Celebrity Deaths of 2009. FUN!

So true.

2010-01-29T16:33:00.001+10:30

Next update on 2009 coming very soon. In the mean time, watch this clip: Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News.

2009 part 1: The heat is....on

2010-01-27T21:16:00.001+10:30

Happy Birthday to Australia for yesterday, celebrating her 222nd birthday. My, we’ve come a long way since Captain Cook first founded the country.

1788

Today

Nice to see Captain James Cook fondly remembered on Google anyway:

The day after Australia Day seems an apt day to kick off our first recap of 2009, a post on the weather. You kids all psyched up to chat about the weather?

Excellent. Away we go.

As I’ve no doubt mentioned many times before, the biggest difference you notice between going from a Londoner back to an Adelaidean is the weather. 14 months later and I still marvel at the constant blue skies. I generally find the Adelaide climate to be the best I’ve come across, those who swear that tropical Asian countries have the best weather obviously don’t mind sweating from humidity. You can compliment the Thai islands all you want, but until you’ve been there during wet season there really isn’t any argument.

Yes, I do love my Adelaide weather. It’s just the heat waves that make me antsy.

I’ve was lucky enough to experience a few temperature records last year, and of course lucky being the operative word. From January 27th until February 2nd, the weather didn’t dip below 40 degrees including one Fuck-Blister day of 45.7.

I still recall that day and the all encompassing heat, and the next senior citizen to tell me how hard he had it when he was young is going to have 45.7C carved into his forehead with a knife, and then will be body slammed through a glass coffee table.

This was the was the worst heat wave the city had seen in a century, but as far as dopey headlines were concerned, it could be topped.

November 9th brought a 35 degree day and the start of a heatwave. I mentioned this quote by forecaster Hannah Marsh in an earlier post:

”if we only get to four days above 35 degrees, it will essentially be for the first time in more than a 100 years, but if we do get to five, it will be the greatest number ever recorded for November

As it turns out, we had eight days straight above 35 degrees. This was followed by a couple of cool days, then a day of 39 degrees. That day was followed by a what-is-this-a-fucking-volcano 43 degree day on the 19th of November. Forty friggin’ three degrees, and it was only Spring.

The problem with South Australia, though, is that your boasts of insufferable heat in the big city are eclipsed by those living in the country towns. Those smart asses living up in the dusty, shit-hole Mad Max mining towns always have to one up our achievements. These towns always have such stupid names as well. So when I’m strutting around town in my jocks and sunglasses, gasping about 43 degree heat to anybody that will listen, some bastard has to come up and tell me

”Well, just be grateful you don’t live up North. It got to 47 degrees in Moomba and Marree...”

What the fuck is Moomba and Maree anyway? Isn’t that the pig and the ferret thing from The Lion King?

Bah.

That’s the general problem with South Australian weather, 40+ degree days pop out of nowhere and bake you in the face. But due to our cool changes, these hot peaks are hidden well within our monthly averages. The average temperature for Adelaide in January is 29 degrees, a fact that is much publicised by our tourism industry. I wonder how many poor bastard tourists read this figure and thought ”I’m guessing it will be 28C on some days, and 30C on others” only to step off the plane smack bang in the middle of a 45C face melter?

Yes, those forty plus degrees can be pesky. Thankfully, the 2010 climate has been more forgiving than last year’s. That’s not to say the hot days don’t pop up. It was 42 degrees just the other day, and the heat infiltrated my feverish brain and made me start to hallucinate. I walked past the Norwood Cinema and saw a vision of pure evil hanging in their “Now Showing” window. I shrugged it off as an illusion brought on by heat stroke.

Imagine my pure terror when I logged onto the web to find that the film actually exists:

God help us all. That befuddled fuckwit Hugh grant and that Horse Faced Goblin Sarah Jessica Parker crammed into one horrific world ending romantic comedy.

The deeply, deeply original plot synopsis has our two stars playing big city lovers with a waning relationship, forced to live in a rural country town for protective custody.

Yeah and I bet the fish out of water laughs come thick and fast too. It will be like watching Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun drowning kittens for two hours straight. I would rather dip my dick in seal blood and wave it at a polar bear than watch this movie. My heart genuinely bleeds for every boyfriend, husband and first date forced to go watch this tripe.

Man, heat rants bring out the worst in me. By my count, this is the third time I’ve blustered about heat waves on the blog – but this recap rant seems to have polished off my final thoughts on the subject, so my first resolution for 2010 is to not mention the Adelaide weather for the rest of the year.

Okay, one more:

Next Post....PANDAS!

Side Note: For those who do not use the metric system, 40 degrees is equal to one hectowidget plus one sixteenth of a yardmuffin.

Side Note 2: The web seems pretty divided on whether SJP looks like a Horse, or whether she looks like a foot (a claim first made by Peter Griffin). A third party is tagging her trans-gender. I’m sticking with horse.

zero nine

2010-01-25T21:12:00.001+10:30

Starting Wednesday, I will post a series of articles recapping various newsworthy events of 2009. These posts will run until the end of January, and part of the way into February too. I should have posted these at the end of December, but didn’t, because I spent the entirety of that month staring at this picture:

Stop by in a couple of days.

Kind acts of Randomness

2010-01-24T15:06:00.006+10:30

You kids have stepped up to Akinator’s challenge and punched him in the genie face with your fists of pure randomness. Here are 11 characters that fooled the so called web genius:

Sam from Lost Boys

I was quite surprised to find Akinator had dropped the ball on a Corey Haim character. That’s pretty inexcusable.

Random Lost Boys fact: “Kiefer Sutherland was only meant to wear the black gloves he wears as David when riding the motorbike. However, while messing around on the bike behind-the-scenes, he fell off, breaking his arm so he had to wear the gloves through the whole movie to cover his cast.”

Mathew Cuthbert from Anne of Green gables

Random Anne of green Gables fact: Megan Follows beat out 3,000 girls for the role of Anne Shirley. That's a hell of a casting call.

Tom, Bridget Jones’ gay friend

Random Bridget Jones fact: ”To prepare for the role, Renée Zellweger gained 25 pounds, and then actually worked at a British publishing company for a month in preparation for the role. She adopted an alias as well as her posh accent and was apparently not recognized.” But that’s limeys for you. They’d recognise the runner up of Series 3 of Big Brother from across the street, but could work with an A list Hollywood actress for an entire month and not even realise.

Betty, the idiot secretary from Hey Dad

Random Hey Dad fact: Foreigners who are scratching their head and wondering ”What the fuck is that show?”; Hey Dad was an Australian sitcom that soiled our airwaves from 1987 to 1994. It ran for 12 fucking seasons for a grand total of 291 episodes without raising a single laugh. If you’re counting (and fuck it why not, let’s count) that’s ten more seasons than Flight of the Conchords, and over 14 times more episodes than the run of The Mighty Boosh. There is no justice with TV.

Even more random: ”In the series finale, the entire family is confined to the house with a fugitive bank robber holding the characters hostage. The robber places a bomb in the family's VCR, as leverage with the police. The bomb presumably detonates, at which point the cast break the fourth wall to thank the studio audience.” What. The. Fuck.

Bonus fact: Mr Kelly looks like a middle aged Jimmy, my old flatmate.

Keith from Voltron

Random Voltron fact: ”There were a total of three "Voltrons": Voltron I of the Near Universe was the "Vehicle Force", and the "Lion Force" of the Far Universe was Voltron III. Voltron II, from the Middle Universe, featured three humanoid robots that combined into one multi-armed fighter; this version was never shown in the US.” Study this quote well, who knows when it might pop up in a pub quiz.

Brett Mathews, aka Turbo Teen

Random Turbo Teen fact: ”the show broadcast during the growing popularity of the Knight Rider television series and mirrors much of it, even down to very similar sounding theme music. The car that Brett turns into looks like an amalgam of a Chevrolet Camaro and its sister car the Pontiac Trans Am that Knight Rider's KITT is modeled after.”

Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day

Random Groundhog Day facts: Why the fuck did Bill Murray keep experiencing the same day over and over? Because a disaffected ex-lover called Stephanie cast a spell on him to teach him a lesson. That scene was removed from the final draft of the script.

There are exactly 38 days depicted in this film either partially or in full. The original idea was to have Murray’s character live February 2nd repeatedly for 10,000 years (fucking hell). The final storyline is closer to a decade, though somebody has sat down and actually calculated it to be 8.7 years.

Teddy Daniels from the book, and soon to be released film Shutter Island

Random Shutter Island fact: When Paramount Pictures first developed this as a project for the director/star team of David Fincher and Brad Pitt, Mark Wahlberg was wanted for the opposite leading role of Chuck Aule. However, Fincher and Pitt moved on to other commitments, and Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Dicaprio took up the reigns. Scorses and Dicaprio initially wanted Robert Downey Jr to play Aule, and had they secured him would have doubled the chances of me watching the film. They finally went with mark Ruffalo.

Mick Molloy, Australian Comedian

Random Mick Molloy fact: ”In the 2006 Australian feature film Macbeth, Molloy played Brown; it was the second time he has appeared in a production of Macbeth.” Just look at his picture, he's got Shakespeare written all over him.

Roger Rogerson, dodgy NSW cop

Random Roger Rogerson Fact: Rogerson was a big name cop in the 70s, by 1978 his reputation was sufficient to gain convictions based on unsigned records of interviews (ie verbals), and he was brought onto cases that weren’t even within his level of expertise (such as the Sydney Hilton bombing).

He was also a dodgy bastard.

He was acquitted of the wrongful shooting of a Heroin Dealer in 1981, and found not guilty of shooting a fellow officer (twice) in 1984. Rogerson was also convicted for involvement with drug dealing, but had this overturned by appeal. Rogerson was dismissed by the NSW police force in 1986. He spent nine months in jail in 1990 for perverting the course of justice (regarding a mysterious deposit of $110,000 under a false name), lost the appeal, and served a further three years. Just for good measure, he served another year in prison in 2005 for lying to a 1999 police commission.

Roger Rogerson is my second favourite Akinator fooling name. First still stands as Mitchell Goosen.

Siti Nurhaliza, Malaysian singer

Random Siti Nurhaliza Fact: She is currently the most successful Malaysian singer, having garnered more than 200 local awards

Thanks to Lala (1,2,3), Billsy (4), Dowling (5,6), Richo (7,8,9,10) and Ozi (11) for your submissions. You kids have stumped the web genie with your awesome skills. Here is my latest attempt at fooling Akinator:

The Dead Squirrel that was put on Bruce Willis, while he slept in his car at the start of the Last Boyscout.

(Akinator incorrectly guessed Hello Kitty, the gopher from Caddyshack and the goat from Jurassic Park).

It’s been educational. Let’s do this again some time. While we’re on the topic of random characters though, here is round 13 of Ozi and my Photoshop Tennis project. Click to enlarge:

Check the Jingezz site for the latest updates.

(All quotes taken from imdb, except for Hey Dad and Turbo Teen which was wikipedia).

PS Tennis begins (Updated)

2010-01-22T20:14:00.006+10:30

(UPDATE: For the second round, check Ozi's site - click here)

I’ve started a game of Photoshop tennis with Ozi. Basically I took a picture, added something random with Photoshop, then sent it to the Malaysian. He then adds something else to the picture, then sends it back. Then I add something else, and so on, and so forth. You might have seen the game played on a message board in your travels, either way it follows the age old philosophy of the interwebs: if you’re going to waste time, you might as well do it creatively.

This is what we have so far after round One (click to enlarge):

The Happy Holidays Post

2010-01-21T14:22:00.004+10:30

Well kids, looks like a new year is upon us and it’s time to get back into the swing of things. But first, a few festive updates.

I spent Christmas in the picturesque town of Bermagui on the New South Wales Coast, where my Uncle lives. It was my first interstate family Christmas since 1994, which was also the last time I saw my Uncle and Aunt. He had a nice house situated near a lake with copious amounts of wildlife inhabiting the area, it was just unfortunate it’s such a bitch to get to. It took us two days to drive there, with the ironic added bonus of a 43 degree day on the drive there, a 41 degree drive home a week later, yet non stop rain in between. Just one of those situations when the weather gods decided not to be nice, and chose to pick pussy scabs off their knees and stuff them in our mouths instead.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I’d had a bad back for at least three months leading up to the trip, and sitting for longer than an hour caused me grief. Riding in a car for two days straight left my spine feeling as battered as a porn star’s tonsils, and I limped out of the vehicle when we arrived at my Uncle’s house late Christmas Eve. After a series of hugs and cheek kisses (I used to have a couple elderly Aunts who insisted on kissing family members on the mouth, thankfully they are both dead now) we made our way to my Uncle’s recently finished outdoor entertainment area, whereby he revealed a pleasing amount of beers and fine wines, and a Seafood spread that made me weep with joy. Come midnight we were shuffled off to our accommodation, whereby I learnt the house was at maximum capacity of sleeping relatives, and I had to spend the week sleeping in a tent in the backyard. This fact should amuse most of you guys, as you all know I’m about as outdoorsy as Anne Frank.

