And now, thanks to the literary editors at Coles, there’s Amelia:

The best part was when she rhymed “nice” with “nice”.

Anyway, time for a GrodsChallenge. Whoever writes the best poem about the most unspectacular grocery item gets to lick the cake-mix off my beater.*

Have at it!

* Not a euphemism, you depraved Leftists.

Oh, and bugger me with a fish-fork if the woman who won isn’t a dead ringer for a certain Pamela Allen children’s book character:

Now, I know what you’re all thinking … but no, I don’t mean politically. I might be a pernicious Leftist, but I’m not that pernicious — he’ll need to be at least two years old before I read him The Communist Manifesto, and I’ll wait until he’s mastered Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before bothering with The Internationale.

Instead, I’ve started him on an area second only in importance to politics — sport. Lesson no.1 was football codes, and I’m delighted to say he passed with flying colours:

Download audio file (indoctrination.mp3)

(Transcript here if you can’t understand babytalk)

Next week, I think I’ll introduce him to Club Wah’s superb Ashes for the Ignorant series.

Ant Rogenous: Do you want to have sex?

E Rogenous: No.

Pwned.

What is it with Teh Left and making treasonous wog shit on this most sacred and patriotic of days?

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.

But after having been alerted to the fact AWH had been deblogrolled by Tim Blair, MK tonight alleged — get this — that AWH had actually paid Tim for the privelege of being included in such illustrious company as J.F. Dreck, Andrea Harris and Andrew Bolt!

My own feeling is that, even though Tim once famously rattled a tin at his readers so he could buy himself a shiny new laptop, it’s got bullshit written all over it.

But it’s an explosive allegation nonetheless, and it raises several questions … the most important of which is this: how much would GrodsCorp have to shell out to get a guernsey?

Apparently it was written at the beginning of the 20th century by one Hway Ung, a Chinese scholar in Melbourne:

I went … to see the game they call Foo-pah … It is played in winter heaven, for it requires top endurance and activity … Men on one side try to kick goose-egg pattern ball between two poles that represent a gate or entrance. They run like hares, charge each other like bulls, knock each other down rushing in pursuit of the ball to send it through the enemy’s pole… 

I defy anyone to do better than that.

UPDATE: Oh, dear. Just out of curiosity, I plugged a line from the above quote into Google and came up with this:

The following excerpts were written in 1899 by a Chinese visitor, describing his experience in America (Hwuy-yung, A Chinaman’s Opinion of Us and of His Own Country, London: Chatto and Windus, 1927).  He was writing for Chinese readers who were eager to know what Americans were really like.

Authors Paula Hunt and Glenn “the Bolt” Manton: research FAIL.

UPDATE II: Do click on that link, though. There’s some very funny stuff, including this earth-shattering observation about Americans:

Their arms and ears do not reach to the ground, as we depict them.

“Hey, Aunt Gladys — make sure you pick up the paper on Thursday. I think you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise!”

Anyway, if you’re not too familiar with the ancient work, it’s probably not quite what you’d expect. Forget about the infamous 64 sexual positions — that part occupies only 10 of Vatsyayana’s original 36 chapters and, frankly, is about as useful a guide for lovers as Weekend at Bernie’s is for apprentice morticians.

The bulk of the Kama Sutra concerns itself with how one should live one’s life — not just in lurve, but also in general. Practical advice covers a diverse range of topics, from pseudo feng shui right through to convoluted schemes for seducing your mate’s missus.

Now, I can’t vouch for the quality or authenticity of the translation of the book I rediscovered on my bookshelf the other day, inspiring this post — it was published by Roli Books and now appears to be out of print, and my own Sanskrit has been rusty since I stopped speaking it in the 16th century — but if it’s in any way representative of the genuine article, the Kama Sutra is a work of comic genius.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here are three of the book’s best passages, quoted verbatim.

1) On general hygiene:

You should bathe daily, rub yourself with oil every other day, use soap every third day and shave every fourth day. You should do all this without fail and rub the sweat of the armpits every now and then.

2) For the laydeez:

The rules for a courtesan to make a quick fortune are simple:

• First check your man out carefully.
• Secondly, make him fall desperately in love with you.
• Then fleece him well.
• When he’s broke, throw him out without remorse.

3) For mah homies (on which women are the easiest to seduce):

Those who stand at the doorways of their houses; who peer out on to the street; one who steals glances at men; one who is jealous, covetous, immoral or barren. Also those who are lazy, cowardly, vulgar, foul smelling, sick or old.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and be the best damn lovers you can be.

And so Conservapedia was born.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — demonstrates the rank imbecility of this website more than its entry on Barack Hussein (!!1!) Obama. The whole article is worth reading, just to marvel at how desperate and deranged its authors are — but for your convenience, here are a few highlights:

Obama used his Muslim middle name when sworn in as President,^[7][8] and chose not to use the Bible for his real, private oath. Elected by claiming he’s a Christian, Obama has since avoided attending church on Christmas and Sundays.^[9]

Obama refers to America in the third person, as a foreigner would.

To announce his trip to Berlin in July 2008, Obama used posters which show a marked similarity to posters of Lenin.^[14]

Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for “Pakistan” rather than the common American one.^[36]

Obama has consistently shown himself to be an elitist who looks down on “ordinary” Americans.

Obama’s smears usually fall into two categories: race-baiting and distortions.

Seriously, go and have a look — there’s plenty more gold where the above nuggets came from. And if you have time while you’re there, do yourself a favour and check out the references for the entry’s most outlandish claims (the Lenin poster one is particularly laughable). They make Leon Bertrand QC’s spectacularly inept fumbling for evidence to support his claims seem like the work of a perfectly persuasive genius.

But the last word goes to Wikipedia itself, whose Conservapedia entry lays bare the kind of attitudes that led to its creation:

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project written from a young Earth creationist, Americentric, right-wing^[2] and Conservative Christian point of view.

[...]

Several articles on the site have had reputations for bias and inaccuracy.^[9][10][11] Conservapedia has also been seen as part of a trend of conservative and Christian-themed Web sites imitating the format of mainstream sites to provide a right-wing antidote or Christian alternative.^[3][12]

Fair dinkum — even if I’d been stupid enough to hitch my wagon to the ideology of the Right all those years ago, I would still be mortally embarrassed by the abortion (pun intended) that is Conservapedia. I wonder how many “conservatives” are.

Fifteen-month-old Baby is really beginning to talk now, and he’s able to name a handful of animals and make their noises. So I decided I’d make a game of drawing a few creatures for him to identify.

Now, I’m well aware that drawing isn’t a strength of mine … but there are worse people to get stuck playing Pictionary with, I reckon.

Turns out Baby begged to differ when I drew this dog:

He looked at the board; looked up at me; looked back at the board; looked up at me …

“Meow?” he said.

