Welcome to the static archive of GrodsCorp, a blog that closed down on 1 August 2009 after five years in operation. More about the story behind GrodsCorp and the archive’s resurrection can be found at my personal blog. While looking around GrodsCorp please be mindful of the following:

• Some internal links will not work
• Some images may not load
• Some author Gravatars in earlier posts are incorrect
• Some formatting in earlier posts is a bit dicey

Two months ago I slapped down my credit card and made a purchase that I had been planning for some time.

India. One-way.

This plane ticket, and everything it represents, is more important to me right now than anything; everything in my life at the moment is viewed in the context of my plans to travel through India and the middle east next year. As a true Leftist I’ve even been learning Arabic since February.

For this reason I’ve decided to close GrodsCorp.

In late 2003 I started GrodsCorp for much the same reasons as any other blogger: I wanted a place to dump my thoughts and opinions in the vain hope that someone, anyone might read them. The very first iteration of GrodsCorp was built with hand-coded HTML — a skill I learned (badly) by trial-and-error during long, boring overnight shifts in television back in 1998. After transitioning through various content management systems and designs, GrodsCorp ended up as the Wordpress blog with the orange and blue theme (thanks, silpheed!) that you all know today.

The dude with the sunnies in the header has been GrodsCorp’s mascot for most of the site’s history, and there is no truth in the claim that GrodsCorp’s mascot is similar and/or identical to that of Austrian pretzel company Soletti. Here’s me on the ski fields of New Zealand daring Soletti’s lawyers to bring it on by strapping Joe to my backpack while snowboarding.

You go faster with a stuffed toy on your back.

And here’s me defending the Soletti vs. GrodsCorp case in the Supreme Court of Teh Blogosphere.

The restitution prosts, your Majestness.

In the five-and-a-half years since I first uploaded this site to the intertubes via my dialup connection, GrodsCorp grew into a community of hundreds of people who contributed, read and commented. Over 2,600 posts, 30-odd podcasts, 40 episodes of Lachlan Connor, Independent, and four episodes of Let’s Cook! With Craig later, it is the community that made GrodsCorp so much more than the sum of its parts. Of that content, some was shithouse, some was okay, some was pretty good, and some was fucking awesome, but no matter what was published we always had a good laugh and even managed to debate some important stuff along the way.

Through GrodsCorp I’ve made real-life friends, bloggosphere (sic) enemies, attracted a creepy stalker who likes to send emails to my boss, and discovered Iain Hall. The Internet: there’s nothing else quite like it.

The literally thousands of hours that I’ve spent building, maintaining, moderating and writing for GrodsCorp were worth it because of the community of people who hung out on the site or lurked in the background — youse are such a bunch of funny, pernicious bastards and I can’t thank you enough. Writing is fun, but writing for an audience is funner.

But most of all I’d like to thank the dozen or so people who wrote for GrodsCorp at some stage during its life, and especially the five contributors who rounded out the GrodsTeam until the end: John Surname, Bridgit Gread, Ant Rogenous, Bron and Jason. A finer bunch of Leftists I’ll never meet, and superb writers to boot. Except John Surname.

I’m going to keep writing at a new, personal blog: scottbridges.id.au. The new blog is not Grods2.0, rather a place for me to intermittently publish longer-form stuff, my writing at Crikey, newmatilda.com etc., and telegrams from my travels next year. I’d love it if you all dropped in to say hello sometime.

A few members of the GrodsTeam have asked to publish personal farewells.

John Surname:

Tell my loyal fans that I will be releasing a compilation of my best posts entitled Journey To The Centre of John Surname.

Bridgit Gread:

So, at last it’s come to this – such is blogging. This is like the last Chooklotto on the last episode of “Hey Hey It’s Saturday!” except that Scott is Daryl Somers, Ant is John Blackman, I’m Jacqui McDonald and John Surname is Plucka Duck.

It’s been a rollercoaster few years. I’ve laughed and gasped and cringed; I’ve ridiculed all manner of fools and freaks; and above all I’ve had fun. Together we’ve all done made a blog that people like reading – and even when you’ve spent most of your time writing for a living, that’s a feeling you still enjoy. My thanks to Scott for hosting Grods, for making it shine and for allowing me to be a part of it – and for enduring the river of shite that being a blog owner invites. You can teach my kids Marxist theory or “The Internationale” anytime, comprade. Thanks also to my fellow team members: the loveable Ant ‘George’ Rogenous; the irrepressible John Surname, the concupiscient Bron and the gorgeous Jason. And to the host of regular Grods commenters: Chuck, Wah, confessions, silpheed, JT, phyllis stein, Tobias Ziegler, dribble, michelle, even bloody Fang and Ray bloody Dixon from bloody Bright.