Christmas Day was the usual fanfare of present opening and feasting, with the traditional crappy crackers getting pulled. I was looking forward to getting a miniature compass or toy from my cracker, only to be rewarded with a plastic whistle. In fact, all of the crackers had plastic whistles in them. We all blew the whistles in a piercing fanfare at the table, until the novelty wore off roughly four seconds later. After lunch my Uncle suggested we drink a couple of bottles of red and watch Bad Santa, and in one deft swoop elevated himself from mere Uncle, to most favourite relative ever. It set the mood for the rest of the week, seven days of drinking, sightseeing, poker playing, and getting to know the neighbourhood fauna.

The house was surrounded by native vegetation, which meant all kinds of local animals would come through the front and backyards for a visit. On one day we woke up to find nine kangaroos sitting round the yard chewing on grass, including joeys sticking out of pouches and everything. I took a heap of photos on my old lady’s camera, and I might upload some photos and post them on the blog if I can be fucked making the effort (spoiler: I can’t).

Besides the kangaroos, there were possums and all kinds of colourful birds hanging about. There was even a pair of Kookaburras that would stop by every day, and sit in a gum tree and laugh their insane cackle. Yes, it was a good old Aussie Christmas complete with local fauna, which made for great viewing during the day as we sipped beers and ate from the barbie. Of course, it was a different story at night, as the various beasts crawled and slithered past my tent while I lay there shaking in the darkness. On more than one occasion I awoke to hear marsupials mating less than a foot from my head. It was a little unnerving to say the least. The overcast nights made for pitch black darkness in the tent, and I would wake to that five second “holy shit, where am I!?” zone humans experience when we are in that limbo between sleeping and waking, only to hear a growling, gurgling sound not completely dissimilar to the one Predator makes. I’d pull the covers tight, with my heart beating like a jackhammer and the only thought that could penetrate my sweaty skull was a recurring ”What would Bear Grylls do?”

Seriously, fuck camping. Next person who asks me to go on a camping weekend will get punched in the throat.

The Excursion eventually came to a close, and we departed early on the morning of the 30th. Before we departed, the wildlife had one last act of torment in store for me. We had decided to do the drive home in one hit, which involved us leaving at 4:30am. I was chatting on the front lawn with my Uncle at about 4:25am, saying my goodbyes in a hazy sleep deprived state, when two bats flew between us out of nowhere, one of the bats clipping me in the face with its wing. I was so tired it didn’t either register until at least an hour later that, holy shit, I had just been hit in the face by a fucking bat.

Driving from Bermagui to Adelaide in one day involves sitting in a car for 17 fucking hours straight. The first fifth of the trip isn’t too bad, as the Snowy Mountains are quite scenic. But then you hit the long stretch, where you experience the “true Australia”: scrubland and yellowing acres of rural fields. Miles and miles of endless nothing, it’s so agonisingly boring that local farmers have been known to light bush fires, just so they have something to fucking look at. I relented to the lure of texting to relieve the boredom somewhere out on the hay plain, and found that no less than three groups of mates were descending on the coastal town of Victor Harbour for New year’s Eve (only an hour from Adelaide, so a doddle compared to the odyssey I had just been on). Several texts later, and I had a lift, accommodation, and for the first time in almost a decade, something to actually do on New Year’s Eve sorted.

We hit home base at about 10:30pm, and I’d been shaking for the last hour from Cabin Fever. I got out of the car to find that somehow, mysteriously, the 17 straight hours of sitting had fixed my bad back. Seriously, it hasn’t hurt since. Irony working in my favour is a completely alien sensation, I have to tell you.

I crashed that night in my much missed bed, enjoying the serenity of sleeping without possums fucking in my ear hole. The following morning I awoke to the last day of 2009, packed a bag, and jumped into a car with Aspin and Mule to head to Victor.

We stopped off at a winery to have lunch with Yatesy, Wal and others, whereby we ate expensive platters of fine foods, drank a few bottles of wine, and drank the only two beers they had in the whole winery (!). The rest of the day was spent driving around and catching up with various felons around the greater area of Victor Harbour, or trying to catch up and failing due to lousy directions. We finally settled at a holiday home rented by Dowling and Lachie, and spent the night drinking piss and playing card games. At the stroke of midnight we watched the Sydney Harbour Bridge fire works on TV, which was followed by (what definitely was a strange choice of broadcasting considering the prime programming slot) the 1980 musical Can’t Stop the Music.

Which, as far as I could tell, involved a young music writer putting together a band to sing his collection of songs. The musician was a 21 year old Steve Guttenberg, putting in the most spastically hyperactive performance I’ve ever seen put to film. The singers he “randomly” came across on his musical journey were the Village People. He happens to cross paths with the various singers (except for the Indian, who was already Guttenberg’s flatmate), and all of their characters based on their costumed alter egos. So the Cop is actually a cop, the Construction worker, a construction worker.

We watched the entire film sitting on the couch sipping Coronas, with the volume off. The laptop with the night’s music choices was dominating the soundtrack of the house, so we listened to that while watching Can’t Stop the Music on mute. My first film experience of 2010 was a surreal one, and more than a little foreboding.

gumtree.com: Room for rent. Three bedroom house.
Current occupants Steve Guttenberg and a gay Apache.

I managed to get to bed before 3am in a reasonable state, which left me hangover free for our beach adventure at noon the next day. Our beach of choice was Boomer’s, a local stretch of coast infested with bratty teenagers (like most of Victor Harbour), but with the odd chance of having some decent waves. There was also the odd chance that the beach would have constant choppy waves to smash at your bruised bodies relentlessly, which was what Boomer’s was providing on that sunny day of January 1st. Of course.

I’m not much of a beach person, so I was more than a little out of practice when I hit the surf. I managed to hold my own for a decent amount of time, diving under the waves that were hitting, swimming up and over the ones yet to break. But I knew I was in trouble when Dowling warned me with a stern “We need to go LOW for this next wave”, and suddenly the water that had been up to my chest was pulled out to around my knees, and in front of me was a giant fuck you wave. I dived down as far as I could, but it wasn’t far enough and the liquid leviathan grabbed me and tossed and turned me around like a penis in a vacuum cleaner. I finally managed to get my bearings and stand up, gasping for air, only to find another wave beating down on me and sending me through the exact same motions. This time I didn’t have the luxury of air in my lungs, as the wave pile drove me into the sand under a tonne of sea water. I tumbled and squirmed as the current kept me under, fighting to get back above sea level as the current held me down. At one point, everything went all black, and I swear Davy Jones himself tried to finger me. I eventually came bursting back out of the water like an angry Poseidon, gasping to get air back into my aching lungs. I stumbled back onto the safe shore with sea weed in my hair and crabs hanging off my nipples, I would have muttered “fuck this” if the three gallons of salt water I had swallowed hadn’t impeded my ability to speak. I had ocean up my nose and in my ears. I had sand in places only a Scout Master would venture. I rubbed my red raw eyes to spot several locals staring at me like I was some kind of retarded sea monster (did I mention all of the above had happened in about four feet of water?), there was only one thing I really knew for sure:

Next person who asks me to go to the beach will get punched in the throat.

I arrived back in Adelaide at Five in the afternoon, sporting an impressive sun burn, bar the white hand prints of my juvenile attempts at applying suntan lotion. I showered for about 30 minutes, trying to get all of the sand out of my body, and all of the Guttenberg out of my mind. I failed on both counts.

And that, my dear friends, was how I spent the final week of 2009, a year that Time Magazine described as (and I’m paraphrasing here) ”kinda shit”. For me, 2009 was a year I concentrated on paying off debts and working my way through the “Rock n Roll Hangover”, that first 12 months of London detox every returning ex-patriot must go through. As a whole, 2009 wasn’t bad. A transitional year for me, marking the end of an era.

Although technically the decade isn’t over until the end of this year, it is the end of that patch of time we called “the Noughties”. Anybody have any idea what the next decade is called? I’ve heard it referred to as the “tens” , the “twenty tens” and the “teens” , though “teens” doesn’t really fit for 2010, 2011 or 2012. One guy on Google Answers suggested that if the years are in their teens, let’s call this next ten years “the Pubies” . One thing is for sure, the topic has warranted countless hours of aggressively retarded conversation.

Welcome to 2010 anyway, kids. Did you all have a boozy New year’s Eve? What about Christmas? Get any awesome gifts? My best present came from a cousin currently living in Tokyo, and I gotta tell ya, it’s pretty damn sweet:

I wear this every night, so that I don’t get cold when I go sleepwalking. A few of the neighbourhood kids have seen me walking around my backyard after dark wearing it, and think that I am some kind of crime fighter. God bless their fertile imaginations.

That wasn’t the only interesting present I received, I also got this from the Secret Santa at work:

I need a new job.

Filler

2010-01-17T23:39:00.006+10:30

Currently working on “My Happy Holidays post” which should be finished in a few days. In the mean time if you’re looking to kill a few lazy minutes, go and try to stump Akinator the web genius.

He’ll ask you to think of a character (ie a real person or a character from film, television, literature etc doesn’t have to be human), then he will attempt to guess it by asking a series of yes or no questions. He’ll take a guess after the 20th question, and if he doesn’t get it he’ll take another guess after the 30th. If you can make it to the 40th question without him guessing correctly, then you win.

It’s actually trickier than it sounds: he has an extensive knowledge (he guessed Jubei from Ninja Scroll correctly), and even when he fails he is usually on the right track (I was thinking of Emil, the dude who got melted by toxic waste in Robocop, Akinator guessed Clarence Boddiker). Also, if you pick somebody (or something) too random, you’re not going to know the correct answers to his questions, so can’t claim a successful victory through that route.

I’ve managed to stump him with a few characters, including Marlene McFly (Marty’s future daughter), and Rupert 'Stiles' Stilinski from Teen Wolf. Dowling topped my acts of randomness by winning with Mitchell Goosen from the 1993 Rollerblading movie Airborne.

Are you as cool as this guy? Didn’t think so.

But for every time he failed to guess correctly, there was more than a few times when Akinator freaked out my delicate brain with spot on answers. Just a few of the characters he managed to guess correctly:

Yes, that is the Chinese Wildman from Big Trouble in Little China. As for Master Shake, Akinator guessed him in only 12 questions. Freaky.

Give it a go anyway, click here. If you beat him*, email me and let me know the character you stumped him with (beefabeef@yahoo.com), because if there’s anything I love more than movie and TV characters, it’s random-ass third tier supporting movie and TV characters.

I mean, what else have you got to do online anyway? Work? Solitaire? Jealously stare at your friends’ extravagant holiday photos on facebook, with growing bitterness and resentment? Bah.

Go visit Akinator, and if you see Stiles, tell him I say ‘hi”.

* But don’t be too spastically esoteric about it, I doubt Aki will know ”That kinda cute tractor repairman from two episodes of series four of McCleod’s Daughters”.

Sunrise, Sunset

2009-12-23T01:02:00.001+10:30

So the virus in my computer became so severe that a couple of dudes in hazmat suits came and took the fucking thing away.

I don't know, fucking computers. One minute you're watching a hot Spanish chick push her tongue up a midget's A-hole, the next thing you're dealing with a “High Level Trojan Worm”. Fuck you Bill Gates.

Anyway, I have a new computer now. One that is big and beautiful and fast, which is good news for you, my faithful filthy readers.

I can now churn through my backlog of outstanding posts, including a series entitled ”2009 the Year in Review”, which will no doubt ~~bore and confuse~~ enthrall you. Yeah, I'd get right on that...except I'm heading off on a family vacation at 6am later today (it's currently 1am, still haven't set my blog post time to Central Australian Time Zone Format), and wont be able to post anything until at least January 2nd. Be patient, my little fuck rats, and we'll bathe in shoddy filth at a prolific rate in the early days of 2010.

Until then: enjoy the expensive cluster-fuckery of Christmas, and the overrated and ultimately anticlimactic event that is New Year's Eve.

See you next year kids.

yeah

2009-12-10T23:31:00.002+10:30

Bare with me kids - my computer is goosed with a virus, and I'm sorting out the situation.

Frustrating, because I've had a few posts that are near completion sitting on my hard drive for a few weeks now, and I have a heap more I want to churn out before the year ends.

Shit happens.

Probably the most relentless Serial Killer you'll ever see

2009-11-14T12:51:00.004+10:30

Trailer for: The Incredibly Slow Murderer With the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

Christ, here we go again

2009-11-09T00:32:00.003+10:30

So the Advertiser tells me to brace myself, as we are heading for November’s first official heat wave next week.

The Advertiser is predicting:

Today: 35C
Monday: 35C
Tuesday: 37C
Wednesday: 37C
Thursday: 37C
Friday: 36C

Duty forecaster Hannah Marsh (a pornstar name if ever I heard one) revealed that

”if we only get to four days above 35 degrees, it will essentially be for the first time in more than a 100 years, but if we do get to five, it will be the greatest number ever recorded for November”

Greatest number ever, I’ll just let those words mill around in your head for a while.

Ever is a long time kids. It means we may beat our previous hottest November week in history:

I told Morgan Freeman the kind of weather we could be expecting this week, and he just sat there staring at me like this:

No shit. He just froze up for what seemed like hours, but must have only been about ten minutes or so. It was kind of awkward, and I ended up excusing myself and leaving the room.