Off I ran to tell E Rogenous my latest hilarious “kids say the darndest things” story. She looked at the board; looked up at me; looked back at the board; looked up at me …

“Is that a nose or a penis?” she said. “And why does its tongue have testicles?”

PWNED. By every member of the family.

Mis dedos! Mis dedos! Por el amor de Dios, ¿DÓNDE ESTÁN MIS DEDOS!!1!

Oh, está bien … aquí están. 

Indeed, the government’s warnings and Teh Right’s fears seemed positively ludicrous while we were there. Everywhere we went, smiling locals wanted to chat and have their photos taken with us. Their approaches were never short of being polite, welcoming and perfectly innocent.

Or so we were led to believe…

On close inspection of our holiday snaps, it turns out we were wrong to be so carefree. Pernicious extremists were trying to kill us at every opportunity.

The photo below still sends a shiver down my spine. It was taken at a 1200-year-old Buddhist monument — which should have set off alarm bells immediately because, as we’re told, Muslims hate freedom of religion and therefore couldn’t have been visiting the site for any reason other than to destroy it. Oblivious to the danger and having proceeded to the top of the monument, we were approached by a group whose ostensible desire was to have a photo taken with the handsome Baby.

I’ve noted, for your untrained Leftist eyes, just a few of the ways our lives were put in jeopardy by these bloodthirsty lunatics:

1. Wiener kid has clearly swallowed a large quantity of explosives.
2. “We’ve got two of ’em, Osama!” Phone poised to play lethal Crazy Frog ringtone as soon as bin Laden returns the call.
3. Clove cigarette smells delicious but is killing us slowly with second-hand smoke.
4. Provocative hint of homosexualistism designed to distract me from imminent danger.
5. Anthrax residue.

Honestly, it’s a miracle that we made it back to Australia alive. Next Christmas we’re going to the United States, where no one ever gets murdered at random.

If you are planning to attend this event, please note: do not, under any circumstances, carry this image in the back of your mind while Mr Braithwaite is on stage:

Enjoy the show.

But that’s not really the point of this post. While flicking through the pictures, I was reminded all over again what a weird and wonderful country India is — which was a welcome distraction amid the tales and images of carnage, and the fucking idiots who wasted no time in exploiting the tragedy to score cheap political points.

Anyway, this photo in particular made me laugh. It’s taken not far from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and shows a young E Rogenous posing for a portrait while enduring the kind of hilariously shameless curiosity visitors to India attract at every turn:

I imagine a few conversations in offices around Mumbai’s financial district later that afternoon sounded something like this:

PRABHU:  What’d you get up to on your lunch break, Sanjay?

SANJAY:  Watched some white chick having her portrait drawn.

PRABHU:  …

SANJAY:  …

PRABHU:  … sweet.

Embarrassment aside, though, the portrait itself was worth every rupee.

But one of his comments today over at An Onymous Lefty, in response to a woman who has floated the idea of organising a “recently single” party, is his most outstanding effort to date:

Problem with you Miss P is you look a bit like someone,I liked very much.And my dogged pursuit,was in the end a sort of Humphrey B.Bear all suit,and no clown inside. Glad I wouldn’t be at that party anyway.For myself,rather than any other reason.Keep your alcohol consumption low,after all you don’t want to be a binge head. Although I suppose the cure for that,is having to face the next day,by pre -arrangement a shampoo of onion juice freshly squeezed!? Which I find myself is a luxury ,whilst we still have onion growers and workers.

God bless you, philiptravers — you’re a national treasure.

But the Young Libs are, at least, authentically undergraduate. Miranda Devine, on the other hand, is old enough to know better. Yet she too threw her weight behind Make Australia Fair – and with accusations that were even more risible. Why, there’s a Brisbane school, don’t you know, that celebrates Mao Zedong as a “freedom fighter”, right next to George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi – Liberal Senator Brett Mason popped in once and caught them in the act.

Devine’s revelations about Brisbane’s Long March High are not just nutty. They, like the Make Australia Fair campaign, epitomise the peculiar brand of petulant victimology that now grips the populist Right. The Young Liberals’ education campaign website reads, in fact, like one big pity party, a compendium of stories of youthful Tories oppressed by mean teachers, and books with which they don’t agree and posters they see on university walls.

“I have found the constant liberal-bagging, jokes and Labor pushing agenda threatening and frustrating,” confesses one disconsolate young reactionary. “In class discussions I constantly feel like my opinions aren’t welcome and quite often I do not say anything.”

But hang on a second. Aren’t the Liberals the champions of individual responsibility? Don’t the Young Libs themselves proudly proclaim their opposition to the “nanny state” and declare that “while we believe the government should provide the individual with the best opportunities possible, we recognise that the onus is on the individual to seize the opportunity”?

Didn’t, in fact, Ms Devine herself devote her next column to an attack on the whole notion of government intervention?

And there’s plenty more gold where that came from. Read it and weep, wingnuts.

* Writing, in this instance, in Crikey, which I can’t access because I’m a tightarse non-subscriber.

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:

And while we’re posing the big food-related questions here at GrodsCorp … is it wrong to read cookbooks on the toilet?

The chorus went a little something like this:

So tell me
Why should I let you go
Give me twenty good reasons
I need to know

Twenty. Presumably this means if the ex only managed to come up with 19 bulletproof reasons for hating this fellow’s guts, he’d politely decline her request to be free of him and continue stalking her.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Surely anyone who’d write a song about not being able to accept that a relationship is over is bound to be a top bloke and a good catch. Hell, the missus just probably never truly appreciated how much he adored her and how lucky she was — the ungrateful, aloof cow!

But then, today, I googled the lyrics of the chorus and discovered the song was by the hilariously named Thirsty Merc:

Suddenly I understood that one good reason was all the justification she’d ever need:

Rai, my dear, you have a moustache that looks as though you’ve dropped your dessert spoon at the Coogee Bay Hotel and thought: “You know what? To hell with it. I’m just going to eat this complimentary gelato with my face.”

As such, I find the very thought of touching you repugnant and would sooner engage in sexual congress with a frightened echidna than spend another minute in your company.

Now please, get out of my hydrangeas. And take that fucking guitar with you.

And it doesn’t.

The short version of the story, just in case any Andrew Bolt readers have stumbled by (we all know you imbeciles don’t bother reading links), is that a woman kicked up a fuss over seating at a pub function and was allegedly given a free bowl of poo-smeared ice cream as a “placatory gesture”.

I worked in the hospitality industry for many years and saw some horrendous things (and heard of worse) … but this despicable act would take the chocolates, so to speak.

Anyway, here’s the bit that really impressed me:

Ms Whyte said she realised something was amiss when she brought a spoonful to her lips and “the stench went through my nostrils”.

“I retched and spat it out into the napkin,” she told News Ltd.