I feel like I’m losing a friend – quite a few friends actually – but like the ‘existential Buddhist’ I am, I know they won’t be gone forever. Good people and good humour never die, they just take a holiday and come back wearing cheap Hawaiian shirts and with a thousand digital pictures.

Now it’s time to down my last McMuffin, hotwire the Noddy car and hit the wide open road. To borrow some parting words, “I’m just going out and may be gone some time.”

Bridgit

Bron:

Well, this is sad and unexpected, but I take great comfort in knowing that Grods is going out on top. No matter the reason for its departure, it is still the best fucking blog in the blogosphere [sic]. Of course, I could just be biased.

The authors of Grods have made it what it was — but most of all, it was the community we created, beginning with Scott. The community is one of the biggest things I’m going to miss.

I have met a lot of wonderful people via Grods — and have had the opportunity to meet some of them in real life who I know will always be friends. And then there are those who I care about deeply, although they may not fully realise it right now. You know who you are.

I will be around reading and occasionally commenting on blogs that some of you have and I hope to see the rest of you around very soon. In fact, I have a new blog that I will start writing in again someday – A Fresh Start In August.

Don’t think of this as an ending — but rather as an opportunity for a fresh start.

Ting tong, tingtong,
Bron.

PS Hey, that rhymes! Oh, the shame! Damn you Michelle for saying that to me! I never wanted to be linked to that shithouse poem! Even though it’s the best fucking poem I’ve ever read!!!

PPS Cosmicjester, tha bastard son. I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you but it’s actually spelled T-H-E.

PPPS Oh, nothing. Just checkin’ to see if you’re still reading. Fuck off, now. No, really.

PPPPS First warning, Scott.

So I guess that’s it. My sincere best wishes to each of you.

Cheers,

Scott
sdebridges@gmail.com

GrodsCorp by the numbers:

Posts: 2,481
Comments: 32,100 (on this version of the blog software)
Authors: 18
Dumb video series episodes: 40
Funny video series episodes: 4
Fictional characters embedded in reality TV series: 0
Podcast episodes broadcast: 31
Podcast episodes not broadcast: 1
Most comments on a thread: 667
Commenters banned due to supersized threads: 1
Total banned commenters: 3
Stalkers: 1
Posts about Prodos: 48
Bottles of scotch extracted from Iain Hall: 0.5
Number of broken promises to stop talking about Iain Hall: 6
Legal threats: 1

But the only number that matters:

Years in operation: 5

Happy fucken birthday to us; here’s to another five years of larfs, groupthink and misbehaviour. Thanks to all of our readers, commenters and lurkers who make this whole thing worth the effort.

Feel free to share some of your favourite GrodsCorp moments in comments.

Ant Rogenous: Do you want to have sex?

E Rogenous: No.

Pwned.

In what was surely the most shocking upset in world sport since Leon Bertrand Spinks beat Mohammad Ali in 1978, GroupThinkFC was bundled out of the finals tonight, scoring a meagre two goals against the opposition’s 10.

Still, it wasn’t a total loss. We were beaten by a team named Dirka Dirka, which can only mean they’re Islamist terrorists — which, as we all know, means Teh Left still wins.

Peace be upon them, Mohammed jihad.

With the holidays upon us it’s time for all of us here at GrodsCorp to wish our readers a very merry Christmas and an awesome 2009. We’ve appreciated your company this year and we’re looking forward to more laughs and debates next year.

May all of your stockings contain Fleshlights!

Sometimes you just have one of those years. One life-changing event has barely passed you by when another sneaks up and pegs you without so much as a romantic dinner or a lick of petroleum jelly.

Somehow, the best people among us — like The Editor, Scott — manage to carry on with dignity and the cracking sense of humour that drew us into their orbit in the first place.

In that sense, they’re pretty lucky. They can always count on things looking up sooner rather than later — and they’ll always have plenty of friends around to celebrate when they do.

So, from all of us here at GrodsCorp:

Didn’t even realise it at the time, but we cracked the 2,000 post mark on GrodsCorp the other day. And in the cruelest of ironies it was bloody John “Nevernude” Surname who took the millennial honours with this effort.

Bastard.

I’ve received a few emails from GrodsReaders who are desperate to know why last week’s GrodsThink went unpublished, so here are some snippets of the recording that give you some idea about just how shithouse it was.

It’s the end of the week, so allow me to distract you from the usual dull, insipid, boring and monotonous tedium of this execrable blog with this extract from a new blog I discovered, Anonymous Liberal. Think of him as a superior version of our own Anonymous Lefty (seriously, man, get back to martini girl already).

This is Anonymous Liberal’s take on how Obama should fire back at John “You’ve Done It Again” McCain and Sarah Palin:

“You know, I was listening to the Governor of Alaska today and she repeated a claim that virtually every news organization has already disproved. She said she “told Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ to the Bridge to Nowhere.” Then I heard John McCain speak and he repeated that claim too, along with several others that have been disproved: she sold the plane on Ebay, she fired the personal chef, and so on . . . . and while I was listening to all that, something occurred to me. I’ve been doing this all wrong! You see, I’ve been limiting my claims to things that are actually true. But campaigning is so much easier when can just make stuff up.

So today I wanted to tell you some things I never have before. Did I ever mention that back in my Chicago days I played professional basketball for the Chicago Bulls? It’s true, when Jordan retired, they wanted me to take over at guard, but I said “thanks but no thanks; I’ve got a job to do in the state Senate.” Oh, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before either, but my running mate, Joe Biden, he once wrestled a live grizzly bear…and won! He also once sold the entire state of Delaware on Ebay. I kid you not.

I don’t know about you, but I feel liberated. This whole truth thing was really holding me back. I mean, John McCain keeps saying that I’m going to raise your taxes, even though every independent organization who’s looked at it says that my plan gives you a bigger tax cut than his. Well, two can play at that game. Did you know that under John McCain’s economic plan, if you fall behind on a house payment, his staff comes and takes your house away? It’s true. I swear. How do you think he got all those other houses?“

Owned.

So what do you think? Hit or shit?

(If things are looking a bit strange please “hard refresh” your browser to remove old elements of the GrodsCorp site from your cache. In Firefox press CTRL+SHIFT+R (APPLE+SHIFT+R on a Mac), in Internet Explorer press CTRL+F5.)

Now that the theme is safely installed and everything is as it should be it’s time for a big-arse thankyou. Remember my original aborted attempt to install the new theme? Well, in its wake Boredomistan’s Slipheed got in touch to offer me his nerd skillz and what you’re looking at is the result of his generosity. Unlike me, Slipheed tested the code on a number of browsers and here’s what he had to say.

The new theme now looks great in Firefox 2 & 3, very good in Opera 9.5, IE 7 and Safari 3.1 (Windows) and shit but passable in IE 6.

So I guess the moral of the story is that if you’re using the outdated version 6 of Internet Explorer you should upgrade. Preferably to Firefox.

As you were.

We may have had a go at Hungry Jack’s fan “Utegirl” before, but it now seems that the company she so adores is censoring her comments at their Facebook page and denying her her right to free speech!!1!

A few days ago Utegirl left a wall post on the Jack’s page directing other Hungry Jack’s fans to this critical post at GrodsCorp and it had been on display all weekend. But it seems that the page administrators got to work this morning, didn’t like what they saw, and got all fascist on Utegirl’s arse with a pernicious flick of the delete button.

All of here at GrodsCorp are with you in this ugly fight against censorship, Utegirl.

 Our comrades in the Chinese sweatshop have finally delivered the goods!

The timing couldn’t have been better, either: the People’s Football Club™ begins its new campaign for glory tomorrow night.

Virgin season, fresh start — and with shiny new uniforms, only John Surname an imbecile would bet against us taking out the championship.

You can keep track of our results here.

And remember: show your support and solidarity by keeping the jeering to an absolute minimum.

The NSW government, copping a flogging for setting up ‘pope police’, says the World Youth Day organisers wanted anti-annoyance laws; the organisers say they wanted no such thing. Australians are richer than ever – but apparently we’re depressed because of it. The cops are called on Ben Fordham, after he takes a break from schmoozing with underworld thugs to chase down a parliamentary thug. A vigilante newspaper in (you guessed it) Queensland may be charged with stalking because it’s hounding a released pedophile. Starbucks will shed 600 stores and 12,000 jobs, as people finally realise their coffee is shit. And having reached his 90th birthday, Nelson Mandela is finally off the US terrorist watch list (obviously at 89 he was still capable of sabotage, assassination and maelstrom).

What a busy news day. The world seems to be going mad … I blame teachers, global warming nutters and Gough Whitlam.

I was in the pub the other night (how many stories start with this line?) and I picked up a free little magazine sitting on the bar. It was called Trouble and it promised “uncensored” action. So I picked it up and had a squiz, just like all guys do when they find their high school girlfriends’ Cleo and Dolly magazines with “uncensored” sealed sections on how to give the perfect blow job.

Is that Billy Corgan?

I was flicking past some boring, wanky story about art when I came across this photo and instinct made my hand stop turning pages.

I wasn’t sure what caught my eye so I had a closer look.

Hang on… no. Can’t be.

Is it? Aargh! Oh. My. God.

Either the roo or the dude has a huge cock, and if it’s the dude’s it’s a funny shape.

(Shut up. I know it’s the kangaroo’s tail.)