Six days straight of 35+ degree days. Not that I’m all that concerned. I’ve been back home over a year now, and have acclimatized just swimmingly. The Australian sun has finally beaten the London out of my skin and 37 degrees doesn’t phase me like it used to. When I think 37C, I think beer gardens. I no longer think of hiding inside my refrigerator weeping like a sexually abused cucumber.

Though keep in mind we are still three weeks off Summer kids, and I very well may change my tune come December.

Custom Troops

2009-11-06T22:45:00.007+10:30

I was surfing the net for information on Comic Con (America’s largest Comic and Film convention, held in San Diego in July this year), and in amongst the film promotions and photos of fat Goths dressed like Anime characters (shudder), I spotted these nifty custom made Storm Trooper figures.

Star Wars can be a bit of a dirty word these days, what with those piss-awful prequel films molesting us in the face. However, I still have a lot of love for the design of the characters from the original trilogy (before Lucas finger fucked it with CGI like some drunk Step-Father on Christmas Eve, that is). I also crack a fat over genre hybrids, which you probably already knew.

Here are the pictures (I ganked from MWCToys and i-mockery).

I love the fact that somebody had a Stormtrooper figure and thought “You know what?, I’m going to turn this fucking thing into a fly and stick it on some fruit!”. Star Wars fans can be pretty creative. Check out this guy:

What’s his story? Where did he go dressed like that? A job interview? Wherever he was, no doubt he kicked some ass.

And check out this invention, by some kind of sex toy MacGyver:

Do you have anything that innovative in your bedroom?

Didn’t think so.

201st

2009-11-03T23:58:00.003+10:30

Hi kids, I’ve been in Asia for a few weeks so haven’t had time to post – but more on that later.

We were due for a milestone, so here it is:

Bit of a random number I agree, but the Grand Final post took up the coveted 200th spot, and you know how I hate to see an achievement go by unheralded, so here we are. The 201st post.

Here are a few stats for you to stare at nonchalantly:

Accumulated number of words (not including this post): 103,890.

The average novel is between 80,000 – 100,000 words. So if you have read every post I have ever written, that time could have been spent reading an actual book. Or even two novellas. You could have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, and still had enough words left over to read a dozen short stories. Instead, you chose to read about me eating booger flavoured jelly beans.

Unique hits: 10,620

Page views: 15,915

It amused me to see the stats counter click over the 10k mark, to know that the shoddy blog with all it’s dead hooker charm had that many visits. 10,000 hits might not seem a lot to some bloggers (who could rack that up in a single day), but I was pleased with that figure seeing how I haven’t followed the four golden rules of blogging:

1. Written quality articles.
2. Updated on a regular basis.
3. Promoted the blog.
4. Christmas Carded.

In the case of rule number three: promoting the blog; I pretty much started the shoddy blog, told a handful of people about it – and then left it at that. I haven’t made any attempts to encourage more readers to attend this barrage of filth and fury, and I still have long standing friends (some who often get mentioned on the site) who have no idea this blog actually exists. I prefer to have this tight little community of likeminded cretins (that’s you, kids) then letting the whole world know I’m here. Do I really want potential employers to read about my rants on flicking the bean? Or for potential girlfriends to hear about me head butting the homeless? Or for my great Aunt May to grab a hot cup of tea, sit down in front of her computer, and engage herself in my online witticisms of spinning plates on my morning boners?

It’s just not a blog for mass consumption. If I notify my fellow face-bookers of an update, I do it in code: Status Update - ”beef has updated the shoddy b”. Those who are down with the sickness will know what I am on about, the rest are left in the dark.

And though my parents are aware I have a web-site, as far as I know they’ve never been here. (But if you are reading: Hi mum, and sorry for tackling you when I drank too much red wine when I was 17 and mistook you for a burglar).

In the case of rule number four: Christmas Carding; the tried and true way of building a readership on a blog, is to visit other blogs and make yourself known. If you visit a blog, and leave a comment – then that blogger feels obliged to come back and visit your blog, and leave a comment on yours. After all, it’s the polite thing to do. Visit 50 blogs, comment, and voila – you’ll have 50 more hits before the day is through (and probably 50 comments too). If you spot regular commenters on the blogs you have commented on, then you can harass those people as well – until you have one giant spider web of people commenting on each other’s blogs (aka the blogosphere). I like to call this phenomenon “Christmas Carding”, due to the level of obligation.

Of course, it isn’t all just vapid small talk etched into cyber-space. Genuine ideas and knowledge can be passed back and forth, and real friendships can be forged with people you would otherwise have never met. It all depends on the level of energy you have for such things, of which unfortunately I have fuck all.

I’ve only been visiting a handful of blogs over the years, of which I have included in the link section to the right (fuck, I’ve been meaning to update that thing for a few years now, the Chewbacca blog was taken offline back in 2007). Ironically, I wouldn’t have known about most of these if they hadn’t first commented on my site. Bart, Eris, Lala and Ozi you’ll probably be familiar with, the newest addition is Billo – who is easily the best photographer I know, so go check out his stuff.

To Bart, Eris and Lala – apologies for my absence in your comments sections, know it was due to laziness and not disrespect. No need to apologise to Ozi, he is well aware of my slothfulness, having spent most of his Uni days trying to drag me out of bed.

So anyway, this is how my figures look as per comments over the years:

2006 – 265 comments (3.9 comments per post)

2007 – 209 comments (3.5 comments per post)

2008 – 34 comments (2.1 comments per post)

2009 – 33 comments (0.6 comments per post)

Most of those comments are from casual readers, and not other bloggers. It’s hard to imagine, but we were having entire conversations in the comments boxes at one point (I racked up 34 comments in a single week back in December 06). Compare that to this year, when at one point I received one comment in a 13 post stretch.
My own slackness in commenting is a factor in this outcome. Also, I squandered a lot of momentum I built in those earlier years with an obscene tardiness of posts in 2008 – I think a lot of readers dropped by the wayside at that point. Maybe I’ve jumped the shark with this blog, I certainly get a sense of de ja vu when writing about drunken antics and hangovers, and no doubt my life was more interesting to read about when I was living in a derelict flat in London, as opposed to my current situation of just hanging around Adelaide. All of these factors have something to do with it, but probably the biggest shock to the blogosphere is the rise of facebook, and to a lesser extent twitter.

Back in 2006, blogging was a novelty – as there was a small percentage of people willing to post their pictures and opinions on the internet. Now with the advent of facebook, everybody is doing it. Millions of people who couldn’t be arsed with MySpace, have logged on to the social network of facebook – posting photos, exchanging opinions, taking polls, writing movie reviews, the list goes on. I know of a few bloggers who lost interest in the realm of blogging, and turned their attentions to the upkeep of their facebook profiles, which is, to be honest, a far simpler soap box to stand on. That is what facebook essentially is, millions of small blogs tied together.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing, quite the opposite. The more people involved, the merrier.

At the end of the day, I still get comments about posts I write all the time – but through emails, facebook messages, phone calls and conversations I have at the pub. Nobody can be fucked actually logging in to blogger to leave their comments, and I’m fine with that.

However, it does look pretty fucking lame when every post is full stopped with a glaring “0 comments” reminder. So I’m going to meet you guys halfway on this, and remove the comments function altogether.

If you feel the burning urge to slap me in the face with an opinion, contact me by email:

beefabeef@yahoo.com

Just make sure you put shoddy blog as the subject heading, or I’ll think it’s spam and delete it.

Christ, enough pontification. One last set of stats for ya:

Number of posts per year:

2006 starting March: 68 posts (average of 6.8 posts per month)

2007: 60 posts (average of 5 posts per month)

2008: 16 posts (average of 1.3 posts per month)

2009 up until November: 57 posts (average of 5.7 posts per month)

Though not as prolific as the inaugural year, 2009 certainly hasn’t been tardy in any respect. Stay tuned, as we worm our way into 2010.

If you keep reading it, I’ll keep writing it.

The vinegar stroke

2009-10-04T00:26:00.004+09:30

The Grand Final was an epic affair, down to the wire with Geelong winning by 12 points. The game wasn’t without controversy, with Tom Hawkins of Geelong hitting the goal post with a kick, which was awarded a goal by the umpire (non AFL fans note, hitting the post counts as a miss) towards the end of the second quarter. This was followed soon after by an angry Darren Milburn, believing (incorrectly, according to replays) that he had touched Koschitzke's kick off the boot, giving away an additional free kick on the goal-line for abusing the goal umpire. This free kick gave the Saints an easy goal with just five seconds remaining in the half.

I tried to find footage of Hawkins’ faux-goal on You Tube, but came back empty handed. So instead, here is a monkey reenacting the well scene from The Ring.

I don't really have much else to report on the Grand Final day, as I had to work that night so kept the alcohol consumption to a minimum, so there are no bawdy tales to amuse you with.

Besides the AFL Grand Final however, there have been other notes of interest in the world of Football.

Jimmy’s three PAOC sides won their Grand Finals.

The Southern Eagles (The merged team of Edithburgh, Western United and Yorketown) won the Yorke Peninsula Grand Final.

Three of my cousins play for the Kingston Saints, who lost to Kyby in the KNTFL Grand Final.

Sam England’s POC team missed out on a Grand Final berth by one goal.

Probably of most interest, however, is the SANFL Grand Final which is happening tomorrow afternoon. Sturt are taking on Central Districts at AAMI Stadium, which will involve me watching the game and sinking beers in my flat with a few felons: Muel, Burge and Campbell. I knew Burge was in town, but Campbell and Muel appeared out of thin air at my door step like a couple of ancient Chinese Demons today, and left me shaking in cold fear.

Foreigners wondering what the SANFL is by the way: it is the South Australian league consisting of nine local teams, and is the second strongest league in Australia. It’s kind of like a younger sister to the top league, a Uran to the AFL’s Astroboy if you will.

Not entirely sure what Astro is doing to his sister in this picture,
but they both look guilty as fuck.

I was a Sturt supporter as a younger man (a legacy passed on by father), an interest that kind of fell by the wayside when the Crows entered the AFL, and I’ve only followed them this year in an extremely casual capacity. So if you’re thinking I’m “jumping on the bandwagon” tomorrow, you would be mostly correct. Just to add insult to injury, I’ve actually placed a bet that Centrals will win by 20-39 points, due to a prophetic dream I had a few nights ago. So I am supporting Sturt, but betting money they will lose.

Make sense? Didn’t think so.

Anyway, after tomorrow afternoon Football Season is over for another six months, which means I won’t bamboozle you kids with sports banter for quite some time. You lucky bastards.

Welcome to the shit fight

2009-09-23T01:36:00.002+09:30

I’ve had a lazy day off, and thought I would take a break from Arkham Asylum (the new Batman game I hired from Blockbuster today) to drop into the Shoddy Blog and post some stuff.

Uncle Beef has been negligent of late, but with good reason. The Fuller Brothers and Yatesy descended onto the city like a tropical cyclone, and a battle against sobriety was fought and won. For a few weeks there I was swept up in the madness like a rat in the Hadron Collider, but that is in the past now. It is time to write some shoddy material.

Besides, Arkham Asylum was starting to agitate me. It’s a great game, sure. But Batman has an awesome array of fight moves, and spends the entire game knocking people out. He never actually kills anybody.

So many times I’ll be fighting an inmate on top of a building, and want to throw him off to his doom, only to have old Bats give the guy a concussion and leave him there safe and sound to sleep it off.

The irony is that controlling a character with a no-kill policy, is in fact killing me. I want to snap some necks, I want to be knee deep in blood. I turned on the PlayStation 3 to sate my bloodlust, not dish out justice through a series of inconvenient head aches. Christ, in Grand Theft Auto IV you can’t even drive to the corner store for a carton of milk without running down a dozen innocent people, and hearing the glorious crunch of flesh and bone versus speeding metal. It just doesn’t pay to be a Super Hero these days. Oh well.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the footy since last time we chatted. After spending time and energy creating enormous posts on rounds 19, 20 and 21 of the footy season – I will now attempt to wrap up round 22, the Elimination Finals, the Semi Finals and the Preliminary Finals in a single, compact, Goblin-Fuck update.

The Crows kicked Carlton’s ass in the round 22 match up in one of the best games I have seen them play, winning by a pant destroying 12 goals and securing us in fifth place for a home ground final. The game also featured a great mark by Brett Burton:

The commentator all but fills his pants with cock vomit, loudly declaring it ”ZOMG THE MARK OF THE CENTURY!!!1!” - not only declaring it the best mark of the last nine seasons, but also of the following eighty one years as well. Gotta love Sports Hyperbole.

This match was one of those days were all of the players on the ground were playing at their peak, and I left the game hoping the Crows hadn’t blown all their jizz before the finals got underway.

It turned out my fears were unsubstantiated, as the Crows took on Essendon at AAMI stadium and pretty much date-raped the Bombers for a quarter or two, before burying them up to their necks on the back lawn and running over there pleading heads with a lawnmower. The Crows won by 96 fuck you points.