Notice the missing sentence between those two? I imagine it went something like this:

“SO I TOOK A BITE ANYWAY…”

Fair. Fucking. Dinkum. What would have to have been on this woman’s ice cream to dissuade her from putting a spoonful into her gob?

As well as uni graduates who’ve gone on to become ABC sub-editors, one would hope.

You are not Brian Flanagan and my 10 x 2 Hour Metcard is not a piña colada.

The left — those wholly responsible for the subprime crisis — are complaining on every outlet that they “had a deal” that would have passed into law to allow the rescue of the financial industry but for the intercession of John McCain.
[...]

KG, who appears never to have hatched an original idea, is quoting here from fellow right-wing initialism GW of Wolf Howling, who helpfully illustrates his own execrable post with the following diagram:

Cute. But like so many wingtards, GW neglects to tell the whole story.

Here’s the second diagram from the educational Economix 4 Cockhedz series, which illustrates how free-market capitalists can socialise their losses when their avarice catches up with them (and the people they’ve exploited) and everything goes to shit:

See? Let no one say we’re not all about balance here at GrodsCorp.

UPDATE: The $US700 billion ($840 billion) “bailout” package has been approved. I hope you swallowed, free-market capitalism.

Yesterday, while getting dressed in the semi-darkness, I reached for the last piece of my ensemble — this necklace I bought in India in 2003, which I’ve been in the habit of wearing almost daily ever since:

I picked it up, pulled it around my neck, then plugged the ends into my ears.

I blame mp3 players.

12.35pm: “As the mother of one of those troops [about to serve in Iraq], [McCain] is exactly the kind of man I want as Commander in Chief.” Ding! Fries are done Hit the bell.

Whose bell? The only Americans prepared to be consumed by patriotic zeal upon hearing a platitude like that are bound to be Republican voters anyway.

More importantly, I’m not convinced that reminding the rest of the voting public about their nation’s involvement in a vastly unpopular war, and tying John McCain into the narrative, is such a great idea — no matter how many times Andrew has shot his Bolt declared victory for the US and its allies.

But what should have been a thoroughly enjoyable milestone victory over Target Practice turned out to be a drag for several reasons:

1. They were Emos.
2. They were violent.
3. There was a girl on the team, who got away with being the roughest of all of them because the referee clearly didn’t feel right about penalising a girl — and we didn’t feel right about decking her.
4. They were utterly humourless about their abilities (sic).
5. They pretty much conceded defeat in the first few minutes by deciding to defend for the entire match — an astonishing strategy, given how many goals we’ve had scored against us.
6. During the match, Testiclegate erupted, with one of their players accusing a GroupThinker of “grabbing his nuts”. Bullshit — we only ever do that to people in the bar afterwards, and almost always after buying them a house riesling.

Still, a win’s a win. Huzzah.

Toaf — who, to the eternal shame of every other GrodsCommenter*, was the only person to tip a GroupThinkFC victory — takes out the betting prize: a season pass with front-row tickets to our remaining matches, valued at $0.00.

But since he’s currently living in Nairobi, we’ll be auctioning it on GrodsBay … as soon as The Editor designs and gets it working.

* With the exception of EC, who declined to predict a result but — as always — declared her undying support for TehPeople’sFootballClub.

So he applied:

I’ll let you know how the interview goes.

Neither of us has won a match this season (Target Practice’s “win” being the result of a now-defunct team’s forfeit).

GroupThinkFC has conceded two more goals than Target Practice but has also scored two more, which puts the aggregate slightly in our favour when the ratio of goals conceded to goals scored is taken into account.

TehPeople’sFootballClub is coming off a gallant 5-9 loss to the top-of-the-table Kectus last week, while Target Practice also found the back of the net five times in a slightly wider losing margin (5-11) to third-place Hennessy FC.

Both sides have clearly been salivating over this match for weeks — perhaps more profusely than all the other teams salivate over the prospect of playing either of us.

Let there be no doubt: if this were a prizefight, Don King himself would pull out all the stops to promote it.*

So I’m taking bets on the result in comments: correct result and closest to the score will win a prize so awesome in its awesomeness that they’ll be shocked into a seemingly underwhelmed stupor.

NB: An injury cloud hangs over The Editor, who dislocated his big toe during last week’s match. His absence on Friday night would be certain to have an impact on the result, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide what that impact might be.**

I won’t go into Curthoys’ piece in any significant detail*, but I would like to share a withering passage from it, on the increasingly laughable Hitchens — a prime target of whose fiery rhetoric (like that of many of the “new atheists”) Curthoys rightly identifies as “Islam and the Middle Eastern Semitic cultures of early monotheism”:

Hitchens, these days, is all about lurid performance for quick returns. Straining for a culminating flourish in the war on religion, he reaches for a classic trope of anti-Semitism: the Semite as mimic and hostile infiltrator of a superior culture. The technologically adept [September 11] hijackers, he fumes, are ‘continuing [Islam's] long history of plagiarism’ for the purposes of negation and destruction. By the end of his diatribe, Hitchens becomes a ludicrous Crusader wannabe, searching for light and right amongst atavistic barbarians. What is at stake is nothing less than the struggle ‘to transcend our prehistory’, to fight the ultimate battle against that ‘enemy’ who, with their ‘gnarled hands’, would ‘drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars’. Sounds like a case for pre-emptive war.

Hitchens is the thinking man’s KG!

* First, because the piece in question isn’t available online and I can’t be hammered typing out any more of it; and second, because someone of my limited intellect and lack of patience is unlikely to do it much justice.

After reproducing a fawning post by US blogger Dick McDonald — in which he declares, among things, “My first impression is that we may have found our Margaret Thatcher”! — das gut Herr Doktor yesterday took the adulation one teensy-weensy step further:

I predict that she will one day be President of the United States.

Level-headed, insightful and well researched — as usual. Who could possibly argue?

I’d make this one a GrodsCaptionComp, but I’m fairly sure I’ve nailed it in the headline.

In the meantime, we’ll enjoy seeing more of this and this:

Cockhead.

Some poor interstate bastard isn’t getting a root when he gets home tonight.

That’s only the first three paragraphs! And I’ve said nothing about the bowel-twistingly tortured “lightning” puns stinking up the lead.*

David Kirk, Ron Walker and all you other corrupt, myopic, semi-literate corporate-bot arselickers who have played a part in tearing the guts out of a once-fine media organisation (I’m looking at you, Fred Hilmer) — take a bow. 

* Until now.

Damn you to the fiery bowels of hell, The Age, The Australian, the Herald Sun or whatever the fuck you were!

Oh, and paperboy — you just made The List.

The usual “family groups” are up in arms about the damage 24-year-old PE teacher Rhys Uhlich’s involvement in such a program could do to the school’s pupils, and children in general.

But the school — Sacred Heart Primary — and its students have reportedly thrown their support behind the teacher.

