It’s almost Scotch O’Clock, comrades.

This weekend, obviously, I am going (I am going) where streams of whiskey are flowing.

What are you all up to?

After a hectic five days, guess what I’m doing this weekend? There’s a clue in this photograph.

The truth about fishing

Anyone else doing anything awesome?

I’m sick of certain sneering leftists on this website making fun of Joe Hockey. I think you’re all just afraid that his commonsense approach to the nation’s finances is starting to get through to people.

Yesterday in the Canberra Times, he blew the lid off a loopy socialist scheme to destroy all fun in Australia, forthwith.

The Government may also… increase the price of cigarettes by $2.50 a packet and draught beer by 15c.

Opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey said it was ”not good to see that beer and ciggies are going up” in the budget

No, Joe, it’s not good. I have just worked out on the back of a coaster that these hideous Stalinist imposts will add $270 a week to my entertainment expenses. How does this help anyone? Swan might be drunk on power, but what are the rest of us supposed to do for kicks when a schooner costs as much as a Hyundai Getz?

Anyway, as of this weekend, I’m starting to think this boy has what it takes to go all the way. Go, Joe.

This one almost doesn’t need a caption, but Craig needs to learn that if he puts shit like this up on his Flickr I will use it for evil.

Have at it!

You may take Steve Fielding’s pride, but you’ll never take his Bacardi Breezers.

Because when Teh Fielding says ‘no’, Teh Fielding means ‘no’.

If you’ve had as shithouse a week as me – and I know that some of you have – you may be interested in viewing the following.

It’s Friday, GrodsFriends. Embrace apathy. Down schooners. Get pissed, destroy. Remember, contra Steve Fielding – alcohol IS a solution.

The rest will wait until Monday, and by then it might not seem that important. Time to clear your minds and diaries of everything except R-O-C-K, mofos.

Growing up in regional Queensland in the 1980s meant watching locally produced commercial television, some of which must count among the most execrable ever broadcast. Also, watching local television meant being subjected to what amounted to a round-the-clock brainwashing campaign on behalf of Castlemaine Perkins. By my recollection, there was a plug for Fourex every 4.2 minutes, most of which included the only celebrities Queensland had at the time (other than Jackie McDonald): sportsmen.

What with the hoo-ha about the State election, a friend reminded me of the existence of this abomination. Since I saw it about 5000 times in 1985, it’s only taken one viewing to ensure that I can’t rinse the sounds or images from my mind. I thought I’d share the pain with GrodsReaders.

NB

1. The heady blend of alcohol and retro-styled homeroticism.

2. Thommo’s mullet.

3. When they say that there’s been an 80s fashion revival, they’re lying. That is 80s fashion, and you don’t see hipsters getting around in anything that comes even close.

If I can’t get it out of my head soon, I’m calling Dr Nitschke.

Bless you, Barnaby, for your misguided bush wisdom brings joy to my life.

Cash handouts from the Federal Government’s stimulus packages have been likened to a madman at a pub handing out free beer.

[...]

“It’s like a madman giving you free beers at a pub – you’ll drink them but you won’t respect him,” Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce told reporters.

Now I don’t know about you, dear GrodsReaders, but any publican who gives me gratis booze earns my deep and everlasting respect.

Every few weeks I have cause to attend an ’80s cover band gig where I try in vain to pick up one of the many cougars prowling the dance floor, but invariably fail in my quest and have to settle for taking home the keyboard player. Again.

Last Friday night I was watching the gig, drinking a pint, and having an SMS conversation with Random Brainwave’s Chuck A. Spear, when this exchange occurred.

Scott: Lord have mercy. Two dozen cougars doing the Nutbush.

Chuck: Stop teasing me, Scott. I would nail all of them.

Yes. Yes he would.

Riding home from work this afternoon I made a stunning discovery: a cosy little bar in Brunswick is offering so much more than beer, wine and spirits.

Your ale comes with a happy ending

Calloo, callay. As of today I am not working for a while. I have another gig starting in the new year, but I thought I’d give myself a month or so of R and R, so I left my previous job yesterday. No gold watch was proffered, but I did get a bottle of scotch, which you’ll agree is better than a poke in the eye.

Last night I celebrated the only way I know how to celebrate anything – with hard liquor and late-night television. My housemate is a journo so we had to watch the frikkin Walkley awards, which was undoubtedly the least-entertaining broadcast I’ve seen in some time – there weren’t even any punch-ups. I have a dim memory of that abomination giving way to a repeat of the Seinfeld where George won’t give out his PIN number. Then came beautiful, beautiful unconsciousness.

I was woken at about 10AM by the noise of the primary school nearby, and was reminded why leftists hate children. Then I just kinda trundled down the road for breakfast at the Fine Australian Cafe with the Fine Internet Hotspot. And that’s where you find me. Whiling away the morning, watching the passing parade of Newtown, and wondering WTF to do for the rest of the day.