I was at the game in the third row, part of a birthday weekend that started Friday night with the Crows game, and finished Monday morning at 5:30am at Dr Zhivago’s, with me sitting at a table by myself for an entire hour until I was sober enough to remember my pin number, so that I could get some cash out for a taxi ride home.
Muel (who was in town and staying with me) found me on the couch later that morning, asleep with a bag of groceries resting on my stomach. The shopping consisted of a bag of pop corn, a can of corn, a can of beans, and some potato chips. I have no idea where I picked this stuff up, or what I was planning to do with it for that matter.

I got up off the couch, went to my bedroom, and promptly walked straight past my bed and into the wall. I was obviously still hammered, and memories of the weekend flickered through my mind like Butterflies through a sewer. I almost won $250 grand at the Casino. I watched Robocop on a back-seat screen in the Dickslap-Mobile. I ran into two old work colleagues, three people from Edithburgh, and five from High School. I spent a juvenile amount of time folding Dollar bills into paper planes, and throwing them back and forth with a group of lesbians sitting opposite to us on the Crazy Horse catwalk. Speaking of which, at least two dancers at that establishment knew me by name, leading me to believe I’ve gone there one too many times this year. That might also explain the permanent nipple marks in my forehead.

I made a mental note to give the place a miss for a while, as I climbed into bed to get one more precious hour’s sleep before I had to head off to work.

For some reason I thought turning 32 would be a simple affair, as always, I stand corrected.

The following Saturday had Teoby rouse me from my hungover slumber at about lunch time. I was still hurting from the night before – which consisted of a trip to the Alma Hotel for a few quiet drinks to watch the Bulldogs destroy the Brisbane Lions. Somehow, a few quiet drinks had slowly degraded into me trying to eat a Kebab on Hindley Street at about three in the morning, leaning on a table top that wasn’t actually connected to anything, and landing flat on my back in spectacular fashion, damn near breaking my elbow in the process. It didn’t hurt at the time, but it sure as hell Saturday afternoon as I had my sorry ass dragged out of bed, and on to the Colonist, drinking feminine pink Stoli drinks on the way (seriously, that was the only roadies we could find in my fridge – I still have no idea who put them there. But just quietly, they were curiously refreshing). Our trip to the Colonist involved us playing pokies (winning about $800 too by god), and instructing the barmaid on the importance of getting your “five fruit or veg a day”, as we proceeded to drink our way through five Vodka and Apple juices. This behavior wasted enough of the day to bring the next Football match around, the all important Crows vs Collingwood decider. I headed off to the Alma with Muel to watch the game.

The Alma is part owned by the ex Crows Captain Mark Riccutto, who since retiring from the game now plays in the Prince Alfred College Old Collegians A grade – a team my old London flatmate Jimmy plays for. This is relevant, because the PAC A grade, B grade and C grade all played in the Grand Final earlier that day…and all three teams won. Which, of course, made their team pub (the Alma) a Mecca for three teams worth of drunk celebratory footballers. There was a massive hour long line up to get in the pub, which was kind of lost on Muel and myself when we stumbled through the rear entrance to a birthday dinner party purely by mistake, and made our way to the bar.

There’s nothing like watching a finals game in a packed pub, the atmosphere was amazing for the Crows/Collingwood clash. Sadly, there’s also nothing like losing a finals game by less than a goal to knock the wind out of your sails – Collingwood swapping their one point loss for a five goal win, by kicking a goal in the final minutes. Adding insult to injury, their goal was due to a free kick (or penalty, to you non-convicts), which brought back memories of Australia dropping out of the world cup to Italy due to a last minute penalty. Only this time, the free kick was due to our Full back Rutton impeding the player and was rightfully given, not due to some Italian dick-splash taking a dive in front of goal. I drank and chatted with Jimmy and other assorted felons until about 3am, then stumbled home like a wild bear with ten tranquilizers in his back.

I moped over the Crows loss for a week, before turning my attention to the Preliminary Finals. Thankfully it was a low key affair to watch Saint Kilda beat the Bulldogs by seven points at the Rob Roy – “a few beers while we watch the game”, actually turned into a few beers while we watched the game. Heaven fucking forbid. I was home by 11pm. The Geelong vs Collingwood game was an even lower key affair for me, I watched half the game at home before heading off to work. A workmate gave me the score at the office – Geelong winning by an impressive 77 points.

So there we have it kids, the shit fight is over and we are down to the final two teams. I’m actually happy it was these two teams to come out of the Preliminary Finals, I have close mates who follow both teams (Matt supports Geelong, while Dowling is a Saint Kilda fan), and it will also be the match up of the super teams first predicted back in mid season. I wouldn’t have been as interested in the final if it had been between Collingwood and the Bulldogs. True, they were the form sides going into the finals, but I honestly just don’t give much of a shit about either of those sides.

One game to go kids, Geelong vs Saint Kilda this coming Saturday afternoon. The pressure will be on for Saint Kilda, as they haven’t won a premiership since 1966. To give you a rough idea of how long ago that was, Ned Kelly won the Brownlow that year.

Penultimate

2009-08-27T19:25:00.001+09:30

Round 21 found me sitting in AAMI stadium drinking booze with a few of the lads, and watching the Crows decimate the West Coast Eagles by 72 points. This was followed by a bus ride into town (this time we thankfully were not subjected to endless renditions of the rival club song), and more beers at the Rob Roy.

We watched the Port game with a mild trepidation, and drank original recipe cocktails that the Barmaid wanted our opinion on (as she was entering the recipes into a competition, or some shit). At one point Prowse and I became a bit restless so decided to crash the private party in the back bar of the pub. We managed to infiltrate the show for all of about five minutes, when a middle aged woman approached at us at the bar. She mentioned to us that the birthday girl did not recognize us, and then politely requested we leave – and as we got to the door she added as an afterthought ”By the way…Piss Off”.

I eased the pain of social rejection by eating a Haggis and drinking more shitty cocktails, proving a well established fact that if you put something random on your bar menu, I will order it.

The Shogra scores for Round 21:

Western Bulldogs 110
Geelong 96

0/15

Carlton 153
Melbourne 96

0/15

Adelaide 122
West Coast Eagles 48

25/ 25.

Brisbane Lions 107
Port Adelaide 92

0/10

Collingwood 97
Sydney 56

0/15

Final grade for Round 21 is 31.25%. This has been the worst percentage yet, and it shows – our chances of making the top four have become even slimmer (near impossible), yet the chance of dropping to seventh place is very real. The results of just two games in the next round could cost us our home ground final.

Speaking of which, the next round coming up is the final round of the season and so a Shogra scoring system is irrelevant. Besides, I have spent enough time amusing myself/boring the shit out of you guys with this grading system, and will give it a rest until the later rounds of next Season.

I’ve already designed a new system to put into action for 2010, it involves a combination of Numerology, Astrology, and getting a palm-reader to read the lines in Graham Cornes’ craggy-ass face:

And this picture is from about 20 years ago too.

As for Round 22, there are basically three scenarios that could happen:

Best Case Scenario:

The Western Bulldogs lose by ten goals.
The Crows win by ten goals.

This would allow the Crows to take the fourth spot on percentage points, but is highly unlikely.

Middle Measure Scenario

The Crows lose.
The Brisbane Lions lose.

The Crows lose, but still retain sixth place for a home ground final.

Worst Case Scenario

The Crows lose.
The Brisbane Lions win.

This would allow the Lions to take sixth place, and therefore the home ground final.

Time will tell.

And now I will attempt to dissect the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Just kidding. MORE FOOTBALL NEWS!!!

2009-08-21T00:05:00.003+09:30

I’m no doubt boring the pubes off you non-AFL fans with these footy posts, but there is only a couple of rounds to go, and then I will STFU for a good few months regarding the sport.

Anyway, Round 20 approached us and so I turned to my email account to chat with the boys on a possible venue. Choosing a pub is a lot harder than you would think, and we have been let down many times by various locations around Adelaide. The Cooper’s Alehouse, for instance, is a pub specializing in our South Australian beer – yet they seem to treat Ausse Rules (South Australia’s favourite sport) with a snobbish disdain. ”We aren’t a football pub” a barmaid once told us, after we requested having one of their five televisions switched over to a Crows game. Meanwhile, their plasma screens showed a combination of Rugby and Golf.

Who the fuck goes to a pub to watch golf?

Besides John Daly I mean, and can we really include that walking heart attack in the consensus? The bastard is so fat that when hookers get on top of him their ears pop. True story.

sexy

I’ve singled out the Alehouse, but there have been many other establishments to turn us away like a pregnant Mary on Christmas Eve. I’m not saying a swanky cocktail bar should switch it’s Music Videos over to Channel Seven so I can ”check the score”. But that sleepy worker’s pub round the corner with the three televisions and fuck all patronage, would it kill them to chuck a bit of footy on for a group of paying customers?

So after getting stung a few times, we were certainly open to suggestions. I was inspired by Stranger’s proposal – he had seen an advertisement for the Elephant, boldly declaring their promise to show every single AFL game. The Elephant was a British pub off Rundle Street, and though Guinness and Aussie Rules was not an obvious combination, it was certainly one that tickled my fancy.

Friday evening was soon upon us, and Stranger, Richo and your humble narrator found themselves with a pretty decent table, sitting in the crowded front bar of the British pub waiting for the game to start.

We thought everything was looking roses as we sipped our Guinness, until we noticed the time and a mild panic started to set in. It was five minutes until first bounce (the AFL’s equivalent of “kick off”), and the TV was showing a Korean Boxing match.

I approached a young barmaid at the bar to assess the situation.

Me: Hi, your ad said that you show any AFL game.

Barmaid: yes we can show any AFL game.

Me: Great, can you put on the Crows game.

Barmaid: yes, we can put on the Crows game.

Me: …uh…can you put it on now?

Barmaid: yes, we can put it on now.

This was followed by an awkward silence as we both stood there staring at each other for about a minute. For some reason my simple request had locked me into a rhetorical battle of wits with one of Batman’s villains.

Luckily (or so I thought) the manager came over to inquire about my problem.

Me: Can we get the Crows game on?

Manager: Sure, what channel is it on?

Me (thinking that maybe their boastful ad had been a crock of shit, seeing how they didn’t even know what channel it was on): Channel Seven.

Manager: Okay, just give me a minute to program the television, it’s only set to Foxtel channels.

Obviously we had missed some kind of small print on the pub’s advertisement. They must have been showing every game, except for the Adelaide ones. After watching the manager try to program channel seven onto the screen for about ten minutes, we decided to cut our losses and head out the pub door and into the heart of the city.

Of course, the problem was that we were on Rundle Street, and there is probably no worse place to be when you have a yearning for televised sport. There were plenty of pubs, just not the ones we needed. The Austral’s bohemian clientele were too busy sipping red wine and discussing Master Chef to concern themselves with football. The great unwashed inside the Exeter were busy comparing tribal tattoos and body odour, and were no doubt unfussed with the Crow’s chances against Hawthorn. The Crown and Anchor could provide us with barmaids with shaved heads and vampire fangs, but could not provide televised sport. It seemed hopeless.

At this point Richo revealed a desperate contingency plan – he had once watched football at the Oyster Bar, a tiny and kind of pricey venue, but one that was close to our current position. We legged it to the bar to find three seats in front of the corner TV, which the bartender was more than happy to put the football on for us.

We had made it just in time to see the Crows get their arses kicked in the first quarter, which thankfully tuned out to be the traditional “Crows sole shitty Quarter” for the game, and they ended up beating Hawthorn by 27 points. Turns out that The Oyster Bar is a decent place to watch the football, and I would happily return.

Google image search reveals this picture for “Oyster Bar”. Funny, I don’t remember it like that.

Although one flaw in my plan was the lack of food (aka “blotting paper”) to absorb the barrage of alcohol. I had planned for a solid steak and chips meal at The Elephant, and swapped that for half a dozen oysters instead. Lack of food on a drinking night is my kryptonite, and it didn’t help when my sister arrived at the bar and dragged me to the Irish pub next door after the game, where we drank until closing.

I awoke the next day in a million little pieces.

The Shogra System grade for Round 20:

HAW 67
ADEL 94
22.5/25

RICH 59
COLL 152
0/15

BL 84
WB 102
0/15

SYD 87
GEEL 92
8/10

PORT 67
CARL 121
0/10

ST K 108
ESS 110
7/10

Final Grade is 37.5/85, which is 44.1%. That is the best percentage we have had so far, but still not much of a life changing grade. The score is neither fantastic (we have not made the top 4), nor terrible (we have not jeopardized our final eight chances either), but floating somewhere in between (oh, the ugly grey mediocrity of life. Must you permeate the world of sports also?).

The Crows are now at least three wins clear of the teams vying for a position in the top eight, so with only two games left in the minor rounds, it means the Crows have made the finals.

The see-saw antics continue, as the next games will decide whether the Crows will make the top four (still a slim chance) or failing that, lose the home ground final (by finishing in 7th position).

These are five games that will affect the Crows standing on the ladder, any match involving a team already in the top four will rank out of 15. Any match outside the top four, but vying for a position will rank out of 10. The Crows game will rank out of 25. We want team A to win in each category:

B Western Bulldogs vs
A Geelong

Geelong winning would improve our chances of taking a top four spot over the Bulldogs, who are one win ahead of us. If Bulldogs win, and the Crows win their match, then there is still an extremely slight chance we can take that fourth spot. Match will score out of 15.