Not to be outdone, the Herald Sun — in what seems a blatant attempt to cook up some moral outrage among its readers and ensure a follow-up story with which it can bash the teacher, the program and “community standards” as a whole — has devised an online poll.

There are several honest ways such a poll question might be worded to ascertain readers’ views on the “controversy” — “Do you think a teacher’s participation in a modelling contest sends the wrong message to children?” is one.

But here’s the Herald Sun’s not-in-any-way-loaded question:

I urge everyone to head over there and vote “yes”, just to bugger up the online editor’s news schedule for tomorrow.

On Monday (Eddie) McGuire lectured Collingwood players about their responsibilities and highlighted how much sacrifice club officials, including himself, had made.

It is believed Mr McGuire indicated being president had cost him “four or five” Gold logies.

My valve!

One day, when I was about 10, one of the bigger kids in my street took a rare afternoon off beating me to terrorise me with what he’d obviously just learned about the birds and the bees.

He explained that a man inserts his stiffy into a woman’s fanny — which widens somehow to accommodate it — and moves it around for a while until some “spoof” comes out. This, in turn, leads to pregnancy — unless the woman is taking pills or the man has a kind of balloon over his doodle.

I was familiar enough with doodles, fannies and balloons, but couldn’t imagine what spoof was. When I asked him to explain, he said it was thick and chunky, and that it had “beans” in it.

This only confused me more, since I could only imagine beans to be of the Heinz variety. But I didn’t want to push my luck, so I indicated my understanding and took my leave of him. 

A few weeks later, I noticed a teenager at a bus stop doing that revolting thing where you spit on the ground, then spit again — and again — seeing how big a puddle you can make. Once the bus had arrived and he’d left, I went over to inspect his spit puddle — which, I had to admit, was a pretty impressive size.

When I got there, I was shocked to find that it was unusually thick. And it had what looked like chunks in it — possibly half-digested food.

“Oh man,” I said to myself. “That bloke just spoofed everywhere!”

The next time I ran into the bully, I told him what I’d seen. He beat the shit out of me.

Absolute, unadulterated, solid gold.

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.

Without looking up from my mug, I called out: “G’day, John!” But he just walked straight past me without acknowledging or returning my greeting.

Since I’ve known John for several years, this seemed a bit odd. So I looked up as he continued on his way to the toilets.

It wasn’t John — it was a particularly masculine-looking woman whose name I still haven’t memorised.

She didn’t say anything about it, hopefully because she either didn’t hear me or didn’t twig that I was talking to her — although we were the only two people within 10 metres of each other, so I’d be surprised if the poor woman didn’t realise I was referring to her.

I’m dreadfully embarrassed, of course; but the main thing I’ve been mulling over for the past 24 hours is this question:

Who could claim to be more offended by my gaffe: the woman, who I mistook for a man; or my mate John, who I mistook for a lesbian?

* Not his real name

As usual, Piers nails it. I, for one, won’t rest until my community — the standards of which are altogether too high — is totally fucked.

 (source)

2) If you’re determined to shave without observing Rule 1, only do so on an afternoon when you haven’t invited your mother around for an early dinner.

Truth be told, I wasn’t in a good mood to begin with. About two minutes in to the walk, my dog bounded off to say “hai!” to a young boxer on a lead. It was an entirely friendly meeting, complete with mutual bum-sniffing and wagging tails. But since the boxer’s crabby-looking owner had a face like a puckered arsehole freshly buggered with a lemon wedge, I called my dog to come back — which he duly ignored.

As I walked over to grab my dog, who was still having a great old time with his new mate, the boxer’s owner glared at me. “Why don’t you try putting him on a lead?” she snarled.

And instead of pointing out that this is precisely how dogs socialise in a designated off-lead park, and that anyone who is uncomfortable about it should consider walking their precious mutt where leads are mandatory, I answered her question with another question: “Why don’t you go and fuck yourself?”

Thus was the tone set for the rest of the walk.

Before too long, I noticed a ruckus approaching and turned to find two boys in their early teens riding BMXs recklessly with large branches balanced on their handlebars — god only knows why.

“Gits,” I thought as they zoomed past.

Some way further along the path — which winds its way between a creek and a densely wooded area — I came around a bend and saw my dog sniffing at one of the BMXs, which had been abandoned on the creek side of the path.  I was a good 20 metres behind my dog at this stage, and at first couldn’t see where the kids had got to.

As I neared the bike and my dog, I heard some scuffling and saw some movement from among the trees — and suddenly noticed that the little bastards were hurling sticks and stones at my unsuspecting, defenceless pooch.

So I picked up the bike and threw it in the creek.

In any case, it’s a big improvement over this bloke’s previous business venture, which was a complete disaster.

This isn’t just lazy, obnoxious and ugly — it’s also a flagrant act of cadential vandalism. Seeing someone do it is just as exasperating as being exposed to a musical phrase where the performer hits the dominant or subdominant note, then puts down his instrument and walks off to buy a newspaper.

Where’s my resolution, you bastard? You got me to this point of expectation and you owe me a tonic note. I don’t care that eventually I might hear one in the correct key in a car horn or some tweeniebopper’s $7.95 mobile ringtone. I don’t even care that I’ll forget about it in a few minutes; that the anxious feeling in my gut will go away and somehow I’ll be able to get on with my life. I want my cadence, NOW.

But back to these smokers. When they’ve finished gargling mouthwash in the morning, instead of spitting it straight into the sink, do they let it dribble out slowly while they’re kissing their husband or wife goodbye?

I think not.

When they’re cooking pasta and it’s reached the point where it’s perfectly al dente, do they leave it in the water and only take out as many strands of spaghetti as they need per forkful, until eventually they’ve had enough and can move on to dessert — a pudding they eat straight out of a 200°C oven?

Of course they don’t.

When their stomachs have finished digesting this food, instead of firing the waste matter into the toilet bowl with the requisite number of bowel contractions and sphincteral cuts, do they just allow it to tumble out one step at a time while they’re walking to the bus stop?

Well, maybe — it might explain why they feel the need to surround themselves with the fug of tobacco smoke any time they’re out of doors.

.

You’ll notice I ended this post without a satisfactory conclusion. That’s because I’m sure it’ll be read by at least one person who smokes in the fashion described above. HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?!!!1!

“Oh, and hand me my apologetics hat — it’s going to be a long day.”

Seriously.

As soon as I’d opened the door, he raced down to the back fence. This isn’t unusual either, as there are possums on the fence every night and he can’t even begin to think about lifting a leg until he’s chased these voyeuristic marsupials away.

For a dog that sniffs young girls’ arses in parks, he’s surprisingly modest.

Anyway, what was unusual was the sound he began making after he’d run behind the shed in pursuit of one of these creatures. It was a cross between a bark, a yelp, a howl, an ambulance siren running on a fast-dying battery, and the gurgling shriek of outrage you’d hear from MK if his mummy ever found and destroyed his stash of limited-edition gay Nazi leftist porn.

