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I think it’s appropriate to inform you all of my promotion from Idiot In A Cave Who Yells But Is Not Listened To, to Idiot On The Street Whose Ranting Is Noticed. As Andrew Lovett was walking into court today, surrounded by media asking the Formula Questions, I managed to get his attention, by yelling at a passing bag-lady “We traded pick sixteen for that fuckwit!”.
That’s a sentence that’s no doubt been shouted, occasionally spoken coherently, or more often mumbled between retches, at least thirty thousand times in the past few weeks. I doubt that it’s been yelled by a strikingly good looking, windswept and well-known-and-respected-in-his-field Juzzy out the front of Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, however, and it’s a good thing for our justice system that the only people who appeared to have heard it were a Channel 7 reporter (running from the 7/11 with a packet of Winfields and a very annoyed sound recordist) and Lovett himself. Young Andrew had more important things to deal with than smearing my nose all over my face on national television, so he let it slide.
I didn’t have anything more important to deal with, at least for the next ten minutes, so I remained on my perch in William St, declaiming to one and all how FUCKED AND DOOMED St Kilda are this year, and how much it breaks what is left of my heart. As I write this, the Saints are playing Collingfuck in the pre-season thingo, and I’m not making excuses (should we lose) but I really DON’T CARE.
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The recent drugs charges against Geelong’s Matthew Stokes would be funny if they didn’t have such ramifications. If he’d just said to the arresting officers “Oops, it’s mine, I like a toot now and again”, he would’ve copped a Drug Diversion Notice and it would’ve gone away. The AFL would have spoken to him, quite harshly no doubt, and NOBODY would know.
However, football player that he is, he chose to try and make an excuse: “I was just getting it for a friend”. Which equals Trafficking, which means WADA get involved, which means he’s facing two years or more out of the Game.
Didak and that other idiot tried this over a Drink Drive incident a while back, and look where it got them. Stokes, thanks to the culture of professional sports (“Someone must have spiked my drink/I had a cold”), has tried to shift blame and landed himself in a worse situation. One gram of coke is easily written off as Personal Use, however now one of the game’s champions is officially in Deep Shit. Value to you and I, the sporting public? Nil. Value to The Game? Nil. Value to hysterical anti-drug campaigners and venal politicians and Andrew Bolt? Hmmmmm…
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So Mick Molloy was guest commentator on the Olympics the other night, and managed to goad Eddie Everywhere into some Footy Show-type homophobic remarks. Surprising? NOT! He may come across as a bit of a bogan, but Mick is one scary-smart guy, as his years of brilliance with uber-nerd Tony Martin attest. Go Mick, if the big boys won’t give you a show and let you run with it, then destroy the system from within.
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No longer can I wander into a chain jeans shop and grab a pair of size 33s. My love of The Bike, and of Going To Work Really Fast, have caused my thighs to explode in an orgy of muscle and raw sex appeal, resulting in (deleted- editor).
Well, fuck, there was 200 words of Comedy Gold, excised thanks to our Good Taste Nanny State. What else is pissing me off that doesn’t embarrass Lovelywifeandcoeditor?
Oooh, that’s right, the Winter Fucking Olympics. Have a look at my piece on page 4 about Disability Services, and how there’s just no money there to help people looking after their severely disabled kids, and have a guess at how I feel about government (that is, taxpayer, that is, You And Me) funding for Olympic sports.
A colleague yelled out today “Blah blah won Gold”, expecting a rush of “ooh, who was it, yay!!!”
All the poor bastard got was “That’s so great –we’ve got a Mental Health System that produces little more than suicides and police shootings, and Disability Services leaving old people to die with their kids, and DHS hiding under their desks, but YAY, we all paid for that spoilt brat to fly to Canada to pursue her hobby and now that’s all we’ll see on the News for the rest of the week.”
It shits me no end (you may have noticed) that we pay for the Olympics, in every way possible. Despite the disaster of obese kids and a lost sense of community everywhere, local sports organizations get fuck all government money, because most funds are siphoned off to the elite. TV networks pay shedloads of cash for the broadcast rights, and earn their money back through advertising, and how do you think all the advertisers recoup their costs? Has anyone actually thought about this for a second? Bob’s Bedding pays three hundred grand to get his ads on during the figure skating, so that’s three hundred grand that he either recoups by charging more for his bedding, or by lessening payouts to his shareholders. We pay alright.
And what is it that we pay for? A couple of weeks of occasionally-interesting sport that we wouldn’t bother watching if it was on in our own back yards the rest of the time, ruined by endless slow-motion montages, Eddie McGuire, and twenty eight minutes of ads every hour. Politicians grabbing a few photo ops with the latest bright-eyed Fit Young Thing to get a commentating gig on which ever network bought the rights this time round. Parasites like John Coates continuing to ride coat-tails and slurping millions of dollars of our fucking money so we can get more fucking Gold Medals that mean nothing.
Real professional sport is losing me too, as we enter the era of players switching teams mid-season, and clubs being plonked in Western Sydney and the Gold Coast at the expense of the game’s traditional owners and foundation members, and every time someone famous from overseas lands they have to go to a Collingwood game. Melbourne’s finally going to have a team in the Super 14s, and much as I love my Saints the rugby’s looking better and better, even though I know all sport these days is based on TV rights, franchises, and fist-fucking the fans at every opportunity.
Can someone please create a sport for me, one that’s about the game itself and nothing else, where I can go to a game and pay a reasonable price for a reasonable seat and a drinkable beer. One where I can watch the game and not be deafened by ads on the big screen. One where the wags in the crowd can throw a beach ball around during the quiet bits and not be ejected. A sport that, if I can’t make it to the game, is shown live, and the TV picture isn’t delayed by two seconds, so I can Mute the TV commentators and listen to the ABC?
Despite all of the above, rest assured that when the AFL season proper resumes, I will be back on deck, shouting and spitting, and loving, loving Sport. Of all kinds.
Due to the terms of our Service Contract on the new colour printer, we will be unable to print the following articles/cartoons:
Andrew Demetriou Being Eaten By Wobbegongs
Andrew Lovett Having A Crack At Me
Winter Olympians Catching Fire.
Any complaints re this interruption to service should be addressed to Senator Stephen Conroy, and/or Senator Steve Fielding.
!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved."
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