B Carlton vs
A Melbourne

Carlton are neck and neck with the Crows on the ladder, equal on wins but only ahead of us by 2.68%. They could jeopardize our chances for that top four spot. Match will score out of 15.

B Adelaide vs
A West Coast Eagles

Naturally, we need to win this and preferably by a large margin. Match will score out of 25.

B Brisbane Lions vs
A Port Adelaide

Another one of those freak weekends where you will find me hoping for a Port win. Brisbane could nudge the Crows out of sixth spot (and taking the home ground final away from us, those filthy fucking Queenslanders). If we lose and Brisbane wins, they will leap frog us on the ladder – because they have those two points from the Draw with Essendon up their sleeve. Bastards.

B Collingwood vs
A Sydney

If Collingwood lose the next two games (unlikely) and the Crows win the next two, then there is a chance for us to reach the top four. If Collingwood win this game, then the Crows will not be able to chase them next round. Any Collingwood win will give this match a 0/15 score.

For those of you who are still confused by the Shogra System, here is a diagram I created:

Hang on, that’s not it. I must have loaded the wrong JPEG file. Try this:

Damn it, that’s not it either. What’s wrong with the Blogger image uploader? I created this awesome diagram on how the grading system works, and now I can’t get it up onscreen. One more try:

Ah fuck it. Forget it.

Round 19 Results

2009-08-13T23:43:00.001+09:30

Round 19 waltzed into town, jerked off on our sleeping faces, and then left without so much as a goodbye.

I sat in AAMI Stadium on Saturday night in the cold sipping XXXX beer from a plastic up, and watched the Crows flounder around the oval like a bunch of dying seagulls who had been fed Panadol laced bread by a school yard bully.

I had a bad feeling two minutes into the game that the Crows were having one of their “off days”. Collingwood didn’t play so well either, but they played a damn sight better than the Crows and rightfully took the win. Collingwood beat Adelaide 89 to 68.

My reward for making the pilgrimage to AAMI Stadium was the resulting “Ride of Shame” back to the city centre with Richo, where we got to stand in a crowded bus and listen to the Collingwood Club Anthem sung repeatedly. We amused ourselves by striking up a conversation with a few Collingwood fans about the rest of the season and the resulting finals. It probably comes as a surprise to the foreign readers (especially the Soccer fans) that the two rival fan bases board the same buses home after a game, but that’s just the way it has always been in these parts.

We got off the bus in the city at about 11pm to catch up with mates and drown our sorrows. The venue of choice was the cocktail bar Lotus Lounge, whereby I lined up at the bar for half an hour and paid $34 for four beers (seriously, fuck that place), before we headed off for greener pastures. It had been a tiring week of Sparrow-Fart and Graveyard-shifts at work so I was hoping to have an earlyish night – which of course resulted in me stumbling out of the Crazy Horse at 5 am stinking of Stella, cheap perfume and mild shame.

The Shogra System for Round 19:

CARL 97
GEEL 62
0/10

WB 97
WCE 102
8/10

ESS 87
BL 87
7.5/10

ADE 68
COLL 89
0/20

FRE 116
PORT 74
10/10

The Essendon vs Brisbane game was a draw - as a slight Brisbane win was going to rate a 7, and a slight Essendon win an 8, a draw scores 7.5.

Final Grade for Round 19 = 25.5/60, or 42.5%. Which is half a percent less than last week’s result, so, yes, another mediocre weekend of football (as far as the Crows final four chances are concerned).

The peculiar problem with the Crows current position on the ladder (and the overall closeness of the teams standings), is that they still have a chance to make the top four….but also have an outside chance of not making the finals at all.

If you’re not an Aussie Rules fan, then these posts have probably been boring the shit out of you and you haven’t been reading them all the way through. But if you are wondering what all the fuss is about finishing in the final four, observe the following diagram I ganked from Wikipedia:

Finishing in the top four means you play in the first week of finals. If you win, you go straight through to the preliminary final. If you lose, you get a second chance in the semi final.

Finishing in the bottom four is not as advantageous. If you win , you have to then slog it out in the semi. If you lose? Game Over, man. Game Over.

So if your team doesn’t make it in the top for, you at least want to finish in positions 5 or 6. That would mean the first final game for your team would be a home game. The home ground advantage can make all the difference.
Wikipedia has more information on the advantage of ladder positions here. Learning is fun.

Losing to Collingwood put a serious dent in the Crows top four campaign, but there still is a slight chance we can do it, though a fifth (or sixth) place is probably the more reasonable goal.

New changes to the grading system for Round 20: the Crows game is ranked out of 25, games that affect our top four chances are ranked out of 15, games that can affect our final eight chances are ranked out of 10. In each case we want team A to win. Team A winning by more than five goals = 100%, two to five goals = 90%, less than two goals = 80%. Team B winning by less than two goals = 70%.

Here are the six games that will make a difference for round 20:

A. ADEL
B. HAW
Out of 25

A. RICH
B. COLL
Out of 15

A. BL
B. WB
Out of 15

A. GEEL
B. SYD
Out of 10

A. PORT
B. CARL
Out of 10

A. ST K
B. ESS
Out of 10

Sam

2009-08-11T01:00:00.004+09:30

We’ve had ourselves yet another premature celebrity death, only this time it’s a damn sight sadder than the passing of Michael Jackson.

Sam the koala, mascot of hope during the Victorian bush fires and cherished marsupial here at the Shoddy Blog, was put down on Thursday due to inoperable abdominal cysts brought on by a case of Chlamydia.

A workmate was telling me he heard of the death on the radio, and that the presenter had suggested the koala caught Chlamydia off the water bottle the Fireman had given her. Rest assured this is not the case, urogenital chlamydiosis affects up to 50 percent of the koala population and in Sam’s case the infection had become so severe the vets would not be able to manage the pain.

Judging by “Shock Jock” Kyle Sandilands’ handling of a 14 year old girl’s rape ordeal (which had happened to her when she was 12), I’m unsurprised that there’s a radio presenter out there suggesting our local volunteer fireman are out in the scrub infecting the wild life with sexually transmitted diseases.

Fuck em. I find commercial radio unbearable anyway, hopefully the stations burn down in the next bush fire.

RIP Sam.

Round 18 results

2009-08-07T01:50:00.001+09:30

(I started this post on Thursday, but was so busy last week I had to post it late and back-date it. Shit happens.)

I’ll recap the weekend of footy now, I’m not suffering from the delirium of sleep deprivation this time (like I was last post), so there will be less references to masturbation and vampires, and more honest to god sport.

It was a damn fine weekend of football, with no less than three teams winning by four points or less, including the undefeated Saint Kilda who managed to scrape in a one point win against Sydney in the final 20 seconds of the match.

Yes it was a great session of games for a casual viewer, but not so much as a Crows supporter. A few of the teams we needed to win did not produce the goods, and let’s not forget the Crows own agonizing two point defeat to Geelong. Here are the results, and how they affected my grading system for the round (Good = 8/10, Better = 9/10, Best = 10/10. Anything else scores 0/10):

Carlton (94) beat North Melbourne (84) by fuck all = Good (8/10)
Western Bulldogs (111) beat Freemantle (80) = (0/10)
Geelong (93) beat Adelaide (91) by fuck all = Good (8/10)
Collingwood (95) beat Brisbane (55) = (0/10)
Port (121) beat Hawthorn (55) = (0/10)
West Coast Eagles (95) beat Essendon (68) by shitloads = Best (10/10)

The final grade for Round 18 is 26/60, which is 43 percent. That’s a mediocre result for the round, and the ladder shows it with the two teams above us winning and growing more comfortable in their positions, and the two teams below us losing and floundering in their spots. This left the Crows stuck in the middle growing stale in fifth place.

Working out these grades revealed some flaws in my system, the obvious one being the score lines (less than two goals gets a grade, as does five or more – but what of the scores in between?). So I have made changes to this system for round 19.

By the way, I have decided to name this collating of data the SHODDY GRADING SYSTEM or the SHOGRA SYSTEM, for short. It’s a catchy name, even though SHOGRA sounds like a giant autistic slug that attacks Tokyo on odd occasions. Actually, the Shogra System sounds like the section of the universe that Luke and Yoda go to pick up whores. Either way, fuck it – the name stays.

ROUND 19

Carlton vs Geelong (Geelong are too secure in points to affect us, but Carlton can still pose a threat to a top four finish for the Crows):

Carlton win by under 10 points = 7
Geelong win by under 10 points = 8
Geelong win by 11 – 20 points = 9
Geelong win by over 20 points = 10

Western Bulldogs vs West Coast Eagles (Bulldogs are third, so better for us if they lose by a lot)

WB win by under 10 points = 7
WCE win by under 10 points = 8
WCE win by 11 – 20 points = 9
WCE win by over 20 points = 10

Essendon vs Brisbane (Brisbane are uncomfortably close to us on the ladder, need them to lose and decrease their percentage. Essendon are three wins behind us, so are less of a threat)

Brisbane win by under 10 points = 7
Essendon win by under 10 points = 8
Essendon win by 11 – 20 points = 9
Essendon win by over 20 points = 10

Adelaide vs Collingwood (another change to my scoring system, the results of the Crows game will be rated out of 20, so that it has a greater affect on the overall grading of the weekend. Collingwood are in the fourth spot and one win ahead of us - a loss would put them clear on the ladder by 8 points, so any win for Collingwood ranks a zero in my system):

Adelaide win by under 10 points = 16
Adelaide win by 11 – 20 points = 18
Adelaide win by over 20 points = 20

Freemantle vs Port Adelaide

Port win by under 10 points = 7
Freemantle win by under 10 points = 8
Freemantle win by 11 – 20 points = 9
Freemantle win by over 20 points = 10

The other games for the weekend are:

Hawthorn vs Saint Kilda
North Melbourne vs Melbourne
And
Richmond vs Sydney

The outcomes of these matches have no affect on the Crows final four chances, so are not included in the grading system for the round. These matches could be played on mine fields, using a Beach Ball full of wasps, while Pirates rape stray dogs in the change rooms – it truly doesn’t matter.

So does everybody understand the Shogra System?

Does anybody understand?

If you do understand, please send me an email and explain it because I’ll be honest with you I’m fucking confused.

This shit is doing my head in, I’m going to take a break and go watch Flight of the Concords.

Enough with the Pig AIDS, it's time for SPORT

2009-08-01T00:06:00.004+09:30

(If you’re not an Aussie Rules fan skip this next post because it will bore you. Back to regular postings about booze and morning boners next week, until then, I dunno, go read a Twilight novel or something.)

It’s round 18 of the Aussie Rules season, meaning it is not long now until the finals. Saint Kilda is still undefeated at the top of the ladder, with Geelong only two games behind that. Those two teams are pretty much secure in their positions, but it’s extremely close for the next four teams who are all aiming for a third or fourth finish (meaning a double chance in the finals):

And the next four teams on the ladder also have an outside chance of securing a top four position.

It could come down to percentage for a top four birth, so these next five rounds will be a tense battle, like a condom full of bull ants.

As a Crows supporter, this is how I would like to see this weekend’s results: ranked good, better best. Best meaning the least likely outcome, yet the optimal change to the ladder for the crows. I want to see the teams with the threatening percentages lose by large margins, but if they do win I want it to be by a small amount. If you find this confusing, then switch off the computer and go watch Dancing with the Stars.

ROUND 18

North Melbourne vs Carlton

Carlton beat NM by fuck all = GOOD
NM beat Carlton by fuck all = BETTER
NM beat Carlton by shitloads = BEST

Western Bulldogs vs Freemantle

Bulldogs beat Freemantle by fuck all = GOOD
Freemantle beats Bulldogs by fuck all = BETTER
Freemantle beats Bulldogs by shitloads = BEST

Geelong vs Adelaide

Geelong beats Adelaide by fuck all = GOOD
Adelaide beats Geelong by fuck all = BETTER
Adelaide beats Geelong by shitloads = BEST

Collingwood vs Brisbane Lions (we want Collingwood to lose because they have the better percentage):

Collingwood beats Lions by fuck all = GOOD
Brisbane beats Lions by fuck all = BETTER
Brisbane Lions beat Collingwood by shitloads = BEST

Port Adelaide vs Hawthorn (both of these teams have an outside chance, but lets’ go for Hawthorn. Because fuck Port)

Port beats Hawthorn by fuck all = GOOD
Hawthorn beats Port by fuck all = BETTER
Hawthorn beats Port by shitloads = BEST

West Coast Eagles vs Essendon

Essendon beat WC by fuck all = GOOD
WC beat Essendon by fuck all = BETTER
WC beat Essendon by shit loads = BEST

By the way, I consider “fuck all” to mean “2 goals or less”, “shitloads” to mean “5 goals or more”. (I pretty much just made this whole system up on the spot, so there may be a few creases to iron out. If you have any ideas, fee free to email me at fuckahamster@witchtits.com).