I ran down to the corner of the yard and saw my dog staggering backwards, still making that horrible noise, dragging in front of him the most outrageous lip piercing I’ve ever seen: a fully grown and particularly pissed-off brush-tailed possum.

He couldn’t shake his head to force the to possum let go because it had a claw hooked right through his fleshy, dangly Weimaraner lip, which was clearly causing him a lot of pain. And the possum obviously had no intention of letting go until this brute stopped making that hellish racket.

There was only one thing I could do: I booted humanely encouraged the possum away from my dog, after which the possum skidded along the grass for a bit thanked me kindly and made his way up the nearest tree.

You’d think Weimar Rogenous would have a) learned his lesson, or b) been grateful for my intervention. Or maybe even both. Instead, he stood under the tree barking up at his attacker — fairly begging for another shot at it — until E came down from the house and dragged him inside so we could examine his wounds and put Betadine on them.

Dogs. Who’d have them? 

This is the happiest day of my life.

Though the police kept the two groups separated for the duration of the protest, our presence in front of the clinic was a complete success: the bigots left, defeated, after about half an hour of non-violent confrontation and fiendishly clever chants. (I particularly enjoyed the subversive “we demand free 24-hour child care” one: take that, whichever side of the child-care debate you stand on … whoever you are!)

Anyway, that’s enough of my blathering. Pictures, after all, speak louder than words. But since no one took any particularly good photos of the event, we’ll have to make do with the next best thing: The Editor’s brilliant documentary.

Anyone not moved by this remarkable film is dead inside. And a git.

PS: Special thanks to GrodsCorp’s own General Bron, who did an outstanding job rallying the troops for this protest. Getting a ragtag bunch of booze-soaked Lefties out of bed and into the bitter Melbourne air before 10am on a Saturday — with nary a latte-stand in sight — is quite an achievement, but doing it all via email from Sydney is another matter. Awesome, awesome work.

So thanks again, Bron! And we’ll all see you down here for the next one.

My brother, ever the helpful soul, kindly hung it up for him.

You, sir, have been pwned.

“In … that … order … please,” he barked at the poor kid behind the counter, who cowered and shuffled off to assemble the bastard’s breakfast with the terrified caution of a Parkinson’s sufferer playing KerPlunk with blasting caps and lit tealights.

A couple of points:

1) Leaving aside the fact that anyone who buys toast from a café is a chump, anyone who is particular to the point of discourtesy about the application of condiments to said toast should bloody well make it himself before he leaves for work.

2) Either this man has a palate so inconceivably discerning that it can distinguish yeast, salt, animal fat, fruit peel and sugar by the sequence in which they were placed on the bread, despite all of the ingredients having entered his mouth at precisely the same time; or he’s just a garden-variety wanker who gets some perverse thrill out of making life difficult for people.

Oh, and Vegemite, butter and marmalade on toast? Eat shit, Hollywood.

They’re lying.

I blame Seinfeld. Until 1992, when the episode The Opera went to air, coulrophobia was a relatively rare phenomenon most people hadn’t even considered. In their desperation to prove how quirky and Kramer-like they were, unimaginative Seinfeld devotees began claiming this phobia en masse as a ready-made point of individual difference.

Obviously, it doesn’t work when everyone else is saying the same thing.

These were the kind of people who railed against anchovies on pizzas in the late 1980s — not because they’d ever eaten anchovies and found them unpalatable, but because Michelangelo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame didn’t like them.

Eventually, the rash of people who claimed to have a fear of clowns became so virulent that it infected the next generation, so that now even people who were barely born when The Opera went to air — like 17-year-old Alamela from Australia’s Next Top Model* — carry on with the painfully unoriginal charade.

In short, when you ask someone about their phobias and they tell you they have a fear of clowns, what they’re really saying is that they have a fear of not being able to come up with a snappy, interesting enough answer.

Essentially, it’s a fear of being seen as dull — which is fair enough. So GrodsCorp is here to help.

Next time you’re tempted to succumb to the tired old clown meme, choose instead a fear from the following list:

       • Ferns
       • Black people
       • Margarine
       • Terry McCrann
       • Wheels

You’ll be an instant hit.

* Yes, I watch it. Get fucked.

Helloooooooo sailor.

Memory lane … Various images from 1991, the last time inflation breached 4 per cent.

Subtle, huh? But did readers take the bait?

And how. Third comment into the thread reads:

This is what you get with Labour (sic).

Posted by: YoungLib 12:12pm today

And, of course, it’s mostly downhill from there. Thank you, NewsLtd.

A reporter and photographer ventured out into Greater Shepparton asking the following question for the newspaper’s “On The Street” section:

If you could learn another language, what would it be and why?

From the responses published, one can only assume (in order of likelihood) that:

1. The opinions editor has a wicked sense of humour
2. Of all the responses received, only six were (barely) fit to publish
3. There were only six respondents, and space and deadline constraints meant all of their answers had to be given a run.

A few stood out. The first was that of 38-year-old Stanhope resident Denise Bowyer who, despite possibly having told a porky-pie about her age, offered the following:

Japenese (sic) so I can understand most of them.

Either Stanhope has an enormous Japanese community whose Engrish is barely intelligible, or Denise believes all Asian-looking people (you know, the ones with the funny eyes) are Nips. I’ll let you decide which is more likely to be the case.

Clint Morris, a 14-year-old Mooroopna resident, puts an even finer point on Denise’s sentiment with his response:

Asian, because there are so many of them here.

Clint’s done away with the folly of trying to pin down these shifty immigrants to individual nationalities — and why not? Since they all look the same, it makes perfect sense that they’d all speak the same imaginary language.

Bill Huylands, 67, of Moama provided what, on the face of it, seems a reasonable enough response:

Spanish, because you can use it anywhere.

Except in Stanhope, of course, where the throngs of incorrigible little foreigners refuse to understand a word of anything but Japenese (sic). And would probably karate-chop you for your insolence anyway, amigo.

The most thoughtful response came from 12-year-old Steven Sutton of Invergordon:

Auslan, so I can understand deaf people.

A terrific answer. Which goes to show that youth need not be a barrier to commonsense and open-mindedness.

“Oh, here we go — E had better watch out now! When your teeth first came out you used to bite my nipple so hard, and by god it hurt!”

Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s lovely talking to my mum about Baby — he’s her first grandchild and she’s every bit the doting grandmother.

But a little piece of me died when she said “nipple”.

[...]
Do you understand how debasing it must be to put your name to the kind of shit that Andrew Bolt has published? The man deserves the Grand High Medal of Rupert for his efforts.

The fact is that Andrew Bolt has been rewarded for his efforts over the past few years, as have several of his News Ltd stable-mates — not by Rupert Murdoch, but by the man who holds the biggest place in his (and their) heart(s): John Winston Howard.

A News Ltd insider emailed me a few weeks ago and revealed, under the condition of anonymity, that shortly after Howard’s ignominious defeat in the 2007 federal election, the former prime minister personally sent a special gift to each of his most sycophantic lickspittles strident supporters in the press; a touching memento of their faithful service over the course of his time in office.

Say what you will about John Howard, but there’s no denying he knows how to look after the people who so vigorously looked after him.

In the first passage, Mills is attempting to explain why Hawke — whose diplomatic skills were regarded highly among world leaders at the time — was never quite successful at “breaking through the starch and reserve of the Japanese”. It made me laugh out loud on the train:

Perhaps his style and abrasive vernacular puzzled them. On one occasion he told Japanese businessmen they would be ‘out of their cotton-picking minds’ if they didn’t support him in the pilots’ dispute; another time he assured the Japanese that Australia wouldn’t play ‘funny buggers’ on protectionism. He was told later that the phrase had been translated for the audience as ‘humorous homosexuals’.

The second passage describes a moment on Brisbane talk-back radio where Hawke “veered back to indiscipline” during the otherwise meticulously managed 1990 election campaign. Indiscipline aside, Hawke’s rebuke serves as a stark reminder of just how far John Howard’s latent racism and cynical opportunism later degraded the moral authority of the prime ministerial office:

On this occasion, when a caller offensively urged Hawke to hold a referendum on Asian immigration, he embarked on a passionate assault on racism. ‘I happen to believe profoundly in the concept that I learned from my father, and that is if you believe in some concept of a God, then if there’s a fatherhood of God then we are all brothers and sisters in this world. So I reject you profoundly in terms of fundamental patriotism for the future of this country, and I reject you with total contempt on moral grounds.’

Sadly, I’m pretty sure we’ll never again hear a prime minister publicly reject a bigoted citizen with “total contempt”. But with any luck we’ve also seen the last prime minister who will treat so many citizens with contempt, while enjoying the shameful cheerleading and apologetics of a most viciously partisan commentariat.

As a daily tram user, I witness one particularly dangerous act of stupidity on a depressingly regular basis: drivers failing to observe the law that they must not pass the rear of a stopped tram, thereby allowing passengers to disembark safely.

In high school, a mate’s mother was killed in such an incident, so I’m especially sensitive about this all-too-common traffic violation. So are tram drivers, but the most severe censure they’re able to give motorists who zoom past their stopped trams is the embarrassingly impotent bell treatment: take that (ding!) and that (ding!) and THAT (dingding!) you naughty man or woman!

Of course, in most cases the drivers are so far beyond the tram by this time that they won’t even hear the bell, let alone realise how close they’ve come to injuring or killing someone. That is, until today.

This morning, at a very busy intersection, I was the last passenger disembarking from my tram. As I stepped down onto the road, I noticed an approaching taxi that didn’t look like it was going to stop. It wasn’t moving very quickly — the traffic light ahead was red — but it showed no intention of slowing down until it reached the stop line.

I held out my hand to indicate that the driver should stop, but he completely ignored me and kept driving. In a remarkable stroke of luck, the planets aligned and the timing was perfect for me to indulge my righteous indignation — so as the taxi drove between me and the tram, I sunk my knee into its back door. Really fucking hard.

It produced what I can only assume was the most satisfying crunching sound since George W Bush fell off his Segway.

Now, at the risk of sounding like an apologist — but hey, some of my best friends are apologists — I’d just like to point out that we’re being prevented from playing at full strength by one significant factor: we still haven’t worked out how to play soccer.

Rest assured, though — once we’ve stopped picking up the ball and I’ve developed a better goal-defending strategy than this, the championship is more or less in the bag.

Get fucked.

I guess the wingnuts were right all along: Al Gore is a fatty boombalada.

It’s dirt cheap and fairly easy to do: just follow these instructions, and if you make sure all your equipment is sterilised you should have very little trouble.

Oh, and for those who don’t know, home-made ginger beer is alcoholic. Hooray.

All it took was a little taste … so much for my solemn pledge to stay clean.

Anyhow, a few moments ago I came across possibly THE most absurd thing I’ve ever read in what we’re expected to believe is a forum for adult ideas and debate.

Aurora, a blogger for the execrable Midnight Sun, was being questioned in this comment thread about her scant regard for accuracy and citations. In response to THR’s challenge to back up her outrageous claim that New Zealand prime minister Helen Clarke “is just marginally to the right of Stalin”, she had the following to say:

I’ll say it again. I’ll also state that I think she’s a snake and a dragon, a devourer, a demon. The ugliness of her ideologies can be seen coming out in the features of her face. This is an interesting natural phenomenon you can observe in evil individuals.

Laugh? I almost shat.

I am neither pro nor anti-abortion, but I virulently oppose this kind of wanton emotional violence.

Contrary to what these zealots seem to believe, the decision to have an abortion is not undertaken lightly. The overwhelming number of people who use abortion clinics do so under extreme stress, and arrive there having made the most excruciating decision of their lives.

Do these (mostly Christian) crusaders honestly believe their god would condone their judgemental bullying, or even reward them for it in the hereafter? The god I learned about in 15-odd years of Catholic catechism would take a particularly dim view of such despicable passive-aggression.

Anyway, my contempt for these people was thrown into sharp relief today when I received an email from my wife, E. She’d returned home from a walk with Baby Rogenous to find an anti-abortion leaflet in the letterbox, containing several bloody photographs of aborted foetuses.

E and I suffered the pain of a miscarriage two years ago. It hasn’t gone away; I suspect it never will. She was, understandably, distraught upon seeing the pictures.

Do the people who peddle this kind of indiscriminate emotional terrorism give a fuck? Does the elderly woman next door to us, who in her youth suffered years of failed attempts at pregnancy, have anything to gain by seeing these images?

What of the people who receive this leaflet who have had abortions, and who might be battling the demons of regret — as many do for the rest of their lives? Does it persuade them any more than the residual torment of their procedure already has that abortion is a course of action not to be taken lightly? That it’s morally wrong?

Does enforced guilt serve any purpose other than to compound remorse or suffering? Has guilt ever helped anyone make a resolution for the right reasons?

I don’t think I’ve ever been more appalled than I am today. For the safety of the ever-present East Melbourne protesters, I think I’ll catch the train home tonight.

Apparently the woman sat down on her boyfriend’s thunderbox one day and never got off — at first because she wouldn’t, and eventually because she couldn’t:

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple, in Wichita, Kansasn (sic) said it appeared the 35-year-old woman’s skin had grown around the seat.

Seriously, read the story. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s one of those rare beasts that becomes increasingly surreal (and funnier) the deeper you get into it.

We have three tickets up for grabs for the low, low price of $25. Don’t miss your chance to join the Australian blogosphere’s two most uninteligible non-bachelors for what promises to be a tolerable time at the very least.

Kickoff is at 7.30pm, but we’ll be meeting earlier to grab a beer and some decent seats.

Express your interest in the comments, and I’ll contact you by email.

* Okay, they’re known as the Chunnam Dragons. See, you didn’t know who they were either.

UPDATE: Too late — I have to head off now. Anyone who’s still interested will have to contact me on my mobile: 0411 GET BNT. Cheers. *sob*

“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.

Labor razor gang slashes carers’ bonus

LABOR will scrap annual bonuses of $1600 paid to carers as its budget razor gang carves deep into welfare programs to cut spending and curb inflation.

It will replace the payments with a higher utilities allowance but will leave the sick and disabled and their carers hundreds of dollars a year worse off.

But I’ll let that slide for the moment and say I agree that this announcement is disgraceful. Full-time carers have it tough enough as it is, and were barely supported under the previous government.

Wayne Swan, get your fucking act together. Or join the Liberals.

I went into the shower so she and our son wouldn’t see my tears. After a while, with the water still on full, I sat down, wrapped my arms around my knees and gently rocked myself until the water ran cold.

Reaching out of the shower, I remembered that my towel wasn’t hanging on the towel rail because the towel rail is in the bottom drawer of the vanity, where it’s been for the best part of six months.

I think I might call Hire A Hubby tomorrow myself.

Howard, who you may remember as only the second Australian prime minister in history to be turfed out of his own seat during an election, has used his Irving Kristol Lecture for The American Enterprise Institute (a neo-conservative wankthink tank) to take what Bolt describes as a “well-deserved swipe” at the new Rudd government.

The Australian reports:

Mr Howard also made two key criticisms of the Rudd Government, which swept him from office in November last year, saying Australia should not withdraw its combat troops from Iraq and should not roll back his government’s industrial relations reforms.

“That will be a mistake. It will be the first time in 25 years that a major economic reform in Australia has been reversed,’’ he said. “In particular, bringing back the old unfair dismissal laws will stifle employment growth amongst small businesses.”

Bolt foams with indignation whenever Paul Keating points out the mistakes of the government that succeeded his. Worst of all, suggests Bolt, is that Keating’s comments insult the voters who saw fit to remove his government from office and hand Howard the mandate for his many controversial reforms.

You’d therefore expect the ever-reasonable and balanced Bolt to be equally critical of Howard’s petty self-indulgence, right? Well, you’d be wrong:

Howard may in time prove a more fearsome critic of Kevin Rudd than Brendan Nelson. For one, he’s sticking to his guns.

I’m beginning to think Andrew Bolt might be a bit of a hypocrite.

Last night I was walking my dog around the local park, where there’s a soccer club and several pitches. A young women’s team was playing a practice match on one of them.

As we walked around this pitch, my dog noticed a player taking a breather from training. She was on the outside of the pitch, leaning her forearms on the waist-high fence and watching the match. He bounded off towards her, as he does when he sees anyone at the park — and as he’s a gentle, friendly hound, I saw no cause for concern.

Neither did the girl, at first. She turned around and gave him a quick pat on the head, then turned back to the match. And that’s when the trouble started.

Suddenly he registered an interesting scent. He began sniffing at the air around the oblivious victim, then gradually — cautiously — turned his attention to her legs.

I sensed strife but was about 20 metres away. I walked as briskly as possible towards them and began calling out to him to come to me — to no avail.

I was about five metres away by the time he threw caution to the wind and zeroed in on the source of the scent. And it wasn’t your dainty “what a lovely rose”-type sniffing either — it was like a vacuum cleaner sucking biscuit crumbs from between couch cushions.

It’s hard to say what startled her more — my yelling or a large dog’s snout up her arse. She was remarkably good-humoured about the incident, but I’m not sure who was more embarrassed as I clipped the lead on my dog, apologised profusely and dragged the dirty bastard away.

A short time later, when I’d judged that we were far enough away, I unclipped my dog’s lead — and, you guessed it, back he ran for one last desperate, lunging crack at her.

She was far less amused the second time around.

A Fleshlight!

Cricket writer Gideon Haigh

Wicked Witch of the West

]]> http://www.grods.com/post/2010/feed/ 10 http://www.grods.com/post/1995/ http://www.grods.com/post/1995/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:25:43 +0000 Ant Rogenous http://www.grods.com/post/1995/ There you have it — the only thing anyone in their right mind could possibly find amusing about Rove, and I’ve blown it.

On the plus side, I may have just saved you $44.90.

Anyone who pays money to see Rove McManus do stand-up at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival — presumably because they feel they don’t already see enough of him — wouldn’t know funny if it tickled them with an Ossie Ostrich arse-feather jammed into the business end of a Fleshlight.

There, I said it.

MEMBERS of a Melbourne-based terrorist group discussed killing John Howard while he was prime minister, the Victorian Supreme Court was told today.

Shame on them.

Clearly, I reckon never. However, I’ve been given the order that I’m never to wear these bad boys again.

According to the wife, this pair has reached the stage where they’re offensive. “You’ll make people uncomfortable if you wear them in public,” she said.

Well! I might have been too gutless to retaliate while she was busy attacking my pants, but I’m certainly man enough to blog my retort while she’s not around. So here it is.

More often than not, I wear underpants — dark-coloured ones at that — so there’s little chance of drawing undue attention to the offending area.

Furthermore, anyone who goes out of their way to look at my crotch is obviously doing so in the hope they’ll see something. Far from making them uncomfortable, you could say I’m providing a public service to one of the most marginalised groups in society: dirty filthy sickos.

In fact, one might almost say that kind of selfless act would make me a true Australian hero — and who wouldn’t want to be married to one of those?

Or maybe I’ll just throw the damn things away before she gets home and murders me.

In the NSW District Court today, Judge Michael Finnane accepted Jones had an honest belief that he could broadcast the name, but found this belief was not reasonable.

This finding is noteworthy in that it was based on the rarely cited judicial principle of etiam autem haud.

Jones is believed to be considering yet another appeal, but his lawyers have refused to confirm whether they’ll be putting forth the aw, carn defence.

Hodges, it must be said, is an intriguing fellow. Legend has it he founded the AANCC after being denied membership to the Canberra chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, on the basis that he was too ignorant and mean-spirited, and that he spelled “abbows” incorrectly on his application form.

This post isn’t about Hodges, though — if I wanted to discuss excruciating and embarrassing turds, I’d make an appointment to see a proctologist. Rather, it concerns an interesting tale about the creator of this propaganda poster, Australian artist Frederick William Leist (1873–1945).

Fred Leist rose to prominence in the 1890s as an illustrator for The Bulletin and the Sydney Mail. He moved to London in the early 1900s to pursue his painting career, and found some success there.

But like most artists, Leist found that to make ends meet he had to supplement his art with commissions and odd jobs — and his oddest job of all was designing recruiting posters during World War I.