The last time I wasn’t working, studying or both for such an extended period was back during one of the deliberately-engineered recessions of noted Stalinist and PC Thought Policeman Paul Keating. In those days, being unemployed was easy. All that was required was scrawling a crude X on a photocopied form once a fortnight, dropping it in the slot by the door of the DSS, waking up the next afternoon and spending it all in a giddy rush on cask wine, No Frills Frozen Burger Patties and Holiday 50s. I won’t be engaging with the welfare system this time around, so I don’t even have that much to do. I’m flummoxed.

But things may be looking up soon. On Sunday, I’ll be departing for an extended sojourn at the Beloved’s family seat in country Tasmania. Fresh air, big sky, farm animals. They even have broadband, so I might post some piccies here. But even that doesn’t sound very busy.

Still, I’m sure it will all be fine. Think about it. A between-jobs blogger from Queensland retreats to a rural area, armed with nothing but limitless spare time, an Internet connection, access to a Wordpress blog and a head full of opinions. What could possibly go wrong…

Facebook can be shitty, frustrating and useless at times, but it’s awesome when a message like this pops up in your feed.

Awesome!!1!

And when I clicked on the link I wasn’t disappointed. Check out this double-whammy of Craig goodness.

What’s worse — the haircut or the drink?

Turns out that Craig’s girly-drink thing has been a problem for quite some time. At least his haircuts are slightly better these days.

Choice Magazine has unveiled its annual list of ten “shonky” products, and it’s bad news for Craig.

For a hard earned thirst

Consumer lobby group Choice has unveiled its annual Shonky Awards for what it terms dodgy and deceitful goods and services.

[...]

[One] of the 10 winners of a Shonky this year is the maker of the alcopop Vodka Mudshake Original Chocolate.

[Choice's Christopher] Zinn says this won because it masked its 4 per cent alcohol content with its chocolate milkshake flavour.

I shit you not, Craig loves these things. Once we were bushwalking at the Grampians and went to a Chinese restaurant in Sale Stawell for dinner. I took in a couple of longnecks of Coopers Sparkling and Craig took in a four-pack of those Mudshake abominations. Despite the looks of hatred from locals as we entered (”Would ya look at them city poofs with their city poof drinks, Bev?”) Craig skolled one in two gulps, wiped his mouth with glee, opened a second, and necked half of that before even breathing. There’re also one or two rotting at the bottom of my fridge that he left there after pizza one night.

It’s easy to give Craig shit about his girly-drink habit (he took a sixer of UDL cans to Canberra for our Lachlan Connor, Independent roadtrip, while the rest of us took a case of beer), but after I read the whole article about the Shonky Awards I got a bit worried about Craig.

“Even before the whole alcopop got very controversial we decided to test them with some teenagers aged 18 and 19, for legal reasons of course, to see if they could actually taste the alcohol in alcopops – and there was one where half of the males couldn’t tell that this Vodka Mudshake Original Chocolate actually contained any alcohol,” he said.

“So the makers of that have got a Shonky for a product that really resembles a milkshake and tastes like one and doesn’t really taste alcoholic at all, which of course is the idea because all the advice is that kids at first don’t actually like the taste of alcohol and these are gateway beverages that get them used to the taste.”

A “gateway beverage”? Yikes! What will Craig move onto next if we don’t stage an intervention?

We all know that Andrew Bolt is a savage critic of the Rudd government, but did we really think he’d go this far?

THE Federal Government plans to crack down on alcohol companies making a mockery of its alcopop tax by producing drinks that look and taste exactly like the ready-to-drink products, but are technically beer.

[...]

But its efforts have been undermined by alcohol companies. Independent Distillers – producer of popular alcopop brands such as Vodka Cruiser and Pulse – recently launched a “malternative” called Bolt, boasting that it bypassed the alcopop tax. The product comes in blueberry, raspberry and passionfruit flavours and is up to $25 a carton cheaper than pre-mixed spirits. Last week, one retailer was selling two four-packs of Bolt for $16 – equivalent to $2 a drink.

There you go, boys. Just in case you felt slightly queer drinking Cruisers, you can now enjoy a Malternative lifestyle. Or, I don’t know, you could just drink beer!

I understand that the experience of drinking Bolt is similar to reading his column – a mild feeling of nausea, followed by a proper ralph in the gutter outside the TAB.

Update: Proving that he doesn’t just stop at malternatives – Andrew Bolt’s semi-autobiographical film Bolt has opened in the US. It tells the story of his rise from lowly cadet to uber-Opinionist. Critics expect it to make more money than An American Carol.

Shock!

New research by the Sydney Sexual Health Centre, based at Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street, showed that a culture of binge drinking among young [backpackers] may be contributing to unsafe sexual behaviour and higher rates of infection when compared with the general population.

The centre’s acting director, Lynne Wray, said yesterday a study of 4382 travellers and 8810 non-travellers aged 18 to 30 who visited the clinic between 1998 and 2006 showed that the travellers were more than twice as likely to drink excessively.

They needed to do a study to work that out? There’s a reason that John Surname goes backpacking around the CBD of Melbourne every weekend.