There are two other games this weekend, Sydney vs St Kilda and Melbourne vs Richmond, but their outcome has no bearing on the Crows chances so I have left them off the list.

And lastly, if I am gunning for your team to lose by a shitload this weekend, then I apologise for hurting your feelings, but that’s the tough world of sports. If your team does lose by a shitload this weekend and you find yourself sad, I’ll buy you an Edward Cullen poster to cheer you up. Stick it on your bathroom wall and gaze at it while you masturbate with your shower attachment.

This just in: Pigs Still Suck

2009-07-27T23:54:00.002+09:30

I had to take a sick relative to the Public Medical Centre yesterday, which turned out to be a two hour ordeal, most of which was spent sitting around in the fairly large waiting room. I passed the time by scouring the crowd for hot chicks to look at, until I realized that these hot chicks were probably here to get “some kind of weird rash” checked out, so I lost myself in a copy of The Advertiser instead.

At one point I went to the reception desk to check on the waiting time, and found a distressed young girl and her mother chatting with the receptionist. It turned out the young girl had been diagnosed with swine flu and had obviously been crying after being given the diagnosis. The receptionist and mother were consoling the girl telling her it was nothing to worry about. The headline news of the day probably didn’t allay the girl’s fears; a 12 year old girl had died from the flu strain in an Adelaide hospital Saturday morning.

The whole incident reminded me that it has been a good few weeks since I first wrote about swine flu. 40 days to be exact. Which means we’re long overdue for a

Swine Flu – the disease that pretty much jumped the shark before it even took hold, and you’re all no doubt sick of hearing about it. But fuck it, Australia is playing a huge role in the infection count, so let’s take a look at the current Leader Board, and how it has changed since my last posting on Jun 17th.

Holy shit, Australia has shot up the ranks three places, even overtaking Mexico (which quite frankly is a bit of a worry). The United Kingdom has also climbed a spot, and Thailand has gone from bottom to 7th place. Spain only had an infection climb of 488 in the last 40 days, which drops them from 9th place all the way down to 16th. Meanwhile Peru now has enough infected people to make the top ten, so they must be feeling really proud. Here are the infection counts for countries 11 – 20:

11. Germany 2,844
12. Hong Kong 2,702
13. Philippines 2,688
14. New Zealand 2,585
15. Brazil 1,566
16. Spain 1,538
17. Taiwan 1,280
18. Singapore 1,217
19. South Korea 1,166
20. Israel 1,094

Of course with any global dilemma the statistics reflect not only the rate of infection, but of the authenticity of the figures in the first place. China in particular has come under fire, with accusations that the Government is withholding information on the infection. For a country with over 1.3 billion people they are posting an infection count of only 1,852 and only one death.

Speaking of deaths: Australia has racked up quite a body count with a current tally of 48.

I still remember the first Swine Flu death, the victim was a man from the Northern Territory but he died here at an Adelaide Hospital on June 19th and it was pretty big news at the time. The South Australian Health Minister John Hill had the press release:

"We do know this man was seriously ill from a number of conditions,"

Then came the second death soon after, a 35-year-old obese and diabetic man dying in a Melbourne Hospital.

The Third came on the 26th of June:

"A 50-year-old woman suffering from life-threatening bone marrow cancer died in the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in Melbourne on Wednesday morning after being admitted with flu-like symptoms on Saturday."

A 71 year old woman died the day after that. In the case of this fourth death, the victim’s family requested her medical history be withheld from being released. By now, though, the more astute readers will no doubt have noticed a pattern forming, and it is one that has continued all the way up to the 42nd death on Wednesday of a 70 year old Queensland man.

What people have to realise is that the normal flu kills over half a million people a year, and if a “seriously ill” person catches the swine flu and dies, it is not really a cause for alarm. This doesn’t stop the media from rattling our cages with their constant headlines:

It’s only after further reading do you find the whole story:

The 12 year old girl dying here in Adelaide was a sad occurrence, it’s one thing for a grandparent to die, another case completely when it’s a young child. But even then the girl in question had ”serious underlying medical conditions”.

But what of the perfectly healthy people who catch swine flu? What about the people who caught it but weren’t already crippled with a pre-existing life threatening ailment? The 99.23% of the H1N1 infected who survived the virus and lived on to tell the tale?

A Russian man identified by the government as infected with the country's first case of swine flu says he feels fine. – UPI News

i have swine flu apparently i feel fine now it lasted just over a week I would say I have experienced worse with a normal flu – UK victim on Sky News

A 13-year-old boy who has the swine flu appears to be fine and rode his scooter Wednesday as he took some time off from school… - KCRA News

Christ, all these swine flu sufferers and they “feel fine”. Meanwhile, Uncle Beef had one too many reds last night and is feeling a little worse for wear. Fingers crossed, hopefully I can catch swine flu and “feel fine too”.

Those who don’t want to catch the disease can always turn to the Centre for Diseases Control for expert advice. (Warning: CDC tips may make cause you to slap your forehead in a “well duh” manner)

* Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.

* Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.

* Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.

* Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people.

* If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

And of course, my personal favouite:

* Try to avoid close contact with sick people.

Thank you CDC, you fucking pioneers of the obvious. Here’s a few I wanted to add to your list, just in case:

* Don’t jump off buildings.

* Don’t invite bears into your home.

* Don’t pour battery acid into your pee hole.

I’ll update again next month.

Where’s Wally gets punched in the face, Amy Grant gets fingered, and a dead hooker soaks in an acid bath. It’s business as usual at the Shoddy Blog.

2009-07-06T02:44:00.001+09:30

We are deep in the guts of school holidays at my end, a period that almost always fills me with abject fear. It is not so much the younger kids clogging up the shops and streets by day squealing and screaming like the godless bastards that they are, but rather the older students - the teenagers.

Those that patrol the streets at night like restless vampires, high on Alco-pops and intoxicated with the inconsequential recklessness of youth.

There was a small group of us working the graveyard shift on Saturday night, and it was our third and final late shift for the week. Halfway through we felt a little bored, so pulled up a few chairs to the main window to see if there was any action out on the street below.

The street below was North Terrace, one of Adelaide’s busiest CBD streets during the day, but strangely quiet during the wee hours of the morn. We have had a few looks through the window on various nights, and usually the best sight we can muster is that of an animated drunk stumbling home from the Casino, or a group of people leaving a work party.

This particular Saturday night (aka 4am Sunday morning) represented the end of the first day of School holidays, so all bets were off.

There were about half a dozen guys urinating in the shrubs below our window. Hordes of young people stumbling on the footpaths, including a small group who had deiced to casually stroll up the middle of the street with cars angrily blaring their horns behind them. Most of the girls seemed to be wearing skimpy summer dresses, even though the temperature would have been 10 degrees at best. Most noticeably there seemed to be a plethora of drunken arguments going on. Mostly chicks arguing with their boyfriends, but there seemed to be a heated argument between two groups of people across the road from us outside a Hotel – that was slowly getting increasingly aggressive.

The confrontation was eye catching, mainly because the smaller of the two groups (which was trying to back away from the skirmish) was lead by a young guy in a red and white jumper and matching beanie, and looked a dead ringer for Wally of Where’s Wally fame. Now there’s a character you’d never expect to spot in public. Poor old Wally seemed to be copping the lion’s share of the ire, as various guys came up to him yelling and shoving. We thought the fight was going to kick off when somebody ran up and punched Wally square in the face.

(Though to be honest, if I saw this twat on the street I would punch him too)

But then words were exchanged between the two groups, and they both parted ways. The sights we had seen in these short moments had whetted our appetites for more drunken carnage to view, so came up with the simple yet unanimous decision to spend our lunch break (at 4:30am mind you) wandering the streets outside instead of the staff canteen within.

Upon venturing outside, we found the previous sights to be a mere entrée for the main course as we were greeted by a small army of drunken teens waiting for cabs. Despite the freezing weather there were t-shirts and short skirts. The boys were all dressed like they’d just been to Satan’s skate park, the girl’s dressed like they wanted dollar bills stuffed down their tops. There were hair cuts that defied the imagination and even gravity. All present were bleary eyed and babbling.

We turned the corner onto the infinitely more terrifying Hindley Street, and almost got bowled over by a drunkard who had been thrown out of a club and didn’t have the faculties to stop his momentum until he was face down in the middle of the street. Hindley Street is Adelaide’s main pub and club drag, a street full of seedy bars, Tattoo Parlors and strip clubs. It can be quite an experience, and this particular night was one of the very few I had dared venture down it sober. School Holidays had only upped the pandemonium, and I felt a real end of the world vibe as I strolled down the blocks of this squalid cluster-fuck.

There were people passed out in the gutter, lakes of vomit, and I counted no less than three brawls – including one guy who produced a full bottle of beer from his pocket and tried to launch it at a couple of young guys, missing and hitting the wall in a fury of broken glass and wasted beer.

The girls were crying, the boys were fighting. This was our current generation of High Schoolers, the future leaders of our mighty nation. An entire platoon of crazy youths, who had not yet learnt their alcohol consumption limits. The unspoken rule was to keep drinking, until it ended in tears.

By the time we had gotten to the end of the street, I felt like I needed Snake Plisken to fly a helicopter in to save us.

We passed a busker who was sporting a pair of locked hand-cuffs (!), and made the journey back to work to finish our shift. We punched out a couple more hours of labour before heading home. The work-mate who gave me a lift dropped me at my house, and then headed off to the dying embers of a 21st birthday party. I preferred the warm confines of my bed, and drifted off to sleep at about 9am.

My alarm woke me four hours later, sleep had to wait as I was meeting the boys (we’re talking Stranger, Matt, Richo and Prowse) at the pub to watch the biggest match up of the AFL year so far, the undefeated Saint Kilda versus the undefeated Geelong.

I got to the Alma Tavern (our venue of choice) to find the bar staff all wearing school uniforms. Immediately a shiver ran up my spine as I recalled the annihilation of the night before. As it turned out, they were promoting the Alma’s Sunday School Session. A day off nonstop happy hours which included the highly agreeable pricing scheme:

2 pm– 3pm $2 Schooners
3 pm – 4pm $3 Schooners
4 pm – 5pm $4 Pints
5pm – midnight $5 Spirits

We watched the Carlton game after that one, enjoying cheap booze and post game banter. Everybody slowly filtered off due to work/baby/dinner commitments until 7pm when the last stragglers decided to call it a day. Having finished a heavy week of work and having just watched a full day of sport, I was left with a bit of a “thirst on” so decided to head on a solo adventure. I had a pint and played some pokies at the Oriental, before heading off to Finn Macools to sample a few Guinness’s. It was a slow Sunday night, and the chatty bartender struck up a conversation with me regarding all topics from travel to music.

I drank and waxed lyrical until closing time, then ambled home. It was 10pm by this point and it still felt too early to call it a night, so I decided to drink all of the beer I had in my fridge while watching music clips on You-Tube. I somehow managed to string this simple list of activities out until 5am, when I finally hit the sack.

I woke up at lunch time the following day to head off to a chiropractor appointment. The Chiro reckoned I need to drink more water, because my body seemed dehydrated. I was unsurprised.

After that I came home and logged into my Yahoo email account to find out what the plan was for the next Footy match this coming Saturday, even though my splitting head ache and aching body shuddered at the mere mention of future alcohol related activities.

I was surprised to find about a dozen emails from You-Tube users waiting for me in my Inbox regarding comments I had made on various clips in the wee hours of the morn.

I had no idea my You-Tube account was actually linked to my email address. I had first set up my account in 2006 (under the name "El Ganso") when we were putting our tropfest entry Slice Slice Baby onto the site. Until this morning, that had been the last time I had commented on a clip. I have kept the account running, because it allows you to watch the Adults Only stuff on You-Tube (mainly trailers for films that include violence and swearing).

I guess it’s also handy when you’re drunk, bored and feeling more than a little belligerent, and feel the need to let your inner commenter out. In my infinite drunken wisdom I took screen captures of all the comments I made. Retracing my steps from these shots, I found my first comment on the film clip for Amy Grant's Baby Baby

I’m not entirely sure what any of that actually means, but I must have grown bored of the conversation as I went to the Bruce Springsteen page for Born in the USA for a change of topic:

You-Tube user Kruezoraxe somehow finds hidden meaning within my comment:

I continue with

The next commenter is EmMeDv95 with

I reply to him/her with

I was being a smart-ass at this point, knowing that EmMe was writing about something completely different and in Spanish (and I had a Spanish User name) I thought it would be ironic to confuse their post with French and pretend to translate it. Even then I had it all wrong, as declared by sputnikspaynol in a personal message to me:

"EmMeDv95 speaks italian, not french XD"

Christ, I can't even do irony properly.

This line of questioning eventually spilled over on to the Transformers 2 trailer (which is a film I don’t even have any intention of watching):

And finally concluded on the Hannah Montana comments board (Don’t know what brought me to this particular clip, I’m not entirely sure who or what Hannah Montana actually is.)

The twisted thing about this inappropriate comment spree, is that of the dozen emails I received only one was negative:

"WTF is all this shit about dead hookers?"

The rest were either simple LOL or ROFLMAO comments, or people wishing me good luck on my endeavour.