The poster above was his last, due to a little-known misunderstanding.

In 1916 the War Office commissioned a piece from Leist entitled Australian Chivalry. The creative brief for the poster took the form of a telegraph, which — due to Leist’s experience and exemplary record with the Office — dispensed with the usual detailed instructions and simply requested a “depiction of Digger with crusader; tone more gay than gruesome”.

The wording proved most unfortunate: the War Office couldn’t have known that Leist was well ahead of his time lexicologically; likewise, Leist couldn’t have known that the term “gay” wouldn’t come into popular usage as a euphemism for homosexual for several decades.

An understandably confused Leist, who felt somewhat indebted to the War Office, didn’t want to appear foolish by requesting clarification; so he set about creating three slightly different paintings that would work either as a series or as individual posters, depending on which option best reflected his employer’s concept.

The staunchly conservative War Office was mortified by the posters Leist submitted, but a looming print deadline meant recommissioning the job was not an option. They reluctantly chose the least questionable of the three, paid Leist and never sought his services again.

The complete set was thought to have been lost or destroyed, but as luck would have it was recently discovered on my PC. CLICK HERE to view it.

Not all of us are blessed with Andrew Bolt’s towering intellect or knack for doublespeak; but now, thanks to GrodsCorp’s Legitimisation For Dummies, you can fudge it:

1. Take an authoritative-sounding phrase: “new racism”

2. Capitalise it: New Racism

3. Wait by the phone for a call from the Macquarie Dictionary editorial staff.

In news completely unrelated to the post below, my wife, E*, and I need to get the hell out of Melbourne for about a week in February.

We’re not averse to flying somewhere, but finances are such that the airfare and accommodation would have to be relatively inexpensive.

The only other criteria for the trip is that we’re as near as possible to a beach and as far as possible from people — who, with the exception of those who frequent this site, tend to suck shit.

Any tips, GrodsReaders?

* I’m all out of Rogenous puns now, I swear.

I’ve been working late shifts these past couple of weeks, which means having to take taxis home in the wee hours of the morning.

Two nights ago I was driven home by a lovely bloke from a less-travelled part of India, in which I happen to have spent some time. We traded stories about his charming city, the fine cuisine of South India, and spoke of the challenges he’s faced in leaving his wife and new-born son while chasing a better life for them all in Australia — where, sadly, he’s made few friends in the six months he’s been here.

All in all it was a dandy chat, and he introduced himself formally before I got out at my house, shaking my hand (twice) and wishing me all the best. I, of course, wished him more of the same.

Imagine my surprise, then, when last night — at the same cab rank — the same taxi driver emerged from the shadows of the city laneway, intercepting me on the way to the first cab on the rank (not his) and saying: “Oh, my goodness, what a coincidence! Come, come, I think I remember where you live.”

It was 1.30am and he looked more than a little dishevelled. And I swear I didn’t imagine his surreptitious glance at his watch as he shepherded me towards his taxi.

The first few minutes of the ride were a bit quiet, until the driver let loose in a torrent what he’d obviously been mulling over for the best part of 24 hours:

“You remember last night how you said you wanted to visit India again, well if you do would you do my family the honour of staying with us, we will provide everything and you will want for nothing and my wife will cook all of your favourite foods like idli and sambar and chutney and vadai, you remember saying you liked them last night, yes, well please, please, would you stay, it would be the greatest honour!”

Stalking: treading the fine line between sweet and creepy since 1982.

Here are some tips to help you avoid potential embarrassment.
0

HYGIENE
Some cyclists figure that, since they’re going to sweat like John Farnham on the way to work and take a shower once they arrive, there’s no need to bathe before they get going. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Sweat that runs down the body’s nastier crevices smells infinitely more fetid when said crevices are unwashed.

The result of forgoing the pre-ride wash is that within 10 minutes on the road, you will smell like a mixed grill of armpits and arseholes. And bike paths are crowded places where morning breezes carry the news of your disgrace far and wide.

Some might argue that showering twice a morning is a misuse of water, a precious and increasingly scarce resource; others are just filthy bastards who wouldn’t know cleanliness if it assaulted them with a bar of Solvol.

Whichever category you fall into is irrelevant. If you are unwilling to change your foul ways, follow this golden rule: do not, under any circumstances, overtake another rider. Ever.
o

APPAREL
The law of cycling apparel is best expressed by the following formula:

If T ≥ D then C = W

C — cyclist
T —time it takes to change into your wang pants, click shoes, Thriller gloves and fitted shirt festooned with advertising no one is sponsoring you to wear. Worse still, you probably paid for the privilege of giving [insert brands here] some exposure to which they had no right. Saw you coming, didn’t they?
D — time it takes to get to work.
W — wanker

o

RECUMBENT BIKES

If you own one of these, well, you can just go and take a flying reclining fuck.

I’ve taken to singing to my 12-week-old son this past month, and it’s led to a realisation all adults have sooner or later: the youth of today have musical taste up their arse.

Here are the last three songs I sang him:

1. Beyond the sea by Bobby Darin

Reaction: Apathy

2. Good day sunshine by The Beatles

Reaction: Indifference

3. I’ve been thinking about you by London Beat

Reaction: LOST HIS FUCKING MIND

Shi-pow-pow.

Far be it from me to bring GrodsCorp into disrepute so early into my tenure, but as a concerned citizen I feel duty-bound to call to your attention some of the filth I’ve seen recently on shop signs.

As if rampant consumerism and guerrilla marketing weren’t revolting enough…

____________________

BOX CANYON
Menswear

Any reasonable person who heard this name would assume Courtney Love had opened some kind of theme park.

And menswear? That makes as much sense as naming a dress shop Timberland.

____________________

PENETRATION CLOTHING
Anything but

In my limited experience of penetration, I’ve found that very little clothing tends — or needs — to be worn.

Shoppers venturing into this store in the hope of finding an exclusive range of white bobby-socks, truckers’ caps and black stilettos will be sorely disappointed.

____________________

BROWN GOUGE
Dry cleaning

This is just plain insensitive. My brown gouge is the reason I keep having to take my trousers to the dry cleaner.

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JOCKS CONCRETE PUMPING
Christ only knows

Legend has it the owner’s wife talked him out of naming the business Shit-A-Brick.

He swore at the time that he appreciated the wisdom of her advice, but he’s never quite forgiven her.

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SQUAT & GOBBLE
Café and crepery

Came across this one in San Francisco’s Castro district last year and was initially impressed: “Touché, Mr Self-Deprecating Café Owner,” I thought.

But an Asian-inspired dish on the menu reminded me that in some parts of the world, squatting is a mostly utilitarian act with undeniably satisfying but less-than-savoury results.

I was powerless to stop the subsequent mental images of coprophagia which, naturally, led to thoughts of Andrew Landeryou.

By that time I’d completely lost my appetite. And my capacity to feel love.