Bron has been doing an awesome job organising GrodsCorp’s anti-emotional terrorism protest at the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic on May 24 and I totally intended to plug it in this week’s GrodsThink but totally forgot. Here’s the photo I emailed to her last night to prove that I had it written in the rundown.

So as part of my penance here are the details of the protest.

Where: Fertility Control Clinic, 118 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne

When: Saturday 24 May, 10am-12pm

Enemy: Helpers of God’s Precious Infants (who emotionally terrorise women seeking treatment with religious propaganda and disgusting signs)

There will be a boozy debrief after the protest at a local pub.

At this stage, it’s looking like 24 May is the date pro-lifers will be campaigning their offensive anti-abortion agenda, using revolting pictures to (erroneously) make their point.

After being outraged and extremely annoyed by some stupid letter spotted by The Editor in The Melbourne Times, it was widely agreed that Grodsters and other supporters of the — let’s give it a name — pro-choice movement should give these schmucks a bit of a rumble, The Outsiders style.*

So as I said, it’s looking like the date is 24 May. Mark your calendars.

Persons interested to attend are invited to email me at general_bron AT hotmail DOT com **

(It’s not my usual email, so stalkers and trolls, don’t bother doing whatever it is you normally do. And if you try to send a fake email pretending you’re someone else, I’ll be able to tell. Creeps.)

All names and details kept confidential. Suggestions on placards, slogans, info for blogdom distribution etc will be shared.

Please note that this will take place in East Melbourne.

*Not really, but it will be a protest — a peaceful anti-anti-abortion protest, in case any nutjobs are reading this.

**Kudos to Chuck A Spear for giving me the inspiration to think of a new email address name!

UPDATE: If you can’t attend the rally, but have some ideas for placards, spreading the word, etc, please let us know either in email to me or in the comments. It would be much appreciated!

So after recording GrodsThink last night (to be broadcast later this arvo — beer and work have got in the way, although sadly not at the same time) we headed to a nearby pub that was advertising trivia and $11 pot-and-parmas. During our meal the other trivia punters started to trickle in and it became increasingly clear that we were the odd demographic out. Us GrodsThinkers were all men in our early thirties wearing jean/t-shirt combos surrounded by couples in their fifties and sixties wearing ties and frocks.

The old dude running the trivia looked like he crawled out from under a shelf at the nearby university library and he announced three rounds of fifteen questions. By question five of the first round we knew that we were going to be totally pwned. This wasn’t your “name the title of Britney’s latest single” kind of pop trivia. This was all about European battles of the seventeenth century and obscure references to obscure literature. As Jeremy said at one point: “At least when I’m hopeless at pop trivia I can dismiss the questions as being irrelevant. When I’m hopeless at this trivia I feel dumb because I should know the answers.”

At the end of the first round MC Gerald announced that The; Fleshlight’s (sic) were actually coming second on six points! Problem was, the team coming first were nine points ahead on fifteen. While we weren’t being humiliated we were clearly not going to win. It was this moment that the pub chose to send a representative around the tables to collect the $5 participation fee from each punter.

What. The. Fuck? Who charges for trivia? And if you’re going to charge for trivia at least advertise the charge. And if you’re not going to advertise the charge collect the money before the trivia starts so we can choose not to take part.

“Is this money going towards the prizes?” Jeremy asked.
“Yes,” answered the money chick.
“Is there a second and third prize?” Jeremy asked.
“No,” answered the money chick.
“So what you’re saying,” we all noted in unison, “is that we’re essentially giving this money directly to that table that’s slaughtering us.”
“Um, yeah,” money chick conceded.

I won’t repeat the avalanche of swearing that followed, although I’m sure you can imagine it. I’ll simply note that Jeremy started preparing a law suit, Ant smashed a beer bottle on the table and looked menacingly around the room, Craig played Tetris on his iPhone with renewed frustration, The Happy Revolutionary started singing The Internationale, and I began preparing this angry blog post in my mind.

But we played on, taking satisfaction from the way that MC Gerald looked uncomfortable every time he had to say The; Fleshlight’s out loud when he called the scores, and alternating between writing “John Surname” (who’d pissed off early) and “;;;; ;;;;” every time we didn’t know the answer.

ps/- Here’s Jeremy’s take on the incident. What? Us groupthink?

Being forced to cancel my holiday by a sprained ankle last week made me so angry that I decided to un-cancel it to teach that ankle a lesson and give myself a reputation for decisiveness and courage. So I drove up to the Grampians (albeit a day late) and hobbled around for a couple of days getting some nature up me and clearing my mind. Bushwalking in mountains is truly good for the soul.

While tramping around I stalked an echidna;

admired the view;

saw some awesome Aboriginal rock art;

saw some woeful proofreading on government signs;

drove past the most craptastic of all of Australia’s “big” things;

and showed that ankle who was boss.

GrodsCorp is pleasured to announce that long time GrodsReader, Bron, has joined the GrodsTeam as a regular contributor. As a filthy Sydneysider (not that there’s anything wrong with that; some of my best friends are from Sydney) she will bring a much needed non-Melbourne perspective to this site and will also breathe new life into the tired Fleshlight genre. We look forward to publishing her upcoming 40,000 word thesis on the overuse of ellipses in contemporary English written discourse as seen from a feminine gender perspective.

Welcome aboard… Bron!

I’d like to hear a round of applause for The; Fleshlight’s [sic] who came second in pub trivia last night. The combined talents of Craig, The Editor, Jeremy and myself weren’t quite good enough to stave off a table of New Idea reading women*. Also Jeremy spent the whole time complaining that he’s not down “wit da kids”.