I spent an early morning trolling You-Tube posing as an inept serial killer and get praise for my efforts. Meanwhile, there is probably some poor 14 year old girl who has been brave enough to post a clip of herself singing to get some constructive criticism, and is drowning under a tirade of ”STFU” and ”OMG U SUCK!” commentary. The internet is a sick place. Probably why I like it so much.

All of this nonsense reminded me of that hungover afternoon I spent harassing poor old Father Christmas at SantaBot.com. I was pleased to find the site was still up and running, so decided to get Saint Nick’s advice:

Santa doesn’t have a favourite way of disposing of dead hookers. Meaning what? He likes all ways? But how creepy is his second comment (and up yours Santa, I’m spelling those words like the Queen intended me to):

My favourite colour is transparent

Holy shit. It sounds like something that David Lynch would have engraved on his tomb stone. I’m going to be up all night wondering what the hell it means. Fuck you Santa, you demon.

I’ll leave you with this comment left on Katrina & The Waves - Walking On Sunshine

Notice that no less than six people gave me a thumbs up for crapping on my neighbour’s door step.

God bless You-Tube.

As a side note: Readers from the US of A may be confused as to what Where’s Wally is, and that is because the title of that book series was changed to Where’s Waldo when it hit your shores. Just as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. American kids don’t know what a Wally or a Philosopher is, but they are quite comfortable with Sorcerers.

Let's hope they leave the title of the final book in the series (Harry Potter and the Dead Hooker) alone.

Tilt

2009-07-04T08:01:00.002+09:30

I was chatting with a workmate last night who is a keen photographer, who was telling me about a process that enables you to make normal shots look like miniature models. Kind of like the reverse of what Godzilla movies try to do.

Chud.com had more information on it (and are quoting Wikipedia here):

Tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature scale model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is.

The effect is quite nifty. File this in your “cool but kinda pointless” folder:

Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

mj

2009-07-03T05:43:00.001+09:30

My current job is labour intensive, so during working hours I don’t have access to a computer and by default any News services either.

I first heard of Michael Jackson’s death from a colleague halfway through last Friday’s shift – he had told us of the singer’s demise in a casual fashion:

Shannon: Hey guys, did you here Michael Jackson died?
Me:...And? What’s the punch line?
Shannon: No punch line, he’s really dead. Cheryl heard it on the radio and told me ten minutes ago – thing was, I thought she was leading into a joke as well. He died of a heart attack.

This is what happened for the rest of the day, people were informed of Jackson’s death only to assume it was a build up to some peadophile reference. It was only a couple of months ago that somebody had sent me a link to the top 101 Michael Jackson jokes – meaning that the humour had become so prolific that they had to cull the list just to get it to a manageable triple digit figure. Kind of a shame that such a promising young talent had grown up into a living punch line.

The general mood at work was one of apathy tinged with a “good riddance” mentality. My workmates are a mixture of AC/DC and Chemical Brother fans, if anybody liked Jackson’s music (and there are surely a few) they would never admit it. It hasn’t really been “cool” to be into Michael Jackson since Reagan was president and ALF was on the air waves, but it was more the problem of the singer’s surreal personal life that soured opinions (and those pesky molestation charges certainly didn’t help).

However, his impact on the music scene certainly cannot be denied. Thriller still stands as the greatest selling album of all time (109 million copies sold, a good 60 million more than the closest competition), and the music video for the titular track still ranks as one of the best ever made (compare the film clip for Thriller to anything that’s come out in the last decade or so).

At the end of the day this was not a guy you could see settling into his twilight years smoking a pipe in his rocking chair at the age of 80. Still, it came as a bit of a shock to see such an icon shuffle off this mortal coil – especially considering his huge tour was kicking off in just over a fortnight.

All that is really left to do now is churn through the media onslaught that accompanies any celebrity premature death. Of course this will involve the punitive eye witness reports, as dozens of people close to the star come forward to tell of how he looked “perfectly normal” only days before his death (or as normal as that skeletal Martian could muster).

One thing is for sure, DJ’s will still be filling dance floors to Billie Jean, and cover bands will be ripping out the Jackson 5 tunes long after the likes of Pink and Kanye West have become faded memories.

Auto-Tune

2009-06-23T00:26:00.001+09:30

I’ve been watching the “Auto-tune the News” series on YouTube, where musician Michael Gregory has been using an Auto-tuner to turn news Broadcasts into songs. If you haven’t seen it, this latest one is pretty catchy:

Smoking Lettuce is bad for you by the way. Thanks for clearing that up C-Span.

Purchase

2009-06-20T00:25:00.003+09:30

We often sit around work on our lunch breaks sifting through the Shopper Classifieds in that behemoth of South Australian Correspondence (ie The Advertiser), and chuckle at the useless shit people are trying to sell for a quick buck. Luke spotted a pearler in today’s copy, which I have scanned for your convenience:

Most probably a hoax, but you never know with Adelaide.

If Kim Jong doesn't wipe us out, the pigs will

2009-06-18T02:04:00.004+09:30

I was treating this whole Swine Flu cluster-fuck with the same bored indifference I offered SARS and Bird Flu when they struck a few years back. This just seemed like another disease scare with annoyingly vague symptoms (a cough, runny nose, body aches – that’s pretty much how I feel every morning when I wake up), and an excuse for the media to post photos of Asian people wearing surgical masks out in public, and I swear it’s the same stock photos used for the last couple of “Worldwide Panic” stories.

Photo used for SARS 2002, Bird Flu 2006, Swine Flu 2009 and will return for Squirrel AIDS in 2011.

Of course, The Advertiser has jumped onto the media scare wagon with urgent information, including prevention tips such as “Washing your hands before and after eating food” – something my Grandma used to tell me often as a child, and I had no idea she was preparing me for a Swine Flu pandemic. The Newspaper even posted pictures of what the Swine Flu virus looks like, I guess so you can avoid it if you see it walking down the street.

One thing for sure, this disease has legs and Australia has been one of the hardest hit countries. Current Swine Flu Leader Board as of June 17th (number of confirmed cases):

1. USA 17,837
2. MEXICO 6403
3. CANADA 4049
4. CHILE 3125
5. AUSTRALIA 1965
6. UK 1461
7. ARGENTINA 871
8. JAPAN 638
9. SPAIN 488
10. THAILAND 310

On the local front, South Australia is currently fourth (we had 89 confirmed cases on Monday), Queensland third, New South Wales second, and Victoria is number one with a bullet, counting for over 80% of the Australian figures. Scientific Scare-mongers have estimated that one in three Victorians could contract the disease. I was surprised to see Queensland lagging, what with that state looking like a pig’s head and all:

Stay tuned for further updates.

Honestly, where would we be without Science?

2009-06-14T01:17:00.003+09:30

From Yahoo News:

”A force known as orbital chaos may cause our solar system to go haywire, leading to a possible collision between Earth and Venus or Mars, according to a study released on Wednesday.”

You are probably shitting your pants in fear right now, but you shouldn’t be too concerned for two reasons:

1. ”The good news is that the likelihood of such a smash-up is small, around one-in-2500.”

And

2. “...even if the planets did careen into one another, it would not happen before another 3.5 billion years.”

Welcome kids, to yet another inane Scientific Study.

Scientists often make extraordinary breakthroughs and discoveries regarding atoms and molecules and all of that stuff and nobody gives a shit, which upsets them deeply. So every once in a while they’ll get together and make outlandish claims that the media can drench in hyperbole and thrill the public with. Then the Scientists will see their names in print, high five each other, then go back to jerking off cats or whatever the hell it is these fuckers do for a living.

You’ve seen this shit before, a headline will scream out ”THERE MAY HAVE BEEN LIFE ON MARS” that will titillate you while you drink your morning latte on your way to work, only to get to the end of the article to find the statement“But probably not.” It’s a load of shit, but still more entertaining for the casual reader than actual real scientific discoveries (New Breed of Lungworn Found....etc).

Likewise, the Planet Collision story we are discussing here came under the headline

EARTH AND VENUS MAY COLLIDE

A quick perusal of the article and the less exciting truth becomes apparent:

”Indeed, there is a 99 per cent chance that the sun's posse of planets will continue to circle in an orderly pattern throughout the expected life span of our life-giving star, another five billion years, the study found.”

Well done dickheads. I just did my own study and found that in a trillion years Cockroaches will evolve into killing machines and murder all remaining life on Earth, though my results show that “This probably won’t happen”. Do I get any grant money?

The “Experts” credited with these lame discoveries further deflate their hot air balloon of bullshit with this confession:

But peering further into the future of celestial mechanics with exactitude is still beyond our reach, said Jacques Laskar, a researcher at the Observatoire de Paris and lead author of the study.

"The most precise long term solutions for the orbital motion of the solar system are not valid over more than a few tens of millions of years," he said in an interview.

Right. So we can’t make any accurate solar system predictions past a 20 million year arc. That kind of leads me to ask the obvious question: Why are these French Cum-Splats giving advice on a five billion year time scale?

How exactly are they running these scenarios anyway? I picture a group of eggheads going down to the local pub on a lunch break, writing the names of the planets on some billiard balls, then writing down their findings as they down beers and play Snooker for a few hours. But no, this is now how they did it: They used computers. Super, Duper extremely brainy computers.

”Using powerful computers, Laskar and colleague Mickael Gastineau generated numerical simulations of orbital instability over the next five billion years.”

Fantastic.

Okay, so Earth survived that scenario. Let’s watch 2500 more, then we’ll download some Hentai Porn.

It’s such a shame that Scientists waste all of their efforts on shit like this. Just imagine if the world’s brainiacs stopped trying to generate Doomsday plots, or find moss on Mars, or work out if Dinosaurs could talk – and did something genuinely productive with their time. Like, Oh geez I dunno, find a cure for Cancer. Or Aids.

I hate Scientists.

Jelly Belly Spits on Your Grave

2009-06-11T06:07:00.001+09:30

I dropped into Matt and Schona’s Broadview home on Saturday night for a small get-together of ex-Londoners, which resulted in some Nostalgic London banter and a nice meal. The small gathering of people dispersed at various reasonable hours due to work commitments or social engagements (the Sea and Vines Festival was on the next day), until there was just Matt and myself left to polish off the red wine, which we managed to accomplish by a little after 3am.

I awoke at noon the next day in the spare room, feeling like Lumberjacks had torn off the top of my skull and shat on my brain. It was at roughly this point that Dowling rang me and invited me to go watch the regional Women’s Hockey semi final in Port Adelaide, an invitation so random I dared not turn it down.

The thought of sitting on some wooden benches in the drizzling rain seemed daunting to both of us, so we decided to stop at a Supermarket to stock up on some Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee (which is an ideal tonic in these circumstances). It was while procuring these items that I had a sudden urge to purchase additional sugar related necessities, so made my way to the confectionery aisle.

Amongst the usual fanfare of chocolate and candy, one product caught my eye:

I’m a big fan of Jelly Belly brand Jelly Beans (“the Gourmet Bean”), so was naturally curious. The back of the box revealed the product’s grand scheme:

Although my scan is a little blurry, you get the general idea. The jelly beans are added as pairs, one normal and one disgusting, and you cannot tell the two apart. So that green bean you grab from the box could taste like a Juicy Pear, or it could taste like a Booger. Yes, a Booger. Essentially it is the Russian Roulette of candy.

I am no stranger to the Extreme style of candy products – I’ve eaten Warheads before, stuffed twenty Hi-Sours into my mouth in the middle of a schoolyard, and even licked Magic Gum off a Hooker’s ass. Okay, maybe that isn’t all true. It was more like a dozen Hi-Sours and not twenty. The point is that I felt no need to be scared of this latest trend in confectionary warfare – so purchased “Bean Boozled” as a Hockey Match snack.

I thought I would give the beans a test run before we got to the car, and so popped a solitary orange one into my mouth, wondering if it would be Peach flavor….or vomit. About half a second of chewing later revealed the answer: it was vomit flavor. It was here that the lunacy of Bean Boozled became apparent – the vomit jelly bean didn’t taste “kinda gross”, it tasted like half digested food mixed with stomach acid. It tasted like actual honest to god puke. I ended up spitting the bastard into the gutter with the phlegm velocity of an adult Llama.

Dowling and I ended up sitting in the stands watching the Hockey and slowly working our way through the pack, albeit with many five minute nausea breaks. We got a few funny looks from the spectators and parents in the stand, as we gingerly ate jelly beans from our seemingly innocent box of candy, only to moan in agony before spitting the beans into our hands and throwing them behind us like hand grenades.

I’ve never eaten pencil shavings before, but they tasted exactly like they smelt. I missed out on Black Pepper, which Dowling likened to chewing on about ten peppercorns at once – but I did manage to eat five Boogers in a row. We both agreed that the Rotten Egg flavor was the worst.

This is what the Bean Boozled experience is like

Dowling pointed out that as far as games go this was a pretty cruel one. It wasn’t like the ratio of “sickening” flavours to “pleasant” ones was fifty-fifty, but more like 95 – five, and the bad ones were truly nauseating. I was intrigued as to why a confectionary company, especially one as expensive and top shelf as Jelly Belly, would release such a foul product. Research did not reveal a motive, but it did reveal that there were two sets of pairs in the USA edition missing from the pack I bought here in Adelaide:

I didn’t get to try Ear Wax, or find out what a Skunk’s anal scent glands taste like, so I do feel a little cheated. Still, I've definitely ticked another box:

You have to seriously wonder though, who comes up with stuff like this and releases it on an unexpecting public?:

Was it this guy?

I think it was. Damn you Doctor Treeface.

The Devil will probably not accept your facebook friend request

2009-06-05T21:52:00.003+09:30

Even though we aren’t even halfway through the year yet, I think I might have found the best film title of 2009:

I like it. It’s sincere.

The website offers this synopsis:

Inspired by films from the golden age of religious cinema, SATAN HATES YOU is a graphic horror movie that tells the stories of two individuals and their personal struggles with Lucifer himself. In the film we follow Marc (Don Wood), a homicidal maniac driven by demons buried deep within his soul and Wendy (Christine Spencer), who lives life fast and hard without any thought to the consequences. Their separate paths will eventually cross, but will it be on the road to salvation or the highway to hell?

This is the kind of spastic shit I can really get involved with. The film opens in the US this month, but I can’t see an Adelaide release happening any time soon so I might download it later this year.

That’s all I really have to say about the subject for now. Any questions?

Yes Timmy. Satan hates you.

Done

2009-06-01T03:07:00.001+09:30

Well this is it, the final post for May-hem II.

It was a solid month of posts, and kind of drizzled out at the finish here with a handful of short articles, but not to worry as I will tie up any loose ends over the next week or so. It was a struggle to get the posts finished in the last few days. It was so much easier to get posts up for the first half of the month when I was hardly working, and not drinking – and I think that realisation surprises absolutely nobody. Still, even in those early weeks I was up until 4am getting the writing finished (having procrastinated for most of each day), and I’m finishing this current post at just after 3am. The shoddy blog is still set on UK time, something I didn’t realise until starting this little mission, so it doesn’t reflect the late-ass nights I’ve been spending on them. Its been amusing, but I’m certainly glad its over.

Anyway, today was another day of football and beers. I watched the Crows defeat Hawthorn at Footy Park, taking in some beers with Prowse and Richo – followed by a viewing of the Port game at the Cooper’s Alehouse with Richo and Stranger, finishing up last drinks at a respectable 10pm.

Christ – that’s four matches I watched in three days, and if I watch any more football I’m going to pop a Sherrin out of my anus. Glad its over for another week.

Its June now kids, so back to our regular sporadic posting. Stay tuned.

Short n Sweet

2009-05-31T08:15:00.000+09:30

So I worked the midnight shift, got to bed at 9am – slept for four hours, then got up to go watch PAC Old Scholars play Fitzroy in the Div 4 match up. It was a decent match resulting in PAC defeating the until then undefeated Fitzroy. This was followed by a solid drinking session at the Alma. At one point I was drinking with my old man, Stranger, my old flat mate Jimmy and the former Crows captain Mark Ricciutto. I would be hard pressed to form a more random collection of drinking partners.

Dad and I got home at 10pm, and I have to say that getting tanked and then sitting down for a family meal is an interesting experience. I had a tentative plan to return to the Alma for further drinking with Jimmy, but the day’s events have gotten the better of me. I’m posting this write up, then I am going to crash like a mother fucker. Good night.

Busy Days

2009-05-30T06:00:00.001+09:30

Its been a viscously busy week at work, and I think it finally took its toll as I crashed until about 2pm today. I spent a few hours walking around Norwood, had dinner with the parents, then went and watched the Sturt vs Norwood game at the oval with my old man (Sturt won by 46 points). In a couple of hours I’ll head into work for a midnight shift, get home at about 8:30am and sleep for about four hours before heading off to watch another Footy match with the old man. Not sure what Saturday evening holds me for yet, hopefully it wont be too hectic because I have to get up Sunday morning for a few beers with the boys before heading off to watch the Crows game.

Christ, my life has become a whirlpool of beers, work and live football (I’ll have seen three matches live in 67 hours by late Sunday afternoon), with the odd bit of late night gambling thrown in for measure.

The end result is that I haven’t had time to clear the backlog of posts I was hoping to finish for May-hem (Golden Goose list and top 15 of 2008 amongst others), so there’ll be about half a dozen posts trickling into June.

I must say I haven’t done too badly this time round, for those paying attention I’ve only been late twice (both Saturdays), and will probably miss another deadline by Monday morning.

But thems the breaks.

And now, here's Rambo with the weather

2009-05-29T03:34:00.003+09:30

We’ll take a break for lists for one day, as I worked late tonight, and then the boys and I hit the Casino for an hour, and then I stopped for a Guinness at the Irish pub near my house. What I’m getting at is that I’m not drunk, but I am tired as all hell – so I’ll reconvene the Golden Goose list tomorrow (as it takes some concentration) and post a quick film related update instead.

Most people sputtered in their beers when they heard Sylvester Stallone was making a fourth Rambo film, a good two decades after Rambo 3, and casting himself in the titular role even though he was 62. But, by gosh, made the film he did –and though it didn’t wow the critics (personally I thought it was pretty good), the film made some decent coin.

Movie sequels are as resilient as cockroaches, yet still I was surprised to see this on IMDB.Com (mainly considering the fact that Stallone will literally be a senior citizen when it is made):

IMBD.Com’s (kinda vague) plot synopsis:

Rumors say the script will follow the original one written by Stallone for Rambo (2008), in which Rambo finds out he has a daughter and she has been kidnapped by a hostile cult, from which Rambo must rescue her. There are also rumors about Rambo V being in Africa.

Stallone’s career thrived on his Rambo roles in the 80s, and was revived with the 21st century sequel. Kinda ironic when you consider the fact that Rambo didn’t survive the story arc of First Blood in the original novel. An ending they actually shot:

In a twist of fate, the Hollywood powers that be decided to change the ending for a more upbeat one, and an iconic (and seemingly endless) film series was born. Life is strange like that.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Wikipedia:

“…in an interview with Metro magazine, Stallone said that he was "half-way through" writing Rambo V and that it would not be another war movie…”

”Not another war movie”….huh? A romantic comedy perhaps? A musical? A clay animated story about a turtle with Down Syndrome that learns to rollerskate?

Wikipedia provides more clues:

On February 4, 2009, Sylvester Stallone quoted, "Yeah, we are doing another Rambo, but the conflict is whether to do it in America or Australia."

Once again: Huh?

Anyway, I’ll keep an eye out kids, and if I spot Stallone on the streets of Adelaide, I’ll let you know.

Golden Goose List part I

2009-05-28T01:53:00.008+09:30

(Another set of posts from the backlog)

I’ve been jerking off into your eyes over my favourite films of 2006 and 2007 (the 2008 list will be up next week), so it is high time for me to spit venom instead of heap praise, and introduce you to

THE 2007 GOLDEN GOOSE LIST

The following ten films aren’t the worst of 2007, hell some are actually quite watchable, but they are the films that pissed me off the most. These are ten Blockbusters that took a good thing (such as a great cast, a great story, or a great franchise) and ruined it with Hollywood sewerage. Because of the obscene amount of money thrown at these projects these films aren’t just goosed, they’re Golden Goosed.

Its true that cinema is an art, not a science, so mistakes will be made. It is also true, though, that cinema has been around for over a century – and mistakes should be learnt by other people’s failures, not repeated ad nauseum. I’ll point these out throughout the list.

I’ll also explain why it was such a shame that the film was fucked up, and I’ll outline an example of “unnecessary CGI” in each movie. Special Effects should be seamless, and it makes me grind my teeth in rage when a distracting computer generated shot is used, instead of a stuntman or model effect.

These films aren’t rated on quality, but on how badly they fucked up a sure thing.

Onto the first three:

10. Shrek the Third

Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and Antonio Banderas all take a break from their shitty acting careers to do voice overs for an unnecessary sequel, and get paid a bastardload of cash for doing so.

Why was it Goosed?

I didn’t mind the first Shrek, and was happy to sit through the second – but felt that the characters had done their dash by the finish. The first two films made too much money for there not to be a third.

Shrek feels like an awkward fish out of water in the refined Royal City. Donkey has a weird relationship with a Dragon. Puss in Boots is an amusingly smooth debonair. There are plenty of OMG LOLZ moments, as recognisable pop culture icons get a medieval slant. The central theme is to believe in yourself, and take strength in your friendships. This is the synopsis of Shrek 2. Unfortunately, it is also the synopsis of Shrek the Third.

Enjoy your plate of reheated leftover shit-casserole, kids.

Unnecessary CGI moment:

The whole film is an unnecessary CGI moment.

Lesson not learnt?

If you’re going to make a sequel, introduce new themes and ideas to keep it fresh.

Which could have been learnt from watching:

Home Alone was a previous popular family entertainment franchise, that decided to rehash the old story with Home Alone 3. The film is considered dog piss.

Such a Shame:

There are other animated films more deserving of a sequel. I would have rather seen a Toy Story 3 (actually now in production), or an Incredibles 2 before a third Shrek film.

Critic Quote:

“(Shrek the Third) suffers from that common virus, sequelitis - the ennui that afflicts blockbusters when they've outlived their capacity to amuse.” - Sydney Morning Herald

Please Sir, I want no more:

This series is dead in the water….artistically wise, but it still makes those souless cocksuking Dreamworks Executives a shit load of cash. The McDonald’s Happy Meal toy rights alone have the accountants spraying the inside of their jocks with thrust dust.

Shrek Goes Fourth will be out in 2010.

9. Rush Hour 3

Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker team up and fight Triads in Paris.

Um, yeah.

Why was it Goosed?

To keep the series fresh, they relocated the characters to the complete “fish out of water” setting of Paris, but then didn’t bother to create any decent humour or stunts.

I can’t understand what went wrong with the script – the film was written by the brilliant Jeff Nathanson whose past credits include the exquisite Speed 2: Cruise Control, and whose future credits would include the magnificent Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What a complete and utter genius.

Unnecessary CGI moment:

Any action scene involving CGI and stunt men in the place of Jackie Chan. Chan refused to use wire work, stunt men or computer effects for his stunt work for the first three decades of his film making career. Then he whored himself out to Hollywood (where actor insurance is a little different to Hong Kong). Quite depressing really.

Lesson not learnt?

Taking actors who are a little long in the tooth, to play characters they are bored of playing, in a series of uninspired over the top stunts – is generally not a great idea.

Could have been learnt from watching:

Lethal Weapon 4

Such a Shame:

The first two Rush Hour films are hardly the lofty peaks of cinema perfection, but they are enjoyable action romps – the kind of fare you could happily veg out in front of on a Monday night after work. The third film tarnishes this ethic.

Critic Quote:

“Rush Hour 3 is an awkward Greatest Hits Reunion Show, and neither one of them seem up to the task. Tucker's character is irrational and irritating (imagine biting on a sheet of aluminium foil). Chan still does some of his own stunts, but he's 53 now and some of the stunts he does cause more concern than wonderment.”

- Urban Cinefile

Please Sir, I want no more:

There was talk of a fourth film set in Moscow, but I think this series might be (thankfully) dead in the water. There was a six year gap between Rush Hour 2 and 3, so they’d be lucky to squeeze out a number 4 before Jackie Chan hits his 60’s.

Not that Chris Tucker has anything better to do. Check out a decade of his career from IMDB.Com:

8. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Johnny Depp is the lovable rogue Jack Sparrow, “Orlando Bloom” sounds like a fragrance of feminine deodorant – but is in fact the name of that guy from Lord of the Rings, and Keira Knightley is a castrated cabin boy (in real life, can’t remember what character she plays in the film).

Why was it Goosed?

Pirates took the simple nautical fantasy of the first film, and somehow mashed it into an overlong mulit-plotline mess. Sometimes exciting, but mostly confusing or boring.

Lesson not learnt?

Shooting back to back sequels that choose style over substance, and take a convoluted story line and drench it with over the top special effects is generally not a good idea.

Which could have been learnt from watching:

The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions

Unnecessary CGI moment:

Those breathtaking shots of a REAL pirate Ship sailing on a REAL Ocean captivated viewers the first time round. Those have been replaced by a confusing multiple Pirate Ship fight in the middle of a Whirlpool, that is so unconvincingly computer generated I swear I saw Max Headroom board one of the boats.

Such a Shame:

Jack Sparrow is one of the best film characters created in recent memory. Highly amusing. Well, he was in The Curse of the Black Pearl. I loved him in that film, but was sick of him by the time we hit World’s End.

Critic Quote:

”Interminable, with more plot lines than pirates, this is a mix of theatrical bravura, magical special effects and tedium... a journey on a tempestuous ocean with mountainous highs and fathomless lows. I was confused, enthralled, dazzled and bored.” – Urban Cinefile

Please Sir, I want no more:

There is a fourth Pirates film planned – this time dumping all of the extraneous characters and concentrating on Jack Sparrow. His adventures may swap from the Supernatural to Science Fiction, by taking a flying ship to the stars.

I’m indifferent about this project, though I will admit there is still life in the character, provided they don’t take a big oily shit all over it like they did with World’s End.