Fo’ real.

*Tap

______________________
The Editor edits…

At the risk of attracting a beating from John for editing his post, I’d like to add that we missed out on first place by one point. One point that we gave away to the winning team in the first round.

Here’s how it happened.

The question was “what are the two superpowers that Hiro Nakamura from the TV show Heroes has?” Now, I’ve never seen the show but the other guys were across it. We wrote “time travel” and “teleportation”. When reading out the answers MC Jess (of Ausculture and Defamer fame) said that a team had written “space travel” instead of “teleportation” and she asked the floor if it should be marked correct. I argued — loudly and strenuously — that although space travel technically means moving from one place to another its common useage implies travel outside of Earth. After a few minutes of verbal slanging between me and the other table I conceded only to avoid the riot that was about to start. That point cost us the game.

So what do you think, GrodsReaders? Should I have conceded or should I have stuck to my guns?

It’s been another bloody scorcher here in Melbourne with the temperature hitting a bee’s dick under 40 degrees for the third or fourth day in a row. But as much as it’s been uncomfortable for average Melburnians, spare a thought for those people amongst us who sport a full coat of fur and for whom it’s been so very difficult to cool off. Normally when I get home from work Napoleon comes running down the hallway to greet me but this afternoon he didn’t move from his spot between the couches where he lay panting and lifeless.

So I threw a glass of water over him.

“I have filed this away in my memory and will exact revenge when you least expect it.”

The Daily Telegraph today broke the story of 43-year-old Jeff Fenech’s ill-advised embarrassing shock boxing comeback, quoting the three-time world champion as saying:

“I’ve got three months to train and I’ll train like never before.”

In a GrodsCorp exclusive, we can reveal that he ain’t joking.

A couple of weeks ago McBec and I were laying in bed reading (exciting, no?) when we heard a bizarre noise coming from the hallway. It sounded kind of like this: sliiiiide, thump; sliiiiide, thump; sliiiiide, thump; sliiiiide, thump. Intrigued, I got up and went to investigate. I found Napoleon sitting on the floor, neck craned upwards, staring at a picture hook that had recently been made vacant by McBec’s neverending picture rotation game. Closer inspection of the wall indicated that Napoleon had been painting it for us.

The picture hook is circled and the section of wall indicated by the arrow has been enlarged below.

If you look closely inside those circles you’ll see sets of three vertical dirty paw pad lines from where Napoleon has desperately tried to climb the wall to “catch” the picture hook.

And just in case you forget what the gorgeous little shithead looks like here’s a picture I took of him chillaxing on the back porch yesterday.

Lazy Sunday afternoon

It’s that time of the year here around GrodsHQ when we load our hard rubbish onto the footpath and watch the vultures pick it over before the council trucks even arrive. McBec and I were carrying a broken-down old bookshelf that has been superceded out of the house this afternoon when I declared “twenty bucks says this’ll be gone by tomorrow morning.”

It was gone ten minutes later. I shit you not. And we live on a dead-end street with virtually zero pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

UPDATE (6:55pm): Broken VCR gone too.

At the risk of turning this site into a blogospheric My Career liftout, I’d like to put out a call to any GrodsReaders who might be interested in doing a small graphic design job in exchange for a little bit of beer money. Want details? Drop me a line at grodscorp (at) grods (dot) com.

GrodsCorp is taking an age to load today for some reason. An email has been sent to the hosting company’s technical support department and it is being duly ignored. Hopefully we’ll be back to normal before too long.

UPDATE (4.40pm): And we’re back! Seems that a stats plugin I had running (Wassup) decided overnight to cause a bit of hell. No apparent reason; just felt like it.

GrodsCorp favourite Chris Johnston has written about Heath Ledger. The article, naturally, excels at nothingness, but it does contain this line:

The result, though, was a sick and sad and talented boy who stopped breathing.

Oh, so that’s how people die.

So I had yesterday morning off work because I was attending a training course from 12pm to 5pm. I had a bit of a sleep in and got up at 7am feeling relaxed. Went the gym, ate a leisurely breakfast over the paper, read the intertubes a bit. Relaxed. The rain meant that I was going to have to catch a tram instead of ride my bike but this would give me a chance to listen to some music on the headphones and relax some more. At 10.30am I got a call from work and found out I had to drop in on the way to the course to pick up some paperwork, which meant I was going to be unable to make it from home to school to the city on public transport by midday so I was going to have to ride my bike.

And it had started pissing down rain a little bit harder.

So I waited for a little gap in the rain and pedaled off to school. Got there in a surprisingly dry state and picked up my package. Wanted to wait for another gap in the rain but the start time for the course was approaching and I had to set off regardless. Not very relaxed anymore by this point.

About 15 minutes into my 20 minutes ride to the venue I got a flat tire. It was pissing down rain. I was running late. I was hungry. I needed caffeine. I was completely unrelaxed.

I finally made it to the registration desk at the venue just as people were entering the conference room. The caterers were putting away the sandwiches and the coffee. I managed to beg the dude for one triangle of an egg-and-lettuce sanger and a cup of coffee. I walked into the conference room dripping wet, insufficiently caffeinated, and completely, utterly, unrelaxed.

After the course it took me an hour to walk my dead bike home. I met Craig at the pub in Brunswick and drank two pints of Guinness in about four minutes flat.

How do, Grodcorpuscles, I’m back from my winter sojourn to Europe. I’ll make a post about it later, once the jetlag has cleared and I’ve toiled my way through a month of washing. In the meantime, check out the cover of this snazzy book my neice is starting the school year with - the title is at once misleading and accurate: